The Teacher Departs

The Teacher departs. We say, He ascends. As His Person is Itself the Kingdom of Heaven, both His departure and ascension are anomalous — beyond the reach of human language and comprehension. As we have shared many times, the Kingdom of God is a fluid situation with angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. And, it turns out, that the Son of Man represents ..... ourselves, in our fullness.

The students are left on their own, left alone with their own understandings and their own more slender powers. It is this latter subject — the Master's pupils — which has always been the primary subject.

Yes, as St. Athanasius the Great has written (De Incarnatione), the Logos merely touching the Creation with His earthly Person unleashed a cosmic shock so great that it reset the world to its former state (we just heard in our Epistle lesson, "Restore the Kingdom") .... "reopening Eden" in this sense. His Forerunner appears as the man of Eden — in his natural attire, in his purity, and in his vegetarian diet of manna.

But Eden is ours to enter only insofar as we are also purified, sanctified, wholly focused on Jesus (Athanasius says). For it is Jesus Himself Which is the Key that unlocks Paradise .... bringing us back to our main thread: the pupils, the disciples. As the Master Himself says, He never really departs. "I will be with you," He says, "until the end of the age," that is, forever.

Moreover, He promises the Spirit of Truth, Who will remind us everything He has taught. Everything, then, is focused upon those learners, hearers.

So here at the moment of His departure, a final examination is implied. What happens at the end of the term as the professor folds shut his class notes at the end of the semester. The focus now shifts to the students.

His three-year course of teachings, has been the main business of his ministry, teachings. His theme has been the transformation of our minds and souls. He strikes this note at the point of His departure:

But this begs the question: what exactly is repentance or remission of sins?

I had thought of repentance as a moment of regret and true sorrow. But it turns out that it is much more than that. My conception was a child's conception: I simply step forward. I admit I was wrong. I express regret. And then receive instant forgiveness: a complete wiping clean of the slate. But the underlying Greek work — μετάνοια / metánoia — specifies a transformation of my whole self. So much more than a little boy who says, "I'm sorry." I can no longer be the person I was, but now a whole new person begins to appear. This is the joy of confession and absolution. A whole new life appears. And we are freed from the past life.

I am reminded of the many facile assumptions I made along the journey of my stumbling discipleship. Among the earliest of these (perhaps it happened in Episcopalian Sunday school) was the assumption that as the Scriptures were unlocked for the Disciples, so they were unlocked for all of us. You see, I believed that this secret knowledge divulged to the Eleven Disciples was simply this: that Jesus turns out to be the Suffering Servant; that He turns out to be the Child of the Sign, that a virgin shall conceive; that the Temple of His Body was destroyed by the men; that He would rise on the third day; and finally, that His death mysteriously has removed the weight and effects of our sins. I hasten to add that this last clause I (somehow) filled in myself, for that is not what Jesus says as we go back to read the Gospel lesson today: it says that He rose "from the dead on the third day" and that "repentance and remission of sins should be preached." We find no causal connection between these two things though they are often mentioned together.

I do not want to get off track here. Many times, we have pondered the splendid and cosmic mystery of Jesus laying down His Life for His friends. As Luke writes elsewhere, Christians following the Master have been inducted into a Damon-Pythias kind of fellowship, in which each lays down his or her life as a ransom for the other. ("No, I will!" .... "No, I will!") "No greater love hath anyone," the Master has taught. I would like to believe that that is the kind of love we share at the Hermitage. For is this not the heart of the Christian life? "No greater love ...."

How different this is from offering up the dead, limp body of Jesus: "Him, not us!"

Let us stay with our first point, though: at the Ascension of the Lord, the primary focus is wholly on the Lord's pupils. They have been with the Risen Christ now over the course of forty days. We may well imagine that three years of teaching by indirection in parables, riddles, and mysteries, has now been distilled to direct, plainly-spoken, and highly focused instruction:

The question had always been throughout the Gospels, "but do we have ears to hear it." We must assume that, now, being schooled by the Risen Christ, they do. The Disciple do! The veil has been lifted. The scales have fallen from the eyes. They have been present for the "Master class" over a course of forty days. Are we to believe that forty days have been filled with nothing more than a passage it takes us fifteen seconds to read? The unlocking of the Scriptures that I just rehearsed?

The content of these intense teachings, in fact, has never been revealed to us. Moreover, consider St. John's declaration,

Imagine! St. John is talking about the books that were never written which the world could not contain. The world could not contain them! He is saying that, by far, more was not written down than what had been written down. This one sentence (which by the way gives the lie to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura) sets before us the most elusive "book" of all: Sacred Tradition. What the Apostles knew and what they told their trusted inner circles.

The Risen Christ has opened the eyes of the Disciples. He has opened their ears. Now they are ready to receive the teachings which before had been inaccessible, blocked from their understanding. And why have these teachings been blocked? Has the Teacher intentionally hidden it from them? No, He has revealed it to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear (Mk 4:9, Mt 11:15, Lu 8:8). But the path ahead had been blocked. "Do you still not understand?!" (Mk 8:17), He asked them in exasperation.

You see, our path ahead is always being blocked by clutter .... all that baggage attaching to our egos. For we cannot bear to admit that we have been wrong, even foolish .... or shameful. Moreover, we cherish certain past beliefs that we cannot let go. Indeed, we have made many of them "our faith."

A cherished belief of the Christian West is that "Jesus died for my sins" — an error proceeding from a Benedictine monastery in Italy in the eleventh century. Is it not shocking that so many Christians do not notice how fundamentally un-Christian this is?! The essence of this belief is .... "Take Him, not me!." The right response of very Christian should be the opposite: "Take me, not Him!" ".... not the Lord!"

Repugnantly, this conception is cast precisely in the mold of animal sacrifice, the same blood sacrifice against which He so vigorously had protested, even beating adherents of this grotesquery with a whip .... that He made!

Jesus has enjoined us to follow Him. Very different from offering Him instead of us. He says. "Pick up your cross!" "No great love hath anyone than this," He taught, "than to lay down one's life for his or her friends!"

The final exam draws near. The Risen Christ turns to Simon-bar-Jonah. "Will you lay down your life in the name of this love (agape)?" He demands. And Peter replies, "No". He will not offer his life, but only the luke-warm love, which an apprentice might offer his master: philia. The lukewarm love one might have for a friend .... you know how undependable friendships are. Three times Jesus demands, and three times Peter stubbornly refuses, offering the weaker word philia each time .... which explains the "grade" Peter gets on his exam:

Wow!

Why did Jesus address him as Simon-bar-Jonah? Because he is the Son of Jonah, the one who ran. And he will run again. He ran not once, but three times. Aside from this examination, he ran in the courtyard of the high priest denying Jesus, again, three times. He ran from Rome abandoning his flock. He meets the Risen Christ on a road outside the city. He asks, "Quo vadis, Domine?" .... "Where are you going, Lord." And the Lord replies, "I am going to be crucified a second time," which finally moves Peter to stop running.

Agape — this is the highest grade in Jesus' exam. You see in the end there is "A" on Peter's final exam.

On the point of His ascension, this is His question for us: Will you lay down your life? Will you pick up your cross? And all of them did. All, in the end, would lay down their lives .... except for the Beloved Disciple entrusted to record all of these things faithfully. This is the essence of Christianity, offering ourselves as a ransom, even unto death, for our friends.

On the day of our Teacher's departure, let us remind ourselves that as we unlock what we thought we knew, the primary challenge is to admit that we might have got it wrong.

We say we seek salvation. May I go back to more of my former errors here? My childish mind had written an equation, which I never questioned later:

But that is not what salvation means. The Greek σωτερία / sotería implies a process. Its literal meaning — to be delivered — implies a journey in the context of Sacred Scripture, for the great deliverance set before us in Scripture is the Exodus. And deliverance must always be understood in the context of facing the great Red Sea .... right before us. Who will part these waters? Who will clear the path before us? And should the path to safety be cleared, by the grace of God, the next task surely must be our own: to complete the arduous journey .... hair-raising to say the least. You see, salvation is no instant thing. And to imagine it might be instantly granted by pushing our Precious Lord, our Friend, out front, crying "Take Him!" .... is nothing less than grotesque.

My other error had to do with Heaven. For I had assumed Heaven to be a place of ultimate joy, which I conceived in terms of material happiness. As a teenager, I pictured my own white, sandy beach (having no rocks or sea urchins, of course!). May I share a detail? I had Jesus' face fiberglassed on the deck of my surfboard (He Who walked the waves). Offshore were perfect, aqua-colored waves peeling off one after another .... and my favorite surfboard always free of dings or cracks or browning foam. Perfection! This is Heaven! At least that is what I thought nearly sixty years ago.

But it turns out that the Kingdom of Heaven is filled with people who love, who deeply care about each other. You see, the lives of others are also their lives. No private beach. No days-on-end surfing by myself. The saints are still still busy laying down their lives for us. How else could they hear our most urgent pleadings? How else could the Most Holy Theotokos hide us under the shadow of her wing and mantle? No white sand beaches .... but rather love of the highest and finest kind.

This is what we know through the prism of ours souls, this is the content of our hearts ..... though not necessarily in the calculus of our minds. As for the whole course of Sacred Tradition, the entire content of the Risen Christ's teachings over a forty-day period? That we do not know.

The fact of hidden teachings is attested. Hidden teachings were a spiritual norm of the Early Church. St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote,

Origen (that most influential among the Greek Fathers) wrote that strict secrecy concerning the holy things was a matter of course. Only the highest ranks of priests were initiated into the Divine mysteries. Porters were not permitted to see what they were carrying. And the high priest's family were to cover all the holy things with several covers, "so the true meaning of the tabernacle (and temple) was never known to them" (Margaret Barker, The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom of God, 2).

As Dr. Barker concludes in her introduction to the same book,

How humbled we should be .... that we are the generation to whom this earliest Christian world is being revealed .... so much more bountifully, so much more clearly. Two generations have gone by since the Dead Sea Scroll have been discovered. Our part is to attend to its findings and to be open to its insights.

So many other epic-scale events are also unfolding around us — things that we thought could never happen, were unthinkable, even unimaginable — are unfolding around us. Why these new revelations about the faith and these earthshaking events in our culture and world should be unfolding during the same time period is subject matter for our deepest and most sober prayers.

Meantime, let us love each other, and let us love the Lord as He ascends to Highest Heaven promising that He will be with us until the end of the age.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.