Having confidence in the promises of Christ, we go forward with a steady gait towards the Kingdom of Heaven. We are certain of the goodness and stability and permanence, yes, and love that awaits us .... awaiting all of us .... everyone who enters into this real and present life.
We think of Jesus words:
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I do not pray for the world, but for the ones whom You have given me, Father,
for they are Yours .... that they be One with You as You and I are One. (Jn 17:9ff) |
The world signifies the selfish rejection of God's love while His prayer signifies the life-giving sphere of love, guidance, and the path towards personal maturity. In this, we grow toward union with Him. And, we discover what we already know: this love is the experience of growing up in a virtuous family. That is how it works.
The purpose of life, as Holy Orthodoxy teaches, is this union with God: to be inseparably united to the Son as He is to the Father as they are to the Holy Spirit as the Holy Trinity is to the saints, in goodness, purity, and blessed fulfillment and happiness. Makarios! Jesus declares from the Mount of the Beatitudes. "Happy are you!" for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven (Mt 5:1ff).
This is the spirit of life at the Hermitage. Each time we lift up the Holy Gifts at the Altar, before the gaze of our loving Lord presiding at the Mystical Supper, we whisper a prayer: Ut unum sint. "May we be One with You as You are One with the Father, with your glorified disciples, with the Myrrh-bearing women, with all who are in the embrace of this good life. May we all be carried by angels into the the Bosom of Abraham.
Day by day, we strive to follow Him. "Follow Me," He teaches — an imperative verb spoken by God, that is, a Divine command. But how do we do this? He is the God-Man. We are mere humans.
But we take heart, for is this not the learning of family? As boys, our fathers were impossibly larger than us in every way: physically, emotionally, spiritually. How might we ever cross over this impossible ravine separating ourselves, far inferior in every way, from this race of splendid giants? Yet, this formidable destiny was ours from birth. We were born with our parents' image set upon us.
We are also born bearing the full stature of Christ (Eph 4:13) .... if we will accept this destiny, too. Yes, we might reject it .... in which case we would deform ourselves and squander the chance of our lifetimes. We might withdraw cringing beneath His outsized example. But we do not. He has made us not to cringe but rather to be uplifted .... and confident. For He says, "I would not tell you if it were not so" (Jn 14:2).
No matter. We must also admit that we are surrounded by mysteries. The very element of God is Other .... other than our artificial world with its dog-pack think. It is this worldliness, which means not of God (1 Jn 2:15-17). So we live in anticipation of Heaven's Kingdom. We prepare ourselves. We pray and mature and become sanctified, helping each other, following a cloud of witnesses who have gone before us.
We call to mind all He has said and taught. Certainly, this was the mind of the early Church. For decades and centuries, people asked, "Who was That?!" They echo the Apostles Who actually knew Him: "Who is This, then, who commands even the winds and water?" (Lu 8:25). For the greatest life ever lived was in their midst, and it is in ours. How shall we grasp it? Where are its compass points? Which analogy might possibly explain it or comprehend it?
Yet, for all its mystery, for all its cosmic scope and scale, the life of Jesus was, first of all, familiar. Who is not comforted by His words even as we read them two thousand years later? Who is not consoled and inspired by His love, His great love? For His was the most authentic life ever lived .... truly the purest, the best, and most human .... what we ourselves were made to be. What do we say when people fall below this character? We say that they are being inhuman.
Still, He is God, the paradox most magnificent. He is the Truth and the Life and the Mighty God .... Yet, He is the Way, so intimate and dear, and we are drawn to Him for reassurance and solace over and over and over again.
We experience both these strong, opposing feelings in a single word: fear:
| "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom...." (Prov 10:27) |
The underlying Greek word teaches that we are aroused from unawareness or indifference now beholding a grandeur and glory beyond imagining, right before us.
The Early Church spent centuries attempting to cross this sublime distance between God and Man through reflection. The non-canonical, mid-second-century Gospel of Peter, for example, speculated that Jesus most surely was God though temporarily disguised as a human. But this cannot be, for such a conception discards the Lord's humanity as nothing more than a paper mask and a disposable tunic. He most certainly did perform the mighty works of God right before our eyes, yet He would be resurrected as a human, still bearing the wounds He suffered at His Crucifixion. He implores His Disciples to touch them. And He supped with them: along the Emmaus Road and in the Upper Room.
Do you recall this little detail from our Gospel lesson this morning? After raising the little girl from the dead, Jesus commanded that she be given something to eat.
No, his humanity is not a Halloween costume. And the human body is no throw-away but rather enjoys a very high dignity, even after passing through death and resurrection .... not an illusion, but as real as a hearty embrace and as palpable as a bountiful meal shared among friends.
Another meditation of the Early Church was a kind of reversal of the first proposition. Instead of beginning as God descending to earth, Jesus this time, as the hypothesis goes, was a human who had discovered a hidden, divine knowledge within himself called γνόσισ / gnósis. The idea was, that Jesus as man graduated from the human scale into the Divine, becoming God. But this speculation must always fail. For exactly where, finally, is the boundary between the human and the Divine? You see, you can slide the scale up or slide it down, but somewhere along the way you must have a decisive line between the human and the Divine. Shall men, on their own, command the winds and seas? Shall men truly die and then defy death arising in glory from a tomb all through some discovered hidden knowledge within themselves?
We see this hidden knowledge. We recall Simon the Magus and his magic incantations from the Book of Acts. He would have had a magic book. Corinth was full of them. And we have that scene in Acts in which magicians, discovering the sublime truth of the Holy Spirit, heap their books on a bonfire (Acts 19:19), abandoning this idea of finding hidden truth.
Yet, sincere theologians pressed hard for this hypothesis. They worked out a hierarchy of a lesser god, closer to us, and a greater god, further away. By the fourth century, this heresy, called Arianism, had so dominated the Church that St. Athanasius, the Pope of Alexandria, fled his see, seeking refuge with the Desert Fathers and declaring his motto to be Contra mundum, "Against the World!" .... the whole world in its heretical belief.
Yet all these heresies would stumble. Each would be doomed to return to a pair of immovable facts, which cannot be bent to anyone's will: Jesus is man, and Jesus is God. Both are fully and completely and perfectly true. His humanity does not limit His Godly dimension. His Divine nature rests easily, in equipoise, with His human nature. The Apostolic Father, St. Ignatius of Antioch, captured this in the phrase communicatio idiomatum, which was later affirmed in the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). You see, all His properties were in harmony with each other such that we can talk about the sufferings of God or the Divine dimensions of the human .... where "Son of God" and "Son of Man" unite.
But let us stick with what we know to be true in our own skins. Let us return to our inner truth in that sense. How comfortable we are with God! And how comfortable God is with us! This is not other but the furthest thing possible from other. This is our very essence. We do well to wake up in the morning and give thanks for this Divine Presence within us and all around us. God and we .... we understand each other. When we read the words of Catherine of Siena, that Western saints, "It is nothing but Heaven all the way to Heaven," we resonate. Exactly! That's it! Is this not the most basic fact about the Kingdom of Heaven? We become it, and it becomes us.
So let us, this morning, reflect on this mind-bending unity, which is not mind-bending at all. This is the kernel of our Gospel lesson today.
We can imagine the delight with which the icon-painter St. Luke depicted his word-picture: an icon within an icon, each commenting on and illuminating each other.
In the outer frame, we encounter Jesus going about His missionary task of saving the lost lambs. He has only just returned from His mission to the Lost Tribe of Gad. Upon His return the people clamor for Him. They greet Him at the shore. They countenance Him to be the Lord of Life. For the synagogue ruler Jairus rushes forward prostrating himself: "Save my daughter!" he cries. "For she is dying!"
In view of what physicians were unable to do merely to staunch the blood of an older woman (Lu 8:43), we must understand that this is a petition one only puts to God.
Soon we find that the girl has died. Yet Jesus, paying no mind to the lesser claims of death, touches her, filling her with Divine lifeforce.
This outer icon, as we have said, is a completed perfection. Returning from the Tribe of Gad, where He displays Divine power but is rejected, He now returns to "the other side," to the north shore of the lake. He is received with due honor. He is imputed to be God. And He reveals His Divine identity, which is emphasized by the last sentence: "Tell no one what has happened here."
Within this outer icon, however, is set a very different scene — a smaller icon, but no less important. Its modest stature is seen in its offhanded manner. While all are aware of the great drama playing out surrounding the death of Jairus' daughter, few notice the story within the story. The crowd is in the midst of its great progress towards the synagogue. Jesus alone stops. The Disciples are confused. "What is He doing?" they think.
He speaks. "Someone has touched me" (Lu 8:45).
Everyone denies it (Lu 8:46). Peter offers, "But, Master, everyone has touched you! You are being pressed within a crowd!" (Lu 8:45).
Jesus ignores him. Instead, He utters the sentence for which the entire passage has been written:
| But Jesus said, "Somebody touched Me, for I perceived power going out from Me." (Lu 8:46) |
"Power has gone out of me." Remarkable. The Greek word here is δύναμις. / dúnamis
In the first century, it meant "physical force or power." Its first-century definition is expansive. It meant "political power and influence" (giving rise to our modern word, "dynasty"). It meant "military potency" (giving rise to our modern word "dynamite"). It meant "source of power" (giving rise to our modern word "dynamo"). We may think of His "personal strength" and "force of being." Remarkably, these have gone out of the Lord. For something "to go out" means that its has departed. You see, one thing is being filled, but another thing is being emptied. Jesus stops in His tracks as He feels this depletion.
The Disciples do not understand what is happening. They do not know this category, for they are not constantly pouring themselves out, emptying themselves, that their force of life might be given away to the aching need all around them, as the Lord does.
Now, following the Resurrection, the Ascension, the all-important Teachings of the Risen Christ, and the Giving of the Holy Spirit .... they will come to know this. They will. All of them will pour themselves out to the last and the highest and the most beautiful degree. Our tradition teaches that St. Peter's turning point came just outside Rome:
"Quo vadis, Domine," he asks. "Where are you going, Lord?"
The Lord replies, "I am going to be crucified again" .... for Peter has abandoned his flock. We know Peter will set down his walking stick, no longer to be used again, that he might pour out his beautiful oblation lying just before him in Rome.
This is the glorified world in which St. Paul wrote. In a letter to his spiritual son, Timothy, as he reaches the fullness of his vocation. St. Paul writes,
| For I am already being poured out like a libation, and the time of my departure is at hand. (2 Tim 4:6, NRSV) |
The RSV translators render it
| I am already on the point of being sacrificed .... |
These are images that invokes Melchizedek — the libation, the sacrifice — who offered the acceptable sacrifice to God, which is wine and bread, that is, our blood and body.
The great importance of this little scene in a crowded street is its concise power to reveal the meaning of Eucharist. Soon Jesus soon will say, "This is my Body which is broken for you" .... "This is my Blood which is shed for many." He will offer, at dear expense to Himself, and we will receive. Did He not teach us,
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"the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve,
and to give His life a ransom for many" ? (Mt 20:28) |
Lying within this insignificant-yet-sublime story is a profound truth we must not miss. His sacrifice of d&uactute;namis is not a "this for that." It is not a trade or a transaction. It is a state of being, always and everywhere, an essence of His being, which cannot be altered.
St. Paul is explicit. At His conception and birth, the Son of God laid aside His glory which He had before the world began. He did this to enter the horrible straits of our narrow humanity:
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[He] made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bond servant, and coming
in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. (Phil 2:7-8) |
As we move back now to the outer icon, we behold the Almighty in the midst of His saving mission, lately to Gad and now in Galilee, about to a raise the dead but everywhere pouring out His life .... even through the hem of His garment.
He commands us to follow Him. But how can we follow Him? we ask. How can we cross from humanity to Divinity? Nonetheless, He has shown us the way.
Returning to our passage from St. Paul, we learn that His gift of kénosis (Phil 2:7), of self-emptying, of subtracting Himself, is paradoxically the way through these high mountain passes:
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Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the Name which is above every name,
that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in Heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:9-11) |
St. Paul says pointedly,
| Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus .... (Phil 2:5) |
Here is the ultimate communicatio idiomatum, the properties of Man and God freely mixed though distinct. Here is the gateway to Divine life and living.
But this makes no sense in the calculus of the world! Shall I give myself away in order to have abundance? Shall I humble myself in order to come to full stature?
In the outer frame we find the sublime lineaments of God. In the inner frame we find a Man Who empties Himself in a world demanding ever more. It is in this inner frame that we find a golden door passing through and leaving behind all our perceived limitations and incapacities. You see, they were a fiction all along. It is the door that leads to the icon surrounding it, and above this door reads a simple epigram:
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For whoever desires to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for My sake [following My Way] will find it. (Mt 16:25) |