Superabundance

Today we behold a culmination. What God had made — a Heaven on earth and an earth near to Heaven — had been lost. Fellowship with God had been lost. In the period just before and just after the Nativity of our Lord, fellowship with angels was ridiculed by Temple authorities, who banned the subject from serious discourse. But then God touched the earth with His Own Person, Jesus of Nazareth. And the "Kingdom of Heaven" was proclaimed, a phrase not attested in the Hebrew Scriptures of Judah-ism.

Today, we behold a culmination. God has acted. He has caused His Creation to be whole again. For in order that the world be whole, God must be Present. This He had accomplished in becoming organically united to the Creation, materially united, at the Incarnation of His Son. And, now, today He has flooded the earth with the Fullness of His Presence through the Holy Spirit. This is why the liturgical color of Pentecost is green: the immanence of eternal spring, of Paradise, had lay hidden since the Fall of Mankind. But now, with the giving of God's Holy Spirit, it breaks forth, throwing out new, green shoots everywhere — an overflowing which no power in Heaven or earth might resist. And vistas everywhere shimmer with Divine beauty. Have you seen the shimmering Creation?

What had been promised at the Lord's Baptism — the Fullness of the Holy Trinity — now fills the earth with Divine Presence — not merely angels seen to be passing freely between Heaven and earth (though that in itself is Heavenly) but on earth the greatest Abundance: the Fellowship of the Triune God as it had been in Eden.

Through Pre-Lent, Great Lent, and Paschaltide, we have reflected on this unfolding story in several aspects: the cultural, the historical, and, of course, the spiritual. We saw that the Forerunner and the Most Holy Theotokos had participated in re-opening the gates of Eden, which the Son of God then decisively effected at His Nativity. As St. Athanasius has written in his landmark masterpiece, De Incarnatione, the Creator touched the Creation with His Own Person producing a cosmic shock so profound that it flipped the télos of our world from a destiny of death to one of life.

As all Orthodox Christians know, the purpose of human life built on this edifice is aspiration to Heaven, called theosis. God has acted by imparting Divine life to the Creation, and we respond by claiming our Divine birthright which was declared making a Godlike Image at the Creation of the world .... and at the new creation of each of ourselves at birth. In this, we might once again unite to God, Who walked with our First Parents in the deathless groves of Paradise.

Isn't it wonderful that each one of us should be born again in that Edenic innocence — each one of us a new creation of Paradise.

St. Irenaeus wrote that, in their youthful enthusiasm and recklessness, Adam and Eve, born as infants and then becoming children, had strayed from this God-ordained path. In His Incarnation Jesus completed Adam's interrupted course evincing the faithfulness and spiritual maturity that our First Parents had lacked. Irenaeus termed this recapitulation. For it was only in going back and completing God's plan of spiritual maturity, that union with the Father might be possible. This is the essence of theosis, of course: spiritual advancement.

The raw power, the inimitable beauty, even the fragrance and taste of the Creation is where we meet with that Almighty and Sublime Presence known to us as God. Yet, He is our gentle, loving and caring Father, Who has made all provision for us. Is this not what we experience as toddlers and young children? God is the source and element of our lives as our parents were. Each of us proceeds from God at our birth. And all shall meet our Maker in the end. In the Creation, God has crowned us with glory and honor (Ps 8:5). We are the apple of His eye (Ps 17:8). We are the reason God created the earth, which is one-of-a-kind in all the universe.

God and Man enter into unimaginable intimacy in the Creation. We say at the Liturgy that He might dwell in us and we in Him .... indeed, that we might become Him through theosis as He became us at His Incarnation. Why, this extreme intimacy touches even the character of the Holy Trinity. For the Son, Who is fully a Person of the Triune God, is also fully human. Mindbending.

Yes, to create is the first verb to be found in the Holy Scripture. And Creation is, and forever shall be, the burning point of the God-and-Man nexus. Creation is not something that happens once in our lives but continues every minute of every day as new cells are born within us. as we see all around us, indeed, as new cells are born with us. It is said that in the regeneration of cells, we become an entirely new person every seven years — a holy number. Yet, our souls are ageless. Each of us is the same "Me" at age ninety as we were at age nine, revealing the mystery of the soul's immortality. And our lives each day continue to be founded in, nourished by, and mysteriously saved by the God-Man, by the Incarnation .... in the unity of the Holy Spirit, our Tutor, our Comforter, and our Protector.

The ancient Hebrews understood both theosis and intimacy-in-Creation. The Tabernacle at Mount Sinai and the First Temple upon which it was patterned were understood to be microcosms of the Creation affirmed in an early Midrash (ancient Hebrew commentary on the Scriptures). The First Day of Creation corresponded to the Holy Throne of God. The Second Day corresponded to the the Veil, the boundary between the material world and the spiritual. The Third Day corresponded to the table of bread and wine, sacraments Melchisedek revealed to Abraham (Gen 14:18). The Fourth Day corresponded to the seven-branched lamp signifying the sun, the moon, and the stars. The symbolism of the Fifth Day, however, is somehow botched. It is no longer clear as the Hebrew and Septuagint texts diverge, but there is a suggestion of burnt offerings (which, I have argued in these reflections, was an artifact of Mesopotamian religion and controverted by the Essenes, Jesus, and His followers). The Sixth Day corresponded to the High Priest in the Holy of Holies attaining union with God as Moses had done on Mount Sinai.

Thus did the Tabernacle-Temple reflect the plan for Eden. Eden begins in God, is created for the spiritual advancement of humankind, and leads to a mystical union with God in which the creatures made in God's Image become One with Him.

Alternatively, the journey through the Temple to the Holy of Holies from the outer courts (i.e., the fallen world) signified the place of union, recapitulating a progress from the completed Creation to the high point of human life, which is ascent from the unredeemed human state to the fullness of becoming One with God as the Father and the Son are One (Jn 17:21).

The era just preceding Jesus' Nativity, however, was a period of particular estrangement from God. Even the idea of a Kingdom of Heaven, much less notions concerning angels, was suppressed by Temple authorities. And the cultic activity of the Temple had devolved from spiritual theosis to the carnal, impersonal offering of animal blood in order to appease a distant god after the example of the Babylonians and Persians. The Second Temple, underwritten and built by Persians, Jesus commanded to be razed to the ground. This was the formal charge leveled at St. Stephen: that His Master would "take away the customs Moses had delivered to us" and destroy the Second Temple (Acts 6:14). This was the reason for an abiding hatred of Christians on the part of Second Temple officials, for Christians, in effect, declared that Judah-ism was a fake religion. Only the religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob might be deemed authentic.

The public ministry of Jesus had announced a return to the ways of the Patriarchs, who were the familiars with God, who knew the intimacy of Divine fellowship. In effect, with His proclamation that man shall see Heaven open (Jn 1:51), Jesus declares, "Let the fullness of God fill the earth!" not merely one room in Jerusalem in the Temple accommodating one man once a year. Nonetheless, bespeaking the humility of the common man and woman, it would be one room in Jerusalem, a lowly upper room, where the outpouring of God's Holy Spirit would begin:

As St. Theodore the Studite wrote,

With the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Incarnation of the Son is seen in the Fullness of God's Plan, for the whole earth has now become the Temple. And each person is called to offer him- or herself as a mindful, holy, and living sacrifice to God. As St. Paul wrote,

This was the Temple sacrifice offered by the Essenes of Jesus' time. According to Philo (who knew the Essenes),

By the fourth century, the Church had not yet attained a settled theology on the Holy Spirit as we see in the Council of Nicaea. A significant influence in coming to this theology was a little book called On the Holy Spirit written by St. Basil the Great. Let us conclude with an excerpt from this landmark work:

The gates of Eden are opening. The Kingdom of Heaven is everywhere to be seen. Even we might become the children of light sharing in God's eternal glory through union. A fullness of blessing has been bestowed. And the only thing now lacking for the renovation of Heaven and earth is our consent. As the Lord of Hosts once waited upon the consent of a twelve-year-old, virginal girl to bring about His great cosmic drama, He now waits upon each of us to say Yes to His restoration of Paradise. For as our First Parents taught us, it all depends on our hearts for God and our embrace of the eternal life with Him.

God has given the earth to the sons and daughters of man (Ps 115), but His utmost hope is that all be in all (1 Cor 15:28). As we read in Psalm 24,

This is the hope we cherish today with the fullness of God descending and ascending all around us. Yes, we continue to live in a world blighted with disease and death, yet immanent within this brokenness is the Kingdom of Heaven, really and truly, here and now, beckoning to us. All we need do is follow Jesus in completing Adam-Eve's course — in spiritual maturity, in the nobility befitting our birthright, and in self-discipline expressing the high dignity of the human person. For as St. Paul revealed,

Here are the magnificent lineaments of a Christian: claim them in the love of God, and you are well on your way to embracing the Divine, Whose nature and elements these are.

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