Christ is risen! Truly he is risen!
Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, “You are gods”’’? If He called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken)… (John 10:34-35)
Christ reminds His fellow Jews that in their beloved Law (Torah), God says humans “are gods.” He brings this point up in a dispute with His interlocuters when they accuse Jesus of making Himself God. Several different streams of thought are coming together in this roiling river of “what are we arguing about?”
One issue relates to the Law itself. Christ says it is the Law (Torah) and thus is the Divine Plan that we humans are gods – we were created to share in the divine life. Here we see how “the Law” was intended to help humans find their way back to what God intended us to be – gods. To be fully human is to be Christlike godlike, to be united to God. The Law is misunderstood when it is reduced to a long list of rules and regulations (613 of them to be exact) to be slavishly obeyed in terror of divine punishment for the smallest infraction. Rather, the Law is about being fully human – about our being united to God and sharing in God’s love and life. This is what Christ tried to teach us in opposition to the Pharisees who reduce everything to obedience to rules, rituals and regulations. “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14). When we reduce religion to slavish obedience to rules and rites we lose sight of its very purpose which is to elevate humans to heaven. Instead, we turn religion into a worldly pursuit related to the body or life in this world, rather than lifting us up to the Kingdom which is to come. So St Paul writes:
If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations, “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things which all perish as they are used), according to human precepts and doctrines? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting rigor of devotion and self-abasement and severity to the body, but they are of no value in checking the indulgence of the flesh. (Colossians 2:20-23)
A second and even more important issue is Christ defending the theological idea of deification or theosis, saying this is God’s own thinking about what humans are or what it means to be human. God intended humans to be united to Him meaning God wishes to share His love and His life with us whom He created.
Salvation, holiness, righteousness, redemption thus mean far more than humans obeying the minutia of the Law or being juridically moral. They imply a union with God, of our becoming one with God or our becoming ‘gods’. Sin is not mostly violating rules but more importantly means failing to enter into communion with God. When we reduce being holy or a member of the Church to correctly performing rules and rituals or obeying the Ten Commandments, then we turn Christianity into another form of Pharisaism. The trouble with sin is not that it is a rule violation which will require God to punish us. Sin leads to death because it separates us from God [The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), not punishment!]. Sin thus disfigures and malforms us humans into something less than fully human, so that we are not capable of union with God. Sin distorts our very being. In confession we shouldn’t focus on ways in which we violated God’s rules, but on those aspects of our hearts and minds which are preventing us from being in communion with God.
Three comments from St Sophrony help illustrate the notion of salvation as deification or theosis:
The world is not self-sufficient: it does not exist of and for itself. Its function is the final transfiguration and deification of the creature through knowledge of the Creator.
God did not create the world in order to live the life of the creature: He created it in order to associate man with His own Divine Life. And when man does not arrive at the deification, which cannot be achieved without his own collaboration, the very meaning of his existence disappears.
Created in the image and likeness of God, man is endowed with the capacity to apprehend deification – to receive the divine form of being.
The universe is a marvelous creation but the mystery of the creation of eternal gods is even more prodigious. (THE MONK OF MOUNT ATHOS, pp 98, 99, 111)
Fraternized 