Touching Jesus

And a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years and could not be healed by any one, came up behind him, and touched the fringe of his garment; and immediately her flow of blood ceased. And Jesus said, “Who was it that touched me?” When all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the multitudes surround you and press upon you!” But Jesus said, “Some one touched me; for I perceive that power has gone forth from me.” And when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling, and  falling down before him declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”    (Luke 8:43-48)

 Must we see Jesus? More than that: we must touch Him. “Which we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled, of the word of life…,” writes the apostle John. The woman afflicted with an issue of blood declared that if only she could touch Jesus’ garments, she would be healed. She touched timorously, from behind, Jesus’ tunic; and she was cured of her illness. I ask that no day pass without my being able to touch at least the fringe of Jesus’ garment without a power going out from the Savior which will be unto me a pledge of salvation.  We must touch Jesus in secret conversation with Him, in contact with the human members of the Body of Christ which is the Church, in the mystery of Lord’s Last Supper. We must not suppose that we have touched Jesus because we have drawn near to Him. But there are privileged moments when a kind of ineffable shudder, a sort of irresistible evidence (which, if authentic, cast us into the depths of humility) make us cry out: “I have touched Jesus,” or better, “Jesus has just touched me.”  Lord, I am not worthy to lift my eyes towards You. Be merciful to me, a sinner.”  (A Monk of the Eastern Church, Jesus: a Dialogue with the Savior)

Suffering through the World

Frances Young in her book,  BROKENNESS & BLESSING: TOWARDS A BIBLICAL SPIRITUALITY , makes a few comments on a Christian attitude toward suffering that I think are worth us considering. 

“…we should remind ourselves of the post-Enlightenment tendency to view suffering, atrocity, and so on as grounds for atheism.   The current assumptions of our culture include the notion that all ills can be removed, death can be indefinitely postponed, and all risk can be eliminated, if we can only find the right formula. …  The media encourage us in our refusal to face our vulnerability, mortality, and creatureliness.  The presupposition is that bad things shouldn’t happen, or certainly shouldn’t happen to good people; and since they do happen and the world is imperfect, there cannot be a God.  Indeed, the world is so dreadful, as it impinges on us in our living rooms on the small screen, that trying to put it right  or make sense of it seems beyond us – as compassion fatigue  sets in and we find ourselves lost and insecure, confronted with a world so threatening that the most noticeable reaction is the creation of comfort zones.”  (p 30)

The notion that death is somehow foreign to humanity is certainly found in the Christian interpretation of the Genesis 3 fall of humanity from grace into sin and death.  The Orthodox understanding of this story is the notion of ancestral sin which introduced mortality into the human condition.  The Resurrection of Christ is God’s own defeat of death and promise of eternal life for all humanity.  However, Christianity has been very real that sickness, suffering and sorrow are part of the human condition and will continue to be so until God establishes His Kingdom on earth.   This is no doubt a test of Christian faith as we struggle with why God allows His creatures to suffer, especially when we consider innocents, children, infants or even animals who have not sinned.   Atheists tend to point to the suffering of humanity as a sign that there is no Intelligent Designer for the universe.   Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) remains realistic that in this life we will experience the ravages of disease, injury and illness while constantly seeking the mercy of God to give us the faith, hope and strength to deal with the suffering we encounter.

In Christianity it is the suffering of humanity and our mortality which  are reasons for the incarnation of the Son of God at Christmas.  

“Yet the experience of being physical beings lies at the very cusp of the ambiguity of our human condition.  Vulnerability, corruptibility, and mortality are characteristic of the physical, natural world – ‘Change and decay in all around I see’!  The Fathers were highly sensitive to this reality, but they saw this mortal, natural existence, with all its passions and joys, pointing beyond itself to that full-bodied living which is God’s ultimate purpose.   The physical senses are analogous to the spiritual; physical love is stimulated by beauty, and the beauty of God evokes spiritual love: ‘My God, how wonderful Thou art!’  For the Fathers, ‘anagogy’ meant the spiritual journey upward through analogy.”  (p 114)

Unlike Ray Kurzweil’s singularity in which he sees humanity as escaping the limits of the body by ultimately converting our consciousness into electrical impulses on the Internet, Orthodox Christianity believes our physical bodies are part of God’s plan for us and salvation.  Our bodies despite the limits of physicality, illness and mortality, are made not only to bear divinity (Theotokos) but to become united with divinity (Theosis).  Suffering in this view does not overcome our humanity, but rather our spirituality – namely our union with Christ – overcomes our mortality.  See my blog  Transcending Biology:  Theosis vs. Singularity.

Salvation from hell: Christianity as Fire Insurance

I have often felt that it is going to be up to poets to save Christians from having our hearts turned to stone by those demanding literalism alone as the way to approach the Word of God.  God’s Word after all is not to be carved into hearts of stone, but is meant to sown like seeds in the good soil of our hearts.  Poetry helps remind us that Scripture is meant to be living and active and bearing fruit, causing us to sing in joyful praise, not just be memorized or obeyed.  As the Lord says in Isaiah 55:10-11 -

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Scott Cairns, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, and an Orthodox Christian, is considered by many to be one of the best poets currently writing.  His book of poetry, LOVE’S IMMENSITY: MYSTICS ON THE ENDLESS LIFE, is a collection of poems based on the writings of numerous Christian saints and mystics – Eastern and Western.   His poetry helps convey the sense in which Christianity cannot be conveyed only through the rationalism of biblical literalism.  Truth is also beauty, and taking the time to encounter Christ through the beauty of icons and words leads one to the Orthodox experience of salvation in the incarnation as well as the resurrection.

Cairns in describing the Western Christian mystic Walter Hilton (d. 1396) says he lived at a time when being a Christian had been reduced to “a mere matter of fire insurance (salvation from hell).”    Such reductionism in Christian thinking deprives Christianity of any value in this world  – it says we live only for the world to come.  Why then did God create our world, place us in it and why does He act to save it?      If the only goal of Christianity is salvation from hell, then it is completely based in the non-biblical notion of dualism wherein the created world is of no value to God or His people and in fact is considered completely depraved and evil.  The Biblical truth is that God so loved the world that He gave His own dear Son to live and die in this world in order to redeem it and give it the life of being made a new creation.   There is goodness and life in God’s creation, He did not make a completely evil material creation nor has He allowed sin, evil and death to completely triumph over His world or His people.

Christianity is about living in this world and giving thanks for the world and rejoicing in God’s blessings.  We experience the created order transformed and transfigured by Christ.  This new creation of theosis can be experienced by every Christian in this world and lifetime.   It is not meant only for life in some distant after death “other world” which has not come.  Christ came into this world in the incarnation and returned to this world in the resurrection.   Salvation is not abandoning this world, nor are we saved from the world or from our bodies.  Christianity proclaims the resurrection of the dead – the transformation of our bodies in the new creation of God’s saving plan.  In this world and in this life time we can fully experience the love of God, and embrace it by loving both God and neighbor.

I offer four excerpts from the Cairns’ book (with the disclaimer that excerpts can never do justice to the poem or poet) as examples of how he captures holy truth by using the beauty of language:

A]        Know this: whoever bears a grudge when he prays

is like a man who sows grain in the sea

and expects to reap a harvest.   

B]         No one who loves true prayer and still gives way

to anger or resentment can be protected

from the appearance of insanity.

C]         Bearing our curse, becoming sin,

   You loose us from both the burden

    of the law and from our lawlessness.

D]       Observe the tress.  Just as they

must endure the winter’s storms

before they can bear fruit, so it is

with us.  This troubled age is our own

destructive storm.

 

 

Who is the man, Jesus?

Sunday of the Paralytic         John 5:1-15

St. John Chrysostom said of this Gospel Lesson:

Afterwards Jesus found him and said to him: ‘See, you are cured. Sin no more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.’ Did you see the physician’s wisdom? Did you see his concern? Not only did he free the man from his ailment at the time he was cured but he also made him sage against disease for the future. And this was a very opportune time to do so. When the man was lying on his couch, Jesus said nothing like this to him; he did not then remind him of his sins. For the souls of those who are sick are distressed and somewhat morose. So first he drove out the disease, first he restored the man to health. Then, after he proved by his deed his power and his concern for him, he gave his timely exhortation and advice. Why? Because Christ had already shown by the very things he did that he now deserved to be  believed.

The Paralytic was asked “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your mat and walk?”   St. Athanasius provides an answer by describing Jesus this way: 

Therefore, since God he is and man he became, as God he raised the dead and, healing all by a word, also changed the    water into wine. Such deeds were not those of a man. But as wearing a body he thirsted and was wearied and suffered; these experiences are not characteristic of the deity. And as God he said, “I am in the Father and the Father in me;” but as wearing a body he rebuked the Jews, “Why do you seek to kill me, a man that told you the truth which I heard from the Father?” But these facts did not occur in dissociation, on lines governed by the    particular quality of the several acts, so as to ascribe one set of experiences to the body apart from the deity and the other to the deity apart from the body. They all occurred interconnectedly, and it was the one Lord who did  them all wondrously by his own grace. For he spat in a human fashion, yet his spittle was charged with deity, for therewith he caused the eyes of the man born blind to recover their sight; and when he willed to declare himself God it was with a human tongue that he signified this saying, “I and the Father are one.” And he used to perform cures by a mere act of will. But he stretched forth a human hand to raise Peter’s wife’s mother when she was sick of a fever, and to raise up from the dead the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue when she had already expired.

The Annunciation (2009)

“In the days of creation of the world, when God was uttering his living and mighty “Let there be,” the word of the Creator brought creatures into the world.  But on that day, unprecedented in the history of the world, when Mary uttered her brief and obedient, “So be it,” I hardly dare say what happened then-the word of the creature brought the Creator into the world.”  (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, Annunciation, 1874)

I love the theological play on ideas that one finds in the theology of the incarnation. 

In Genesis 1, God said, “Let there be…” and His Word brought creation into existence.

In Luke 1, when the Virgin Mary says, “So be it…” that same Word of God is brought into the Creation which He made!

Such is the most profound and wonderful theology of Christianity.  It reveals to us the true and total love God has for His creation, and the most profound and mysterious relationship that He has with it.   God not only creates a world, but in Mary, the Theotokos, He creates someone capable of bearing God within her!  In God we all live and have our being (Acts 17:28), but then in a most amazing act of salvation, God lovingly enters into creation and is contained within it.   With the Psalmist I ponder,

“When I  look at your heavens, the work of your  fingers,
   the moon and the stars,  which you have set in place,
  what is man that you are  mindful of him,
   and  the son of man that you  care for him?

 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
   and crowned him with glory and honor.”  (Psalm 8:3-5)

Is There Something We Know that God Does Not?

Yeah, I was out of touch

But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough

I just knew too much

(CRAZY,  Gnarls Barkley)

“One of the cruel ironies of any literary endeavor is that the filmmaker-or the playwright, or poet, or novelist-can never truly experience the work the way the audience does.  I, who worked for six years on this movie [Field of Dreams], will never know what it’s like to see it.  To enter the theater without knowing what will unfold and give myself over to the story.  I knew too much, and if I had the ability, I would invent a machine that would selectively wipe our memory, so we too could enjoy our creations without pre-knowledge of their secrets.”   (Phil Alden Robinson, writer/director of FIELD OF DREAMS, quoted in the WILSON QUARTERLY, Winter 2009)

Those who know me will know that Phil Alden Robinson’s quote intrigues me for it makes me think about the Great Poet, the Creator God.   Genesis Chapter 1 has God speaking His poetry, which creates not only wonderful sounds, but amazing sights as well.  The creation of the universe is presented at first as a poem being told by a creative God. 

Robinson says the filmmaker or poet cannot enter into his work as the audience does.  And if we apply that thought to theology, we would have to say that we the actors in God’s great unfolding drama therefore know something that God can never know- what it is like to live as a guest in His creation.  (For in truth we are not passive audience in the history of creation, but are its actors or more truthfully its co-directors).    Is it possible that we know something that God can never know?

In the Quran at several points, Allah says to the humans “I know what you do not.”   And certainly in Judaism and Christianity there the sense that God is omniscient.  Yet is there a blind spot in his view of creation?

Of course in Genesis 2 and 3, God the Creator more anthropomorphically acts in creation itself – at least He is described as participating in the very creation He made. 

It is Christianity though which really undermines Robinson’s claim, theologically speaking in any case.  For in the Christian theology of the Triune God, one Person of the Trinity actually crosses all of the boundaries which separate Divinity from humanity, created from the Creator.  God the Word became flesh, became part of the creation, became an actor within creation, not anthropomorphically but incarnationally.   God who enjoyed the goodness He saw in His creation from the beginning, so loved His creation as to have His Son become enfleshed in what His Word had spoken into existence.

Despite the reception His Son was given by the world – nailing the King of Glory to the Cross – God continues to love His world as proved by the Resurrection.   Christ risen from the dead, destroys death, not humanity.  Christ was sent into the world for the salvation of the world not its damnation (John 3:17, 12:47).

Transcending Biology: Theosis vs. Singularity

A follow-up blog to my The Singularity and the Acceleration of Evolution and The Singularity is Near Gnosticism.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil’s THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR: WHEN HUMANS TRANSCEND BIOLOGY ends up being a mixture of science, science fiction and Kurzweil’s personal transcendent beliefs and assumptions.   He accepts a Gnostic notion that humans are trapped in their own bodies, trapped by their biology, and thus in need of transcending biology to attain pure intelligence.   Earlier Gnostics may have seen the soul or the mind as transcending biology, but Kurzweil limits even further what is valuable to humans as their own intelligence – the only part of humanity really worth projecting into the future, into some form of “afterlife.”  For Kurzweil it is human intelligence which by transcending its biology and merging with artificial intelligence creates the singularity in which human intelligence attains an eternal life.

Kurzweil’s assumptions though see human intelligence as having an existence apart from the biologically determined humans.  Intelligence for him is not completely rooted in either the individual’s mind nor connected to the person’s brain, but is capable of being divorced from both and still retaining its content.  Thus he severs intelligence from biology, from the human brain and the person who developed the particular intelligence.  Intelligence is thus almost equal to information in his thinking – information which can be transferred to other things in the universe – specifically computers or other artificial intelligence “devices”.   Thus, by his way of reasoning “intelligence” is not organically connected to the senses which brought in that “information” which the brain interprets into intelligence.   Kurzweil does not believe there is an organic connection between intelligence, mind, brain, person and senses.  For him human intelligence is not the blessed result of all these things being organically connected but rather has some universal existence and only temporarily resides in a person.  Thus he rejects both the materialism of evolutionary thinking and the design of a Creator who endows inanimate material with a soul, heart and mind.  Both science and the major Western Religions with a Creator God value the material universe.  Kurzweil  however sees the material universe as doing nothing but limiting intelligence – not giving life to it, not being foundational to it, not amazingly capable of transcending its own materialism by being capable of sustaining consciousness and conscience. 

Kurzweil offers us no reason why we should accept his interpretation of existence or his metaphysical assumptions.  He does not give us reason as to why we should think it good that intelligence can or should escape the material world that gave rise to intelligence and conscience.  Evolutionary thinking seems willing to admire with great awe the material world and the development of conscience.  Those who believe in a Creator see the material world as both a gift from the Creator and a way to come to know the Creator through His actions and believe the material world is capable of bringing us to transcendence.  Neither sees the material world as being particularly limiting to human intelligence.

In Orthodoxy human biology does not in any way limit the human being, for it is through our biology that we come to know God, and it is our biology as well that is transfigured by God  in the process of salvation known as theosis.  Transcending biology in Orthodox Christianity means reaffirming the wholeness of the human being including ones’s biology and the non-physical aspects of one’s being.   Humans can aspire to something greater than themselves because they are endowed with God’s breathe which brings the soul into existence and thus are not limited by their biology. 

See also my blog God is a Materialist

Sola Scriptura or the Incarnation of the Word of God?

 Notes from Christmas Sermon 2008   Luke 2:1-20   and  Matthew 1:18-2:23

One of the truths about the entire Christmas story is that it is all about God’s intervention into human history.  God speaks to Mary and Joseph through dreams and angels, to the shepherds through angels, and to the non-Jewish magi through the movement of the stars in the cosmos.  God intervenes into human history and uses supernatural and natural events to convey His message.

For us as Christians today, we also have ways in which God can speak to us – certainly through His Scriptures, His written word, but also in and through His people, the Church, through His saints, through the Liturgy, and also through angels, the Holy Spirit, through dumb beasts, the stars in the heavens, through poets and scientists.   God can use not only His written word, but people, events, symbols, poetry, prophecy, dreams, and animals to convey His message to us.   Our task is to be able to discern these messages, and to know the difference between hearing God speaking to us and listening to our selves, or between God speaking to us and the evil one tempting us.

The teenager and Virgin Mary is pure and holy and yet finds herself pregnant.  She certainly knows the Torah and the righteous demands of how a woman impregnated by someone other than her husband is to be punished.  The Torah, the Scriptures,  are very clear.   And if all she has to rely on are the Scriptures, she is in trouble.  And yet she has heard the word of the Angel Gabriel, and accepts the pregnancy because she has been faithful to both God and to her betrothed.  The Scripture alone would not have been enough to guide her.

Joseph the Betrothed is a righteous man.  He has studied Torah and knows the Law of righteousness.  He contemplates what to do with this pregnant teenager to whom he is betrothed.  And he is a just man and righteous, but also kind and merciful.  He knows what the Torah, the written word of God says about the likes of Mary.  But he is also moved by the mercy taught so clearly in the Torah.  He decides to quietly divorce Mary and not make a big deal or demand justice or public penance or punishment.  His mercy exceeds what Torah expects of him.  And yet, even in this God has some other word to him -  don’t follow Torah, take the pregnant teenager as your wife.  Don’t be afraid, for all of this is the will of God.  And Joseph the old man wizened by years of listening to and obeying Torah is open to the promptings of God and keeps Mary as his wife while contemplating what it could all mean to set aside Torah in order to obey God.

The shepherds hear of the birth of the Messiah from the angelic host, not in the temple, not from rabbis, but out in the field at night as they are keeping watch over dumb sheep – not while they are reading scripture.  They hear God’s message through the angels and then go to see what they have heard about.  Their faith guides them to seek out what new thing God may be doing.

The magi too apparently know of the scriptural prophecies of a Messiah King to be born, but it is not scripture but the stars which lead them to Bethlehem.  They too are open to the promptings of the Spirit and discern not only the stars but their own dreams to obey God.

We too are invited each Christmas to consider God’s revelation to the world and intervention in the world.   How does God speak to each of us at Christmas?  Through all of these people who were open to God’s promptings – magi, shepherds, teenage girl, old man.  God continues to speak to all of us through His scriptures, but also through the saints, in the Liturgy, and through nature itself.  The Holy Spirit is at work in the Church today and speaks in our hearts about what God is doing in the world right now but also in our hearts.   We like the characters in the Nativity story must be ready to hear God and to follow His people and His plan.

The Spirit of Christmas – The Spirit of Christ

While we can find plenty of references from our culture as to what the “spirit of Christmas” is (gift giving, family, food, friends, shopping, peace, warmth, light, tradition, feelings), I’ve tried to offer through this blog more theological ideas about the meaning of spirit of Christmas.   At least in its origins Christmas was a Christian Feast focusing on the birth of Jesus the Son of God and Messiah.  And yes there is good evidence that the Christians intentionally placed the Feast of the Nativity of Christ on December 25 to compete with pagan festivals of the Winter Solstice and the Invincible Sun.  Nevertheless, the Feast is a Christian theological feast, even though for the most part our culture and society endeavors to remove the theology to make Christmas into a winter festival acceptable to all.   As Christians, our best way to keep the Spirit in Christmas is to keep it as a Trinitarian Feast – a Feast which upholds the theology of God the Father, and God the Son/Word and God the Holy Spirit.   It was the Holy Spirit which came upon the Virgin Mary and impregnated her with the Word of God Jesus, Who also is the son of God the Father.   It is the Trinitarian truth about Christmas that gives the Holy Day its power and meaning.   Dorotheos of Gaza in the 6^th Century wrote:

“Therefore our Lord did come, by being made man for our sakes, so that, as the scripture says, like should be healed by like, soul by soul, flesh by flesh, for he became completely man-without sin.  He took our very substance and took his origin form our race and he became a New Adam, like the Adam he himself had formed.  For he renewed man in his nature, restored the depraved senses and sensibility of human nature to what it had been in the beginning.  Having become man, he lifted fallen man up again.”    (DOROTHEOS OF GAZA: DISCOURSE AND SAYINGS) 

Constantine Tsirpanlis in his  INTRODUCTION TO EASTERN PATRISTIC THOUGHT AND ORTHODOX THEOLOGY says of the 4^th Century St. Athanasius:

“For salvation and deification, therefore, Athanasius demands the Incarnation of God.  And even though he mingles the need of the redemption into his explanation, that need is not the ultimate reason, according to  him, why the Incarnation was necessary; the ultimate reason is the fact that man was a mere creature, and it takes a God-Man to deify man.  Consequently, if man was destined to be deified from the beginning, the Word had in mind, from the beginning, to become man.  Union with God is as impossible without the Incarnation as deification.” 

Christmas: When Repentance is Not Enough

Though the first message Jesus proclaimed was a call to repentance (Matthew 4:17), the early Christians understood that the purpose of Christ’s coming was not mostly about this message.  For indeed the prophets had already called God’s people to repentance, and before Jesus, St. John the Forerunner also called all to repent (Mark 1:15).   Repentance however was not enough to accomplish salvation.   St. Athanasius in the 4^th Century AD said:

“Nor does repentance recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it does is to make them cease from sinning.  Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God.  No, repentance could not meet the case.  What-or rather Who was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required?  Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of nothing?  His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all.”  

Christmas for St. Athanasius is about God healing human nature which had become corrupted by sin.   God had already given the Law and sent the prophets to tell the world to stop sinning and how to live properly.  If all that was needed was that humans stop sinning, Christmas would never have been necessary.  For us Christians, we can look at Christmas and ask, “What  was the purpose of the Incarnation?    What was the problem or evil for which God determined the birth of Christ was the solution?”   Christmas is the undoing of what had happened to humanity and to our relationship with God ever since the sin of Eve and Adam in Genesis 3.