Keeping Faith with God

This is the 4th and final blog in a series  which began with  “Through the Law, I died to the Law: St. Paul and Torah.”  The immediate preceeding blog was Keeping Torah: Examples of Faith.    In these blogs I have been reflecting on St. Paul’s comment, “For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God”  (Galatians 2:19).    For St. Paul the failure of the Torah was that the Jews made keeping the Torah the center of their spiritual life, rather than keeping faith in God.   They should have done both, but became focused on the minutiae of rules. 

Once St. Paul recognized that Jesus was in fact God’s promised Messiah, he realized the Law had served its purpose – it had kept him faithful to God so that he could recognize what God was now doing for the salvation of the world.  He realized the Law was God’s gift to help him and all Israel be faithful to God, but with the coming of the Christ, the purpose of the Law was fulfilled.  The Law was meant to keep Israel faithful to God’s promises.   The Messiah was the fulfillment of God’s promises, thus the very thing the Law was preparing them to recognize.   For Paul adherence to the law came to an end because now faith was demanding that Israel recognize its Messiah.   The object of his faith was not the Law, but the Messiah – what God was doing for the world.  The Law it turns out was a temporary custodian to help keep Israel focused on and faithful to God.  The Law like the Scriptures were not the end in themselves but point to the Christ (John 5:39-40).   Now being faithful to God meant following Christ; the Law with its demands was shown to be a temporary tool for keeping faith in God.   

In Galatians 2:20 and Philippians 3:9, St. Paul uses a phrase in talking about Christ referring to the faith of Christ.  He says he lives by the faith of the Son of God.  Modern Protestant translators often changed the phrase to read that Paul lives by faith in the son of God.  But a number of current scholars (Morna Hooker or James Dunn for examples) have come to think that Paul intended to say Christ’s faith as the passages literally state.  St. Paul does think we all must live by faith, and Jesus is the greatest example of this.  Jesus is the incarnate Word of God but as a human he must live by faith to be the Savior of the human race.  As Christian we actually do live by His faith, not just our faith in Him!   Christ models faithfulness to us as we can see in Luke 22:41-44 where Jesus is praying on the Mount of Olives just before His crucifixion.  Ritualized religion cannot help Jesus at this point – he now places His full trust in God His Father for He has submitted Himself to the Father’s will in becoming incarnate and setting aside His divine prerogatives.  Keeping Torah cannot save Him from what He must endure to save humankind.  St. Paul’s criticism of the ritualism of the Jews is that they have replaced faith with religion.  Jesus keeps faith despite what religious conviction and authority imposes on Him on the cross.  Jesus does in fact model the faith which St. Paul so brilliantly explicates.   It is the faith of the man Jesus which keeps Him humanly oriented to the Divine Will.

Even in the Gospel Lesson of the woman with the flow of blood (Luke 8:41-56), we see this same message being offered.  The woman’s being faithfully observant to Torah cannot heal her.  Only when she reaches out beyond keeping Torah to touch Christ is she healed.  The Law declared her unclean for her hemorrhage and says she is unfit to be in public or to touch anyone – to touch Christ is to reach beyond what the Torah allowed.   Christ Himself emphasizes the theme of the limit and failure of the Law.  The woman had been healed surreptitiously and nobody knows she is unclean, but Christ calls attention to this fact, and the woman publicly confesses her uncleanness and having touched  Christ against the Torah prohibition.  It is at that  very moment that Christ proclaims it is her faith which has healed her.  Keeping the Law would not have healed her and in fact keeping Torah would have prevented her from touching Christ and being healed.   It is faith to which the Law was meant to bring us, not to keep us away from God!   The woman showed her faith by keeping Torah but her faith led her to Christ.  The sign of her keeping Torah is her desire to secretly touch Christ without letting anyone know she is actually unclean and thus violating Torah.  She kept Torah in order to be faithful to God and then was able to recognize God at work in Jesus Christ.  Through the Law she died to the law so that she might live to God.

As a further means to understand St. Paul’s point about faith and law, I will offer this non-biblical example:   Say you become ill and the doctor prescribes a regiment of taking medicine to help you recover.   You begin taking the medicines, but aren’t getting better, so you decide you need to more strictly follow the doctor’s rules.  You become obsessed with keeping the details of the doctor’s rules, yet your condition worsens.   The direction say take a full glass of water with your medicine, and so you decide a cup 7/8 full is not full enough.   If your focus on rigidly obeying the doctor’s order causes you to fail to notice that your health continues to decline, you have made the mistake that St. Paul ascribes to the Jews – you made following strictly the details of the doctor’s regiment more important than your improving health.   Something got lost in the process.  The doctor was not ultimately as interested in you rigidly following the regiment as he or she was in your getting healthy.  Slavishly following the directions regarding the medication has caused you to lose sight of the fact that the doctor was not concerned about you taking the medicine but rather about you getting better.

Leo Tolstoy wrote the story “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” in which Ivan has a terminal illness.  Ivan fanatically tries to keep the doctor’s rules to the minutest detail, yet no amount of following the rules can change the fact that his condition is terminal.  He loses sight of the big picture until the disease progresses to such a point that he has to come to grip with death itself.   Then he realizes that the rigid following of such rules is a distraction to the ultimate and important issues of life.

When St. Paul accepted that Jesus was the Messiah, he realized the Law had served its good purpose and so through the Law he died to the Law for the Law could not do for him what faith alone could – keep Him oriented to God’s current plan of salvation.   Keeping the Law was never the goal, rather it was always meant to help us keep faith with God.  Rigid keeping of the law could be done without the heart being brought closer to God, while faith opens the heart to being a through for God Himself.

Lest we falsely imagine St. Paul’s criticism of Torah-keeping replacing true faith is only directed at Jews, we must remember as Orthodox it is easy for us to replace faith in God with the religion of Tradition.    Orthodox Tradition serves the same role for us as the Torah did for the Jews.   We can follow all the details of liturgical ritualism or ascetic rigorism and still be lacking that faith in God which St. Paul taught.    Consider St. Paul’s words:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3 RSV).

Through the Law St. Paul died to the Law because his faith causes him to be crucified with Christ.  He embraces the faith of Christ and understands that it is His faith which saves us.   We must never imagine that obedience to a tradition is equivalent to faith in the Son of God.  We could be like Zechariah so faithful to tradition that even God sees our righteousness and yet incapable of believing what God is doing in our lives.  We can also be like the crucified Christ –  stripped of the religious tradition and yet faithful to God even to the point of death on the cross.

Healing: The Cosmic Dimension

This is the second part of my blog based upon Paul Meyendorff’s book THE ANOINTING OF THE SICK.    The blog began with  Healing and Salvation.  While appreciating Meyendorff’s historical analysis of the Sacrament of Healing and his call for a restoration to more frequent use of the sacrament, I was disappointed that he hadn’t thought more about how the Church’s services of healing could be used as part of the missionary and evangelical outreach of the Church.

The cosmic nature of salvation is part of the beauty of Orthodox Christianity.  Sickness and suffering are not fair and just, happening only to the wicked and unbeliever.   They happen because there is a fundamental brokenness in creation itself – a separation of creation from God which affects all people because we all are born into a world separated from God through sin.  As Meyendorff writes:

Sickness, suffering, and death are the inevitable result of the separation between God and humanity that took place when humanity disobeyed God’s command, when it chose to please itself rather than God.  Sickness, suffering and death are the lot of all humanity in this fallen world—we all share the same fate, saint and sinner, young and old.  Even Jesus Christ, who was totally without sin, shared our fate when he condescended to suffer and die – this is the very essence of the mystery of the incarnation.   …. In each of us, the process of disease, decay, and ultimately death begins from the very moment that we are conceived.  When we sin, moreover, we contribute to a process that is already underway in each of us.  This is the state of the world in which we live, and this is the sad reality that the Son of God came to overcome.  (p 69)

As Meyendorff rightfully goes on to say,

With the fall of Adam, both humanity and the entire cosmos were affected.  Illness, therefore, is not the root problem, but only a symptom.  The far more significant consequence of the fall was the rupture of the communion between God and humanity, between humans among themselves, and between humanity and the rest of creation.  For Christians, sickness and death are not the real problem: rather, it is alienation from God, and the resulting spiritual death, which are the real tragedy.  (p 84)

Seeing disease and suffering as not the problem of humanity, but the symptom of a deeper problem frames the entire understanding of humanity in a particularly Christian way.  The Church is engaged in a healing ministry.  The Church recognizes that God provided in the world herbs and elements for healing, and gifted some humans such as nurses, pharmacologists and doctors with the knowledge and gift of healing, all of which are blessings from God.  But the Church also acknowledges that ultimately such healing too has a temporary nature to it, just like disease.  For humans despite healing, despite Christ being the incarnate God, continue to age, become diseased and die.   Disease and death are but the symptoms of the underlying problem of humanity – we are separated from God.   Both illness and medical healing belong to temporal creation and do not answer ultimate questions.  

 The healing services provide us with the opportunity to acknowledge before God our separation from Him, to repent of how we have contributed to this separation and how this separation has unfairly affected even innocent children and infants, besides all creatures on our planet.   We acknowledge our need for God’s forgiveness and mercy, and we repent of our inability to continuously co-operate with God in our permanent healing and eternal salvation. 

“As Fr Alexander Schmemann puts it so well,

‘Healing is a sacrament because its purpose or end is not health as such, but the entrance of man into the life of the Kingdom, into the “joy and peace” of the Holy Spirit.  In Christ, everything in this world, and this means health and disease, joy and suffering, has become an ascension to, and entrance into this new life, its experience and anticipation.’”

Meyendorff’s book offers numerous prayers from tradition as well as rubrics including all prayers for the two services of healing.   One prayer from the oldest known service book for priests (Byzantine 8^th Century) says,

Christ healing the blind man

O holy Father, physician of our souls and bodies, who sent your only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who heals every infirmity and delivers from death, through the grace of your Christ heal also your servant  (name)  from the infirmities of the body which afflict him (her) and enliven him (her) with your good will so that he (she) may thank you by fulfilling good deeds, for yours is the power, and yours is the kingdom….

The Church on earth carries on the mission and ministry of the incarnate God – dealing with the temporal problems which plague not only humankind but all living things.   The Church deals with these symptoms of what is ultimately killing humanity and the world – separation from the living God.   Healing humanity has as its ultimate goal communion with the Creator God: the restoration of creation’s right relationship with the Creator.

Healing and Salvation

Paul Meyendorff’s much delayed book THE ANOINTING OF THE SICK was finally published and reading the first chapter convinced me of the importance of parishes offering liturgical services of healing.  Meyendorff follows and endorses the liturgical theology of Fr. Alexander Schmemann as he advocates for a restoration of the Sacramental rite of healing for baptized Orthodox parish members.   His book offers a historical overview of how the rite changed over time, fell into disuse in some traditionally Orthodox cultures and emerged as a rite in Holy Week in the Byzantine Greek tradition rather late in history.

Meyendorff shows there is an intimate connection between salvation, baptism, repentance, forgiveness, communion and healing. 

In baptism, we enter into a new relationship with God, with Christ, in which sin, sickness, and death no longer dominate.  We become children of God, heirs of the kingdom, members of Christ’s body, the Church.  This new relationship is to endure for ever, and neither sickness nor death can destroy it.  It is a new form of human existence.  Our head is no longer the ‘old Adam,’ who brought sin, sickness, and death into the world, but Christ, the ‘new Adam,’ who ‘destroys death by death’ and gives us eternal life.      Baptism, therefore, is the sacrament of healing par excellence, a healing aimed at the whole person, body, soul, and spirit.  (pp 10-11)

In the life in Christ, we gain a new perspective on everything we humans experience – sickness, suffering and death cannot separate us from God‘s love (Romans 8:38-39) and are proven to be temporary aberrations which Christ has overcome (John 16:33).  Sickness thus is not given invincible power in human life, illness is not viewed as defeat, but rather as conditions with limited duration when viewed from the eternity of Christ’s victory over death.  Our life, our suffering is united to Christ’s and given meaning in Christ who overcomes pain and illness.   We no longer suffer alone, but united to Christ our Lord who triumphs over suffering – we too pass from suffering and death to eternal life.

Baptism, therefore, is the paradigmatic healing sacrament.  Fallen humanity is recreated; our sins are forgiven; the image of God in us is restored; real, intimate communion with God, destroyed because of sin, is again made possible.  The sickness and death which once ruled our lives are defeated, in the sense that they, just like the cross, become a means of victory and a passage into the kingdom.  The brokenness of our human existence is abolished as we are incorporated into the Church, the body of Christ, through which we are saved.  We are no longer left to live out our lives alone, to suffer and die a meaningless death.  Rather, in the Church, our suffering and death become a means to victory, following in the footsteps of Christ, his death on the cross and his resurrection.  Through baptism, we are healed, and we are charged to bring this healing ministry to the world around us, to our family, to our neighbor, to all who we encounter.  (pp 22-23)

While I found Meyendorff’s exposition to be inspiring, I have to admit the last sentence in the above quote is not dealt with very well in the book.  Meyendorff writes mostly about restoring the sacrament of healing – which he says is closed and limited only to baptized Orthodox Christians.  Of course one could argue that if we are to bring healing to the world, then we must convert the world to Orthodoxy and then invite them to the sacraments including anointing for the sick.  I am personally troubled by this thinking from the point of view that Christ first brought healing to the world before His death and resurrection.   He did not bring healing just to Jews, but also to the hated Samaritans and Romans.  He did not bring healing only to Orthodox Christians, but to the world, to all who believed.   Meyendorff writes mostly about the sacrament of healing which he sees as limited to Orthodox Christians, and thus keeps the healing mission of the Church focused inward on our own members and excludes those who are not members in good standing.  He briefly mentions the non-Orthodox, but as a pastor in a missionary situation I wanted to see more written about the Church’s mission to the world and how prayers and healing are something we have to offer to our non-Orthodox and non-believing neighbors, co-workers, family members.     Before God gave the Law to the Jews He saved them from slavery in Egypt.  Before Christians had rules for members, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.     Healing is something Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection have done for the world (“On behalf of all things and for all things” as we say in the Liturgy), not just for rule abiding people because the entire world was subject to futility, death and decay (Romans 8:19ff).   The ministry of intercessory prayer and anointing the sick belong not just to the pastoral work of the Church but also to its evangelical and missionary efforts of being a light to the world and giving hope to humanity in the face of suffering and death.

Next: Healing: The Cosmic Dimension

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.

To the Ungodly and the Enemies of God: Love

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.  

(Romans 5:6,8,10)

St. Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome (and since His Epistle is in our Scriptures, writing to us as Christians), says we were “weak,” “ungodly,” ”sinners,” and “enemies” of God.    He is not addressing pagans, unbelievers, secular humanists, or atheists; rather he is reminding us about the condition in which God found humanity (namely, us) when He sent His Son into the world.  St. Paul, the one time super-holiness Pharisee, is acknowledging that all the law keeping efforts by the most righteous people in the world had neither brought the world to God nor had it saved the world from God’s righteous judgment.   It is not more, better, or greater keeping of the Law which  can save humanity from God’s anger over human sin.   It is God who chooses to save.  It is God who is love who ultimately saves humanity not only from sin and death but from ourselves and our self destructive and self condemning behavior.

This action by God is pure love.  God is not saving only those who are striving to keep the Law, God is also saving those who know they have failed to keep the law and have separated themselves from God.   Think about the parable Jesus told of the laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16).  The Master responds to His critics who think He is being unfair by rewarding those who labored long and hard through the heat of the day the same as He rewards those who showed up at that last minute.  Jesus is offering in parable form the same idea that St. Paul teaches:  the love of God is not dependent on one’s ability to keep the law.  For those who embrace the notion of God as Judge, this seems blatantly unfair since they are the ones trying hard to be righteous.   Jesus is not saying “don’t obey the law” or “the law is a waste of time.”   All He says is that God’s love is not meted out according to how much of it we have earned; human standards of fairness or just reward and just retribution are not the standard by which we can measure God’s righteousness and mercy.

We in fact are to love as Christ loves us (John 15:12).   How did He love us?  While we were still weak, ungodly, sinners and enemies of God.   That is how we are to love one another.  It is also how we are to love, not judge,  the world. This is what it means to be a light to the world and to evangelize.  Success is not measured in terms of the numbers we bring in to the church, but rather is measured by the degree to which we loved others in the same way that Christ loved us.   We are not just seeking out the righteous in the world to add to an already righteous Church.  Our task is to be a witness to all, even the godless and enemies of God, to the love which we have received from God in Christ Jesus. 

In the early days of Christianity there was a sectarian movement called Montanism, which claimed that the Church ought to  consist exclusively of righteous and godly beings and that all  others should be rejected by her. She was for the Montanists a community of those who had received special gifts from the Holy Spirit and by far the greater part of mankind, being sinful, was to be completely repudiated by her. Ecclesiastical consciousness condemned Montanism and upheld the Church as the home of sinners who repent. The saints are the Church’s bulwark and  buttress, but she does not depend on them alone, for the whole of mankind—a mankind seeking salvation—contributes in varying degrees to her perfecting. The Church on earth is the Church militant struggling against evil and iniquity. She is not yet the Church glorified or victorious. Christ himself spoke with tax    collectors and sinners, visited their homes and ate with them, and the Pharisees criticized him for it. His Church has to be like him. A Christianity that extended its recognition only to good people would be a pharisaical Christianity. Compassion, forgiveness, love for one’s neighbor with all his shortcomings—these are the works of Christian love and the means toward its perfection. (Nicolas Berdiaev, “The Worth of Christ and the Unworthiness of Christians”)

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.

 

 

The Judgement of a Merciful God

Christianity at times has forgotten that the coming of Christ was presented to the world as Good News – Gospel.   The message was not Christ has come therefore all sinners are doomed to hell, but rather Christ is risen and Satan is fallen and the dead are saved from hades.  Even when we look at the Old Testament we can see that before God gives Israel the Torah and the Ten Commandments, God saves the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.   The Passover and Exodus happen first.  God in His gracious love saves the Israelites before giving them His commandments.  The Israelites experience God’s grace, mercy, love and salvation before being given His Law.  First they experience God’s love for them which then gives them reason to obey His Commandments.   Christians should learn the same lesson – preach the Gospel of salvation first before teaching God’s commandments.   Let people experience the love, mercy and grace of God before demanding from them adherence to God’s righteousness.   Let them know of God’s salvation before any other message from God, and let them know foremost why they should love God – because He loved them first. 

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo points out that much modern American piety toward God is based in a misconception of God as a ruthless judge.  He writes:

But why do men hate God? They hate Him not only because their deeds are dark while God is light, but also  because they consider Him as a menace, as an imminent and  eternal danger, as an adversary in court, as an opponent at law, as a public prosecutor and an eternal persecutor. To them, God is no more the almighty physician who came to save them from   illness and death, but rather a cruel judge and vengeful inquisitor. You see, the devil managed to make men believe that God does not really love us, that He really only loves Himself, and that He accepts us only if we behave as He wants us to behave; that He hates us if we do not behave as He ordered us to behave, and is offended by our insubordination to such a degree that we must pay for it by eternal tortures, created by Him for that purpose. Who can love a torturer? Even those who try hard to save themselves from the wrath of God cannot really love Him. They love only themselves, trying to escape God’s vengeance and to achieve eternal bliss by managing to please this fearsome and extremely dangerous Creator…Do you see, then, that Western theology teaches that our real danger and our real enemy is our Creator and God? How can we have faith in someone who we detest? Faith in its deeper essence is a product of love, therefore, it would be our desire that one who threatens us not even exist, especially when this threat is eternal.   (THE IKON AS SCRIPTURE)

Putting to Death the Enmity not the Enemy

Sermon notes from 30 November 2008  on   Ephesians 2:14-22    

Christ Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation,

Peace is not an abstract idea or a philosophy; it is neither doctrine nor a document.  It is the person of Jesus Christ.  As the bumper stickers say, “No Christ, No Peace.  Know Christ, Know Peace.”

Christ breaks down the wall which separates humanity from God, and also the wall which existed between Jew and Gentile.  Paul is attributing to Christ a unity between God and humanity and between all humans which is actually part of Jewish teaching but which had sometimes been ignored by the Jews.  Namely:  1)  Genesis 12:1-3 -   ALL families on earth will be blessed through Abraham (not just Jewish ones); and,  2)  Isaiah 42:1-6, 49:6  -  Israel is to be  light to the Nations (it’s very role as being chosen is to serve humanity) 

having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace,

“in his flesh” – the Incarnation, the real meaning of the Christmas story, is about the salvation of the world, about ending the enmity which exists between God and humans and between Jew and Gentile.

The law which was to be a sign of Israel’s faithfulness to God as a light to the world, had instead become an exclusionary curtain which brought darkness to the Gentiles.

As at the beginning of the world in Genesis 1-2, so too in Christ a new man is being created.   All humans are sinners, even those keeping Torah, all are in need of forgiveness, reconciliation, salvation – Jew and Gentile.  The Law didn’t stop the Jews from sinning but they began to act as if it protected them from the consequence of sin.

and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father.

“put to death/slain the enmity”  –  Christ slays the enmity not the enemies.  On the Cross, Christ destroys death, not sinners

James 4:4    -    Unfaithful people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

1 Cor 15:26   -  The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Christ gives peace without defeating the Gentiles, but by making them a new creation and a new humanity.  Christ recreates both Jew and Gentile – the law no longer separates one from the other, nor does keeping or not keeping Torah separate us from God.

Christ defeats death not the Gentiles or sinners.  Christ brings about the reconciliation of humans who had become separated, alienated as a result of the Fall and of sin (Genesis 3-4)

Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,

 Though there is a very heavy emphasis on the spirituality of being in exile, of being a sojourner, of being, a resident alien, or a stranger, ultimately the work of Christ recreates and refashions us into one people; we all become fellow citizens with the saints

having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself  being the chief corner stone, in whom the whole building, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

The Church is not a building made up of brick and steel.  The Church is the living unity and fellowship of all believers.  The true mission of believers is not to build edifices but rather to edify one another and build community/communities.

Why can it be said that one Christian alone is no Christian?   Because to be a Christian is to be a member of the household of God.  To be a Christian is to be part of the living Temple made up of believers being built together to be the dwelling place of the Spirit.  You cannot do this in isolation from other believers.  You cannot go into the woods and commune with God alone and think that is Christianity.  To be a baptized communicatant – a believing Christian – is to be growing together with others into this holy, living temple of all believers.

The bible alone is not what the Bible teaches.

The God Who Does Not Despise the Sinner

In a previous blog I mentioned Fr. Theodore Pulcini’s A Brief Guide for Christian-Muslim Dialog.    Fr. Pulcini mentions what can be a basis for a discussion between Christians and Muslims but also notes there are significantly different and even contradictory ideas about sin and salvation which cannot be ignored in any real dialog.    For example, he writes:

Because Muslims do not recognize the universal and corruptive power of sin, unleashed as a result of original sin, they see no need for salvation in the Christian sense. What you should do, according to the Islamic view, is simply live a good life, pleasing God in all that you do. Submit to God and follow his directives. Religion, to the Muslim, does not mean salvation from sin; it means following the right path, or the sharii`a, mapped out by Islamic law. … That difference in emphasis is very important. If one recognizes the pervasive power of sin, salvation is not just an option; it is a necessity. Christians lament the fact that an incomplete understanding of original sin led early Islam to “throw out the baby with the bath water” with regard to their understanding of sin. …  they have missed what Christians consider to be the central truth of human existence: that no matter how hard we try to conform to “right practice,” we will fall short of the goal. We cannot live the kind of life that God wants by our own power. And that is why salvation is necessary.

That difference in understanding is reflected in the Christian emphasis on repentance and receiving God’s forgiveness rather than an emphasis on keeping God’s Law (Torah, Quran) and is a major difference between how Christians understand God as versus how Muslims and Jews view God and humanity’s relationship to Him.   For Christians if strictly and perfectly keeping God’s law was possible and all that was needed, then Christ serves no purpose as we do not need God’s forgiveness and salvation, all we need is more strict observance of the Law.  Christians would say the very revelation of God’s love and mercy is that He forgives sinners who repent, and does not base salvation on our perfectly keeping every detail of the Law.  God’s love and mercy trumps His demands for righteousness, or maybe more correctly His righteousness turns out to be forgiveness, mercy and love not judgment as we sometimes incorrectly ascribe to Him (see Job 42:7-8)

The difference in belief, thinking and emphasis seemed very clear to me in the priest’s prayer of the Divine Liturgy before the Trisagion Hymn (Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal…) when he prays:

Holy God… who does not despise the sinner , but instead has appointed repentance unto salvation…

God is not so rigidly righteous as to condemn His human creatures for their sinful failings, rather in that He is love, He loves us while we are still sinners because He desires our salvation not our condemnation.  He takes into account our weaknesses and provides us a way to the Kingdom of heaven even when we fail to follow or obey His commandments – through forgiveness and love.

The Universal Gospel: For All Mankind

St. Paul’s conversion brought about in him a true change of mind and attitude toward many things.  One which he struggles balancing in his epistles is the notion of the election of Israel  and the universal message of the Gospel.  As a Pharisee St. Paul had no doubt in Israel’s election by God.  But his encounter with the risen Christ and subsequent conversion experience led him to believe God’s plan of salvation incorporated the Gentiles and ended the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile which was so clear in Judaism.  Israel was to be a light to the nations, but it was to be a light which brought the nations to belief in God.  God’s election was ultimately not to be the cause of eternal and irreconcilable separation between Jew and Gentile, but was supposed to be Israel’s call to bring all the nations of the world to God.  This proved to be a difficult concept for the early Christians who initially debated how this could happen and whether in fact Gentiles had to become Torah keeping Jews in order to be Christian.  In Acts 15 the apostles gathered in Council reject keeping Torah as a requirement for the Gentiles.  St. Paul takes that idea to its logical conclusion – then neither is it required for Jews to keep Torah in order to do God’s will.  Fr. St. Paul his conversion revealed to him that all along, before the Torah and even when the law was given, God really wanted people to keep faith with Him.  The Torah was simply to aid that possibility.  Unfortunately the Jews had fallen into the trap of keeping Torah without keeping faith (Romans 9:31-33).

As an example of St. Paul’s embracing universal salvation for all of humankind, take a look at Ephesians 1:9-10, which I will quote from several different English translations/bibles:

“For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (RSV).

“ having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth-in Him” (NKJV).

“ he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment-to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ” (TNIV)

“He has made known to us his secret purpose, in accordance with the plan which he determined beforehand in Christ,  to be put into effect when the time was ripe: namely, that the universe, everything in heaven and on earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ” (REV).

God’s mystery revealed – His plan of salvation – was that all things in the universe were to be united in Christ.  This the Torah never could do for it had in fact become the very thing separating not only Jew from Gentile but also Pharisaic Jew from the less diligent Jew.

Orthodox Christianity also needs to remind itself about the universal nature of God’s salvation and not fall into the trap of sectarian Judaism thinking that keeping Torah/tradition is God’s design to separate humanity again.   We are to be a light to the world, to bring all to salvation.  That is the very mission of the church.

Think about a few lines from our Divine Liturgy:

For peace of the whole world, for the stability of the holy churches of God, and for the unity of all, let us pray to the Lord. (Great Litany)

Your own of Your own, we offer unto You on behalf of all and for all (behalf of all things and for all things)

We also offer to You this spiritual worship for the whole world, for the holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, and for those living in purity and holiness.

Remember also, Lord, those whom each of us calls to mind and all Your people.

 And all mankind!

In the Liturgy we pray for all the world and for all mankind and for everything in the universe.  Like the Jews we can be tempted to think salvation is for us alone, but with the Apostles, we need to remember the universal message of the Gospel.  Christ’s descent into Hades was for the salvation of the world, for all mankind.  That is the universal proclamation of Pascha:  “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”