… that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height – to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17-19)
For St Paul one must know the love of Christ in order to be saved. This certainly follows Jesus’ own teaching in John 17:3 – “And this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” We are filled with all the fullness of God when we know the love of Christ. To attain theosis, one has to experience Christ’s love. St Maria Skobtsova comments:
“In the sacrament of the Eucharist, Christ gave Himself, His God-man’s Body, to the world, or rather, He united the world with Himself in the communion with his God-man’s Body. He made it into Godmanhood. And it would sound almost blasphemous if He had wanted to isolate some inner, deep Christ who remained alien to this God-man’s sacrifice. Christ’s love does not know how to measure and divide, does not know how to spare itself.
St Maria of Paris certainly has Philippians 2:5-8 on her mind as she speaks of Christ’s love for us: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” Christ holds nothing back from us but gives of Himself completely in order to reunite humanity with divinity. He gives us everything of Himself, and thus empties Himself so that we might be filled with the divine life. St Maria continues:
Neither did Christ teach the apostles to be sparing and cautious in love – and He could not have taught them that, because He included them into the Body of Christ – and thereby gave them up to be immolated for the world. Here we need only learn and draw conclusions. It might be said paradoxically that in the sense of giving Himself to the world, Christ was the most worldly of all the sons of Adam. But we already know that what is of the world does not give itself to the world.” (Essential Writings, pgs. 78-79)
We are to imitate the One Who emptied Himself in love for us, and to love as He loves us (John 13:34, 15:12). We are to give everything in order that others might enter into Christ’s love. As St Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:22 – “I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement says:
“So he takes flesh, suffers and dies for us, for ‘greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends‘. By his love for human beings he is utterly destroyed; he allows the despair of separated humanity to enter into himself, to the point that an unthinkable chasm is opened between God and God, between the Father and the crucified Son, as if God dying in the flesh on the cross experienced atheism in its most hellish form: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?‘ The infinite contradiction between the Living and the Crucified God is witness to humanity that God is infinite love, the love that Maximus the Confessor and Nicholas Cabasilas have called ‘mad’.” (ON HUMAN BEING, p 38)
It is Christ’s love for us that causes Him to die for us – His love for us leads to His destruction. His destruction will turn out to be the destruction of sin and death, which is our salvation. Christ takes on our humanity, including our separation from God our Father. Christ our God in becoming flesh experiences the chasm between humanity and divinity. Christ feels the searing pain of the sense of the loss of God. He does all of this in order to unite us once again to God our Father. Freely choosing death, Christ experiences what we humans experience and dread – death, so that we never have to experience separation from God again.
God knew from all eternity that creating humans would lead to God’s own suffering and death on the cross. God, who is love, still created us and humbly accepted the price God would have to pay to keep us united to divinity.
Fraternized 