Holy Tuesday (2017)

The events of Christ’s life some 2000 years ago are remembered in order to make Christ alive for us today. The events are history, but their importance lies not so much in being ancient history, but because they are alive in the Church today and help orient all believers to the coming Kingdom of God.   Our Gospel proclamation is: “Christ is risen!”  We don’t celebrate that He was risen but rather that He is risen and is alive right now, as of this moment.  His life means the power of death is overthrown. We remember the life of Christ to seek Christ, because Christ is alive now, and because He seeks us.

In the days of Holy Week we remember Christ coming again, as a Bridegroom seeking His beloved – seeking us! – inviting us into His Paschal Banquet.  Our orientation is toward the eschaton, and life in the world to come, far more so than toward past events.  The past has happened and can’t be changed, but the present and future are becoming reality, and in our interactions with God, we are shaping that reality.

“In a series of marvelous images, St. Makarios told us why Christ was born, lived on earth, suffered, died, was buried, and rose. Why? In order to stand and knock at the door of our heart (Rev. 3.20). The fact that he knocks is a sign the He does nothing without our consent: He cannot enter unless I want Him to. Christ seeks us out and knocks on our door, waiting patiently outside like a stranger seeking warmth and shelter. In so doing, He creates within us the sense and experience of His kenosis, His self-emptying (Phil 2.7).

Why does the God of the universe stand outside in the cold, day after day, knocking on our door? Because He can’t do without us. Just as a married woman can’t do without her husband, or a married man without his wife–because each partner is integral to the identity of the other–so too has Christ arranged things so that He can’t do without us. Without us, He is naked, hungry thirsty, and has no place to rest his head (Mt 8.20). He has made us His food and drink, His clothing and shelter: He has made our hearts His only place of repose. And when we open the door and welcome Him in, He fills us with His life and light. But make no mistake: without Him we are dead; a dark, empty place, designating only His absence.”  (Archimandrite Aimillianos of Simonopetra, The Way of the Spirit: Reflections on Life in God, p. 249)

Christ is our food – we eat His Body and drink His blood. We are today His hands and feet and eyes and ears in the world. We carry out His work and ministry. When we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, visit the sick and imprisoned, we are doing this to and for Christ.  The practice of Lenten self-denial has the goal of freeing ourselves from enslavement to the self so that we can serve others.  Abstinence and asceticism have the goal of freeing us from enslavement to the self so that instead of being self oriented and engaging in constant self-love, we can become like Christ and live to love and serve others.

 

Human Freedom means God’s Enslavement

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.  (Philippians 2:5-7)

One of the great mysteries of Christian theology is the humility of God.  God is willing to serve our needs, and to even humble himself to become a servant, a slave who works for our salvation.  God’s humility and God’s willingness to serve us are true because God is love.  God is willing to empty Himself (kenosis) for us humans and for our salvation.  This is the incarnation of love – God becoming human in Jesus Christ.

St. Ephrem the Syrian in one of his hymns on the Nativity of Christ expresses this kenotic theology this way:

“Behold, our freedom forced our Lord to be a servant to us.” (HYMNS, p 181)

When God created us with free will, God knew full well that we might choose against him.  God knew our freedom might lead to His needing to save us.  Thus, as St. Ephrem notes, the freedom which we so enjoy carries the implication, the corollary, that God would have to become our servant to save us.  This doesn’t alter God’s love for us.  Despite the humility required from God in creating us (needed to save us through the incarnation), God created us anyway.  He gifts us with freedom knowing He will have to save us – thus our freedom forces God to be our servant.

This is the great mystery of God’s kenotic love.

Next time you hear the expression, “Freedom isn’t free”, think about what our freedom cost God.

God Enters the Frailty of Human Life

Our celebration of the Resurrection of Christ might to some seem like “pie in the sky” since looking around the world we see  that the same kind of tragedies and evil that plagued the world 2000 years ago are still with us today.  Nothing seems to have changed.  This thinking was already obvious in the time of the Apostles:

“…knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts,and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”  (2 Peter 3:3-4)

We are faced with terrible human suffering in the world, and tragedies both natural and human caused.  The Good News of the Resurrection doesn’t take us out of the world in which suffering and death are present.  Rather the life and death of Christ give us a new insight into God – God is present in our world and in our sufferings.  We take the message of the resurrection even to our cemeteries where we are reminded of the bitterness of life.   We don’t hide from human suffering or pretend it isn’t there.   We experience the divine mystery of God entering the human condition and co-suffering with us.   This is the hope of Christianity and the Good News of Christ.  The world has not yet become the perfect world of God’s Kingdom, but we can now in this world be touched by God.  Fr. John Breck explains:

“If there is any sense to be made of these tragedies from our poor, myopic perspective, it is one provided simply and eloquently by the Church’s liturgical worship. From Nativity, through Theophany, and on to Holy Pascha, the common theme that we celebrate and proclaim to each other and to the world is summed up in the name given to Jesus at His birth, the name Emmanuel, ‘God is with us.’

This means not only that God accompanies us, remains present with us, and provides hope and consolation in our times of grief and loss. It means above all that God shares our suffering. He takes part in our pain and anguish, fully and to the bitter end. To put it somewhat melodramatically, yet accurately: with every drowned infant, every starving refugee, every family buried beneath a mudslide, and every fisherman lost in a ‘perfect storm,’ Christ the Son of God is present, and He suffers and weeps. Since the high Middle Ages, theologians have pondered the mystery of God’s omniscience and omnipotence. In the process they have often lost sight of another aspect of divinity, one that for us is far more important. It is what the apostle Paul refers to as God’s ‘kenotic’ or self-emptying descent into the darkness and frailty of human life (Phil 2:7). Paul uses the word to speak of the incarnation of the Son of God, His taking flesh and becoming a human person, without ceasing to be God in His very essence. But, he declares, that kenotic descent does not end with Jesus’ birth. For the Son of God further ‘humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.’ This is the distinguishing mark of Christianity. The quality that sets Christian revelation and Christian faith off from every form of religion is the one celebrated in the Church’s worship. It is the truth that God’s love for His people – for us – is such that He humbles and sacrifices Himself on our behalf. God suffers and dies, so that we might live in Him.” (Longing for God, pp 186-187)

The Annunciation: the Kenotic Mary

Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)

“The dogma of the Annunciation is not the revelation of a solitary and autocratic God; nor is the Annunciation a story of human subservience to that God.  Mary is called to an act of kenosis (self-emptying, suffering love), imitative of her own Son’s, even before he himself has revealed it to the world. For by conceiving the holy child, she risks humiliation and social ostracism. But whatever the Father asks of the mother, he asks also of his Son, who “emptied Himself… taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:5-11, NKJV).

This passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians is a reading for the feast of the Birth of the Mother of God. St. Paul argues that the kenosis of the Son of God lights the way toward a religious affirmation of human freedom and holiness. The true end of human freedom is voluntary self-limitation in loving service to others and to God. God holds to this law of love when he condescends to become one of us. Mary is the first human being to obey this command wholly and consummately.”  (Vigen Guroian, The Melody of Faith: Theology in an Orthodox Key, Kindle Loc. 702ff)

The Spiritual Miser

The Gospel lesson of Matthew 25:14-30, the Parable of the Talents:

For the kingdom of heaven is like a man traveling to a far country, who called his own servants and delivered his goods to them. And to one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one, to each according to his own ability; and immediately he went on a journey.

Then he who had received the five talents went and traded with them, and made another five talents. And likewise he who had received two gained two more also. But he who had received one went and dug in the ground, and hid his lord’s money. After a long time the lord of those servants came and settled accounts with them.

So he who had received five talents came and brought five other talents, saying, ‘Lord, you delivered to me five talents; look, I have gained five more talents besides them.’ His lord said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.’

He also who had received two talents came and said, ‘Lord, you delivered to me two talents; look, I have gained two more talents besides them.’ His lord said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.’

Then he who had received the one talent came and said, ‘Lord, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed.  And I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground. Look, there you have what is yours.’

But his lord answered and said to him, ‘You wicked and lazy servant, you knew that I reap where I have not sown, and gather where I have not scattered seed.  So you ought to have deposited my money with the bankers, and at my coming I would have received back my own with interest.  Therefore take the talent from him, and give it to him who has ten talents. For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.  And cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness. Where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

St. Mother Maria Skobtsova (d. 1945) writes:

“Spiritual egocentrism replaces the goal of true asceticism. It cuts off such a person from the universe and makes him into a spiritual miser – and then this miserliness quickly begins to develop and grow, because he begins to notice that the more he acquires, the emptier his soul becomes. This occurs because of a strange law of the spiritual life, whereby everything that is not distributed, everything that is saved, everything that is not lovingly given away somehow degenerates, becomes corrupt, is consumed in flames.

The talent is taken away from the one who buries it and is given to the one who will lend it at interest. Further accumulation makes one more and more empty. It leads to dryness, to spiritual numbness, to the complete degeneration and destruction of one’s spiritual essence. A unique process of self-poisoning by spiritual values takes place.”

(Essential Writings, pp 172-173)

The Self-Giving God

“If the work of God in creation is the work of love, then truth demands an imagery which will do no justice to the limitless self-giving which is among the marks of authentic love: and the imagery which the head demands may have a new power of appeal to the moral sensitivity of the heart. As a parenthesis, we may illustrate the kind of imagery which might express the self-giving of God in creation. A doctor tells of an operation which, as a young student, he observed in a London hospital. ‘It was the first time that this particular brain operation had been carried out in this country. It was performed by one of our leading surgeons upon a young man of great promise for whom, after an accident, there seemed to be no other remedy. It was an operation of the greatest delicacy, in which a small error would have had fatal consequences. In the outcome the operation was a triumph: but it involved seven hours of intense and uninterrupted concentration on the part of the surgeon. When it was over, a nurse had to take him by the hand, and lead him from the operating theatre like a blind man or little child.’ This, one might say, is what self-giving is like: such is the likeness of God, wholly given, spent and drained in that sublime self-giving which is the ground and source and origin of the universe.” (W.H. Vanstone in The Time of the Spirit: Readings Through the Christian Year, p 5)

Christ Emptied Himself to Empty Hell

St. Paul tells us that in the incarnation of the Word of God in Christ that the Second Person of the Trinity emptied Himself in order to become fully human.

“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.“  (Philippians 2:5-8)

 The self-emptying of God the Son, called kenosis, makes his incarnation and the divine union with humanity possible.  It makes salvation possible.  For the kenotic Christ then descends into the place of dead and empties it of all its captives – not just the righteous, but all are freed from slavery to death.  This is what we proclaim in our post-Paschal hymnology.

Take for example these two hymns from Matins for the Sunday of the Paralytic:

You have risen, emptying the tombs and despoiling hell by Your almighty power.  Therefore we hymn Your holy and divine Resurrection, O Christ!

Christ is risen as He said, emptying all the kingdoms of hell.  He is seen by the apostles, granting them eternal joy!

Christ empties ALL of the kingdoms of hell – however many there may be, however many levels there may be.  Christ conquers all hells in all their forms.   Christ fills all things with Himself (Ephesians 1:23).   Hell, Hades, Sheol may be emptied of their dead, but they are filled with the presence of Christ.  Thus the Psalmist sings:

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
(Psalm 139:7-9)

Hell, Hades, Sheol, and death are all emptied of their powers by Christ.  Christ also frees everyone who has gone to the place of the dead, so that there is no place on heaven or on earth or in hell where Christ is not present.

“If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.“  (Romans 14:8-9)

“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.“  (Romans 8:38-39)

Another hymn from Matins joyfully proclaims in song:

Christ is risen from the dead, the firstfruits of those that sleep:   the firstborn of all creation and maker of all created things!    In Himself He restored the corrupted nature of humankind!  You shall reign no more, O Death, for the Master of All has destroyed your power!

Not only does Christ empty Hades, Hell, Sheol of all the dead, he heals our humanity by reuniting it to divinity.  He doesn’t just free us from slavery and imprisonment in hell, but He also heals us, making us capable of life in Heaven with our Father.  He not only liberates our souls and bodies from enslavement, but He heals our inner human nature making it capable again of being united to God in eternal life.

Christmas: The Mystery of the Humility of God

“If there is any sense to be made of these tragedies from our poor, myopic perspective, it is one provided simply and eloquently by the Church’s liturgical worship. From Nativity, through Theophany, and on to Holy Pascha, the common theme that we celebrate and proclaim to each other and to the world is summed up in the name given to Jesus at His birth, the name Emmanuel, ‘God is with us.’ This means not only that God accompanies us, remains present with us, and provides hope and consolation in our times of grief and loss. It means above all that God shares our suffering. He takes part in our pain and anguish, fully and to the bitter end. To put it somewhat melodramatically, yet accurately: with every drowned infant, every starving refugee, every family buried beneath a mudslide, and every fisherman lost in a ‘perfect storm’, Christ the Son of God is present, and He suffers and weeps.

Since the high Middle Ages theologians have pondered the mystery of God’s omniscience and omnipotence. In the process they have often lost sight of another aspect of divinity, one that for us is far more important. It is what the apostle Paul refers to as God’s ‘kenotic’ or self-emptying descent into the darkness and frailty of human life (Phil. 2:7). Paul uses the word to speak of the incarnation of the Son of God, His taking flesh and becoming a human person, without ceasing to be God in His very essence. But, he declares, that kenotic descent does not end with Jesus’ birth. For the Son of God further ‘humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.’ This is the distinguishing mark of Christianity. The quality that sets Christian revelation and Christian faith off from every form of religion is the one celebrated in the Church’s worship. It is the truth that God’s love for His people – for us – is such that He humbles and sacrifices Himself on our behalf.  God suffers and dies, so that we might live in Him.”

(John Breck, Longing for God: Orthodox Reflections on Bible, Ethics, and Liturgy, pp. 186-187)

Love Comes with Emptying Oneself

“Souls on fire with the quest to become super men and women may even fail to notice and appreciate treasure in such ordinary vessels. It is our culture’s incessant and infantile desire to withhold love until we find the perfect body, the perfect mind, the perfect mood, the perfect mate, or until we possess the perfect ‘me-ness’…which renders us vulnerable to the same old seduction that began long ago in a Garden called Eden. To the degree that we are all striving, in one way or another, to become something, we are missing out on the privilege of being nothing. Yet ‘it is the Father’s good pleasure to give (us) the kingdom.’ What is the blindness and grasping that leaves us in search of something that will make us worthy of what can only be given as gift? Like the first Apostles, ‘we do not understand about the loaves.’ We still choke on the apple of self-sufficiency, a fatal mistake. The simple fact is God-esteem is infinitely more life-giving than self-esteem and infinitely rarer. The road of love begins where I end.” (Stephen Muse, Being Bread, pp. 65-66)

Feeding the 5000

The Perfect Love of God’s Children

St. Peter of Damaskos (12th Century) writes:

“Men are three kinds: slaves, hirelings or sons.

Slaves do not love the good, but refrain from evil out of fear of punishment; this, as St. Dorotheos observes, is a good thing, but not fully in accord with God’s will. Hirelings love what is good and hate what is evil, out of hope of reward.

But sons, being perfect, refrain from evil, not out of fear of punishment, but because they hate evil violently; and they do what is good, not because they hope for the reward, but because they consider it their duty. They love dispassion because it imitates God and leads Him to dwell in them; through it they refrain from all evil, even if no punishment threatens them.”  (The Philokalia: Volume 3, pg. 168)

St. Paul the Apostle writes:

“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.  

Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name,  that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”  (Philippians 2:5-11)