Knowing God in the Biblical Sense of the Word

The business of this life should not preoccupy us with its anxiety and pride, so that we no longer strive with all the love of our heart to be like our Redeemer, and to follow his example. Everything that he did or suffered was for our salvation: he wanted his body to share the goodness of its head.

First of all, in taking our human nature while remaining God, so that the Word became man, he left no member of the human race, the unbeliever excepted, without a share in his mercy. Who does not share a common nature with Christ if he has welcomed Christ, who took our nature, and is reborn in the Spirit through whom Christ was conceived?

Again, who cannot recognize in Christ his own infirmities? Who would not recognize that Christ’s eating and sleeping, his sadness and his shedding of tears of love are marks of the nature of a slave?

It was this nature of a slave that had to be healed of its ancient wounds and cleansed of the defilement of sin. For that reason the only-begotten Son of God became also the son of man. He was to have both the reality of a human nature and the fullness of the godhead.

The body that lay lifeless in the tomb is ours. The body that rose again on the third day is ours. The body that ascended above all the heights of heaven to the right hand of the Father’s glory is ours. If then we walk in the way of his commandments, and are not ashamed to acknowledge the price he paid for our salvation in a lowly body, we too are to rise to share his glory. The promise he made will be fulfilled in the sight of all: Whoever acknowledges me before men, I too will acknowledge him before my Father who is in heaven.

Saint Leo the Great, pope

Reflection – ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.’ This was one of the little nuggets of wisdom I heard last week at St. Therese Institute. Keep your priorities straight and your vision clear, your sights set on the goal to which you are heading.

This is what this grand sermon of St. Leo the Great is all about, really. All of the contemplation of the redemption of Christ, his total embrace of our humanity and his total offer to us of his divinity—all of this is ‘the main thing.’ And to keep the main thing the main thing, is a matter of not being preoccupied with ‘the business of this life with its anxiety and pride’.

I’m off again today, once again leaving MH to hit the road, this time driving to the city of Orangeville, north-west of Toronto, to do a parish mission. The theme of the mission, requested by the pastor (an old seminary friend of mine) is metanoia, the great act of conversion that we are all called to do continually. Without spoiling the retreat for the people who might be reading this blog from that parish (hi there, you-know-who-you-are!), this little bit of patristic homiletics is exactly what it’s all about.

Before we can talk about conversion, repentance, turning away from sin and all those cheery topics, we have to talk about the beauty, the goodness, the mercy, and the great and wonderful plan of God. 

Conversion is ‘conversion towards’ before it is ‘conversion from’. It is never strictly a negative affair—oh, I shouldn’t be doing that, oh my beliefs are all wrong, oh my life is horrible.

Any of that may be true, and we may even come into truth, goodness, and beauty through apprehending the ugly, evil, false state we may find ourselves in at one point or another.

But for a conversion to be lasting, real, and deep, we cannot simply be reacting against bad stuff. We have to at some point gain some knowledge, some insight, into the beauty of God. And this is the whole action of Christ in the world—to make known the beauty and goodness of God, so that we have the courage to put aside our sins and idolatries and follow the living God to the end.

And to make it known to us, not only as abstract head knowledge or some external apprehension of the senses, either a good catechism lesson or a beautiful icon. But to make it known to us from the inside out, known ‘in the biblical sense of the word’, as the old saying goes. And this is the whole gift of the Spirit, the interpenetration of God’s life into our life and ours into God’s, by his gracious love.

It’s all so very beautiful, and so fundamentally simple. But we have to keep the main thing the main thing, remember who we are, who God is, and what our life is about. There are so many distractions and follies that engage us. Remember the main: ‘If then we walk in the way of his commandments, and are not ashamed to acknowledge the price he paid for our salvation in a lowly body, we too are to rise to share his glory.’

It's (Not) Always Sunny in the New Jerusalem

True reverence for the Lord’s passion means fixing the eyes of our heart on Jesus crucified and recognizing in him our own humanity.

The earth – our earthly nature – should tremble at the suffering of its Redeemer. The rocks – the hearts of unbelievers – should burst asunder. The dead, imprisoned in the tombs of their mortality, should come forth, the massive stones now ripped apart. Foreshadowings of the future resurrection should appear in the holy city, the Church of God: what is to happen to our bodies should now take place in our hearts.

No one, however weak, is denied a share in the victory of the cross. No one is beyond the help of the prayer of Christ. His prayer brought benefit to the multitude that raged against him. How much more does it bring to those who turn to him in repentance.

Ignorance has been destroyed, obstinacy has been overcome. The sacred blood of Christ has quenched the flaming sword that barred access to the tree of life. The age-old night of sin has given place to the true light.

The Christian people are invited to share the riches of paradise. All who have been reborn have the way open before them to return to their native land, from which they had been exiled. Unless indeed they close off for themselves the path that could be opened before the faith of a thief.

Saint Leo the Great, pope

Reflection – More great stuff from the fathers of the Church, courtesy of the Office of Readings. It really does get beautiful this time of year.

Note St. Leo’s emphasis in the first paragraph the importance of recognizing our humanity in Christ crucified. Leo the Great was instrumental in combatting the monophysite heresy which denied a true human nature to Christ. The authentic Christian dogma of Jesus as the one Divine Person of the Son with two natures, divine and human, ‘true God and true man’, can be attributed to a great extent to Leo’s intervention at the council of Chalcedon.

Anyhow – enough with the history of theology. But you can see here what is at stake in those theological debates, the nuances of which may seem a bit abstruse. ‘What has not been assumed, cannot be redeemed,’ is the patristic formula. Whatever Christ who is God did not truly take to Himself, remains outside the realm of divine grace.

So that Christ has embraced our full humanity in every dimension—body, soul, mind, will—and in a sense even has embraced our sin—not that he has sinned, which is impossible, but that he accepted the full weight and consequence of sin in our lives—means that every aspect of our humanity is now flooded with the grace of divine love and redemption and life.

And it is the totality of this redemption that is important. Nobody is beyond it, nobody outside it. There is no dimension, no expression of human sin and brokenness, of human wretchedness and tragedy, that Christ cannot reach, and reaching, save. We are not stuck, we very simply and basically are not stuck in whatever morass of sin and awfulness we may find ourselves in.

Now, most of us moderns (at least of the North American variety) hear that, and immediately we go into a sort of prosperity Gospel mode. ‘Well, then, so if I follow Jesus, my emotional wounds will all clear up, my life will go from strength to strength, and everything will just be sunny and warm and loverly every day.’ And then, when it turns out that’s not quite the deal God is offering us, ‘Well, it’s all just nonsense, then – religion – what a con!’

The truth of the redemption and the hope Jesus offers us is much deeper than a sort of ‘It’s always sunny in the new Jerusalem’ apple pie optimism. In this life, for a variety of reasons usually too complex for us to fully grasp, we carry the burden of our humanity and its broken condition. Problems don’t just clear up with the application of ‘Jesus juice’ three times a day for a week. Sin and its effects in our life remain, a sharp goad towards humility and repentance, for a very long time in all of our lives.

But what Jesus does is give us a way through. We are not there yet, we are not home free, but we are not stuck, either. God always opens a path, a way forward, a little stretch of road, maybe just one or two steps, towards the new Jerusalem, towards the fullness of life in Christ. The path is open, for everyone, and no one is left outside, unless that is the choice they themselves make. And this is the great hope and joy and beauty of our Easter faith, even in the midst of the great Lent of the world when it is so often obscured in us by our own weakness of faith and inconstancy of prayer and vision.