Finally

Finally.
I bet that is just the word Jonah said, as his breath bubbled up to the surface. Finally, the end has come.

There are a couple of ways to picture the prophet Jonah in the little vignettes of his life. The story can be read as sort of a sandwich of ‘rebellion, obedience, and rebellion’… First, Jonah runs, then he comes to his senses on the boat, praises the Lord for his obedience, goes to Ninevah directly upon vomitation and preaches the word of God before he finally falls back into his rebellion to God and hatred of humanity.

You could legitimately (perhaps) read the story as a story of a good prophet gone bad… of only twice. If this is true, then he immediately recognizes the salvation of God Chordatic form and he means every vampy word of his hymn of praise. ‘Finally,’ he would say to himself, ‘finally the end of my disobedience and rebellion against the Lord has come.’ Maybe. I doubt it.

It would be much easier for me to imagine Jonah as a man filled with self-pity. He has been defeated in his battle against the Lord, sure enough, but the fight is not quite over. Think about Jonah on the ship, as he tells the sailors to cast him overboard. He has been found out in his sin. Should he fear the Lord, offer a sacrifice and make his mind up to take the next ship back in the direction of Ninevah? Should he pray, like Moses, on behalf of the innocent mariners whose lives he has jeopardized? or better, like Jesus, ‘they know not what they do!’ What I mean to ask is, do you really think the only way to Jonah’s redemption was to ask for his own execution? And what about that?

Was Jonah incapable of jumping out of the boat on his own? 
Were his legs broken?

No. It was more important for Jonah to be in the right than to own up to his own faults and fight for the good of those around him. He knew he would be in the wrong to jump out of the boat, but what if a bunch of useless mariners tossed him over? Well, their standing with the Lord could not possibly count for much, right?

And we have arrived at Jonah’s basic problem. He was a self-righteous man, above all else. Think about the last verse to his little ditty to the Lord, upon being eaten by a gigantic fish…

Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope
of steadfast love.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you;
What I have vowed I will pay.

For a refresher, who, in this story, is struggling with idol-worship? Two groups: the useless mariners and the wicked Ninevites. And who is on the Lord’s side? One man. Jonah, the grace-hoarding prophet who has caused the sea to be turned upside down and who finds himself in the belly of a fish. Jonah may be one step closer to understanding God’s heart, but he still has light-years to go before he can take a kernel of truth from his own tale. In this story, the mariners have become the God-fearers and the prophet has become useless, vain, idolatrous and hopeless. Jonah’s story sounds all too familiar to my own.

Every day I substitute self-righteousness for responsible living. I measure myself against the jerks I work with. Just like the Pharisee in the story Jesus told, I find myself thanking God that I am not like them. I see Jonah’s reflection when I look in the mirror.

Our call is not so much to sinlessness as it is to love one another; to bear one another’s burdens. We agree when the Lord call us rebels, haters and prodigals. We live lives of repentance. We seek ways to love those around us. And we rest in the one true thing Jonah says in his vampy little tune…
Salvation belongs to the Lord.

He is for us, even when we are working against Him.
Finally the end can come—the end of hating God and neighbor. With every end comes a new beginning. He calls again to us to join in his work of love, burden-bearing and humility.

from his blog

Which will it be?

Divine humanity, or human divinity? Which would we rather have? This is the question that is presented to man in every generation from the first to the last.

The first is not in our control, something we could not even guess at, something only dreamt of by those whose hearts persistently seek the Most-High, wondering what He is.

The second is what we found ourselves left with. Since we couldn’t discover divine humanity, we consoled ourselves by inventing human divinity.

Human beings, worthy or unworthy, raised some of themselves to the status of gods. The ancient heroes of the Greeks, of the Indians, of the Chinese, gods.

The wielders of earthly power, those in whom their peoples invested the ring, orb and crown of authority, lauded ‘guardians of mankind’ and ‘benefactors,’ gods.

Those fools who once graced the courts of kings with levity to assuage the harshness of our earthly exile, now electronically glorified, our entertainers, gods.

Human divinities all, they are sculpted images of the human nature, to be worshipped by their adorers, or vilified by opponents who worship not men but things.

Yet, divine humanity, after long ages, He did appear. Him, the bedreamt of prophets and prophet-kings, has appeared, does appear, and now lives among us.

No sculpture, no painted image can convey Him to us better than He Himself can, walking in our midst, as one of us, though we do not recognize Him but in retrospect.

He is Divine Humanity, having taken our human nature into the fiery folds of His sixfold wings up to the Throne of the Divine Nature, making us enter heaven, and the heaven of heavens.

Making us sit upon His Throne and upon His Father’s Throne, making us sup with Him and with His Father and the Spirit Holy at the banquet Table, in the light of a thousand suns.

Every molecule of our humanity transformed in Him into Divinity, no particle of darkness remains, no shadow, only light, light, wonderous light, bright, bright, brighter.

Divine humanity, or human divinity? Which do you choose?
‘No one lights a lamp to hide it under a bushel.’
‘A city set on a hill cannot be hid.’
‘I set before you life,
And death.’

Even so, I stayed in Your presence

It is impossible to read the Psalms and not come away with more than you have given. The Lord speaks to us through them to the very details of our lives, answering all our concerns, all our prayers even before we ask Him. He is a good and loving God.

Psalm 71, one of the Psalms appointed for the fourteenth day of the month, always stops me in my tracks, especially when I read the words, “To many I have seemed an enigma…” How true, Lord, how true! This was true when I used to pray this Psalm thirty-five years ago, and it’s still true today, but so is the second half of that verse, “but You are my firm refuge.”

God is faithful. He maintains us in our first call, and in our first love. All we have to do is stay close to Him. Here I share with you, brethren, a psalm of a man in his age, and a psalm of the same man in his youth, the sinner but servant of God, Romanós.

Psalms for the 14th Day
71 72 73 74

Psalm 71

An old man's prayer

In You, Yahweh, I take shelter;

never let me be disgraced.

In Your righteousness rescue me, deliver me,

turn Your ear to me and save me!

Be a sheltering rock for me,

a walled fortress to save me!

For You are my rock, my fortress.

My God, rescue me from the hands of the wicked,

from the clutches of rogue and tyrant!

For You alone are my hope, Lord,

Yahweh, I have trusted You since my youth,

I have relied on You since I was born,

You have been my portion from my mother's womb,

and the constant theme of my praise.

To many I have seemed an enigma,

but You are my firm refuge.

My mouth is full of Your praises,

filled with Your splendour all day long.

Do not reject me, now I am old,

nor desert me, now my strength is failing,

for my enemies are uttering threats,

spies hatching their conspiracy:

‘Hound him down now that God has deserted him,

seize him, there is no one to rescue him!’

God, do not stand aside,

my God, come quickly and help me!

Shame and ruin on those

who attack me;

may insult and disgrace cover those

whose aim is to hurt me!

I promise that, ever hopeful,

I will praise You more and more,

my lips shall proclaim Your righteousness

and power to save, all day long.

I will come in the power of Yahweh

to commemorate Your righteousness, Yours alone.

God, You taught me when I was young,

and I am still proclaiming Your marvels.

Now that I am old and grey,

God, do not desert me;

let me live to tell the rising generation

about Your strength and power,

about Your heavenly righteousness, God.

You have done great things;

who, God, is comparable to You?

You have sent me misery and hardship,

but You will give me life again,

You will pull me up again from the depths of the earth,

prolong my old age, and once more comfort me.

I promise I will thank You on the lyre,

my ever-faithful God,

I will play the harp in Your honour,

Holy One of Israel.

My lips shall sing for joy as I play to You,

and this soul of mine which You have redeemed.

All day long, my tongue

shall be talking of Your righteousness.

Shame and disgrace on those

whose aim is to hurt me!

[Amín!]

Psalm 73

The triumph of justice

God is indeed good to Israel,

the Lord is good to pure hearts.

My feet were on the point of stumbling,

a little further and I should have slipped,

envying the arrogant as I did,

and watching the wicked get rich.

For them, no such thing as pain,

their bodies are healthy and strong,

they do not suffer as other men do,

no human afflictions for them!

So pride is their chain of honour,

violence the garment that covers them;

their spite oozes like fat,

their hearts drop with slyness.

Cynical advocates of evil,

lofty advocates of force,

they think their mouth is heaven

and their tongue can dictate on earth.

This is why my people turn to them

and lap up all they say,

asking, 'How will God find out?

Does the Most High know everything?

Look at them: these are the wicked,

well-off and still getting richer!'

After all, why should I keep my own heart pure,

and wash my hands in innocence,

if You plague me all day long

and discipline me every morning?

Had I said, 'That talk appeals to me',

I should have betrayed your children's race.

Instead, I tried to analyse the problem,

hard though I found it—

until the day I pierced the mystery

and saw the end in store for them:

they are on a slippery slope, You put them there,

You urge them on to ruin,

until suddenly they fall,

done for, terrified to death.

When You wake up, Lord, You shrug them off

like the phantoms of a waking dream.

When my heart had been growing sourer

with pains shooting through my loins,

I had simply failed to understand,

my stupid attitude to You was brutish.

Even so, I stayed in Your presence,

You held my right hand;

now guide me with advice

and in the end receive me into glory.

I look to no one else in heaven,

I delight in nothing else on earth.

My flesh and my heart are pining with love,

my heart's Rock, my own, God for ever!

So then: those who abandon You are doomed,

You destroy the adulterous deserter;

whereas my joy lies in being close to God.

I have taken shelter in the Lord,

continually to proclaim what You have done.

[Amín!]

Know and trust

A ramble…

Yesterday I found myself writing the words 'instant Christianity' to describe the kind of religion that takes no notice of anything in its path but mows down all opposition without a hearing—this, really in reference to a certain 'missionary' style, though it can be applied to churches as well.

Thinking about just the phrase, not what I'd originally intended by using it, I imagined 'Instant Christianity—Just add water, and mix' as if it were a label on a product. This made me think of another aspect of modern Christianity: its religious relativism, and its marketing and branding.

That brought a scripture to mind, 'And the misery of the children of men who corrupt their minds and are cheated of the truth, and they think that making money is the worship of God; but stay away from these things' (1 Timothy 6:5). This almost seems to prophesy a kind of 'prosperity gospel.'

Back to 'instant Christianity.' Thinking about it some more, two images came to mind. The first, the baptism of an infant. Yes, some might see this as a magical form of 'instant Christianity, just add water,' as if baptism as a rite can make someone a Christian with no effort or knowledge.

The other image was that of an adult man being baptised by immersion in a large tank in full view of a congregation. To many this would seem to be the only kind of baptism that is valid. I know people who have submitted to this kind of second baptism because they were made to doubt their infant baptism.

Yet, in actual practice, this 'believer's baptism' is quite often just as magical and as much 'instant Christianity' as the other. Again, a concept of 'just add water' and, there you are. Once when I was witnessing downtown by reading scriptures aloud, I was stopped and asked by a listener, 'Don't you think water baptism is necessary for salvation?'

The questioner quoted me relevant passages from the third chapter of John's gospel, which I had only just read. Christ seems to be telling Nicodemus that water is somehow necessary to salvation, 'No one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit' (John 3:5).

'Well, then,' I responded, 'who or what is it that saves? Is it the water, or is it Christ?' My informant unhesitatingly affirmed, 'It is both. Baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation, because Christ said so.' All that came into my mind in that moment, and I said it, was, 'Well, who baptised the thief on the cross?'

Back to 'instant Christianity,' if we use it as another thought weapon to attack each other, then let's bury the hatchet right now. For me, it simply signifies the state of mind that forgets that our neighbor too is Christ, even if he is an unbeliever. Our witness to him can never ignore this fact, else it becomes transgression.
'Lord, when did we see You like that?' (See Matthew 25:31-46.)

One last thought that came to me as I was considering what makes Christianity real and not instant or imaginary. There are two entrances into Christianity in my experience. One entrance is through knowing. The other is through trusting.

Some people become Christians through study. Not just books, but life itself, especially their own. They know, and are forced by their knowing to become disciples of Jesus. In this category probably belong C. S. Lewis among the modern, and St Augustine of Hippo among the ancient Church fathers.

Some people become Christians through trust. They find themselves somehow in the presence of someone or even something that they feel they can trust, and they give themselves over as easily as a bride to her husband. In this category are many people raised as Christians, and I am one of those.

Those who know, and therefore become Christians, will arrive sooner or later at the state of unshakable trust. Those who trust, and therefore become Christians, will arrive sooner or later at the state of certain knowledge. Both of these are predicated on the fact that it is the living God they know or they trust at the beginning.

Now, place the template of baptism over these ideas. The baptism of infants is an example of Christianity by trust. Believer's baptism is an example of Christianity by knowledge.

'Do you know the Lord and accept Him as your personal Savior?' is the qualifying question to the adult baptised, but there is nothing you can ask an infant, yet its answer can be found in the book of Psalms, 'Enough for me to keep my soul tranquil and quiet like a child in its mother's arms, as content as a child that has been weaned'
(Psalm 131).

That is trust.

Bad alliances

If you make yourself a friend of the world,
you cannot be God’s friend.

The father of the prodigal son was a pious and God-loving man, because only such a man could have allowed his sons their full freedom and still receive one of them back with love and honor (and unself-conscious forgiveness) after he had abused his freedom and defiled himself.
The boy was ‘brought up right.’

A good marriage and family life does not come about by magic. It begins with mutual faith. It grows and is sustained by mutual faith and faithfulness. And it continues blessed and good right to the end only as long as the first faith and trust is preserved inviolable.

What can destroy it? Wanton breaking of the commandments, adultery, bearing false witness, theft and covetousness—all of which stem from forgetting who is the Lord: “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”

I have passed on to my sons what my dad passed on to me, “If you are looking for a good wife, you don’t go looking for one in bars. You go to church and find one.” Though I did not exactly follow his instructions—he told me this after I was married—I followed a slightly different route, which is maybe even better: Pray to the Lord to send you a wife, and then watch closely whom He sends to you, just as you watch for friends that He sends you, and one of these will be your wife. It goes without saying—or does it?—that you are living a life of discipleship when you make this prayer.

How simple all of life is, especially family life and our circle of relationships, when we follow the commandments! Jesus says, “If you love Me, you will follow my commandments.” That’s what I’m talking about, not some rigorous set of rules whether biblical or self-improvement-minded, neither of which will ever succeed in really making anyone better. “Branch out for a time they may, but when you look for them they will be gone, vanished like their vain hopes.” Christ is at once the source of all righteousness, the way to it, and the achievement of it. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” says Jesus (John 14:6).

Even being raised in a pious family, a son does not become a Christian by magic. As soon as he reaches the age of independent decision, his parents’ faith no longer speaks for him the moment he makes the conscious choice to take the world for his friend, instead of God. Even after making that choice, he can repent, and God our heavenly Father, can and will take him back. But just as the father of the prodigal son did not restrain that son from the choices he made, neither does God, or the parents, restrain him or constrain him. They may advise, they may teach, they certainly must pray for him to turn away from his friendship with the world, but they cannot force him to give it up. He must want a better friendship.

So it is, that a man who has taken the world for his friend no longer thinks of God, except of the punishment that he will receive after everything he does is done and his life is over—if there is a God.

Instead of memories of a youth spent in innocent fun and friendships, he finds memories only of riotous relationships, infidelities, the waste of his virginity and that of one he might have truly loved and been wedded to, and years of profound loss: spoiled friendships, missed opportunities, time and money wasted, and all for what? Now the mercy of God can only drive him to even more miserable states, to where he, like the prodigal son feeding unclean animals (pigs) and not even being given their slop for food, finds himself at another point of decision: To utterly despair, or to return to his Father.

Rather than flee from house to house, or from town to town, to escape his brown girls and their offspring, like John of Puritania this son needs to turn around and start traveling Home, facing East. The road back will look very different than that same road looked when he made the world his friend and followed it to the place of bondage. By making God, in Christ, his Friend, the road will turn into something very, very narrow, but he won’t mind that, because he will hear his Friend going ahead of him, saying, “Follow Me.”

The magic of existence — Théosis

Some people talk as though it were totally barbaric and unworthy of Him that God should have created a world in which such a thing as sin exists, that has so corrupted His chief creation, Man, that He now must punish him with eternal torment in fire, unless he accept the bloody death of a unique Man, who is also somehow His only-begotten Son, who sacrificed Himself voluntarily to satisfy the requirement of His angry heavenly Father, whose Law demands blood to compensate for its violation, as a ransom for his sins, so that he can be regenerated in sinlessness as his first forefather Adam was originally created.

This is like saying that
God created a good universe
into which His chief creature, Man, was placed
with the expectation that he would always be of one will with Him,
while at the same time allowing an evil agent into it,
which He knew would corrupt Man’s will,
and then forcing Himself to eternally punish this Man
and all his descendents from their very births
to eternal damnation for breaking a Law
which He established and to which He is now bound,
when He could have either not created that Law at all,
or else overridden it for Man’s sake,
or else not allowed the evil agent to deceive Man
and cause the sin that must now be avenged,
since God is holy
and cannot tolerate sin.

Well, what would you have?
A good God who created a good universe
into which He placed a good creature, Man,
who sometimes acts against what he knows intuitively is right
by a standard he didn’t create
but which the good God did,
whose Son also entered that good universe
and somehow was accidentally put to death
but was rescued and resuscitated somehow,
so that His teachings could be learned and followed,
restoring Man,
if not to his originally perfect and righteous state,
at least to a state in which his moral failures
are somewhat in control,
allowing most men to live together in relative peace and safety
and to enjoy a reasonable level of freedom and happiness?

Religion.

That would be nice!
That is how Man would like it.
That is how Man in his natural state would like to see existence
and give it meaning.

That is how a civilised and worthy God
would have set things up,
that is, if He exists.

Let’s have none of this sacrificial talk!
Away with the barbaric demand for blood by an angry God,
who is unfit to be called Father
if He has to send His only Son
to a humiliating, bloody, excruciatingly painful death,
to save His creatures from a sinfulness
He almost willed them to have,
to save them from an eternal and fiery torment
that He imposes on all who reject His love.

His love?
Would a loving God have such a plan?
Would He create beings only to torture them
for not being His robot slaves?

With all due respect to those
who try to prove God
loving, righteous, rational, and worthy of our praise
by departing from the words
of holy and divine scripture
to paint a picture of Him
in colors that are pleasing to our sense
and standard of right and wrong,
of what we call love, and mercy,
and what we would honor as holy

—I know what they are trying to do,
to make God lovable
so that we will love Him and believe in Him—

This strategy in the end
does not produce the effect in us
that the Word of God was revealed to produce,
does not raise us out of our mortal, human reason
to immortal, divine faith,
does not deliver us from death and bring us to true life,
does not equip us for and acculturate us
to what we can only call
—because it is just the other side of our ontological ‘event horizon’
and we cannot express it any other way—
life eternal.

The real universe,
not the one that scientists explore,
test, measure and define by human standards,
not the one that sociologists and historians archive
and try to understand,
not the one that moralists and would-be theologians
devise as a frame of reference
to interpret the results of the studies
of the other two groups,

but the real universe
—what really exists,
what really operates and animates
all that we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel
and philosophize—
is so beyond our human capacities
as to be conveyable to us
only in what seems miraculous or magical,
or else so out of sync with what we should have expected
that it seems barbaric and primitive in the extreme.

Not that real universe,
but its Creator,
has told us about that existence
which lies just beyond our human nature’s ‘event horizon’
by taking up a literature as the vehicle of His Word,
and that is what we call the Holy Bible.

Why holy?
Because it is, like Him, totally other,
fully incomprehensible to those
who would fit it into the container of their minds alone.

The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not grasped it.

The Bible teaches us,
as a mother teaches her toddler using baby talk,
how to take the first steps into that real universe
where there is no other map that we can yet read,
where there are features
that could harm or even destroy us
in our present state of being and level of maturity
if we met them without warning.

We must listen very carefully,
mimic and memorize the instructions
just as we receive them,
even in the limited language that we know thus far,

because for us,
where we are headed,
where we have no choice but to be headed,
is a state that now can only seem to be
the magic of existence.

It will only be magic
until we find out and understand what lies behind it,
until we find ourselves actually and even factually
crossing that ‘event horizon’
that limits our mortal, human vision,
until by faith we come to
immortal,
divine being.

Théosis.

But I, when I am lifted up from the earth,
will draw all men to myself.
John 12:32 NIV

The Asker and the answerers

Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος, ‘El Greco’ - The Resurrection

Who is this obscuring My designs with his empty-headed words? Brace yourself like a fighter. Now it is My turn to ask questions and yours to inform Me.
Job 38:2 Jerusalem Bible

Who is the Asker, who the answerers?

We always assume that we ask the questions, and God answers them, but in actuality it is He who asks, we who must answer. Yes, must. That’s the one thing in which we do not have free choice,
whether to answer or not.
It is the very price of our being.
Put off answering for a time we may, but not indefinitely.

And what does He ask? Will He ask us a question for which He has not prepared us, of which we had neither inkling nor warning?
No, the question He will ask is one He has already asked.
It has been written down.
We can read it for ourselves before we will hear it from His lips.

What our answer will be is the sole determiner of who we were,
who we are, and who we will forever be. Yes, will, not shall.
We have freedom to answer what we choose,
but not to withhold our answer.
It is His very question that brings us into being,
and it is our very answer that makes our being eternal.

Jesus turned around, saw them following and said, ‘What do you want?’ They answered, ‘Rabbi,’—which means Teacher—‘where do you live?’ ‘Come and see,’ He replied…
John 1:37-39a

When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been in this condition for a long time, He said, ‘Do you want to be well again?’ ‘Sir,’ replied the sick man, ‘I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is disturbed…’
John 5:6-7a

Looking up, Jesus saw the crowds approaching and said to Philip, ‘Where can we buy some bread for these people to eat?’ He only said this to test Philip; He Himself knew exactly what He was going to do. Philip answered, ‘Two hundred denarii would only buy enough to give them a small piece each…’
John 6:5-7

Jesus heard they had driven him away, and when He found him He said to him, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ ‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘tell me who He is so that I may believe in Him.’ Jesus said, ‘You are looking at Him…’
John 9:35-37a

Jesus said, ‘I am the resurrection. If anyone believes in Me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?’ ‘Yes, Lord,’ she said, ‘I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, the One who was to come…’
John 11:25-27

His disciples said, ‘Now You are speaking plainly and not using metaphors! Now we see that You know everything, and do not have to wait for questions to be put into words; because of this we believe that You came from God.’ Jesus answered them, ‘Do you believe at last?…’
John 16:29-31

Unquenchable Desire

Picture Credit: Paul in Chains, by Richard Serrin

Friends, He lit my desire for you, unquenchable
Fear having been cast, chains make hearts bold
Abounding in love with all knowledge and wisdom
So fruits of righteousness might be offered up
In sincerity and without offense until the 8th day

In our Lord Christ such a prison is free indeed
Filthy guards as brushed ushers in service
Beaten bodies remember ancient scourge
Starving stomachs recall 40 days of fast
And the darkened cell, midnight’s Gethsemane

— David Dickens, Nothing Hypothetical

Nothing else

Anything that can ever be said, written or thought about Jesus Christ by anyone except those who personally knew Him and walked with Him when He was alive as an earthman is going to be contradictable.

Let anyone contradict Thomas, ‘No, you didn't really see Him. You just imagined it,’ and likely as not (if I were him, anyway) Thomas would've let him have it. (Nicholas of Myra is said to have let Arius have it—he punched him—at Nicaea, for which he was expelled from the council—temporarily.)

But anyone can challenge me and my faith in and knowledge of Jesus Christ, and I can do nothing of the sort, only quietly insist that I know what I know, and that’s that.

Even I cannot base my beliefs about Jesus on any of His teachings or miracles, not even on His exact words quoted in the gospels, all of which could be forgeries and in fact are claimed to be by His enemies almost from day one.

In my case, what I base everything on is my intellectual and moral surrender to the fact of His literal resurrection and everything that follows from that, such as His ascension (where else could the body have gone?), and the unearthly behavior of the first generation of His disciples, by which they were able to convince the world of something the world would rather not know. Even reading Paul and the other apostles, though, does not convince me. Only Christ Himself convinces me, and only by His resurrection.

Yes, and all that follows from it, the ascension, and then pentecost, and then Christian history, all of which are either done or still happening, and then, only one more thing, His return to end the world as we know it.

That resurrection also rolls back to legitimatize all that flows out of it in reverse order, such as His birth of a virgin, and His conception through the Holy Spirit. Once these things are settled, the stage has been set, intellectually and morally, in me to accept everything else that is written about Him in the New Testament and prophesied of Him in the Old. But never, never could I have started out from there. Only the resurrection of Christ could convince me, because if it happened, it is the source of all meaning in the human, or any, universe.

What else makes my belief and knowledge of Christ (this knowledge is first, knowing Him, and second, knowing about Him, inseparable but distinct) invincible for me, that is, incontrovertible, is the proof that is to be had by putting the resurrection into practice.

Having accepted the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, totally on faith since I didn’t experience the fact of the resurrection, only the act, a new frame of reference is created inside me intellectually and morally, through whose prism I experience the world around me, and inside me, all that happens there, all I do there. This, however, is really no different than it is for any other believer in any other religion or god. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, even animists, all live within world views—frames of reference—that filter reality to fit their paths. So I cannot claim for my doing this any added authority. It works for me, so what?

So, in the end, all mental acrobatics and pugilism aside, the unprovable for me can be nothing other than the improbable for those who do not accept the resurrection of Christ, and even for those who say they do accept it, myself included, unless it is put into practice. Even for the believer it is no real proof, only, as their critics allege, a kind of crutch for the weak.

Yes, weak we are too, just as they say of us, when we do not practice the resurrection, living in it, putting it before us, behind us, beside us, above us and below us, walking with Christ, as Christ’s earthmen, surrounded by that same nimbus by which He in His resurrection is surrounded in the holy ikons.

He has gone, and is still going ahead of us, now no longer just the earthman people thought He was when He was with us in that body of death. He now goes ahead of us, behind us, to our right and left, above and below us, the God-Man that we know Him to be.

And it seems to me, you cannot know Him unless you walk with Him.

And you cannot walk with Him unless you believe, even know, that He is here, with us.

Apart from that, nothing else matters.

You know my path

PSALM 142

Prayer of a hunted man

Poem of David, when he was in the cave, psalm.

To Yahweh, my cry! I plead.

To Yahweh, my cry! I entreat.

I pour out my supplications,

I unfold all my troubles;

my spirit fails me,

but You, You know my path.

On the path I follow

they have concealed a trap.

Look on my right and see,

there is no one to befriend me.

All help is denied me,

no one cares about me.

I invoke You, Yahweh,

I affirm that You are my refuge,

my heritage in the land of the living.

Listen to my cries for help,

I can hardly be crushed lower.

Rescue me from persecutors

stronger than I am!

Free me from this imprisonment,

and I will thank Your name once more

in the Assembly of the virtuous,

for the goodness You show me.

Running, or fast asleep

Some labor and struggle hard to earn forgiveness, but better than these is the man who forgets the wrongs done to him. Forgive quickly and you will be abundantly forgiven. To forget wrongs is to prove oneself truly repentant, but to brood on them and at the same time to imagine one is practicing repentance is to act like the man who is convinced he is running when, in fact, he is fast asleep.

John Climacus

A new gospel

There is a new gospel, a fresh gospel, that is preached to every person, in every circumstance, and that gospel is going to always be slightly different from the gospel preached to the next guy. That is the strength of the gospel, not its weakness: that it can be all things to all men.

Paul was not saying something astonishing or scandalous when he says he is all things to all men: he was only saying of himself (since he was the servant of that gospel) what is true of the gospel itself, fitting itself into the ears of each one, for ‘faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.’

Isn't that what is so good about the good news? That Christ who is Himself one person of the Divine and Holy Triad, sheds the might of His divinity, coming down to our level, to live among us, to speak our language, not just to feel our pain and endure the temptations we suffer.

If He must die on the Cross for our salvation, that cannot be conveyed to us, placed within our reach, without it being sized and fitted to the broken hearts of each of us. Yes, the Man of Sorrows, but also, the God of Joys. The latter doesn’t balance the former; it engulfs it like the sea engulfs a pebble, leaving no trace.

Hence, the gospel, always new, always fresh, containing all, supporting all, adapted to all, welcoming all, transforming all, but one by one, even as one by one we each receive the call, and one by one are seated at our places in the banquet of the Divine Nature, the wedding feast of the Lamb.

Mitzvot

Originally, the Torah, the Law, comprised only two commandments. The first commandment that the Lord gave to our first parents Adam and Eve was in fact not even spoken to them as a commandment, but said over them as a blessing. “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground”
(Genesis 1:28). The first of God’s commandments to us was a positive commandment, and contained within it abundant blessings.

The second commandment was different. It was a negative commandment, the first of the ‘Thou shalt nots,’ and moreover, it was spoken only to the Man. Why is this? Well, Woman had not yet been pulled out of Man; she was still hidden within him. The mystery of the Two becoming One had not yet been revealed. In this first example of the Great Reversal that seems to meet us everywhere we look, the second commandment now becomes the first, according to time, and the Man and the Woman he bore within him must learn obedience before blessing.

But at the beginning there were only these two commandments:
“You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die” (Genesis 2:17), a negative commandment, God’s naked will revealed for Man, so he could know God’s mind as a child knows the mind of its father. And then, “Be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) and the rest of the commandment and blessing that is carried within it, when faithfully carried out: ownership, lordship, and mastery, of the outer world but, yes, of the inner world as well.

Following the two commandments, Man is created free.

This is not what happened. Before the second commandment could even take effect, the first was broken and, as scripture says, to break one commandment is to break them all. At the time, there was only one other commandment that also fell by Man’s disobedience: What should have been mankind’s glory thus became his shame, and the water of life in him became a poisonous spring, that everyone who has ever drunk from it has come to know and, against his will, fallen sick, irremediably sick, with sin and death. Thus the Physician of souls appeared, to save us.

Breaking two commandments, then ten were revealed to replace them and hold back, as much as possible, the flood of sin and death, but even these were broken, and could not effect the cure. Within themselves, within the Torah, the Law, was prophesied the coming of the Physician who would cure this sickness, death. But those who read the words overlooked Him, and instead they planted a hedge around the Torah to protect it: the Ten Words that God gave at Sinai were multiplied into six hundred thirteen mitzvot, commandments that no one could keep.

Finally, our last Parent was born of His Mother without a father, begotten by His Father without a mother, and the overlooked Physician became the rejected Messiah. A new Adam came seeking His lost Bride, a new Eve, though when He found the first of them—for they would be multitudes—she was His own Mother, who now became the new Mother of all living, whom He gave to His own beloved disciple as Mother, revealing for all time who He is, who She is, and who We are. And the Torah which He wraps around Him as a cloak because He is the only one who ever fulfilled all of it, He wears worthily as He stands before His Father and Our Father, interceding for us.

Having broken first two, then ten, then six hundred commandments, we have been delivered from our disobedience, and again, just two commandments have been laid upon us, this time both comprising blessing. “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).

Glory to You, O God! Glory to You!

All we know

There are those who, like myself, have many spiritual fathers and mothers but not in a structured or formal way, with saints who like us realise that there is only One teacher, the Messiah (cf. Matthew 23:8-12), and would not allow us to pedestalize them. I am the same way. I sometimes am spiritual father to someone, and then we switch places the next moment. How is this? Because Christ who is alive and among us at this very moment is, as He says, the only Teacher. We only say what we hear Him saying.

My dear people, we are already the children of God

but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed;

all we know is, that when it is revealed

we shall be like Him

because we shall see Him as He really is.

1 John 3:2

I take the verse quite literally. Seeing Christ at His glorious coming will perfect us into the image of His holiness and His eternity, and that, whether we were hard on ourselves or easy, as long as we believe in Him. The part about trying to purify oneself, as He is pure, is just the work that He has given us to do, while we await His return. He knows that we cannot finish the job. He knows that even with His grace, our old man will not be completely burned up until we see the light of His face. He knows who is fooling Him, even though they are mighty in works and self-discipline. He knows who is following Him, even though their performance may not be spectacular. He knows everything about us, and He doesn't judge those whom He has redeemed, because everyone is judged by the Word He has spoken to each. Will our consciences condemn us before the Lord? That is the question.

Surely, everyone who entertains this hope

must purify himself, must try to be as pure as Christ.

1 John 3:3

Try to be pure as He is pure? What else is there to do? Be changed into His likeness at His second and glorious coming? How can we not be, if we have confessed Him before men?

That one is you

The Orthodox fathers use the sun as an analogy to the Holy and Divine Triad. The sun itself is the Heavenly Father. The light of the sun is the Divine Word and Son of God. The heat of the sun is the Holy Spirit.

No one can see the sun, except by the light, which enters our eyes and shows it to us. We have no other way to be in contact with the sun or even know for sure that it is there, but for the light (and the heat). If you approached the sun to touch it, you would be incinerated long before you reached it. The Father, thus, is ever intangible and unreachable to us, in His essence.

The light of the sun, though, both shows us what the sun looks like and tells us that it is there. ‘Who sees Me sees the Father,’ says Jesus, the Son and Word of God. In Jesus the Father is both visible and reachable. We make our prayers known to the Father through the Son. Moreover, light itself has two natures. It is both particles (photons) and waves (pure energy), and in the same way, Jesus the Son of God is both human and Divine. Yes, and He is the Phos ek Photós, ‘Light from Light.’

The heat of the sun would be evidence, even to a blind man, that the sun, or at least some source of heat, is out there, because he can feel its effect on him. In a similar way, even if a man is spiritually blind, he can still feel the warmth of the Holy Spirit falling on him, telling him that there is a Father in heaven, yet he can still move out of that sunlight and into the shadows. It is his choice.

There was never a sun without light and heat, yet the light is not the sun, nor is the heat the sun; each is distinct, yet inseparable from the source. In the same way, the Orthodox fathers teach that the Father is the source and principle of the Godhead, of the Divine Nature. The Son (only one of Him) is begotten eternally from the Father as light emanates eternally from the sun. As heat proceeds from the sun by means of the light that emanates from it, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, but by means of the Son of God, who said, ‘I will ask the Father and He will send you another Advocate.’

Co-eternal, consubstantial—these are words that seem overpowering and mystery-laden, making the Holy Triad seem to be unthinkable and unexperienceable by man. But the Orthodox fathers show us that the mystery is not that God should be three yet one, but that we could have ever imagined a God who is only one.

The unity of the Divine Nature, ‘Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is One’, is not diminished by His being a Triad. His Oneness is so One without second, so beyond numerical oneness, that even His triadic nature does not take away from it.

God is changeless, and yet He is One. God is changeless, and yet He is love. There can be no love except ‘between’ and no pure love, impartial and selfless love, except between ‘three.’ Hence, the Divine Nature says, ‘Let us make man in Our image.’

No one has ever seen God, only the Son of God, Jesus Christ, has made Him known and shown Him to us, being Himself God and yet not the Father. And the Holy Spirit, that third member of the One God in Triad, is our own membership in that Society of Persons which we call the Holy Trinity. Through Him, through the Spirit, we take our places at the banquet of the Divine Nature, becoming by genuine adoption what Christ is by nature, sons and daughters of the Most-High.

Théosis (divinization) is what we were made for, sotiría (salvation) is the process of our transfiguration.

Christ ‘was, is, and is to come.’
We were saved, are being saved, and are to be saved, that is, to be one with the Divine and Holy Triad, as Christ prays, ‘that they may be One, even as You, Father, and I are One.’

See the Orthodox ikon of the Holy Trinity, the original written by Andrei Rublev, posted above. There you will see the three ‘angels’ seated around a table, with one place left open for another.

That one is you.

Things human, and things divine

There is a persistent problem in encounters between two kinds of religions. Those that are based on reliable historical testimony, and those which depend on fabrications based on, but not consistent with, historical testimony. In the first group are to be placed: Most varieties of Judaism and Christianity. In the second group: Islam and Mormonism, and a host of insignificant cults derived primarily from all four religions.

Scholars continue to study the historical sources of Judaic and Christian scriptures, because they have left a physical trail. Scholars study Islamic scriptures only within the closed context of these scriptures themselves, since historical and fictional elements are intermixed. No serious scholars study the Mormon scriptures, which are acknowledged by all impartial authorities to be entirely fabricated.

There can never be serious dialog between the members of the first group of religions and the second, because it always resolves itself into accusations of lying on both sides: The first group asserts that the scriptures of the second group are fabrications; the second group asserts that those of the first group have been corrupted and are therefore inadequate. In plain language, the other group is lying.

Between Judaism and Christianity, something similar happens in such encounters, because these two religions are essentially the same, yet different, based on a single fact asserted by Christians but denied by Jews: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. His historicity is rarely doubted by Jews, only the content of the historic record challenged. On the Christian side, nothing can be asserted against Judaism, except its denial of Christ.

This is why we think, 'They must be joking' at best, when we encounter the pronouncements of the ayatollahs and other Islamic teachers, or hear about Muslim beliefs about Jesus, for example. We are here meeting a fabrication of something we consider fundamentally true and incontestable. The boldness of the Muslim (and Mormon) assertions is designed to unnerve and destabilise us.

But God is God, and though we mock each other, He cannot be mocked. Aside from all religions true or false, He is; and all those who have had experience of Him, whether Christian or not, know more about Him than the belief systems of all religions combined. Only those who have had this experience are in a position to distinguish 'the stale from the fresh' in things human, and things divine.

O Lord, my strength

My elders taught me, when I was a youth,
to cling to heaven and earth, lest I stumble.
For a long time I remained a child,
and for a long time I used to lean on the crutch that they gave me.

But once eternity flooded through me
and I felt like a stranger in the world,
heaven and earth snapped in two in my hands like a frail reed.

O Lord, my strength, how frail are heaven and earth!
They look like palaces built of lead,
but they evaporate like water
in the palm of the hand in Your presence.
Only by their bristling do they conceal their frailty,
and frighten uneducated children.

Get out of my sight, suns and stars.
Sunder yourselves from the earth.
Do not entice me, women and friends.
What help can I receive from you,
who are helplessly growing old and sinking into the grave?

All your gifts are an apple with a worm in its core.
All your potions have passed through someone's entrails many times.
Your garments are a cobweb that my nakedness mocks.
Your smiles are a proclamation of sorrow,
in which your feebleness is screaming to mine for help.

O Lord, my strength,
how feeble heaven and earth are!
And all the evil that men do under heaven
is an admission of feebleness and infirmity.

Only someone strong dares to do good.
Only someone who is nourished and watered with You,
my strength, is filled with strength for goodness.

Only someone who sleeps in Your heart knows rest.
Only someone who plows before Your feet
will enjoy the fruit of his labors.

My childhood, nourished with fear and ignorance,
came to an end; and my hope in heaven and earth vanished.

Now I only gaze at You and cling to Your gaze in return,
O my cradle and my resurrection.

—Prayers by the Lake, IV - Nikolaj Velimirović, bishop of Ohrid

The gates of repentance

Open to me the gates of repentance, O Giver of Life,
For my spirit rises early to pray towards Your holy temple.
Bearing the temple of my body all defiled;
But in Your compassion, purify me by the lovingkindness
of Your mercy.

Lead me on the paths of salvation, O Mother of God,
For I have profaned my soul with shameful sins,
and have wasted my life in laziness.
But by your intercessions, deliver me from all impurity.

When I think of the many evil things I have done, wretch that I am,
I tremble at the fearful day of judgement.
But trusting in Your lovingkindness, like David I cry to You:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your great mercy!

Today we are at the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, not yet Lent, but it's never too soon to pursue repentance, as the hymn quoted above testifies. This Lord's day we met these images once again, spoken by the Word of God in human form, our Lord Jesus Christ. Nor is it ever too soon to yearn for true discipleship, for the grace of God who alone bestows it upon us, praying in the words of Ephraim of Syria…

O Lord and Master of my life,
take away from me the will to be lazy and to be sad,
the desire to get ahead of other people and to boast and brag.
Give me instead a pure and humble spirit,
the will to be patient with other people, and to love them.
Let me realize my own mistakes,
and keep me from judging the things other people do,
for You are blessed now and for evermore.

This prayer is associated with the time of Sarakostí, Great Lent, the forty-plus days of fasting before the feast of the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Pascha, the ‘Passover of God’, the Lamb without spot, slain before the foundation of the world.

Yet the fast is not a program of ascetic discipline designed for our pride. As the fathers teach, ‘Eat what you please, anything, but not the flesh of your brothers.’ To remember this prayer and say it faithfully and with all our heart, even if only once in this fast, with prostrations or without, it doesn't matter. God knows our hearts. He knows our lives. All we have to do is bring our burdens to Him, and lay them down before His Cross, and receive from Him what we do not deserve but what He longs to grant us, great mercy.

Prayer. Speaking to God. He speaks to us, we speak to Him. In our own words, or in words that we make our own, partaking of the mind of the Church, when we read aloud or inwardly what we find in our prayer books. Do you think it is really any different, whether we speak to Him out of our private treasury, or out of the treasury that the saints have bequeathed us? Maybe to some of us, but not to Him. Again, He is listening to our hearts, and our hearts are listening to Him. ‘Remembering our most-holy, most blessed…’ and praying with her and all the saints, as we join them in the heavenlies, ‘a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb… wearing white robes… holding palm branches in their hands,’ there we are, together, one in faith, one in hope, one in charity:
There is the Church, and there is no other.

Prayer is the language of welcome between heaven and earth.

Two brothers

Luckily I’m not a priest. If I were, I’d be obliged to preach on the gospel and the epistle of the day. The first Sunday of the Triodion, the Holy Church reads the gospel of the Publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18:10-14), and the epistle is from holy apostle Paul’s second letter to Timothy (3:10-15), which really spoke to me, strengthening me for the battle that lies ahead. Since I’m not a priest, just an ordinary Christian, and I don’t preach, but blog, I can write on whatever topic I like. I read somewhere that ‘Christian blogs are not catechisms,’ which is good to keep in mind, both for the writer and the reader. They’re just open journals that some people like to keep. Writing often helps you see your thoughts and experiences ‘from the outside.’ That’s probably one reason why I started writing as a teenager and why I still blog.

What’s always on my mind is the mystery of obedience, as Christ speaks about it in his parable of the two sons, one obedient in word but not in deed, the other disobedient in word but not in deed.

“What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’ ‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went. Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go. Which of the two did what his father wanted?” “The first,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.”
Matthew 21:28-32

We’ve heard this parable so many times, and we think we know what it means, that we’ve almost stopped thinking about it at all. ‘Right, tax collectors and prostitutes get into the kingdom of God before religious hypocrites. Sure, of course they do. We know that!’ Then we forget the parable as quickly as we heard it. Why? Because it simply doesn’t have anything to do with us. We’re not tax collectors or prostitutes, and we’re not religious hypocrites. We’re just ordinary folks, whatever that means, and so obviously since we’ve listened to the story at all, it must mean we’re Christians, and nice people, so we’ve got nothing to worry about.

This reading ourselves always in the favorable position and somebody else in the unfavorable, well, what can I say? It’s natural and we all do it, but being a follower of Jesus is supposed to be, by definition, supernatural. We begin to suspect that the two groups of people may not always coincide.

Think of it in modern terms, in personal terms even. Forget the tax collector and prostitute. Think about the son who has dropped out of church. He thinks it’s just too dumb for words. He finds ordinary life more exciting. You’ve tried your hardest to show him by teaching and by example that life in Christ is worth living, that it too can be exciting, not mere religious drudgery. He sees through your explanations and even your examples when you’re putting them on for show. He keeps you honest, but he still doesn’t ‘accept the Lord.’ Instead, he seems indifferent, yet you notice strange things about him as he is growing up.

He has a ‘religious brother’ who wears a cross and involves himself in churchly activities, with great gusto even, but who taunts him and makes him feel like he’s the dumb one, the reject, the retard, the one who’s too dumb to know how cool it is to be an ‘Orthodox youth.’ As they’re growing up together (and he’s the younger), they fight as brothers often do. The ‘good’ brother fights to kill and even breaks the arm of this ‘bad’ brother, because the ‘bad’ brother knows when to stop, he instinctively knows right from wrong, and without making a big deal of it, he chooses the right. (The ‘good’ brother, however, doesn’t.)

Gradually a split develops between them and grows worse year by year. The ‘good’ brother has kept up his church attendance and activities while the ‘bad’ brother has gone off and found new friends. He only shows up on Christmas and Pascha to please his parents, but he has a quiet respect for the religion that he outwardly rejects. He won’t speak against the Church even though he won’t be caught dead there anymore. The animosity between the two brothers persists. The ‘bad’ brother wants to be friends, but the ‘good’ brother continues to put him down, insult and mock him… and goes to church.

We haven’t seen the end of this story, because it’s still happening, but it’s a good example in real life of what Christ was talking about in the parable. You don’t have to be a tax collector or a prostitute to be considered bad. All you have to do is stay away from church, for whatever reasons. The irony is exactly the irony of the two brothers in the parable. The ‘good’ brother pretends to be obedient, but he doesn’t do what the father asks him to; the ‘bad’ brother, though he is disobedient to his father, goes and does his bidding on his own. This truly is a great mystery.

How is this possible? Why is it possible? Yet we see this again and again. Christ knows we would, and so He tells us all about it, and asks us to stand up for what’s right, not just for appearances. Does this mean that the ‘bad’ brother isn’t wrong to have abandoned church and religion, even though he is led by reason and perhaps by a hidden seeking for righteousness to choose the right as he does? No, it doesn’t mean that at all, but Christ’s own words have removed him forever from our competence to judge him, for when we presume to do so, we fall into the role of the ‘good’ brother who appears obedient but actually is not.

It is impossible to trick the living God! He knows our every move and motive, and yet we continue to say ‘Yes’ to Him formally, and then, when we think He’s not looking, we do what we want, not what He wants. As the psalmist declares,

To Yahweh you say, ‘My Lord,
You are my fortune, nothing else but You,’
yet to those pagan deities in the land,
‘My princes, all my pleasure is in you.’
Psalm 16

Lord, have mercy on us, since we do not know ourselves, we do not know whether or not we are obedient or only pretending, since sin blinds us to its presence in us, and we are often mistaken and led astray, judging our brother when in fact, it is we who have lost our way. Grant us to meekly bow down before You in Your Holy Church, side by side with sinners just as bad as ourselves, and not to presume to cast out by our unthinking words and actions those for whom Your Son has given His life; and bring us all, the good and the bad, to repentance, so that we may be found worthy of Your eternal Kingdom. Glory to You, O Lord! Glory to You!

One of us must go

The characters and the scenery may change, but the plot and the story line is always the same: this world is too small for man and God to both be here.

Adam and Eve are still just as alive as they ever were, and so is the serpent.

The Bible is, if it were nothing else, the greatest and longest dramatic masterpiece of all time: man writing his own judgment and sentence on himself, or is it God?

It seems too complete and too honest to have been written just by man. No man or men could bring such a body of evidence, or write such an invincible judgment, or be so generous and merciful in the sentence, to have written this Book.
Is that why some of us think it is inspired?

Though we can’t stand the sight of Him, and wish He would go away, He is written all over our flesh and spirit, and we know that He is the Truth about us.

This is the mystery of our very existence, and we know it. We are drawn to the light as the moth is to the flame, attracted to Him, unable to go back to the darkness, yet we know somehow that what we now are will suddenly end, with no turning back, once He draws us to Himself. Yes, for is it not Him drawing us that we experience as this attraction?

Yes, this world is too small for man and God to both be here.
One of us must go, and we know who that one is.