Pantokrator

Jesus Pantocrator, by PomahToppece

Creeps and Scoundrels: Arianism

A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to St John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it …

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. John bore witness to him, and cried, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me.’”

And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

A Reading from Against the Arians, by St Athanasius of Alexandria:

The mockeries which [Arius] utters, repulsive and most irreligious, are such as these :

“God was not always a Father” but “once God was alone, and not yet a Father, but afterwards He became a Father.” “The Son was not always;” for, whereas all things were made out of nothing, and all existing creatures and works were made, so the Word of God Himself was “made out of nothing,” and “once He was not” and “He was not before His origination,” but He as others “had an origin of creation.”

“For God,” he says, “was alone, and the Word as yet was not, nor the Wisdom. Then, wishing to form us, thereupon He made a certain one, and named Him Word and Wisdom and Son, that He might form us by means of Him” […]

He has dared to say, that “the Word is not the very God;” “though He is called God, yet He is not very God,” but “by participation of grace, He, as others, is God only in name.” And, whereas all beings are foreign and different from God in essence, so too is “the Word alien and unlike in all things to the Father's essence and propriety,” but belongs to things originated and created, and is one of these […]

With such words has the irreligious spoken; maintaining that the Son is distinct by Himself, and in no respect partaker of the Father. These are portions of Arius's fables as they occur in that jocose composition.

Here ends the reading.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Welcome to the fourth of our five-homily Lenten catechetical series, “Creeps and Scoundrels,” a look at how Christian heresies have shaped Christian orthodoxy. By learning what we could not teach, we understand why we teach what we do. Thus far we’ve covered folks who think that Christianity must break entirely with Judaism—that’s a heresy—as well as those who insist that one must first become Jewish in order then to become Christian—that’s a heresy too.

Last week we spoke of those who affirm the divinity of Christ while denying His humanity. So it should prove little surprise that tonight we’re covering the opposite extreme: those who affirm Jesus’ humanity, His creatureliness, but not His divinity. Heresies often come in pairs, with orthodoxy as the middle path. The denial of Christ’s divinity we term Arianism, after Arius of Alexandria. Arius lived at the turn of the fourth century, right around the time when Constantine legalized Christianity and convened the Council of Nicaea to clarify Christian teaching.

The scandal and wonder of Christianity has always been the impossible conviction that somehow Jesus of Nazareth—an itinerant rabblerousing rabbi ignominiously executed by the Empire of Rome—was in fact God on earth, God made flesh. It wasn’t just that He healed; lots of people healed. It wasn’t just that He rose from the dead; others, including Lazarus, rose from the dead. It’s that He was God—and not a god but the God, the infinite, eternal, transcendent Creator of all worlds.

People encountering Christ for the first time asked not “Who are you?” but “What are you?” They came away shaken, stunned, horrified, excited, ecstatic, having had a theophany, an encounter with the Lord. All the Gospels affirm this. Mark whispers it in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Matthew builds to it in dramatic climax. John blurts it out right at the start: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That’s a big idea. That’s all or nothing.

It’s also a hard pill to swallow. How can God be Man and still be God? How can the finite encapsulate the infinite? How is Jesus God and Son of God and Word of God all at once? This is the wonder of what we call the Trinity, the Incarnation. Christianity is not the only monotheism. Judaism, Islam, Platonism, Hinduism, they’re all monotheists at heart. Nor is Christianity the only tradition asserting that a transpersonal God, beyond distinctions of personal or impersonal, can be personified. Vishnu has many avatars. Lao Tzu speaks of the Tao as a man.

Christianity rises and falls on the conviction that this Man, this Jesus, is the full and total revelation of God, the one to whom we look first, last, and forever, who trumps any other depiction of divinity in any other source, including the Bible itself. To say that Jesus is the Word of God is to point to Him and confess, with Martin Luther, that “Apart from this Man I have no God!” Jesus is our Scripture. Jesus is our Sacrament. Jesus is everything we know of grace, mercy, love, and truth.

He is the visible Image of the invisible God; the true Son of the only Father; the Word and Logos within and throughout all of Creation; Emmanuel, God-With-Us. Christ is Alpha and Omega. Christ is Brother, Teacher, King. And when He hands over to the Father the totality of His cosmic rule, then God at the last will be all in all.

That was too much for Arius. And honestly, it’s hard to blame him. It is scandalous that God would become a desert rabbi, to be murdered upon a Cross. How much easier it is to believe that Jesus was special, Jesus was important, but Jesus was not God. He could be a prophet, an anointed king, perhaps even an angel. He could be a god, a supernatural being, but not the God, not the infinite Source of all, not the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Jesus is important, but Jesus can’t be God. Right?

It’s easier to believe that, I think. Simpler, less outrageous. But it destroys the love of God. That’s what Arius did not understand. It snatches Him from our grasp and hurls Him back up to Heaven, inscrutable, unknowable, unfathomable. The distance between a finite Creation and the infinite Creator is insurmountable by any prophet, any angel. Only God can know God. And think what it does to the Cross!

If Jesus is not God, but was only sent by God, then the justice and mercy of God are mockery. I mean how does that work, really? Penal substitutionary atonement? The notion that God saves the world by piling all the guilt of humanity upon one guy and crushing Him for us all? I find that utterly despicable. Imagine if your spouse were brutally murdered, and the police simply couldn’t catch the killer. But they said, don’t worry, justice will be served; and they shoot a perfectly innocent person on the street. There, that should to it, they tell you. Blood for the blood god, yes? My friends, there is no justice in killing an innocent man.

If Christ is not God, then the Cross makes God a monster. God butchered an innocent man to save a guilty world. What father could possibly accept such a cost, such a savage, ugly world? But if Christ is God, then the whole thing changes. It flips. It’s no longer God who kills Man, but Man who kills God. Christ comes to us, forgiving, healing, teaching, revealing, raising up the dead, running about absolving us of sins willy-nilly as if He were God—and we murder Him for it in the worst way we know how. We humiliate and crush Him. We torture and tear Him.

And how does He respond? Does He call down lightning and legions of angels? Does He call upon the planet Mars to bend out of its orbit and knock out the Earth from underneath His feet? Hell, no. He takes into Himself all of our violence, all of our hatred, all of our cruelty, and drowns it in the ocean of His love. He calls out our forgiveness even as we kill Him! My God, what mercy is this! What divinity is this! What love unconquerable, unquenchable, unkillable is hereby released into the pits of hell!

Christ conquers death because Christ is Life. Christ conquers evil because Christ is Truth. Christ abolishes our exile and drags us back to Him because Christ is the Way. If God were a killer of innocent men, then I’d say to the blazes with all of it! Yahweh would be no better than Odin, Zeus, or Crom. By stripping away the Crown of Thorns, Arius and his milquetoast followers would unleash an unholy faith.

But if Christ is God—if He lays aside all glory and might to come down here and to love me, while yet a sinner, all the way to hell and back—my God! I can’t fight a love like that. I can’t kill a love like that. I can’t even escape from a love like that. I can only bow, and worship, and weep, and be raised.

In Jesus Christ, God becomes human, so that all of humanity can now be made one with God. He is in our flesh and our bone, our blood and our breath, closer to you than your jugular. He knows us better than we know ourselves. Not simply because He is God, but because He is more human than we are, the only truly human being. He is whom we are all meant to be, one in His Body and Spirit.

This radical oneness of God and humanity, of Creator and Creation, is the heart and soul of all Christian practice, all Christian life, and all Christian faith. Everything we do here, everything we are, has but this one purpose: to give to us Jesus, to make of us Jesus, everything He has and everything He is. His Name and His Spirit, His Body and Blood, His death and Resurrection, so that each of us becomes a Christian, each of us a little Christ.

Arius understood just how radical this was. Would that he’d had the stomach of Thomas the Apostle, who upon touching the scars of the Risen Christ cried out his confession both in terror and in joy: “My Lord and my God!”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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