Whither Walks the Word
A Reflection on Jesus Christ, the Son of God, by George MacDonald:
I believe, then, that Jesus Christ is the eternal son of the eternal father; that from the first of firstness Jesus is the son, because God is the father—a statement imperfect and unfit because an attempt of human thought to represent that which it cannot grasp, yet which it so believes that it must try to utter it even in speech that cannot be right. I believe therefore that the Father is the greater, that if the Father had not been, the Son could not have been. I will not apply logic to the thesis, nor would I state it now but for the sake of what is to follow. The true heart will remember the inadequacy of our speech, and our thought also, to the things that lie near the unknown roots of our existence. In saying what I do, I only say what Paul implies when he speaks of the Lord giving up the kingdom to his father, that God may be all in all.
I worship the Son as the human God, the divine, the only Man, deriving his being and power from the Father, equal with him as a son is the equal at once and the subject of his father—but making himself the equal of his father in what is most precious in Godhead, namely, Love—which is, indeed, the essence of that statement of the evangelist with which I have now to do—a higher thing than the making of the worlds and the things in them, which he did by the power of the Father, not by a self-existent power in himself, whence the apostle, to whom the Lord must have said things he did not say to the rest, or who was better able to receive what he said to all, says, “All things were made” not by, but “through him.”
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.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.
We see God in Jesus.
That’s it. That’s the entire Christian faith in a nutshell. Everything we do, everything we practice, everything we preach, emerges from this scandalous conviction, this bedrock assertion, that to make ourselves one in Jesus Christ is to make ourselves one with God. The only reason—the only reason!—that we read the Bible, is to find Jesus in it. The only reason that we come to Church is to find Jesus here. And when we love our neighbor, when we forgive our enemies, when we remember the poor, Jesus meets us out there in His world.
Christ is the center of our Gospel. Christ is the center of our faith. Christ is the center of our life. He and He alone makes us Christians, that is, makes us one in His Spirit and His Body, makes of us all little Christs.
About 2000 years ago, Jesus’ public ministry began in the Galilee, a backwater part of a tiny country under the thumb of the mighty Roman Empire. He was thoroughly Jewish, as were His parents, steeped in the religion, the traditions, and the stories of His people. Raised by a skilled builder, He became a rabbi, a scholar and teacher of Jewish Law. And He gathered around Himself a motley crew of fishermen, tax collectors, and other assorted ne’er-do-wells to be His disciples, preaching that the Kingdom of God was at hand.
His was a time of high messianic expectation, when a restless and subjugated people yearned for a deliverer, an Anointed One sent by God, who would liberate them as had Moses of old. Many had tried; all had failed, crushed beneath the hobnailed heels of Rome. But as Jesus’ fame and fellowship continued to spread, people began to whisper—Could it be Him? Could this frustrating, fascinating Galilean possibly be the Christ?
Mind you, the Christ for whom the people sought would not, they believed, be as the anointed ones of old, the kings and priests who one and all fell to arrogance, idolatry, and greed. No, this would be a cosmic Christ, an angel sent from Heaven; perhaps in some mysterious way even God Himself, who had of course been Israel’s true King from the start. And as Jesus continued to teach and to heal, to work wonders and speak truth to power, people found themselves asking not “Who is this Man?” but “What is this Man?”
But then obviously He was killed, publicly tortured to death as a warning to would-be messiahs, those who might claim themselves king, when we have no king but Caesar. And that should’ve been the end of it, one more lost and forgotten christ. Yet three days later—mirabile dictu—He rose up again from the dead! And people started to see Him. People kept seeing Him. And it changed them, radically, killed them and made them alive again. You’d have thought that they’d been the ones resurrected.
And to this very day, some two millennia following the Cross and empty Tomb, people still encounter Jesus: in Word and in Sacrament, in service and in prayer, in the love shared between neighbors and in the story of salvation. He comes to us both in patient endurance and in flashes of spiritual ecstacy, both mundane and miraculous. And ever He gives to us life. Ever He gives to us hope. Ever He raises us up.
Christ is alive! Let Christians sing! And in Him, through Him, by Him, we see God. He is so perfectly transparent, so utterly open to the life and love of God, that He is God, as a Man, God in human form: Emmanuel, God-With-Us. And that He is divinity enfleshed does not make Him less than human—some sort of hybrid, crossbreed, like Gilgamesh or Hercules—but it actually makes Him more human than we are, the only truly fully human being. He is who we were meant to be, and will be in the end, that God at the last may be all in all.
This conviction is born of experience, and of the witness of Scripture. Yet the question inevitably arises as to how exactly this works. Last week we spoke of God the Father as infinite, eternal, utterly transcendent and so perfectly immanent. How can the God whom the heavens can’t contain be born from the womb of a Virgin?
For this Christians turned to the Word. And I mean that literally. Greek philosophy, including Hellenistic Jewish theology, sought to address the problem of how an infinite and transcendent God might be known by finite creatures of flesh. If God is so big, so high, so great as to be ultimately unknowable, how then is that any better than atheism? A God we cannot know might as well not be there at all.
But God is known. He reveals Himself to us through His Λόγος, a Greek word which we translate as “Word,” but which also means reason, plan, logic, or mind. The Λόγος is the mind of God, the reason of God, the thoughts of God. It is the Word that contains all words, the thought that contains all thoughts. If the Father is the infinite Being of God, then the Word is the infinite Knowledge of God. God knows Himself, knows His Being, and thereby knows everything, for God is infinite.
All of us have within our minds an image of ourselves, of who we think we are. And because we are finite, because we are flawed, that mental reflection of us is imperfect. There is more to us than we know, for good or for ill. But the same is not quite true for God. God’s self-understanding, His self-image, is perfect, and as infinite as He is. The God in the mind of God is God, fully, truly, utterly. And this Mind of God, this Knowledge of God, we call the Son, the visible Image of the invisible Father.
These are not two Gods, which remains a logical impossibility. Rather here we know One God, One Essence, in two Underlying Realities: God the hidden Father, and God the revealed Son. Both are real, both are true, both are God. “For the Father and I are one.”
If the Father is the consciousness of God, then He is logically prior to the Son, who is the infinite understanding of God; logically, mind you, but not chronologically prior. The Father and the Son are co-eternal. In one infinite moment, God is, and God knows. It is by His reason, His Word, His thought, His Son, that God is revealed to Godself. And it is through the Son, the Mind of God, that all things are created, all things are revealed. “Through Him all things were made.”
The Λόγος permeates and unifies all things in reason and in truth, for God knows all things and thus is in all things. All of us are words within the one Word, minds within in the one Mind. All of Creation is spoken by God; all of it comes through His Word. In Jesus, a human being devoid of sin, the perfect union of God and Man is revealed, or fulfilled, or restored. Jesus is both a Man become one with God, and God become one Man. By His Cross He draws all to Himself, all people, all life, all the cosmos.
He isn’t just an angel. He isn’t just a creature. He certainly isn’t half of God and half something else. Christ is the manifestation of the Hidden One, God Himself made flesh. And we shall all be one in Jesus, because of what He has done, because of who He is.
In weeks to come we will speak more on this. We shall speak of God the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ. We shall speak of Holy Mother Church as Jesus’ Body and His Bride. And we shall speak of Sophia, the Oneness permeating God and Creation alike. For now let us simply abide in the truth that Jesus is our Alpha and Omega, our beginning and our end. And all that really matters is that we see God in Him.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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