Becoming

Propers: The Third Sunday of Easter, AD 2024 B

Homily:

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

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

“What we will be has not yet been revealed.” I feel as though I should get that as a tattoo, or carve it over the entrance of every church that I can find. This one line, one verse, holds within it an ocean of humility and hope, longing and joy, trust and wide-open wonder. “Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when He is revealed, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is.”

I had a professor of New Testament in my undergraduate days, who dismissed any notion of afterlife as meaningless. “Hell we find offensive,” he said, “and Heaven is simply insipid.” I mean, what are we supposed to do all day, lounge around on a cloud and play the harp? See, his notion of eternity was really perpetuity, a bland and endless sameness—endless both in the sense of not terminating, but also of having no goal, no purpose, no point.

And I would have to agree with him, if that were all there were to it. Yet such a popular understanding of punishment and reward holds little resemblance to the promises of the Scriptures. We are not promised an afterlife. We are promised a Resurrection. Now, by saying this, I do not deny the existence of Heaven or Hell. I am quite sure that they are there. But death is not the end of life. We don’t get shuffled off to the good neighborhood or the bad, like some retirement community. There is more to come, infinitely more.

And in order to understand this, in order to have this hope, we must first have some inkling of who and what we are.

God creates all things from nothing—which is to say that He creates us from nothing other than Himself. God is Being with a capital B, subsistent existence itself. He is the source and ground of all Creation; in Him we live and move and have our being. We only exist insofar as we exist in Him. This is what it means to be made in the Image of God. This is what it means to be brought to life by His Spirit, the very life and breath of God within our lungs and in our veins.

That does not make us God, for we are temporal and finite, flawed and imperfect. Creatures are contingent, but God is absolute. The Creator simply is, while His Creation is becoming. Yet there is something of God in us, called forth as we are out of nothing into plemora, into infinity. The oneness that we share, the interdependence of all things, and our utter reliance on God, we call Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia. Sophia is the bit of God in us. And She calls us back to Him, back to fullness, back to perfection.

We come from God, we are sustained by God, and we return to God. And all of this is done in joy and love. God creates not because He has to, not because Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit lack or need a thing, but because it is the nature of God to create, in overflowing love, in superabundant generosity, as an artist pours out herself upon the page. You and I and all of us, every man and bird and beast, every quark and supercluster in the cosmos, God brings forth in pure exhilaration, in self-sacrificial love.

But wait, wait, wait now, some might say. I did not consent to be born. Ah, but I think that we did. Every moment of creation is a moment of assent. As the Father calls us forth, we thus embrace the thrill of being, of existence, of life. We tend to forget this, however, when we are wracked by loneliness, pain, anguish, despair, grief, loss, and dread. We did not consent to a fallen world; we did not consent to death. And neither, it seems, has God.

Whatever has broken our world, it was not His design. God does not will sin, nor suffering, nor death. These are aberrations in the plan, fallenness from the design. He will not let them stand. God does everything that love can do to save and heal the world. In eternity it is already done—salvation accomplished, Creation complete. We cannot see it yet, as it spools out here below in space and time. We have not reached the fullness of redemption, the apocalypse revealed at artist’s end.

Christ has come to save us all, to show us what our destiny shall be. Jesus Christ is the only truly human being. He is the fullness of Creation who is one with His Creator; who is in fact the Creator, and has been from all of eternity, the only Son of the Father. In His Resurrection, Jesus unveils to us a Man who is become: the plenitude of humanity, no longer becoming, bound to space and time, but infinite and eternal, the One who simply is. The Risen Christ is God made Man and Man made God.

He isn’t a ghost. He isn’t a zombie. He hasn’t simply been returned to a life as we knew it before. He is something new, what we were always meant to be: alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Christ is the Resurrection and the life.

Keep in mind the worldview of the Bible. Ancient metaphysics weren’t the same as ours today. We tend to think of matter, of flesh, as more substantive, more real, while the spirit is ephemeral, like incense on the breeze. Not so in the Scriptures. Folks like St Paul thought of flesh as little better than kleenex. It’s always falling apart, rotting away, of scarcely more substance than sand. Spirit was reality, harder than steel, harder than diamond. An angel could walk through you as though you were made of smoke.

“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom,” St Paul wrote, because in his mind the human body could no more survive the unfettered reality of Heaven than a modern man could make it through the vacuum of outer space. We must become more real than we are. Contemporary Christians quibble over whether Jesus’ body rose in the flesh or in the spirit, because we think that to spiritualize it would be to allegorize it, to say that He didn’t really rise. But just the opposite is true. The spirit can do more than merely flesh. It can descend into Hell. It can hallow the Heavens. Jesus is who we were meant to be.

That is the work of salvation. That is the call of the Church: to make us one in Jesus Christ as He is one with God. We are destined for theosis, destined for deification, to become, every one of us, gods within our God. Of course, to be made one with God is not to cease to be ourselves. Rather, it is to become our true selves for the very first time: each of us a unique reflection of the infinity of God, a face of the divine that no-one else could know without us.

And there is no limit to this bliss, this joy, this life. “And all of us, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” There shall be no room for boredom in this Heaven, no need for repetition, for all is the eternal now of God. In the life of the Trinity, perfect motion and perfect rest are revealed as one and the same. We shall grow in God forever as the children of infinite love.

What is Heaven? What is the Resurrection? Honestly, it must all be beyond all mortal ken. “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” Imagine that, at the end of a long and full life. Imagine that, when we think of ourselves as nought but failure and sin. We as yet have not begun to become what we shall be. It is beyond us. We are beyond our understanding of ourselves. All we know is this: when Jesus is revealed, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is.

That’s all we’ve ever wanted, the heart of all desire: to know God, to love God, to be as one with God. And by the Blood of Jesus Christ, that fate awaits us all.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, you may do so here, and we would thank God for your generosity.