Learning Our Faith from the Church Fathers — 20140525

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In the Book of Wisdom (2:23), which is in the Old Testament, man is not only made in the image of God, he is the image of God properly. Gregory of Nyssa, who, in his anti-Arian polemic, stressed the perfect equality of the three persons, spoke as such: “God is always the archetype in whose image man is said to have been created.

The efforts of Augustine, one of the great Western Fathers of the Church, to discern within the human mind a replica of the life of the Three Persons was, largely alien to traditional Eastern theology. Some scholars believe that various elements of Augustine’s doctrine are found in Gregory of Nyssa and several other Eastern Fathers, Ephrem illustrated the Trinity by means of the three constituent elements of the human person (i.e., body, soul and spirit); while the spirit corresponds to the Father, it was the human body (the third element) which became a parallel to the Holy Spirit. (The Western world reduced this to two elements: body and soul). Some believe that Gregory Palamas came close to the Augustinian concept but did not develop it systematically.

The Trinitarian meaning of the concept of the image is certainly found in the East, but it was applied in a social sense to the Church, the human collectivity united in divine unity.

The expression in the image of God, after God’s image, and the image of God are not synonymous. In the image sounds as if God first created an image-prototype in terms of which he would then have created man. This image, which is intermediate, could be Wisdom or the Logos (the Word = Christ). Christ, however, is the true archetype according to which man is created and recreated; he is in the form of God, the image of God. This language is found in Paul’s letters – Philippians 2:6 and 2nd Colossians 4:4. The entire tradition on this point may be summarized by saying that man is in the image of the Word and that he is the image of God through the mediation of the Word. He is therefore an image of the image.

This general statement, however, includes rather divergent interpretations depending on whether the image was conceived as a visible or an invisiblereality. There is no doubt that Irenaeus thought the God-man (i.e., Jesus) was the model according to which Adam was created by God, and that man was therefore made like to the invisible Father through means of the visible Word.

One realizes, by thinking about the foregoing, that the Church has struggled, and continues to struggle, to understand the relationship between God and man.

Called To Holiness — 20140525

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As I related several weeks ago, I believe that a truly vibrant parish is one wherein the majority of regular members understand that they are called to holiness and find ways to support one another in that pursuit. So during the last several issues of the Bulletin I have been attempting to flesh out what I understand about our call to holiness. I truly believe that the call to holiness is a call to recognize God’s image in us and to understand that our work during this lifetime is to develop His likeness. The only way that we can develop His likeness is to imitate Jesus. Jesus was and IS the image and likeness of God.

So we have a concrete example in the person of Jesus what it means to be in God’s likeness. When a person is like God, he is a person who demonstrates behaviors that reflect God’s attitudes about humanity and creation. Perhaps the most important attitude that is truly of God is the attitude of unconditional love for others regardless of how they treat you. We see this exemplified over and over again in the life of Jesus.  He refused to hate or reject anyone, regardless of how they treated Him.

This is perhaps the most difficult godlike attitude to develop for most humans. Our natural instinct seems to direct us to treat others the same way that they treat us. This is not godlike!

Perhaps the best way to begin to develop an ability to unconditionally love others is to first decide that you will not judge others and always presume the positive intent of others.

While this may seem easy at first blush, I suspect this is more difficult than most think and probably is the underlying cause why we humans find it so difficult to unconditionally love others. When and if we judge others to be wrong, sinful, not like us, or stupid, we will find it difficult to love them. Sometimes we even find ourselves judging others because of what friends or other people in our society say about them (Its similar to the phenomenon of bullying we see happening in our schools. Kids convince one another that a certain student should be judged and harassed and the social pressure of wanting to be a part of the group, seduces even good students to engage in bullying).

For people to truly develop the likeness of God, they must be strong in their convictions about how God wants them to live as humans and courageous to stand, at times, alone in the crowd. Jesus did it and history tells us His followers imitated Him, even unto death!

Learning About the Practices of Our Religion — 20140525

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During the past several weeks I have been attempting to share with my readers how the Divine Liturgy was celebrated during the time of John Chrysostom. One particular difference was in how the Gifts were brought to the Holy Table. As we now celebrate the Divine Liturgy, there is a procession through the Church with the bread and wine and the priest audibly prays, during this procession, for all the living who are truly a part of our worship. This process takes place after the faithful sing the most poignant Cherubic Hymn.

In either 573 or 574, Justinian I had the Cherubic Hymn added to the standard liturgy. The previous prayer used was that of the Liturgy of St. James, which had then been inserted into the Liturgy of St. Basil. That hymn, beginning with the phrase Let all mortal flesh keep silent, is currently only used on Great and Holy Saturday.

During the period of the fourth through the ninth centuries, the shape of the   Eastern Divine Liturgy reached its final form under the guidance of liturgists such as John Chrysostom. In this same period the major formative changes occurred as a result of the Church’s developing theological understanding. The hymns Only Begotten Son, Trisagion Hymn,  Cherubic Hymn, the Hymn to the Mother of God and, of course, the Nicean-Constantinopolitan Creed were added to the Liturgy to counter heresies and express the true beliefs of the Church.

Originally the bread and wine had most probably been brought to church by the people and then brought to the Holy Table by deacons without any singing. In the time of John Chrysostom, the gifts were transferred in a simple manner. It requires a good deal of imagination to realize this in view of the splendor which latter came to attend what we now call the Great Entrance.

For whatever reason, and the real reason is truly unknown, the bringing of the gifts to the Holy Table became an elaborate procession. As it now is served, great stress is placed on the procession itself, rather than on its objective, and makes it a focus of popular devotion. As it is now served, wherein the gifts are brought through the entire church, people can come to realized that these gifts, symbols of life itself, also represent them and that what we actually ask God during the Liturgy is to accept the gift of life     itself, in union with Jesus and communion with the Holy Spirit. We join Jesus in    offering thanksgiving to the Father for the gift of life. Through this action our worship involves us in a very personal way: Christ + Us, inspired by the Holy Spirit, offer ourselves in thanksgiving to the Father!

Jesus + Us, In the Spirit = the Offering

Sunday May 18, 2014

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When the Samaritan woman came to the well with faith, she beheld You, O Water of Wisdom. You allowed her to drink in abundance and glorified her eternally, for she inherited the heavenly kingdom.

 

wonamatthe wellAs I reflected on the two readings appointed for our worship this weekend, two things gripped my attention: (1) the description of what Barnabas said to the people of Antioch when he arrived, and (2) one of the responses the Samaritan women made to Jesus. Both have truly caused me to stop and think. I would like to share my thoughts.

First, Barnabas’ reaction to the Church at Antioch. ACTS states this: On his arrival Barnabas rejoiced to see the     evidence of God’s favor. He encouraged them all to remain firm in their commitment to the Lord. This reminded me that I should say these very same words to all I serve: remain firm in your commitment to the Lord. Do not doubt that the Lord is with us and that He has a plan which is for our good. We may not, perhaps, be able to see what the future will bring but, if we place our hope and trust in the Lord, what will come to pass will only be for our good and our spiritual growth.

The second phrase from our readings that touched me was from the Gospel story about the Samaritan woman. After Jesus tells the woman something about the living water that he would give her if only she asked, she simply states: Give me this water, sir, so that I shall not grow thirsty. Her words signal great insight. She seems to have once understood the Good News that Jesus shared with her. Jesus said to her: If only you recognized God’s gift – that is God’s revelation about how to live life – she would have peace in her life (as the story unfolds, we sense she was not at peace since the man she was living with was not her husband).

Hopefully we can come to understand and believe that God loves us so much that He came Himself in the Person of Jesus to model for us how to live this earthly life so that we might spiritually grow and learn the lessons that this life is meant to teach us. We must always remember that this earthly existence is a time of learning how to live as a person created in God’s image and likeness.

Christ is the water of wisdom. If we drink of this wisdom, given to us through the Scriptures and the Church, we will find that we begin to understand life in a new way. When we don’t understand life as God created it, we quickly become thirsty and parched. To be thirsty in this context means to lack an understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. Only the wisdom of God, expressed through the teachings of Jesus Christ, can quench our thirst for an understanding of life’s meaning.

Χριστός Ανέστη!

Learning Our Faith from the Church Fathers – 20140518

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Since I raised the question in the article in today’s Bulletin about the Eastern Church’s understanding of the image and likeness of God relative to man’s human nature, I thought that I would also share some thoughts on this same topic from the Fathers.

The relationship of the image to the model has a special importance in the thought of the Eastern Fathers. It lies at the heart of allegorical exegesis: the Old Testament contains the shadow of true reality, the New Testament bears its image, but the reality itself will be found only in the world to come. The same holds true for the visible world: things are copies of eternal models (in this respect the Eastern Fathers were heavily influenced by Plato’s philosophy). It should be noted that the Western mind examines the efficient cause whereas the Eastern concentrates on the exemplary cause, pondering the meaning of emerging facts.

Among these many relationships there was one of crucial importance: man, who belongs to the world of reason and   dominates the visible world, is made in the image of God, the ruler of the intelligible world. Even though man’s creation in the image of God has never been questioned, there has existed a wide divergence of opinion about the nature of this image. In the fourth century, pseudo-Caesarius echoed this lack of consensus. Nowhere, do the Fathers present an organic theology of the image: they offer elements of a synthesis, but the synthesis itself is missing. This is probably one of the reasons why the Western world has looked askance on the idea of Theosis.

Both in content and certainly terminology, this theme goes back to a twofold source, one scriptural, the other philosophic. Indeed there are several passages in Scripture which speak, in various ways, of the image of God. The basic text is Genesis (1:26-27) describing the creation of man. The weight of the description is derived not so much from the term image (the Semitic mentality is not formal), as from the context of the revelation proper to Scripture: man is on the side of God. Adam comes from God just as he begets children himself. A study of the Pauline theology of Christ as the image of God allows us to divine the texts into two groups, one which presents Christ as the image of God, the other which deals with Christ as the model for Christians.

During the next few issues, I would like to take time to look at these two groups. I do this since Theosis is the primary concept of our spiritual theology and it deals with the idea of us humans being made in God’s image and likeness.

Called To Holiness – 20140518

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I have been exploring with you, my readers, what it means to be called to holiness. I believe that God came in the Person of   Jesus to personally call us to holiness. It seems that humankind, despite all of the prophets of old, just did not come to an understanding of what God intended when He created humankind.

Holiness is the opposite of the reality of this world and presents itself as the eruption of what is absolutely different. The Scriptures supply us with a fundamental definition. They tell us that only God is holy and a human is such only in a derived sense. The sacred and the holy can never be of a human’s own nature but only and always by participation in the nature of God.

The terms kadosh (Hebrew), agios (Greek), syaat (Ukrainian) and sanctus (Latin) – all words for holy –  imply a relationship of totally belonging to God, and of being set apart. This is, in the world’s view, the state of innocence since the person exhibits sincerity, lack of guile and humility. The holiness of God abides within them and shines forth from them. Just as a place is holy because one can sense the presence of God, so too is a holy person if we sense that they are like God in the way that they treat others and live life.

The liturgy teaches this holiness most explicitly.   Before offering the Eucharistic gifts to the faithful, the celebrant says Holy things for the holy and the assembly responds, moved by this awesome invitation, confessing their unworthiness, “One is holy, one is Lord, Jesus Christ, for the glory of God the Father. Amen.” The One who is uniquely holy in his    nature is Christ. Those who are his members are holy only through sharing in his unique   holiness. As believers in Jesus Christ, we are joined to Him and become parts of His extended body in time – He is the head and we are the members of His body. That means that we are joined to His holiness. This, however, requires that we live in His likeness – that we attempt to put on Christ, making His personal characteristics our characteristics.

This means that we have to recognize God’s image in us and then work to imitate His likeness. We know from the Scriptures that He was humble, gentle, caring, loving and dedicated to the service of others. He lived like God intended humans to live. So the call to holiness is really a call to imitate Christ.

Meshiha qam! (Syriac)

The Spirituality of the Christian East – 20140518

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I have often been asked why I thought God created us like we are. We come into the world without any real understanding of the meaning of life and have to struggle a lifetime to come to a real understanding.  To me it seems that God understands that there is something very valuable in the process of learning. In this process I still retain my free will. I truly believe that free will is perhaps the greatest gift that God has given us. While I feel that the power to think is a great gift, I know that free will far exceeds this ability. Our free will truly makes us different from the angels and other living beings. We can not only think but have the power to choose what we believe.

Granting humankind free will, I believe, signifies true love. It clearly tells us that God does not desire slaves to serve Him but, rather, free daughters and sons to love Him. God was willing to take the risk of us rejecting Him so that any love we might extend to Him is freely given! This also means that He had to allow for the possibility that we might be distracted by the things of this world and fail to respond to His love.

During the years of my ministry I have discovered that we humans are truly fickle.  We choose to ignore God and seek the things of this world until we face a real challenge. Then, when we begin to fear that something bad might happen to us, we quickly turn our attention to Him (there is an old saying: there are no atheists in a foxhole).

I have also found that people quickly state when they encounter sickness or disappointment: why is God doing this to me. They don’t seem to say this when their life is free of any real challenges. Why don’t we love Him always?

So life is meant to help us learn that God truly loves us by providing multiple opportunities to learn how to hope and trust in Him. We, however, always have a choice because of free will. We are called to love God in good and bad times.

Христос Воскресe

Getting to Know Something About Our Greek Catholic Faith – 20140518

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The Eastern Church looks at human nature differently than does the Western Church. Eastern theology asserts that God created human beings innocent and good, but not complete. So life calls human beings to grow in God-likeness. The Eastern Church makes a distinction between the ideas of the image of God and the likeness of God. Even though humanity is made in the image of God, it still has to grow into the likeness of God.

When Adam and Eve sinned, they did not lose the image of God but, rather, the likeness of God. When the likeness of God was lost, immortality was lost.  It is not original sin, according to Eastern theology, that was passed on to us, the descendants of Adam, but mortality. So human beings are not held guilty for original sin. They only become guilty when they sin, as Adam and Eve sinned and they have to learn how to live in order to become beings living in God’s likeness.

Christ came and died to provide us with an understanding of how to live in God’s likeness. He taught us that when we live in God’s likeness, immortality is ours.

John Chrysostom was one of the most eloquent Eastern Church fathers in the fourth and fifth centuries. In fact, his name, Chrysostom, means the “golden mouth,” a reference to the power of his preaching. Chrysostom believed that God’s work of creation was a work of grace and therefore good. Now, there were Greek philosophers who looked at this world as inherently evil, not from God. Our physical bodies are evil, but our souls are good, but unfortunately our souls are imprisoned in this sinful body and cannot find freedom until at death when our souls at last are released from this sinful body. In contrast to such ideas, Chrysostom put it this way: “Many also of the Greeks and heretics affirm that it the body was not even created by God. I for my part, when such things are talked of, would first make this reply: tell me not of fallen man, who is degraded and then condemned. If you would learn what manner of body God formed us with at the first, let us go to Paradise, and survey the Man that was created at the beginning. For that body was not thus corruptible and mortal; but like as some statue of gold just brought from the furnace, that shines splendidly, so that frame was free from all corruption. Labor did not trouble it, nor sweat deface it. Cares did not conspire against it; nor was there any other affection of that kind to distress it.”

As is evident, the Eastern Church has a different understanding of the condition of humankind than the Western Church. Neither are wrong!

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament – 20140518

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In the canonical New Testament (NT), Philemon is the last of the 13 letters attributed to Paul. This is because it is the shortest, only 25 verses long, so brief it is not even divided into chapters. But in a chronological NT, it comes early, in the middle of the seven letters universally accepted as by Paul himself. It is never read in Church and so I would encourage you to pick up a NT and read it. It’s short!

Philemon is one of Paul’s prison letters There is only one other one, that to the Philippians, that is counted among the seven letters considered to be genuinely Pauline. From the details in Philemon, we know that it was a Roman prison. Some scholars think it was in the city of Rome and thus date it and Philippians to the early 60s. But there were Roman prisons throughout the empire, especially in provincial capitals such as Ephesus in Asia Minor. A   majority of scholars think these two letters were actually written during an imprisonment in Ephesus in the mid-50s. Because they were written near each other in time, it is arbitrary to place one ahead of the other. For didactic rather than historical reasons, Marcus Borg, the scholar that I am using, places Philemon before Philippians.

What is unique about Philemon is that it is written not to a community but to an individual person, Philemon. The other person who appears in the letter is Onesimus, a slave of Philemon. Philemon was a member of a Christ-community, and probably its leader because the community met in his house.  Onesimus, for some reason, fled from Philemon. To be a runaway slave was a very serious matter in that world. Onesimus went to Paul in prison, presumably because he knew Philemon admired Paul, and asked Paul to intercede for him with Philemon. Paul sent Onesimus back to Philemon with this letter. It should be noted that slavery was not something that the early Church necessarily found wrong. That was the way that society was structured.

Paul’s letter of intercession is unique insofar as it did not recommend a mitigation of punishment but, rather, that Philemon free Onesimus. Further, although the letter is addressed to Philemon, it is also addressed to the Christ-community. Therefore, as was the custom, the letter would have been read to the entire community. In the letter Paul presents the theological foundation for his conviction.

Paul’s strategy is clever: (1) he first praises Philemon as his dear friend and co-worker; (2) he then emphasizes his own situation as a prisoner of Christ; (3) he then tells Philemon that he could command him to do his duty but preferred to appeal to his love; (4) he then calls Onesimus my child and my own heart; and (5) he then makes his appeal.

Kristus vstal zmŕtvych