Learning Our Faith From the Greek Fathers of the Church — 20170402

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I shared in the last issue how Athanasius tried described the relationship between the Father and the Son as the relationship that exists between the son and its own light. Athanasius’ point is that just as the sun is inseparable from its rays – to be the sun is to shed light – so for the Father to be Father is to possess a Son. How could things be otherwise? And, as he later writes, whatever kind of “begetting” is involved in the relationship between Father and Son, this begetting cannot be external to their natural, inherent paternal and filial relationship.

Athanasius’ argument and illustration run directly against the Arian insistence that the generation of the Son is external to the Father, that is, a generation that takes place at some “time,” even if that time is before the creation of the heavens and the earth. As long as Arius insists that there was a time when the Son did not exist, such must be the case. Hence, Athanasius’ use of the illustration of the sun and its rays. The two are, Athanasius insists, inseparable, as are the Father and the Son.

Athanasius believes that at least part of the Arian error can be linked to the kinds of questions Arian theologians tend to ask. Think of the following two questions:

  1. How can the Son exist eternally with the Father? Do not human fathers beget sons “in the course of time”? No human son existed before his father begat him in time. Every human son did not exist before he was begotten.
  2. How can the Son be the Word, or the Word be the image of God?” Human “speech is a combination of syllables,” signifying a speaker’s meaning as one speaks that meaning into the air. The words did not exist before the speak chose to speak them, and they cease to exist once they have been uttered. How then, Arian thinkers ask, can God’s Word always exist and continue to exist once it has been spoken? No human analogies exist to demonstrate that this can be possible.

Hopefully my readers can see how intense the arguments were as the Church struggled to come to a true understanding of Who Jesus IS and, therefore, Who God IS!

Reflections on the Scripture Readings for this Weekend — 20170402

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On this fifth weekend of the Great Fast, we remember our Mother among the saints, Mary of Egypt and our readings are taken from Paul’s letter to the Hebrews and Mark’s Gospel. This coming week will bring to an end our Great Fast since the week that follows is the Great and Holy Week.

Our epistle reading rightly prepares us for the coming of Great and Holy Week since it shares Paul’s understanding of the sacrifice of Jesus. Paul depicts Jesus as our “high priest” who through the eternal spirit offered himself up unblemished to God. Paul then offers the reason why saying: to cleanse our consciences from dead works to worship the living God.

Our gospel reading relates Christ’s Third Teaching about His Passion and Resurrection and also relates, through the story of the ambition of James and John, how we must live if we desire to be His true followers. Jesus is quoted as sharing this with His disciples:

Anyone among you who aspires to greatness must serve the rest; whoever wants to rank first among you must serve the needs of all. The Son of Man has not come to be served but to serve – to give his life in ransom for the many.

Anyone desirous of following Christ, must think about these words and integrate them into his/her life. It is when we serve others for the sake of the Kingdom of God that the Kingdom becomes real and we can truly sense the presence of God. God is not present only in churches. He is truly present in the hearts of persons who are willing to love their neighbors as themselves.

When we truly begin to make our worship an act of joining with Jesus in offering ourselves to the Father we begin to more fully realize this idea of service to others. As we think of service to others, we begin to think of others in a different light – we begin to see them as an opportunity to become more like Jesus and to gain a greater understanding of the meaning and purpose of life.

As we prepare for the Great and Holy Week, let us redouble our efforts to prepare our hearts and minds to truly enter into the things that we recall about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Let us open our hearts and minds to come to a deeper awareness of what these events really mean to us and all humankind.

CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20170402

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As we grow ever closer to the Great and Holy Week, during which we look ever closer to the final days of the life of Jesus, I believe that the call to holiness becomes ever more clear. First, I think that the call to holiness is a call to face the challenges of life with nobility and courage which are supported by a deep trust in God. We hear again how Jesus faced betrayal, false accusation, torture and death with quiet nobility. He did not allow the hatred of others and the falseness of their assertions to catapult him into protestations of innocence or urge him to use violence to counter violence. He did not get defensive! He knew that how he lived and what he taught was God’s truth. His true courage declared the truth of what he taught. If we know that we stand with God, there is no need to defend ourselves.

Second, I believe the call to holiness is a call to truly believe that love is more powerful than hate and to live according to this belief.

The call to holiness means that we freely choose to respond to others with love and kindness, regardless of how they treat us. Jesus refused, because of His love for His Father, to allow the actions of others to dictate how He lived. He lived as He believed and knew His Father wanted Him to live.

And finally, I believe that the call to holiness is a call to understand that personal transformation IS the purpose of earthly life. Jesus proved this, I truly believe, by the way He lived and died. The way He lived and died is the key to His resurrection. This is why He is our Messiah – the Person who can truly help us to make sense out of this earthly existence.

We all have choices about how to live our lives. I, myself, cannot possibly find any better model to try to imitate than Jesus. His way of living allowed Him to achieve personal resurrection and peace.

Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church — 20170402

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I have been sharing the reasons why our Church, during the Great Fast, traditionally only celebrates the Divine Liturgy on weekends but distributes presanctified Holy Communion on Wednesdays and Fridays in a service know as the Liturgy of Presanctified Gifts. The very first and truly essential characteristic of this Liturgy is that it is an evening service. It is an truly an evening service because it is VESPERS with the distribution of Communion. Vespers, as I am sure my readers know, is Evening Prayer. Drawing upon Jewish tradition, Vespers is always celebrated after sundown and, in fact, marks the beginning of a new day. (This is one of the reasons why the Liturgy, if it is celebrated on Saturday in place of Sunday, is to be celebrated after sundown so that when it is celebrated it is really Sunday).

There is a tradition in the Eastern Church that encourages the faithful to fast before the reception of Holy Communion since fasting is seen as a traditional way to prepare oneself for the celebration of Christ’s presence with us. Therefore the reception of Holy Communion breaks one’s fast. So during the Great Fast, when we fast during the day, our fast is broken by the reception of Communion and, as I shared before, Communion is given to us in order to strengthen our efforts to prepare ourselves for the celebration of the Great Mystery of our Salvation, namely the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, our Savior.

The service of Vespers takes us through creation, sin, and salvation in Christ. It leads us to the meditation of God’s word and the glorification of his love for men. It instructs us and allows us to praise God for the particular events or persons whose memory is celebrated and made present to us in the Church. It prepares us for the sleep of the night and the dawn of the new day to come.

So during the Great Fast this is the perfect service. It begins our movement into a more perfect union (com-union) with God through the reception of the Sacred Gifts which makes Christ present to us in a real and true manner.

The Liturgy of Presanctified Gifts is a “liturgical” service – a true worship service – and not a pious devotion. It, like the Divine Liturgy, brings us into more direct contact with our God since it calls us to actually take our God into our lives in a much more real and concrete way. The act of consuming the Divine Gifts calls us very directly to think about our union with God and more profoundly encourages us to live more like Him.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20170402

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In the last issue of this article, I shared that Mark, in the 15th chapter of his gospel, says that Jesus released his last breath, thus implying that in dying Jesus himself is set free.

The various forms of rise up or be raised are significant because together they form a running refrain that points to Jesus’ resurrection. Mark uses the phrase raised up repeatedly. In chapter 6, for example, when Herod is speculating on the identity of Jesus, he says, “It is John Whom I beheaded. He has been raised up”. By using the word here, Mark hints at the future “raising up” of Jesus. In chapter 14, Mark notes that Jesus says to His disciples, “After I have been raised up, I shall go before you to Galilee” At the end of his Gospel, Mark indicates that an angel repeats these words to the women who came to the tomb; “He has been raised; he is not here”. In other places, Mark consistently uses some form of the same verb to denote the effect of Jesus’ healing miracles. Unfortunately, English translations often blur this meaningful refrain by using synonyms.

When Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, for example, Mark notes that Jesus said, “Rise up”. Jesus uses the exact same words to the man with the withered hand and to Jairus’ daughter, the little girl whom everyone had given up for dead. By using this word again and again, Mark suggests that Jesus’ healing miracles are related to the great miracle of his resurrection.

Another word that is important to Mark is “straightway.” The word sounds odd to modern ears, and most English translations, including the New American Bible, either translate it as “immediately” or “at once” or omit it entirely. But it truly echoes the message of the prophetic voice in chapter 1 that cries out in the desert, telling the people to prepare for God’s coming by making “straight” his “ways”. Mark was so intrigued by this pun (which works in both Greek and English) that he uses it forty-three times in his Gospel.

In the first part of his Gospel, Mark uses the word to signal an act of moral urgency. In the first chapter alone, Mark uses this word eleven times. Mark says that Jesus ascended from the baptismal waters “straightway”. The Spirit drives Jesus into the desert “straightway”. When Jesus calls Andrew and Simon, they leave their nets “straightway” and Jesus calls to James and John “straightway.” It is not just be chance that Mark uses this word so many times throughout his Gospel. More to follow!

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20170402

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I would continue to share thoughts about the 30th Step on John’s Ladder of Divine Ascent. The 30th Step is Faith, Hope and Love.

The highest degree of love for God, which is the love of the dispassionate, is described in ways most of us would associate with passionate romance. This is not coincidental, for this is precisely how divine love is described by the great mystics of the Eastern Church. The saints are sometimes described in Greek as erastes of God. Erastes is derived from the Greek word eros, so it quite literally means those who are “in love” with God.

Have you ever been so deeply and passionately in love with someone that you are distracted by an obsession with that person? You may lose your appetite and forget to eat. You can think of nothing else. The object of your love is the last thing you think of when you go to bed, the first thing you think of when you wake up. The love can be so intense it even hurts.

St. John describes this relationship with God as being wounded by love. Love and beauty can bring a sensitive heart to tears, and yet they are tears not of regret or sorrow, but of joy – an almost painful joy. This being wounded by love, this deep compassion and sensitivity to the beauty of God and His creation, has been expressed repeatedly by the saints.

While love can be “wounding,” at the same time it makes everything seem bright and joyful. Thus divine love is the expulsion, or rather, the transfiguration of all the passions. The deeper and more intense our love, the more cheerful and care-free we become. If the sight of the one we love clearly makes us change completely, so that we turn cheerful, glad and carefree, what will the face of the Lord Himself not do as He comes to dwell, invisibly, in a pure soul?

Think about this!

Reflections on the Scripture Readings for this Weekend — 20170326

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On this fourth weekend of the Great Fast, we also celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation and truly remember John Climacus, one of the great Fathers of the Eastern Church. As my readers will recall, St. John was the author of the Ladder of Divine Ascent which I have been using as the basis for my article on the Spirituality of the Christian East.

The readings we hear today are taken from Paul’s letter to the Hebrews and Mark’s Gospel. In Hebrews Paul reminds his readers that God made a promise to mankind through the Chosen People, Israel. Paul writes this:

God, wishing to give the heirs of his promise even clearer evidence that his purpose would not change, guaranteed it by oath, so that … we who have taken refuge in him might be strongly encouraged to seize the hope which is placed before us.

Of course the promise that God had made to Israel was that He would send a Messiah Who would free people from the bonds that kept them from the fullness of life.

Today’s Gospel story, while it relates the cure of a possessed boy, truly highlights the faith of the father who brought the boy to Jesus. This faith is shown in this interaction between Jesus and the boy’s father. Here is the interaction:

[The father says] If out of the kindness of your heart you can do anything to help us, please do. Jesus said, If you can? Everything is possible to a man who trusts.

The father then makes this absolutely, beautiful response to Jesus’ challenge: “I do believe! Help my lack of trust!” These words are so appropriate and highlight something very important, namely that while we say we believe in God’s great love for us, do we really trust that He will always act out of love toward us.

God has made a promise to us through Jesus. That promise is that He will be with us through all the struggles of life if only we trust Him to keep His word.

Perhaps the problem is that when we are confronted with life’s challenges and we pray to God to be rescued from these challenges and He doesn’t rescue us, our trust in Him is diminished. We must trust that God will always act in our best interest. When St. Paul asked God to rescue him from a problem he was having, God’s response was not to rescue Paul but remind him that His grace was sufficient for Paul to endure the challenge and learn from it.

CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20170326

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I ended this article in the last issue of the Bul-letin by asking: What is the purpose of earthly life? I don’t know whether this stimulated any of my readers to answer this question. It truly is one of the most important questions that we can ask. As we work to find an answer to this question, we find that it helps us make more sense out of the events of life.

So why do you think that God brought all things, including you and me, into existence? Is all of creation merely some kind of cosmic accident?

As I look around at our universe I find that there is an intelligent design to all things. There is too much order and design in creation to believe that it is all due just to chance.

I believe that the call to holiness is a call to embrace whole-heartedly the belief that there is an intelligent being – God – who has brought all things, including human beings, into existence. By saying this does not exclude the possibility of an evolutionary process that was created and is controlled by an intelligent being. I believe that being is God as we know Him to be through the dogmas of the Church. I say this because I also believe that the God I believe in is Three-Persons-In- One. If I believe that Jesus is fully God and fully Man, then I have to believe that God is Trinity.

When I think about God’s incarnation as a human being, I see a evolutionary process unfolding. He could only come into earthly time when humankind was ready to accept the idea of God as Three-In-One. At the time of Jesus, portions of humankind had come to an understanding of monotheism – One God. This had to be established before humankind could come to accept God as Triune in substance and nature. I would call my readers to take time during the Great Fast to think about these things.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20170326

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It is my intent, in sharing thoughts about the Gospel of Mark, that my readers will begin to have a new and inspired understanding of the Gospels. They are not meant to present history in a strict sense but are historical in that they present the life and death of Jesus. They are apologetic documents, that is documents that are meant to inspire belief in Jesus. They are documents which grew out of the oral tradition of the followers of Jesus and which became formulated as a part of Christian worship.

Mark is given to the repetition of certain key words or phrases if we pay close attention to his gospel. For example, he uses some form of the verb “release” to indicate both the forgiveness of sin and the healing of a dis-ease. In chapter 1 he says that John the Baptizer was “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the release of sins (1:4). Later in the same chapter, when Jesus cures Simon’s mother-in-law, Mark says, “the fever released her (1:31). In chapter 2, when Mark describes Jesus’ healing the paralytic, he notes that Jesus said, “Child, your sins are released” (2:5). The word is not translated this way because it is not idiomatic English, but the literal meaning conveys two aspects of Mark’s interpretation of Jesus. First, it suggests an equation between healing and forgiveness. Second, it indicates Mark’s view that Jesus continually sets people free. At the end of chapter 7, when Mark shows Jesus engaged in a healing action that summarizes much of what has gone before, he calls attention to the important of the episode by quoting Jesus in Aramaic: Ephphata! – that is Be opened or, literally, Be released (7:33).

In chapter 15, Mark returns to the theme, using it in an ironic way as part of the speech of Pi-late. As Pilate strives to please the crowd, he keeps asking them which prisoner he should release to them (15:9, 11) until he finally releases Barabbas (15:15). When Jesus dies, however, Mark says he released his last breath (15:37), thus implying that in dying, Jesus himself is set free.

So we see that Mark, and also the other Gospel writers, write their gospels in a manner that was meant to influence others to believe in Jesus and his teachings. In proclaiming Jesus as Savior and Lord, they used every liter-ary means to convince others that Je-sus’ teachings were such that they filled people who followed him with the fullness of life. Remember, that when the gospels were first written, there was not a vision of him being God.

Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church — 20170326

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The feast of the Annunciation is one of the 12 major feasts of our Church. It recalls Mary’s conception of Jesus. Sometimes the story is so romanticized that we fail to realize the strength and courage of Mary. In the time of Jesus, girls entered marriage at the age of 12. She was betrothed to Joseph which meant she was preparing for marriage.

Sacred tradition tells us that she was probably only a young maiden about 12 years of age. Her parents, in thanksgiving for her birth, had placed her in the finishing school that was run by the Temple in Jerusalem. It was there that she learned the Sacred Scriptures and how to be a mother in accord with the rules of Judaism. She was well-acquainted with the history of Israel and especially the prophecies about the Messiah. While there, she found herself with child and was inspired to believe that the child would be special in Jewish history.

Angels have always been considered as messengers of God. The wonder of this story is that she demonstrated true trust in God. She knew that she didn’t do anything wrong and yet she found herself in a very precarious situation. Her parents and Joseph, her betrothed, knew of her faith and trust and therefore did not denounce her before the community.

I truly believe we lessen Mary’s courage and faith by insisting that she had some kind of vision wherein an angel actually announced to her that she was to be the mother of a child without being married. She trusted God and because she was a good, religious young woman, others also trusted her. The very important thing is that she willingly embraced the challenge that life presented and did not cease to believe and trust in God. She was rewarded with an amazing son, Jesus.

The entire story of how God came into the world – became incarnate – as a human is filled with persons who believed and trusted in God even though they may not have fully understood, initially, the true meaning of what life presented. Joachim, Anna, Joseph and Mary are all examples of persons who fully and completely trusted in God. They are true examples for us on how to live this earthly life. As we celebrate this feast today, let us ask them to help us develop a similar faith and trust in our God.