Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20170115

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In the last issue, I shared with you that the true understanding of the Sacred Scriptures can only be understood within the context of our worship. Therefore, the proclamation and celebration of the Word must resolve into silence. This characteristically Eastern intuition is rooted in the apostolic witness and elaborated most fully in the interior pilgrimage charted by the spiritual tradition of the Philocalia, it is called “hesychasm.” Yet this pilgrimage is largely and mainly misunderstood and little appreciated even by Eastern Christians. At the heart of this “way that leads to silence” is the voluntary self-abasement known among the Fathers as “kenotic obedience.” In Christian existence it reflects the attitude of John the Baptizer before the mystery of the incarnate Word: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” This attitude of humble self-effacement, however, is itself the reflection of Christ’s own “kenosis,” the self-emptying obedient self-renunciation that He willingly assumes as the sacrificial Lamb of God. (Its not about you, its about God)

In more practical terms for us as followers of Christ, it means becoming humble and selfless individuals for the sake of becoming more like Jesus. The self-emptying (i.e., kenosis) required of us is the giving up of selfishness and false pride – giving up of the thought of thinking about ourselves before we think about others.

The Word of God Himself, the Paschal Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, is the true and ultimate Sacrament of our salvation. As such, He offers the most compelling and eloquent expression of His power, authority and love, by concluding His earthly ministry in silence: silence before His accusers, before Pilate, and before the Cross.

God reveals Himself by speaking out of silence. But for silence itself to become the matrix of revelation, it must assume its own objective reality. Far from being a mere absence of noise, or a momentary suppression of ambient sounds, silence is an attitude or state of both mind and heart (Think about what St. John Climacus said about prayer and silence). Like solitude, its purpose is essentially spiritual: it creates a sacred space within the life of a person, enabling one to sense an invisible presence and to hear inaudible speech. At the same time, silence permits the person to articulate thoughts, feelings and longings to which ordinary human speech can give no shape or expression.

Think about this!

Acquiring the Mind of Christ — 20170115

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How does God speak to us? I suggested, in the last issue of this article, that He might speak to us in the new “insights” we get when we are praying or meditating. Sometimes it may be a verse from Scripture, a verse from the Fathers, a sense in our own heart, or intuition or conscience or just the peace of God. We must be open and ready for any way God chooses to reveal Himself, always willing to confirm the word with those who have a good witness in the Church. Although He can and might, we should not expect to “hear” Him speak to us in our predominant language.

Monologistic Prayer, or literally “the prayer of one thought” (the Jesus Prayer), helps us learn how to speak with and listen to God. What is most important is that we understand from the beginning that prayer is a matter of constancy and consistency, incrementally building our time with the Lord in a measured and regulated way. We do not want to pray merely so as to fulfill some sense of religious obligation. We do not want to pray so that we feel better about ourselves. God forbid! We want a living, life-giving relationship with our Creator and Lord Jesus Christ, to be sensitized to His voice and to true spiritual reality. This can only be achieved by humble, committed and patient prayer. We must always remember that it is the content of the humble and contrite prayer of the publican that justifies us: “God be merciful to me a sinner”. Prayer is not just a matter of the actual words said, but more so of the right and contrite disposition of the heart when speaking with God.

St. Theoleptos of Philadelphia (not in Pennsylvania) reminds us that we must never neglect prostrations if we are able to do them. The body must be included in this dialogue with the Lord. Our prayer needs to come from our heart, both the spiritual and the bodily. Through prayer, we journey deeper into the body, concerned with its true and real transfiguration, rather than escaping from it. Because the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit, we must transform it into a true and respectful Temple. It is through profound prayer of tearful contrition to the Lord that both the soul and the body are sanctified. Therefore we must never neglect prostrations as they help to bring the mind and body together before the Lord, creating a prayerful dialogue from our whole person.

Involve your whole person in prayer!

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Our Faith — 20170115

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In the last issue of this article, I shared with my readers that the Council of Chalcedon (451) clarified much of the language that several Fathers of the Church, especially Cyril, used to set forth the true faith about Jesus Christ. For the sake of increasing the understanding of my readers about Chalcedon, I’d like to actually quote a text from the Council, underlining the Cyrillian passages and italicizing the sentences inspired either by the Antiochenes of Pope Leo. It shows the “compromise” of thought. This is the resulting Chalcedonian text:

Following the holy Fathers, we all with one voice confess our Lord Jesus Christ one and the same Son, the same perfect in Godhead, the same perfect in humanity, truly God and truly man, the same consisting of a reasonable soul and a body, of one substance with the Father as touching the Godhead, the same of one substance with us as touching humanity, like us in all things apart from sin; begotten of the father before the ages as touching the Godhead, the same in the last days, for us and for our salvation, born from the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, as touching humanity, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union, but rather the characteristic property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one person, or hypostasis, not as if Christ were parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from the beginning spoke concerning him, and our Lord Jesus Christ instructed us, and the Creed of the Fathers [i.e., of Nicaea] was handed down to us.

So, as you can see, our true faith was forged by Fathers of the Church compromising on language which brought about our true and complete understanding, as far as one can really understand a miraculous mystery, of Who Jesus Is. The dogma of Jesus took the entire Church to formulate. It was not just one of the schools of theology, but all the existing schools of theology to formulate. All the schools agreed that what Arius and Nestorius, two of the most pronounced, taught about Jesus was untrue. The Fathers knew that somehow Jesus had to be truly God and truly Man for our faith to make any reasonable sense. And so they hammered out a statement which they felt safeguarded this idea: Jesus is God incarnate as a God-Man and that His divinity and humanity were joined through the Person of the Son and that His two natures were kept totally separate and complete. With this understanding of Who Jesus Is, it is possible that we can, therefore, voluntarily imitate Him, growing in His likeness, and therefore becoming more like God in whose image we have been created.

Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church — 20170115

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As many will remember, before the Winter feasts I was sharing information about the development of the major feasts of our Church. As I shared, the Nativity was introduced into the East from Rome around 385 CE. Around this same time in the East, the meaning of the Epiphany began to shift from Christ’s birth to His baptism, thereby emphasizing the divine or theophanic character of this feast over its earlier more human aspect. The Nativity, which falls only twelve days previous, formed a fitting Eastern complement to the Epiphany by emphasizing the human nature of Christ through the celebration of His birth.

Like the Ascension, the Epiphany was observed locally in some churches before the introduction of the Nativity. The Epiphany’s connotations as a birth feast lingered, as Jerome’s homilies indicate, so this probably accounts for the later adoption of the Nativity at Alexandria (circa 430) and at Jerusalem slightly later than at Alexandria. It is also probable that the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Formulary of 433 – an attempted compromise between the true Church and Nestorian views on the nature of Christ – encouraged the acceptance of the Nativity in these cities.

So, these first feasts of Our Lord took years – centuries – to develop and their introduction seems to have been deeply connected to the Church’s growing understanding of Who Jesus Is. As Councils anathematized various persons for presenting incorrect ideas about Who Jesus Is, these feasts also came into existence. As I have shared, originally those events in the life of Jesus that the Church came to see as revealing the very nature of God – “theophanic” events – feasts began to emerge. They came into existence to proclaim the Church’s ideas about Jesus that were formulated by various Councils.

As the Church formulated what She believes about Jesus, She also thought about who Mary the Virgin was and is. Again, feasts began to emerge in honor of Mary because the Church began to solidify Her ideas about Mary. It was at the Council of Ephesus (431) that Mary was declared to the Theotokos, the Mother of God, because Jesus was/is the God-Man.

Each of the next three feasts to be universally established was to a greater or lesser degree concerned with the Virgin Mary. It is interesting that the first feast makes a very mild statement on the Virgin’s role in the history of salvation, the second a somewhat stronger one, and the third stronger still. (More to come about the Marian feasts)

The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God – 20170115

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Although I already referenced the Hymn to the Mother of God that appears in the Anaphora of St. John’s Liturgy, it was only introduced in the seventh century by St. Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem. This was after the Council of Ephesus that declared her the Mother of God. You will recall that St. John had edited and shortened the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great sometime before this. It is and has been an integral part of the Liturgy since the seventh century.

We remember the Mother of God as we do all those who have gone before us and then we remember the hierarchy of our Church and those who we desire to pray for or who have asked us to pray for them.

I love the way that the Anaphora ends. The priest intones this prayer:

And grant that we, with ONE VOICE and ONE HEART, may glorify and praise Your most honored and sub-lime name, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever and forever.

All present declare their agreement with this statement by saying AMEN. This truly urges us to be united in mind and heart. Although we may not often think about this, but our worship as a community is a way that we support one another in growing in the likeness of Jesus Christ, Our God Incarnate.

After this the priest prays:

And may the mercies of our Great God and Savior Jesus Christ be with all.

To this priestly prayer those present respond: And with your spirit. I wonder whether anyone has thought about what this means? It truly doesn’t simply mean “and also with you.” We must remember that the priest, who is simply a stand-in for Jesus Christ our is our high-priest, is also just a stand-in for a bishop. So there is much more in this response than meets the eye. The response is an acknowledgement by the congregation of the grace and presence of Christ, who is present and operative in the spirit or soul of the celebrant. It is through the priesthood that Christ’s Spirit is bestowed on us. So in the first instance, this response is an acknowledgement of the grace which Christ is bestowing on us through the priesthood. Second, the congregation expresses its wish that God’s Spirit also be bestowed on the priest since when he prays that God’s Spirit be with all present, he does not include himself. So in love, the congregation asks God to also bless the celebrant. Each of us plays an important role in the Liturgy.

CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20170115

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In the last issue of this article, I suggested that there are several very important questions that we, in my estimation, must attempt to answer if we wish to respond to the call that God is giving to us to become holy. I wonder if any of my readers took the time to think about how they might answer those questions. They are truly questions which, I believe, we must go back to repeatedly during our life’s journey, expecting that we might change our answers as we continue to spiritually grow. As we grow in our understanding that we are “called to holiness,” we sill also begin to understand in a much more realistic way what “salvation” means and what “being saved” truly means. I think we will also discover that “being saved” doesn’t meant that we will be spared the possibility of “hell” when we die.

It is my humble belief that God did not become incarnate in the Person of Jesus to save us from hell. I do think that He became incarnate to eliminate the human attitude which suggests that salvation is something that we can leave until later, after we take care of more pressing matters.

Attaining salvation should be and must be the most important task in our life. It is connected with the very meaning and purpose of human life. According to the Fathers of the Church, salvation is not so prosaic a matter as saving ourselves, upon death, from damnation but, rather, the deification or divinization of our whole human person in Christ. Salvation involves becoming like unto Christ to the point of identity with Him. It involves acquiring the mind of Christ and indeed it signifies the sharing in His very life. It is the true work of this life. We cannot put anything ahead of this. We may think that focusing our lives on our children or the achievement of success is more important. They are not. The most important thing we can do for our children is to help them discover the meaning and purpose of their lives. Eternity depends on what you teach them.!

Reflections on the Scripture Readings for this Weekend — 20170108

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This weekend we celebrate the great feast of the Theophany as a spiritual community. It is truly recorded as one of the “theophanic” or “God-revealing” events in the life of Jesus and in human history. In Matthew’s version of the event, today’s Gospel, this was a spiritual event not only for the man Jesus but also for others. It reads:

After Jesus was baptized, he came directly out of the water. Suddenly the sky opened and he saw the Spirit of God descend like a dove and hover over him. With that, a voice from the heavens said, “This is my beloved son. My favor rests on him”.

As this reads, it is John the Baptizer who sees the dove and hears the voice. In Luke’s Gospel we also hear:

When all the people were baptized, and Jesus was at prayer after likewise being baptized, the skies opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in visible form like a dove. A voice from heaven was heard to say: “You are my beloved Son. On you my favor rests”.

Mark’s Gospel presents this event in this manner:

Immediately on coming up out of the water he saw the sky rent in two and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. Then a voice came from the heavens: “You are my beloved Son. On you my favor rests”.

The Church has picked Matthew’s version of this event – especially because of the wording of the voice from heaven – to signify that this event in Jesus’ life is also meant to be a revelation to humankind. One can easily get the impression from Mark and Luke’s versions that the words were heard only by Jesus.

In the story of the Lord’s Transfiguration, all three Synoptic Gospels report the voice from heaven saying: “This is my beloved Son,” clearly sharing that the words were, because they were heard by the three Apostles, meant to be a revelation to all humankind as well as Jesus.

Truly the words of Paul to Titus support the fact that the Theophany is meant to reveal that GOD IS WITH US. Paul writes: “The grace of God has appeared, offering salvation to all men.” The events in Jesus’ life that we celebrate are meant to help us believe that God so loves us that He came to show us how to live and, therefore, eventually achieve the fullness of life, which is salvation.

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20170108

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In the last several issues of the article, I have been considering the 28th Step on Climacus’ Ladder of Ascent. That step deals with PRAYER. St. John has much to say about prayer. When we are still learning to pray, we may end up asking for the wrong things. We allow our passions to dictate the petitions we make to God. So it is no wonder that our prayers are not always answered. But praying for others – even if we are praying for something we think is best for that person, when God knows it is not – is unselfish. We think of charity as being something that concerns only material things – giving food or money to the needy – but prayer itself is an act of charity: we give up some of our time to dedicate to praying for others. Even if we are not experts in prayer and possess a weak faith, we should not refuse to pray for others, nor should we think our faith is the reason our prayers for them have been answered.

St. John states so clearly this:

Do not refuse a request to pray for the soul of another, even when you yourself lack the gift of prayer. For often the very faith of the person making the request will evoke the saving contrition of the one who is to offer the prayer. Do not become conceited when you have prayed for others and have been heard, for it is their faith which has been active and efficacious.

During our set times of prayer, we can often be distracted by thoughts – conversations we had, things we are anxious about, someone who has upset us, and so on. We should not allow these distractions to make us give up praying. We must persist; otherwise we will never learn to overcome such distractions and we will end up praying less and less. Those making a beginning of prayer, frequently become distracted and have to make a conscious effort to bring their minds back to the task at hand. All will come with practice and patience. Stay focused on the task at hand and don’t give up.

The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God — 20170108

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Again I would interrupt my thoughts on the Divine Liturgy to draw your attention to the prayers that are special to the feast of Theophany. The proper prayers for the feast (i.e., the Tropar and Kondak) are magnificent statements of this feast. We pray this Tropar:

At Your baptism in the Jordan, O Lord, worship of the Trinity was revealed, for the Father’s voice bore witness to You, calling You His “beloved Son”, and the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the truth of these words. O Christ God, Who appeared and enlightened the world, glory be to You.

The Kondak likewise is an expression of our faith. We pray this Kondak:

You have revealed Yourself to the world today, and Your light, O Lord, has shined upon us. We recognize You and exclaim to You: “You have come and revealed Yourself, O Inaccessible Light.”

There is also a special Irmos (i.e., the Hymn to the Mother of God that is said during the Anaphora) which is worth noting. We pray:

O my soul, extol Him Who was baptized in the Jordan, Christ the King. No tongue has the power to fittingly extol you; and even a supernatural mind is powerless to glorify You, O Mother of God. But in your graciousness, accept our faith because you know our holy ambition; for you are the Protectress of Christians, and we extol you.

I am sure that all who read this will agree with me about the beauty and power of these words. I find that these prayers wonderfully express what we believe. The Tropar and Kondak tell us that God, through Christ’s baptism, revealed to us that He is Three-In-One and that this revelation has “enlightened” the world. Our Church calls the baptism of Christ a “theophanic” event, that is an event which revealed to humankind that God is Triune and that one Person of our Triune God is both divine and human. This belief, it is my thought, truly gives meaning and purpose to human life.

The hymn to the Mother of God is likewise profound. It truly expresses what we believe about her and this particular belief is truly only accepted by Catholic and Orthodox Christians.

It is important that we think about what we believe when we pray these prayers. They are not just hollow words. They are statements of what we believe as Eastern Christians. Think about it. We can grow in our faith when we take the time to really assess what we pray. These are statements of our faith.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Our Faith — 20170108

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I shared, in the last issue of this article, that the Cappadocian Fathers used ancient Greek thought to clarify the ideas of Athanasius about who Christ is. They accomplished this by using Greek, philosophical vocabulary as a tool, changing its meaning and making it into a manageable instrument of Christian witness. An example of this is how they used of the Greek words homoousios and hypostases (which I hope my regular readers already come to know).

The same – actually almost identical – process took place in the fifth century after the triumph of Cyril over Nestorius. This process is connected with the famous decree of the Council of Chalcedon (451). Cyril’s Christology has been both kerygmatic and polemical. Eutysches – a zealous, ultra-Cyrillian ascetic – interpreted the unity of divinity and humanity of Christ to mean that humanity was so totally “deified” that it ceased to be “our” humanity. According to him, Christ was certainly “consubstantial” with the Father, but not “with us.” His humanity was absorbed by God. Eutyches was formally faithful to the Christology of Cyril, but in fact he was depriving it of its meaning for human salvation: God, according to Eutyches, was not sharing human destiny – human birth, human suffering, human death itself – but, while remaining absolute, changeless and transcendent, was absorbing that human identity which he had originally created. Was he then still the God of love?

Hopefully my readers are coming to understand that the struggle that existed in the early Church was to come to an acceptable (orthodox) understanding of WHO JESUS IS. The understanding of Eutyches was, of course, found to be false. The Council of Chalcedon (451) came as a reaction again Eutyches’ expression of who Jesus is. But the Council’s statement of Who Christ is was a rather elaborate formula which resulted from long debates and was intended to satisfy the different existing terminological traditions: the Alexandrian, the Antiochene and the Latin (these were the three main schools of theological thought). The latter expressed itself in the powerful intervention of Pope Leo the Great in his letter to Flavian of Constantinople. In this famous text, the pope, using a terminology inherited from Tertullian and Augustine, carefully established the integrity of the two natures of Christ, and insisted that this integrity requires that each nature preserve its characteristics.