Reflections on the Scriptural Readings for this Weekend — 20160424

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b-woman-well-01The assigned readings this weekend provide us with an interesting combination of thoughts.  Our Epistle readings tells us that it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians and then adds how the Christians, even though they were undergoing persecution, were very mindful of the needs of others. They considered the needs of other Christians in Judea even though they were being persecuted. This reminds us of the unselfishness of Jesus.

Our appointed Gospel tells us about one of Jesus’ encounters with a Samaritan woman. This is was but one of several encounters that Jesus had with Samaritans, who, you will remember, were outcasts among the Jewish people of Judea. This is another story that permits John to develop further the theme of the water of Judaism replaced by the life-giving water of Christ. And this is the reason why we can see a connection between the two readings.

The water of Jesus, that is His teachings about how to interact and treat others, is the connection between the two readings. We see that the Christians of   Antioch actually sensed the meaning of Jesus’ teaching and, forgetting about their problems, made sure that they attended to the needs of others. They understood that the message of Jesus was something that they needed to actually live. Putting Jesus’ teachings actually into practice is what His followers were and are called to do. His were not just pious words! They described a way of living that is essential if we are to actually experience the fullness of life.

As we grow ever nearer to the ending of our Paschal celebration, it is important for us to understand that God has called us, through the teachings of Jesus, to be the ones that make His Kingdom real in our world today. This means that we must attempt to live “like Jesus lived,” that is selflessly giving ourselves to the service of others. Being of service to our fellowmen is the hallmark of the Christian way of life.

We see in the Gospel that Jesus understood the life of the woman.  He understands our lives also and calls us to live like He lived, that is as a person who tries to be of service to our fellowmen.

I know that this is not the easiest thing to do. It is, however, the right thing to do if we want to be counted as one of God’s children.

Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church — 20160424

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1507060_848314515197967_2751624803318588973_nHaving shared with my readers my thoughts on the Little Entrance with the Gospels, I would guess that they will quickly understand the symbolic meaning of the Great Entrance. Again, the sequence is the same. The gifts – symbols of life (i.e., food symbolized by bread and wine) – are brought from the Altar area (representative of Heaven), into the world of faith (Nave), and, of course, leading back to the very Throne of God (altar or Holy Table). During the Great Entrance, we must attempt to make ourselves aware of this symbolism. Life comes from God. The Life of Jesus, Who first used bread and wine to symbolize Himself, leads us back to God when we join ourselves with Him. This is the important point, I believe. We are called to join ourselves with Jesus and to offer praise to the Father by offering our lives back to Him in true thanksgiving for the gift of life. This is what Jesus did. He offered His human life back to the Father in true thanksgiving for the gift of human life. This is the sense of worship that Jesus shared with us. He did not offer other things to the Father like His religion did (e.g., lambs, doves heifers). Rather He offered Himself! This is true worship as revealed to us by God through Jesus.

So, it is critical that we, during the Great Entrance, join with the symbols of life, bread and wine, and join with our Brother Jesus, and offer our lives back to God. When we truly do this, God, through the power of His Spirit, transforms our lives and makes us ever more like Jesus, the only-begotten of the Father.

Again, during the Great Entrance we are called to think about the bread and wine as “symbolizing our own lives” and intentionally   offering our lives back to the Father, in union with Jesus and others, in an act of true thanksgiving for the gift of life.

When we intentionally, voluntarily do this, our act of worship takes on a whole new meaning for us. We actually become truly engaged in the act of worship, together with Jesus. What we do during the Divine Liturgy should not be to us like watching a program on television. We must make the actions and words of the Liturgy our words and actions. When we participate in the Divine Liturgy in this manner, that is something that happens: we worship God.

Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church calls us to this type of participation. It is something to be     experienced and not just some kind of intellectual exercise. It is one thing to think about worshipping God and another to actually worship Him.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20160424

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the_four_evangelistsSome might wonder why I’m sharing this rather technical information about New Testament (NT) criticism. I’m doing this because I believe it is critical to understand something about NT studies in a world which wants to reduce the NT to very fundamental ideas. In many modern Christian Churches, there seems to be an effort to make the NT a simple historical document that has a very simple message. This, I believe, is not true. I have found that when the NT is reduced to fundamental ideas, it is usually because it can then become a political tool to manipulate people. People tend to like things black and white and don’t want to have to think about things. The truth of the matter is that most things even in the NT are “grey”. I find that people that have a very fundamental approach to the NT, want to believe that they can really know God and, therefore, put Him in a little box that they have made. What they end up doing is making God in their image and likeness rather than attempting to grow in HIS IMAGE and LIKENESS.

I have one basic strategy to assess NT ideas that some people promote: if they lead to “judging” and “hating” others, then they cannot be of God.

In the nineteenth century biblical criticism, building on the work of previous scholars, pursued two very different directions: critically, scholars were concerned with the question of the historical value of the NT and also, theologically, concerned with the underlying meaning of the NT. These two directions shaped the subsequent history of NT criticism (Biblical criticism means the work that scholars do to come to a deeper and clearer understanding of the NT and other sacred scriptures. This means analyzing the meaning of words in the original language, taking into consideration the culture in which they were written, and seeing how the words were used in other written texts.

Few schools have been as influential in this work as that of the University of Tubingen, Germany. Truly the questions formulated by this school and the fundamental insights it has provided have been      determinative for all later NT criticism.  (Pope Benedict XVI taught dogmatic theology at this university).

It is also my hope that in sharing this information with my readers they may become truly “intelligent” and “thoughtful” Christians and find God’s revelation in the NT to be helpful to them as they journey on the path of life and face all the exigencies of life. God would not have given us a mind if all answers where simple!

GAINING A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF OUR FAITH — 20160424

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In the last issue I was setting forth some ideas about use AT-ONE-MENT as the Eastern Christian approach to redemption and salvation. I ended by sharing what Athanasius of Alexandria wrote about God’s Son, namely that He became man that we might become God. As you will recall, this is the primary premise of Theosis the Eastern Christian understanding of why God became man.

Slightly later in the fourth century, St. Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzen), one of the Cappadocian   Fathers, coined a shorter expression, theosis, which became more common among the Greek Fathers to designate the believer’s incorporation into the life of God. This persuasion, or this mode of expressing it, became standard during the period of the great Christological controversies. (You will recall that these took place in the early fourth century before the Council of Nicaea).

It was largely through the Latin translations of St. John Damascene and Pseudo-Dionysius in the Middle Ages that the equivalent deification (i.e. deification) gradually became a more acceptable idea in the West. Still to this day, however, Western Christians find it difficult to translate the work of Christ in these terms.

The word atonement, then, came include redemption’s full effect in the human being – that is, man’s              deification, his transfiguration in the glory of Christ. At-one-ment is, perhaps, one of the best words to express what Christ accomplishes for us.

There is still another understanding of the word at-one-ment. Atonement enjoys the added merit of expressing the cosmology of redemption, that is the reconciliation of the whole universe, its “re-heading” in Christ. Atonement conveys everything Paul meant when he wrote that it pleased the Father, through Christ, “to reconcile all things to Himself, through Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.”

Christ’s reconciliation embraces “all things”. The glory of the transfigured Christ transforms the entire universe; heaven and earth are full of His glory.

I am sure that many may wonder about this statement and ask: How did God becoming man change the entire universe? By God become a part of His creation, that is by His incarnation, He revealed that it is His life-force which animates all things. The abundance of life that we encounter in the universe (e.g., animals, plants) is none other than God sharing His own life to bring all things into existence.
Think about this!

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20160424

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Ladder of Divine AccentIn the last issue I began to present the ideas of John Climacus about POVERTY, the 17th Step on his Ladder of Ascent – his blueprint of how we become holy people. He suggests   that we proceed one step at a time towards this goal and then points out his idea that there are actually 30 steps to achieving this goal.

He reminds us, at this 17th Step, that those who practice voluntary poverty are the ones who are truly rich, because they are freed of need and world concerns. John suggests that as we “need less” in our lives, we can be freed to share more. The less attached to the things of this world we become, the more we discover inner peace and true freedom. By contrast, the more attached to worldly things we become, the more we come into conflict with one another.

Poverty, in spiritual life, is a virtue, but the state of poverty in and of itself does not usually lead to peace and freedom from worldly needs and desires, but the exact opposite. The evils caused by avarice tend to become more acute in times of poverty. This is because someone who is poor can still be avaricious, and the greater his poverty, the more desperate he becomes to acquire what he needs or desires.

Voluntary poverty is a virtue because it is an expression of self-denying love: through a practice of self-denial we are able to live a frugal life, enabling us to give more to others. Poverty is therefore a sacrifice of the will, a surrender of our worldly desires for love of God and neighbor. That is why poverty is the virtue that overcomes avarice.

In our modern world, this is one of the more difficult Steps on John’s Ladder. It takes a lot of thought and true dedication to God’s way of living.

 

The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God — 20160424

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Mystical Supper

Mystical Supper

While I realize that the previous article in my Bulletin, Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, truly seemed to overlap this article on the Divine Liturgy, it is my intention that this article stress more the liturgical theology connected with our Divine Liturgy. I am attempting to share in the article on page 3, that our Church calls us to EXPERIENCE, on a sensual level (all of our senses), what we do together. Hopefully this article presents the spiritual-intellectual aspects of our worship.

I am very aware that the whole idea of anamnesis is, perhaps, very difficult to understand. Because we are humans living in a particular time and space, we find it hard to disregard these aspects of what we do. And yet our Liturgy is designed to transport us beyond space and time and, like God, to experience all of the events in the life of Jesus as current events – things that we experience right now, here in the present. As I have expressed to my readers in the past, there is no time or space in God’s world. He is beyond all time and space and everything exists in the present since there is no past or future.

I realize that this is difficult to comprehend since humans tend to always think about the past and the future and yet, is we are honest, the only things we can truly experience are within the present moment. The past really doesn’t exist – they are only memories and the future is also not real since we have no real guarantee that the future will turn out how we anticipate it to be.

When we come to church, we must leave behind our thoughts about the past and the future and experience God in the present moment. Typically, we humans live in the past because we wish the past had been different and also live in the future, hoping that it will be different than the past. Both are truly faulty ways of living. We cannot change the past and we have no real control over the future. We can only accept life as it presents itself to us in the present moment.

So, for our worship to be real to us, we must embrace the things that we do as things that are happening right now as they did in the past. Christ is present to us, giving us, at the present moment, His Body and Blood as He did to the Apostles.

ACQUIRING THE MIND OF CHRIST — 20160424

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christ_iconAs the Christological understanding of the Old Testament (OT) pertains to the theology of salvation, a special importance attaches to the OT’s theology of sacrifice, inasmuch as Jesus interpreted His own death as a sacrifice offered for man’s deliverance from sin and death.  Consequently, a concentrated study of Israel’s ritual worship, and in particular the significance of sacrifice, is of primary importance for a proper theological understanding of what was accomplished – and how it was accomplished – on the Cross.

This aspect of the story of salvation points to a more general principle that pertains to all Christian theology: It is impossible to grasp “the mind of Christ” – which is, after all, the work of theology – apart from the teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures. No OT, no Christian theology. God set it up this way.

The Apostle Paul indicated the same approach when he described his initial message to the Corinthians:

I delivered to you – as of primary importance – that which I also received: that the Messiah died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the scriptures.

The apostolic preaching did not simply declare the salvific significance of Jesus’ death and Resurrection; it specifically did so “according to the Scriptures.” That is to say, an explicit reference to the OT was contained in the content of the Gospel. It was an integral part of the proclamation itself. Paul would have regarded the omission of the OT as a defect in the apostolic message.

We must remember that all the followers were all Jews and they understood what Jesus accomplished in terms of their Jewish experience.

IF this is true of the Gospel, it must be true of a study of salvation based on the Gospel. An authentic theology of redemption will be – “as of primary importance” – exegetical, that is based on a critical analysis of the OT as well as the NT. It will investigate the death and also the Resurrection of Christ in a specific way; namely, “according to the Scriptures.”

In First Corinthians Paul simply gave prescriptive form to the study of salvation approach we find all through the literary evidence left us by the apostles and the apostolic churches. We need to look at specific texts to truly understand this.

To understand salvation, we must use the OT combined with the NT.

CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20160424

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transfigurationThe call to holiness is a call for each of us to undertake a personal interior revolution – that is a radical change of our attitudes and ways of thinking which dictate how we behavior. In order to accomplish this interior revolution, we must first attempt to heal all of our past memories which unconsciously influence our attitudes and the ways that we think. In accomplishing this revolution memory by memory, Jesus gives us a kind of growth that is slow and therefore one to which we can adjust with relative ease. He also gives us reason to trust His love, for trust is something that also grows slowly. Further, He establishes us as builders of His Kingdom; for His goal is not merely the healing of a memory and the freedom from pain and limitation that results from such a healing – even though our happiness and freedom are important to Him; rather, His goal is the healing of our entire lives and saving us, bringing us out of the dark realms of and making of us a creative force that has the power and authority to build the Kingdom of God on earth.

Finally, as we pray to see Christ in the events of our lives, we need to remember this, namely that when we pray any kind of prayer for healing of memories, we are not “bringing Christ into the situation”; rather, we are asking Him to reveal the ways in which He already has been present in the situation, and we are further asking Him to give us the strength to choose to accept His presence there as more important than the pain we felt. To view healing of memories in any other way is to make magic of it, that is, telling God to go here and there within our memories and do what we want Him to do in them, creating for us a past that, in a certain sense, could merely be a product of our own minds.

Hopefully this makes some sense to you, my readers. It is the way that we approach God for the     healing of our past memories that is important. We ask Him to help us see these memories in a different way. We don’t ask Him to take away the memories but to help us see how they can help us.

Learning Our Faith From the Greek Fathers of the Church — 20160424

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john-chrysostomWhat is John Chrysostom’s gnosiology (the theory or philosophy of learning) which forms his understanding of the revelation of God. I know that this may be rather abstract, but it believe it will become clearer as you read on.

St. John insists that a clear distinction should be made between those things pertaining to God in    Himself and those things pertaining to God’s action or operation in the world. In reference to this distinction, John first emphasizes the fact that God, by His very nature, is immutable and inaccessible. He also asserts that God in Himself, in His essence and nature, is truly invisible and also incomprehensible, and as such can neither be seen nor comprehended. But if this is so, how does God reveal Himself to man? Chrysostom provides us with the following answer which can be found in an address he gave to Eutropius. He wrote:

 When He wishes to show Himself, He does not appear as He is, nor is His bare essence revealed – for no one has seen God as He is. For at His condescension even the cherubim trembled…. He appears not as He is, but as that which the beholder is able to see. That is why   He sometimes appears aged, and            sometimes you, sometimes in fire, and sometimes in a breeze… not changing His essence, but fashioning His appearance according to the different circumstances.

The key word in John’s description of the divine economy is the word “condescension”, for it is by His       condescension that God reveals Himself to man. He does this, John says, not by suffering change in His essence, but by conforming, shaping or adapting Himself to the capacity of His creature. John is not here referring to created effects in God’s revelation to man, for condescension denotes the loving descent and participation of God Himself in the life of His creature. So, it is precisely God’s condescension which reveals His love for mankind, and which finds its ultimate expression in the Incarnation – the         condescension of the Son and Word of God, in the flesh.

So what does this all mean. It means that we can never really know or see God as He really is. We can have an idea of Who He is, but we cannot truly know Him as He is. So He, because of His love for us, became a human being so that He could share with us how to live and, therefore, gain all of the benefits that He built into life itself. He so loved us that He wanted to make sure that we could, if we so desired, learn how to really live human life and derive all the benefit that we can as a human being. All this was done out of love for us!

Reflections on the Scriptural Readings for this Weekend — 20160417

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paralyticAt the beginning of this fourth Paschal week, we hear two stories where paralytics are cured. The first, in Acts, by Peter and the second, in John’s Gospel, by Jesus. This, I believe, is not a mere coincidence. There is something in the stories about curing “paralysis” to which we should pay   attention.

These stories also present two other ideas that have to be taken into consideration as we search for a message. The first, which is in the story from Acts, is that the message of Jesus IS life-giving. Peter was able, through the power of the name of Jesus, bring a young girl back to life.

The second, in the story from John’s Gospel, deals with the fact that the cure took place on the Sabbath, which was forbidden by the laws of Judaism as interpreted by religious leaders. As the message from the first story, I do believe that it is important to think about this.

First, let us consider “paralysis”. Both stories have persons who are cured by the power of the Lord Jesus. Both stories are shared after Pascha.

MESSAGE: Belief in Jesus is the cure for spiritual paralysis. It seems that we humans have a tendency to be paralyzed in our efforts to truly change the way that we think. God is calling us to put on the “mind of Jesus” so that we can help make His Kingdom real right now. Too frequently we are paralyzed in our efforts to change our thinking because we are afraid of what it might mean. What would be different in our lives if we actually changed the way we think and “put on the mind of Christ?”

Spiritual paralysis, that is our reticence to actually take our faith seriously, is one of the greatest maladies that we face as humans. Why don’t more of us truly try to “put on the mind of Christ?”

We know that if we put on the mind of Christ we will have the fullness of life. His message is truly life-giving. Perhaps we get too absorbed in following the “rules” of our faith that we fail to recognize that we are called to put our faith in a Person: God, in the Person of Jesus Christ. Belief in Jesus is not about “keeping the rules”. It is about trying to “imitate His way of living.” Ask not what should I NOT DO but, what SHOULD I DO. Our Christian faith is all about making a true difference in our world by bearing witness to Jesus, our Savior.