Clearing the Way

First He healed His Beloved Creation. This was done, not with a pouring-down flood of lightning bolts, nor with myriad molten fountains and rivers of lava, nor with colossal movements of earth and rending of continents .... but with the hushed Annunciation of an angel. How quiet must your heart be to hear the message of an angel?

At His Conception, the unimaginable and unthinkable took place: the Creator touched the Creation with His own Person and produced a shock so great that it flipped the telós of the human lifeworld: from death (its grim state since the expulsion from Eden) to life. At that moment Heaven's Gates opened for all humankind. This was the moment of our salvation .... and continues to be.

Let us pause to consider that all-important word salvation. The Greek word which Jesus and Simeon and the Apostles used was σωτηρία / sotería which means "to clear the path ahead."

At the same time, He entered the smothering confines of the human frame. His Person, more expansive than the universe, was packed for thirty-three years into a tiny space, thus beginning the Passion of the Christ. For which would you rather face? Thirty-years in a minuscule, suffocating box — with your knees thrust and then frozen behind your head with only shallow breath possible — or three hours of painful dying on a Cross?

Over the next nine months, He would enact an intimacy and love whose height and quality was unprecedented and would never again be repeated. The Christ would later compare our own goal — our journey's end in theosis — in such terms of love and intimacy:

Jesus had become One with the Most Holy Theotokos intermixing with her blood and bones and pulsing organs. Small wonder that She is more honorable than the cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim. For She had requited, to the furthest extent of her human capacity, the Self-sacrificing love of our Father, Who had given His Only-begotten Son. She gave her all: Her happiness, Her honor, Her reputation, and not least that Same Son which the Father had given — "Behold, the Handmaid of the Lord" (Lu 1:38) offering sacred agápe love upon the holiest Altar ever reared.

She would be the Gate into His beloved Creation. And entering this noble womb, the Son sweeps away the curse of Eden to its core. Yes, the transient earthly forms remained visible to the world — disease, pain, withering finitude. But these things are temporary and illusory. In the Godly dimension, a Kingdom of Heaven now has opened to man, the way ahead, unblocked.

His Incarnation would mean setting aside His Empyreal Dignity, far beyond the pomp of kings and emperors. His royal progress from Heaven's climes would descend into squalor: a cave, animals standing about, dung-stained hay, the stink of urine. And for His royal crib, a manger, an animal's feeding trough hewn from wood. We may well imagine that such an unvarnished vessel, used daily to feed donkeys and sheep, was teeming with mold and bacteria. This, after all, was a cave, dark and damp. There were no cleansing rays of sun, no running water to clean the floors and walls and vessels. For these mean lodgings were the lot of outcasts and strangers, surrounded by shepherds, which were the ancient world's criminal class, hiding out at a distance.

Now, this Babe might have been born anywhere — in the glittering palaces of Rome or Baghdad or Babylon. For that matter He did not have to be born. He might have come on to human scene in the figure of a mysterious king — radiant in His beauty and possessing marvelous powers beheld by no human. Do we not have precedent for such figures? Do not the Three Magi, splendidly arrayed, declare the princely alternative to His squalor? But His purpose, as His emptying of Himself (kenósis) from the start He had declared, was lowliness. Lowliness. The fact that we can talk about God at all subsists in His magnificent condescension, His stooping very low to be among us, for this was His name: God-with-us.

Already He has announced His entire lesson plan and curriculum to mankind. Lowliness, Self-sacrificing love, and a Kingdom of Heaven, compared to which our world is valueless.

We are familiar with these teachings teachings:

And if we have accumulated wealth, we must give it back, we must give it to the many who are in want. This teaching we must not take lightly, for this is a central and tireless theme of His teaching. He tells His disciples,

He tells sincere, intelligent seekers,

And He confronts us with figures who have ignored this advice. To one He says, "Thou fool! This night thy soul will be required of you!" while another figure already languishes in burning Hell:

These immutable principles He laid down before He had opened His infant eyes, before He opened His eyes to behold the world He had made but as One of its creatures.

He would be born in Bethlehem honoring His lineage from David and fulfilling the words of the prophets. But He would live in Nazareth. In the year 4 B.C. — the year of His birth according to the Gospel accounts in which years are reckoned by the reigns of kings — the Roman General Publius Quinctilius Varus pursued 2,000 Judean rebels from Jerusalem to Galilee. And in a single afternoon, he crucified them along roadsides three miles from the village of Nazareth. As each condemned man died slowly, his family was butchered at the foot of his cross. In Narareth. In the year of His birth.

Thus, did God take this inutterable cruelty as the backdrop for the most heinous crime in human history: the torture and murder of our God.

(By the way, December 25 is based on nothing more substantial then the arbitrary decree of a fourth-century Roman pope.)

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When I was a confused and stumbling seminarian, with a world of learnings still before me, the Regius Professor at Oxford and a specialist in Patristics, sat reading alone in one of Yale's study rooms. I slipped in silently and took my own place in an armchair nearby.

"Jesus did not have to go to the Cross to save us," the elderly woman said in quiet tones.

I looked up. She was talking to me.

"The early Church Fathers are quite clear on this point," she continued. "Jesus had already accomplished our salvation."

"I have much to learn," I said simply.

But inwardly I suspected her of revisionism. Little did I know that I had it exactly backwards. The Apostles understood the doctrine theosis to be (as they said) the Way to Heaven. The theory of atonement effected by the Cross would come a thousand years later and then from a depraved Italian monastery which St. Peter Damian had condemned, which explains their need for instant salvation. Do we not see a principle of the human condition here? Where great and reformable evil dwells there is a need for doctrines of instant salvation. For theosis — self-denial, amendment of life, purification — is unthinkable for such people.

But several decades later, I ask, "Then what shall we say about the last several days? What do they mean?"

To answer this, let us look at the first several months of His earthly life.

The earliest Church Fathers were fastened upon Jesus' life, not His death. St. Ignatius of Antioch, by tradition one of the children whom Jesus had blessed and later a disciple of St. John the Theologian, emphasized that we should live according the Lord's Life: Κατα κυριακήν ζωήν zωντεσ / kata kurianken zoen zoetes (Magnesians, 9), not as beneficiaries of His death. He characterized the Eucharist as the "medicine of Immortality" (Ephesians 20:2), not as a memorial of Jesus' death.

Another early Father St. Irenaeus, heard the preaching of St. Polycarp, who (according to Tertullian) was a disciple of Jesus and, with St. Ignatius, a student of St. John. His milieu was rich in the living memory of the Apostles. Irenaeus depicted Jesus as the faithful and life-giving Force Who would take up where Adam had left off. He would be the Finisher of the work in Eden, whose goal was theosis. You see Irenaeus depicted Adam and Eve as children. They had become rash teenagers. Had they stayed the course, they would have advanced in their theosis and become united with God. Again, the effect was to clear the way ahead for us. And, Eden, once more became a palpable goal to the first-century thought-world, attested by the enormous influence of the Man of Eden, St. John the Baptist.

We have an icon over our Altar of the Bosom of Abraham. It is Eden. And seated here are Abraham, Isaac, the Jacob receiving souls perfected in theosis. And John the Baptist, who had pointed the way to Eden: Metanoeite!. And the Most Holy Theotokos enthroned, attended by angels.

The Church Father St. Athanasius asked, "Who will sit for the portrait of mankind, which was drawn in Eden?" — God's intention for the human person. It had become ruined, become even indecipherable, with the Fall from Grace. But unless we are able to view it, how will we know what we are supposed to look like? How will we know what we are supposed to be? Only God's Son could sit for that portrait. For while John's baptism might cleanse us, the purity we seek was still more radical. Jesus must be our Exemplar.

St. Athanasius understood the towering significance of the Incarnation from several perspectives. But none was more penetrating than this: at the moment of Gabriel's utterance to the young Mary, and by her consent, the blueprint of mankind was redrawn — ordered no longer to death, but to life. It is Jesus infusing our lifeworld with Divinity, that must save us, not His death.

The great Russian Orthodox theologian Met. Hilarion Alfeyev wrote that while

When I was training to become a Roman Catholic priest, impressed upon me was the high imporance of the Sacrifice of the Mass. We offer the limp, dead body of Jesus in exchange for our salvation.

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But what is that roar I hear of "Hosannas in the highest!"? And who are those multitudes waving branches of palm? It is our God and King Who draws near! He is meek and lowly and riding upon an ass! Yea, lowlier still: upon the colt of an ass.

But we are near to the incommensurably holy! To the Holy One! Remove your sandals! Keep your wits about you! For velocities are blowing through these spiritual currents like unto hurricanes or cyclones. One moment the people throw their tunics down lest His donkey's hoof be soiled, and the next they cry out, "Crucify Him!"

We are aghast! We grieve! Every year, I confess, tears will flow! Yet we have intimations also of something else, of His longed-for release and liberation. He had said in a telling moment,

His suffocating box will soon be rent and cast aside. He will return to His limitless dimensions, like the angels who are able to stand before the Father yet be present to those bound to earth (Mt 18:10, Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom). He will cast aside His beggarly appearance and once more assume His Royal mien. He is the King of king and the Lord of lords! The ancient doors of hell will be shattered at His mere approach! And multitudes of prisoners with rusted shackles will emerge.

But these are privy things, witnessed by few. What shall we say of His Resurrection, which all shall see or learn of .... news traveling more than seven miles to surrounding villages the same day! (Lu 24:13). The Resurrection would be the great touchstone for the indifferent, for the gadfly, for the casual onlooker — a public possession now and forever. For those who did not have eyes to see nor ears to hear — who saw Him raise the dead .... three times; who saw Him feed the multitudes in the wilderness .... twice; who witnessed Him on the Mount of Transfiguration, where He was frankly revealed to be the Son of God — for those and all like them — "an evil and adulterous generation," He called them (Mt 12:39) — He would finally provide the sign for which they clamored, which He promised: the sign of Jonah. Three days in the belly of the earth.

He was hung on the tree, the Fathers wrote, being reduced to nothing. You know, in our delicacy we place a loin cloth on Him. There was no loin cloth. Utter humiliation was the goal. Nothing .... just a bare, bloodied frame .... having not the clothes on His back — a teacher leaving no writings nor even disciples to carry on His work, for all (except a boy) had run.

But wasn't this His message? In the world seek nothing. We must clear the clutter to attain salvation. We must be cleansed of the things of the world which weighs us down. We must attain the lightness of an angel. And with clear eyes we begin to understand the lessons. Choose poverty which is untold riches. Choose foolishness which is profound wisdom. And we behold Him on the Cross as Victor over Death, the mightiest general.

We too must put to death .... death, the culture of death. For our chains consist in nothing more than our wrong thoughts and desires. Our cares consist in nothing more than ceaseless rivalries and hard-won possessions. We are heavy with them, weighed down. We must choose the death of all of this, which alone is life. We must reduce ourselves to nothing:

Truly, He was the One Who was last: Jesus Christ, Son of God, the First-born of Creation.

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