Origen saw the cosmic significance of Jesus’ on the cross; he pointed out how Jesus, the Logos incarnate, revealed his work was universal by the way he stretched out his hands:
The logos is about to say something, and I say that Christ sought God with the hands, on behalf of the whole cosmos, stretching them on the wood and making them fast so that, at that time, he would pray to him with stretching hands and when the whole body and soul were stretched together, not ever the body, but over the whole cosmos, on behalf of the whole cosmos. But you as well, if you take up the cross and have followed Jesus, will likewise seek God with the hands, especially if you are enabled to say, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the cosmos has been crucified to me and I to the cosmos.” Stretching out the hands on the cross, so as to be crucified to the cosmos, you also seek in the cosmos to be made dead to the cosmos and crucified to it, and seeking him you will find. [1]
We are called to take up our cross and deny ourselves; in doing so, we will die to ourselves. We should do so not just for our own sake, that is, not merely for our own salvation, but rather so we can join in with Christ’s work on the cross and serve with him as an intercessor for all creation. That is, our concern should not be for ourselves alone. If we were concerned only about our own salvation, we would not truly be dying to ourselves. We should be concerned about others and their welfare. We should be concerned about all creation, as all creation was made good by God, and so deserves to be honored and protected.
Those who are not concerned about the welfare of others, or the welfare of the earth, are far from what God wants them to be. They show themselves to be so attached to themselves and their own private good they ignore the greater good revealed by Christ, the greater good which they are to embrace and serve as they follow after Christ’s footsteps. If they are interested in the Christian faith, it is purely out of self-interest, which, to be sure, is the reason why most start their journey with Christ, but if they are honest to what they learned with their engagement with Christ, they will see they must change. They will cast off their selfishness. They will deny the fallen, selfish individual they have let themselves become. They will find it is all an illusion, and that underneath that individual lies the person who God created, the person who is called by God to share in and with God’s love.
What we all need to learn, therefore, and realize in our lives, is that the incarnation is not for ourselves alone, but rather, it was done for the sake of everyone, indeed, for the good of all God’s creation
This is the mystery: that all creation by means of one, has been brought near to God in a mystery. Then it is transmitted to all. Thus all is united in Him as the members in a body; He however is the head of all. This action was performed for all of creation. There will, indeed, be a time when no part will fall short of the whole. For it is not just a matter of this great spiritual intelligence being transmitted only partially, but He will do something greater, once He has made <this> manifest and has indicated it here below. [2]
The more we join ourselves to Christ and participate in Christ’s existence, the more we will become like him, that is, we will become mediators in and with Christ, sharing the grace we have received to the rest of creation. We will embrace Christ’s work, helping to break through the sinful barriers which separate and divide creation. We will work to help establish the natural and integral unity of creation, instead of working to further divide it up, so that together, we can become partakers of the divine nature.
Sin divides creation, and having divided the elements of creation, deconstructs what it finds, destroying them. If it is not stopped, it would bring about the annihilation of all things. Death itself is a manifestation of this as it takes what is living and divides it from itself, using that division to deconstruct life itself, hoping to bring it to an eternal end:
Death is the manifest victory of meaninglessness over meaning, chaos over the cosmos. This is specially clear relative to living beings of the higher order. The death of a human being is the destruction of a perfect organism – i.e., and expedient form and instrument of higher rational life. Such a victory of the lower over the higher, such disarmament of the spiritual principle, evidently shows the insufficiency of its power. [3]
And so, in the incarnation, we see the Logos on the cross take up death so that death can be deconstructed from within: by death, death is brought to its own end:
And as for the Resurrection, it banished death and its corruption, it cast out Hades with its gloom, it raised the dead from their tombs, it wiped away (as the prophet says) all tears from every face, and on every living person it bestowed the grace that lasts forever. You see, the gift of the Resurrection was not restricted nor was its achievement evident only to a certain few: For He who entombed himself (or rather performed the Resurrection) in a human body was the God of all creation, and He who knows not how to bestow the gift of grace in a partial way and in whom respect of persons finds now place, made the Resurrection available for all human flesh. Being recognized as the true God of all, He extends the gift of salvation to all human beings, caring for his own image and renewing it to the fullest degree, since every earthly person has been fashioned in the image of God.[4]
This is true not just for humanity, but for all creation; all that has life is called to eternal life, called to share in with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. How each form of life will participate in the resurrection is something we can speculate upon, and we probably would apprehend various elements of the truth when we do so, but nonetheless, the fullness of the truth lies beyond what we currently know, and it is likely, it is only in the eschaton will it be revealed to us. What we do know, from revelation, and from the Christian tradition, is that humanity has been called to be mediators of God’s covenants with the rest of the earth. We are to hope and trust that our co-mediating work can serve as one of many means by which the grace of the resurrection is shared with all. We know, if it is, it is thanks to the way Christ has opened himself to us so that we can share in the work which he has done. Christ and his work remains primary. All those who have put on Christ are to let Christ work in and through them. They are to participate in his universal priesthood, knowing of course, that he remains the high priest. If they do not, they risk dividing themselves from God, and in doing so, become entrenched in the very sin Christ came to overcome, and instead of denying themselves, they will affirm the selfish individual who will threaten their own entry into the kingdom of God.
[1] Origen, Homilies on the Psalms: Codex Monacensis Graecus 314. Trans. Joseph W. Trigg (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2020), 243-4 [Homily 1 on Psalm 76].
[2] St. Isaac the Syrian, “The Third Part.” Trans. Mary T. Hansbury in An Anthology of Syriac Writers From Qatar in the Seventh Century. Ed. Mario Kozah, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Saif Shaeen Al-Murikhi and Haya Al Thani (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2015), 322-3 [V.10].
[3] Vladimir Soloviev, The Karamazov Correspondence. Letters of Vladimir S. Soloviev. Trans. and ed. Vladimir Wozniuk (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 226 [Letter to Lev Tolstoy, July 28 – Aug 2, 1894].
[4] St Sophronios of Jerusalem, “Homily 1: Homily on the Exaltation of the Revered Cross and on the Holy Resurrection” in Homilies. Trans. John M. Duffy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 3-5.
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