Wisdom’s Fire, Radiant and Unfading. Part X: The Life, Death and Resurrection of Christ

Part IX

In the glorious Trinity, love shines forth:
The Father gives his all to the Son
And the Spirit henceforth
Returns that love to the uncreated Origin.

The cross reveals the self-sacrifice of love,
And bids us to return that compassion,
With love, to give it back to God above
And to our neighbor without ration.

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.  And he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:16 – 21 RSV).

The teaching of Jesus is the teaching of the Incarnate Word, spoken to us from the authority of love. What we hear from Jesus are the words of the Word, telling us how to live out the life of faith so as to follow the path of love, the path of the cross. It comes to us from the loving Son of the Father, who knows the fullness of love because God is love. “Jesus’ teaching is not the product of human learning, of whatever kind. It originates from immediate contact with the Father, from ‘face to face’ dialogue – from the vision of the one who rests close to the Father’s heart. It is the Son’s word. Without this inner grounding, his teaching would be pure presumption.”[1] His words tell us the requirements of love, what is expected out of Christ’s followers. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love” (John 15:10 RSV). Of course, this means there needs to be a conversion of the heart. Where our love is lacking needs to be recognized, repented, and overcome.  His preaching is grounded upon love. It is because it is love, and not just any love, but the fullness of love which is revealed and preached, Christ gives us something new, a way of life which transcends legalistic morality. This revelation, of course, is Christ himself, and it is in and through Christ our love is to be grounded:

If one sees in the Gospel words only a “doctrine” and does not notice the Teacher of this doctrine, these words are transformed into an abstract and lifeless morality, full of unrealizable demands, oriented toward utopian maximalism, and deprived of religious cohesion. To be sure, the Gospel morality appears to have such a center in the commandments of love for God and love for one’s neighbor, on which “hang the law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:40). However, this is no longer the Old Testament commandment. It is a new commandment which acquires true significance in connection with the revelation of God-Love, who is in the Holy Trinity and revealed in Christ.[2]

God is love, and the Son of God, in his incarnation, death, and resurrection reveals to us what love entails. Love, true love, is self-sacrificial; it overcomes selfish egotism; it  seeks to give all of oneself to the beloved, in order to find one’s glory in them and not in oneself. In the Trinity, the persons of the Trinity express their love, one with another, in such a self-sacrificial love, one to another. In Christ, we are shown this love, shown that it not only lies at the foundation of the world, but also at its restoration. We are shown love, what it means to love God and our neighbor, in the death and resurrection of Christ. We are shown that such love is triumphant; that self-sacrificial love comes out in glory. The path of hate finds death as its limit, but love sees its glory is such that even death cannot triumph over it. Evil has limits, love does not. We are all exposed to our lack of love on the cross. We all show that what we thought of love was not true love, but rather selfishness put pretending to be love. “It is only when we look the Crucified One in the eye that we recognize the abyss of selfishness – even of that which we are accustomed to call love.”[3] Once we encounter Christ on the cross, and come with Christ to his death and resurrection can we understand his teaching, his message, and be his followers. As long as we hold on to ourselves, we have yet to embrace the cross. “What is the mark of a Christian? Faith working by charity. What is the mark of faith? A sure conviction of the truth of the inspired words, not to be shaken by any process of reasoning, nor by the alleging of natural requirements, nor by the pretenses of false piety.”[4]

Christ comes to us in love to remove from us our old, fallen nature, so that we can put on the New Adam and continue his work of love in the world. It is in the light of the cross we come to his teachings and understand how everything he said and everything he did as being pertinent to us and our life. “Every act of our Redeemer, performed through His human nature, was meant to be a pattern for our actions, so that in following His footsteps according to the measure of our ability we might walk unfalteringly along the path of our present lifework.”[5]

His ministry was a ministry to us all; but it is clear that he took on the outcast of society and lifted them up, giving them a dignity which society did not grant them. He did not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them, to show that they are to be understood only under the light of love. The poor were given good news, and those who follow Christ are to continue to raise up the poor, to witness to the world their proper place in society. This is why there must always be a preferential option for the poor. It is also why we must not find excuses to judge the poor and condemn them because they are poor. They were not poor, sick and hungry due to their sin or the sin of their parents, but due to the sin of society and its inability to form a civilization based upon love.

The world was captive to death. People lived and acted according to the dictates of death, that is, according to the fallen mode of being which taught man and woman to selfishly live for the self, no matter the consequences on the other. The Sermon on the Mount with its deconstruction of fallen social mores, the healing ministry of Christ, the prophetic call against sin and the forgiveness of sin given to those who had a change of heart, all of this show what the Christian is meant to bring to the world. It is what Christ did, and those who follow him are called to follow him in this task. They are to be priests, prophets, and kings in the world, not according to the way the world views these categories, but in the way of the cross. We are called to intercede for the world in the prophetic activity of love, and the one who merges themselves with love rules the world with that love. They serve the world, and it is only because they serve the world, that they have humbled themselves so that all that is unlove has been cast out from themselves, that they have become one with the poor and inherited the earth. St Basil understood the meaning of this when he said, with words that pierce my soul as much as those of most of his hearers:

It is thus evident that you are far from fulfilling the commandment, and that you bear false witness within your own soul that you have loved your neighbor as yourself. Look, the Lord’s offer shows us just how distant you are from true love! For if what you say is true, that you have kept from your mouth the commandment of love and have given to everyone the same as yourself, then how did you come by this abundance of wealth? Care for the needy requires the expenditure of wealth: when all share alike, disbursing their possessions among themselves, they each receive a small portion for their individual needs. Thus, those who love their neighbor as themselves posses nothing more than their neighbor; yet surely, you seem to have great possessions.[6]

The cross judges us as long as we have not died to the self; the words of Christ speak out and condemn us. Even though we claim to be his followers, our sin cries out and points out, as long as we sin, how far we have yet to go to be converted by Christ:

The event of the Passion exposes the truth of humanity – made up of Christians, Jews, and pagans. As the mask is mercilessly torn away, “every mouth falls silent,” and “every man” who speaks of love proves himself “a liar.”[7]

We should not speak excuses for our sin. In our weakness we should cry out to Christ for his merciful love. We should willingly recognize the love Christ expects from us, and condemn ourselves for where we have failed to live it out instead of trying to find justification for our continuation in self-servitude.

Yet, the cross does more than judge us; the cross is the sign of victory, of victory over all that is unlove, of all that can be said to be sin. Christ willingly let himself on the cross, to take the full blunt of sin upon himself, so as to save us and raise us out of the darkness of sin. He lowered himself, and willingly died for us, though his death, instead of a mark of victory by the powers of sin, was a mark of victory for love. “For that self-emptying, which He underwent for man’s restoration, was the dispensation of compassion, not the loss of power.”[8] He came and took fallen humanity, dead in sin, and raised us up with his resurrection, leading us to glory:

For it is a great thing for us to understand the form that Jesus accepted for us: for He became in all things like unto us, apart from sin. (Herb. 4:15). Now therefore it is right that we also should set ourselves free by His advent, that by His foolishness He may make us wise, and by His poverty may enrich us, and by His weakness strengthen us, and confer resurrection upon us all, destroying him that had the power of death. (Heb 2:14).[9]

In the Incarnation, Christ took on human nature. He took on the condition of fallen humanity so as to reconstitute it, to recreate it in the glory he once meant for it. That which was dead, Adam, Christ followed, even unto death; his humanity followed Adam into the depths of the abyss, to be lifted up in glory and take with it all who should join themselves to him into the glory of the resurrection:

Since, then, there was needed a lifting up from death for the whole of our nature, He stretches forth a hand as it were to prostrate man, and stooping down to our dead corpse He came so far within the grasp of death as to touch a state of deadness, and then in His own body to bestow on our nature the principle of the resurrection, raising as He did by His power along with Himself the whole man.[10]

On the cross, Christ established the Church, formed as it were out of his side, the new creation, the body of Christ united in love:

Then, in order that the Church might be formed out of the side of Christ sleeping on the cross and that the words of Scripture might be fulfilled which says: They will look upon him whom they have pierced (John 19:37; Zach. 12:10), the divine plan permitted that one of the soldiers should piece open his sacred side with a lance. While blood mixed with water flowed, the price of our salvation was poured forth, which gushing from the secret fountain of the heart gave power to the sacraments of the Church to confer the life of grace and to become for those already living in Christ a draught of the fountain of living water springing up into eternal life (John 4:14).[11]

The Eucharistic feast brings us together in love and brings us together as one in Christ, in this restored humanity. But it is more than just for us, but for the whole earth, for its transfiguration, that Christ’s body and blood are shed. “His divine body, then, hanging on the cross made the whole air clean and pure. With the shedding of his sacred blood, the whole earth was equally purified of its contamination. Moreover, his divinity descended into Hades, despoiled it, and released the souls shut up in darkness, setting them free.”[12] His work is cosmic: his work is for the whole of creation. By joining ourselves into the body of Christ through the Eucharist, we share in the work of Christ in the restoration of the world, of fulfilling the Lord’s prayer in making God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And yet, he who is the author of life has himself become a subject of death. The cross was the means of the world to let out all it had on Christ, on God, to counter God’s loving yes to humanity (and the rest of creation, though his humanity) with its hateful no. Christ took it. The fallen powers which ruled the world, all that stands against God, had been given by God their victory. Oh, how fleeting a victory! It was to undo everything: death would become the instrument of God, the means by which God would overcome the evil principalities which ruled the earth by the power of death:

Wherefore, then, death approaches, gulps down the bait of the body, and is pierced by the hook of the divinity. Then, having tasted of the sinless and life-giving body, it is destroyed and gives up all those whom it had swallowed down of old. For, just as the darkness entirely disappears when light is let in, so is destruction driven away at the onset of life, and life comes to all, while destruction comes to the destroyer. [13]

The cross is the means by which God justifies us all. Christ gives to us the merits he attained by the cross. The cross sets us free from our sins, so that we can be seen as just by the Father:

For in such a way He was made to be our justification, so that the imparting of |His| merit through grace is our righteousness. And we can request of God our Father that He gives us the Kingdom-of-life because of the merit-of-our-Christ that is reckoned as ours. And I regard this |transfer of merit| as the supreme mystery of the Cross and of |Christ’s| death.[14]

Christ’s love for us is approved by the Father, as shown by his resurrection. We who take the path of the cross, the path of love, share in the death of Christ and it is for this reason we share in Christ’s merit. “We needed an Incarnate God, a God put to death, that we might live. We were put to death together with Him, that we might be cleansed; we rose again with Him because we were put to death with Him; we were glorified with Him, because we rose again with Him.”[15] The cross justifies us because we have put on Christ, we have become one with him in love.[16] We die to the self to find ourselves who we are meant to be, in and through Christ:

The love that God bestows on me makes me become what I truly am, and what I will eventually be. It makes the “I” become the self, the real person that God wants to see and desires to possess. For this love of God in choosing us transforms the rather indeterminate “subject” or “individual”( which man would otherwise be, left to his own devices) into a person in all senses unique. God after all is simply unique, and by the act of choosing me by a love that is unique, he makes me similarly unique in the light of his love.[17]

If one wants to say we are saved because God the Father sees Christ the Son in us, this is proven true so long as we see this as not a mere imputation but a description of the reality which takes us into Christ and makes us one with him:

For the maximality of human nature brings it about that in the case of each man who cleaves to Christ through formed faith Christ is this very man by means of a most perfect union – each’s numerical distinctions being preserved. Because of this union the following statement of Christ’s is true: “Whatever you have done to one of the least of my [brethren], you have done to me.” As, conversely, whatever Christ Jesus merited by His suffering, those who are one with Him also merited – different degrees of merit being preserved in accordance with the different degree of each [man’s] union with Christ through faith formed by love. Hence, in Christ the faithful are circumcised; in Him they are baptized; in Him they die; in Him they are made alive again through resurrection; in Him they are united to God and are glorified.[18]

The life, work, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ all serve together, moreover, for a sophiological picture. In the work of Christ we see the union of created and Divine Sophia working together. Self-sacrificial love was the basis of creation: Divine Sophia, in love, willingly gave freedom to creation, which of course, mean Divine Sophia limited itself so as to give created Sophia its own freedom:

If the creation of the world is already a work of God’s sacrificial love, in virtue of which the Absolute posits alongside itself relative being, then the Incarnation is God’s sacrificial love that involves the humiliation of Divinity, condescending to the level of hypostatic union with man. But this sacrificial love of God for the world is the pre-eternal foundation for the Incarnation, which is thus the second and concluding act of the creation of the world.[19]

The cross, as the revelation of Divine Sophia, is the revelation of love, the love which is the basis of the world and its restoration. We can say, with Theophilus of Alexandria, “…the whole of creation is established and confirmed in the shape of the cross.”[20] On the cross, the incarnate Logos dies according to his creaturely nature, just as in his eternal being, he dies to himself constantly in his love—for the Father and the Spirit, but also for the creation which he let come to be. But for those who die to the self in love, there is no end, but rather, glory, just as we see Christ raised in glory. Love rejuvenates and restores. It was the lack of proper love, where we tried to take our existence upon ourselves, that we found the pains of death conquering us. The cross allows us to once again overcome the self, to follow self-sacrificial love and allow the path of death to become the path of glory. “Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her” (Wis 6:12 RSV).  The Gospel reveals to us the fullness of such love by showing us its glory:

The Glory of God is Divinity itself, the Divine life in Sophia, the Wisdom of God. The glorification of Christ is, first of all, the cessation of the kenosis and the return of the fullness of the Divine life or the Glory to the Logos, this Glory that He removed from Himself in his “descent from heaven” and salvific kenosis. But this is not a mere abandonment or cessation of the kenosis; rather, it is its crowning, consisting of the deification and divine glorification of Christ’s human essence, the “sitting at the right hand of the Father” (i.e., the identification in glory.[21]

Love transforms our experience in the world. True, pure love puts us into communion with Christ, and share in the self-sacrificial work of Christ. Though it can be bitter, though it can be painful, though, like Christ, we might cry out and ask why we have been forsaken, it is when we encounter the response of love, we can bear it all, and even find our sorrows transformed it into a joy:

When the sweet comfort of divine love is withdrawn, the bitter taste of the slightest tribulation seems too much to bear; but a piece of wood sweetened the waters of Marah (cf. Ex 15:25) and the meal that Elisha put into the pot made the bitter wild gourds palatable (cf. 2 Kg 4:39 – 41). The love of God, too, turns every bitterness into sweetness. [22]