… just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father. (John 10:15-18)

Our Lord Jesus Christ tells us that He voluntarily surrendered His life in the crucifixion. This is the sign of His love for us. He had a choice whether to lay down His life or not. Christ does not go to the slaughter because justice demanded someone to die for our sins. His crucifixion was a loving choice which He made and for which the Father loves Him.

‘Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends‘ (John 15:13). In this statement is contained the most complete, most profound explanation of the Savior’s passion. The greatest love is the highest possible kind. It demands giving of oneself which continues right unto death. Golgotha is not a requirement of justice, but one of love. (A monk of the Eastern Church, JESUS: A DIALOGUE WITH THE SAVIOUR, p 158)

There is an implication in this for us Christians:

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. (1 John 3:16)

Christians are mistaken if they think the sign of God’s favor is how much wealth they can accumulate, how ‘successful’ they are in life, how popular they are, or how much power and influence they have. Rather, we are to imitate Christ in living and working for the good and salvation of others, of all others. Which means taking up our cross daily, denying the self to follow Christ.

Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth vegetation: the plant producing seed of its own kind, and the fruit trees that bear fruit containing seed of its own kind’ (Genesis 1:11) . . .  And this we still see happening even at the present time. For, the voice which was then heard and that first command became, as it were, a law of nature, and remained in the earth, giving it the power to produce and bear fruit for all succeeding time. . . .

St Basil the Great does not interpret the Genesis 1 creation account as being a one-off event which happened long ago, but never to be repeated. Rather, he understands that God’s command sets in motion the production of plants on earth. Thus, creation itself becomes life-giving, able to bring forth plants producing seed and thus plants are able to perpetuate their existence. Creation is dynamic and on-going. Creation is a power that God shares with created things – it becomes as Basil says “a law of nature.” Its power continues on earth. We are witnessing the act of creation still today whenever we see plants producing seed, and the seeds giving birth to new plants. “Nature” is also God’s creation and so are all of the laws of nature or science. Basils continues:

Let the earth bud forth by itself, needing no assistance from the outside. Since some think that the sun drawing the productive power from the center of the earth to the surface with its rays of heat, is the cause of the plants growing from the earth, it is for this reason that the adornment of the earth is older than the sun, that those who have been misled may cease worshipping the sun as the origin of life. If they are persuaded that before the sun’s generation all the earth had been adorned, they will retract their unbounded admiration for it, realizing that the sun is later than the grass and plants in generation. (EXEGETIC HOMILIES, pp 67-68)

Basil uses logic and observation (science) to try to show people that the creation account points to one Creator, therefore denying that the sun or stars should be worshipped as gods for they too are part of God’s creation. Some in his time thought the sun somehow drew plants from underground to the surface of the earth. But Basil says scripture has it that the earth is older than the sun and therefore the sun ought not be worshipped as some god who is the source of life. Basil is wrong about the age of the earth and the sun, but his point is to refute those who worship created things as if they are gods. He is not trying to prove the earth is older than the sun but using logic and the science of his day to show why created things should not be worshipped as gods.

Thus, the Genesis creation account is really theology, not science as we understand science. We know plants need sunshine to live, but today we don’t see the sun as a god. Basil has to deal with different “scientific” ideas than we have, as well as prevalent pagan ideas. I think he would accept the sun is older than the earth as long as we don’t treat the sun as a god. It is why we have to understand the Father’s arguments within their own historical context, and not try to use them to refute modern science. Basil was not against science, he was strongly against mistaken theology. Wisdom tells us that Basil’s concern is Orthodox theology not scientific orthodoxy. Those who want to use the Fathers’ arguments against modern science understand neither what the Fathers were dealing with, nor what modern science is.

Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another; not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer; distributing to the needs of the saints, given to hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. (Romans 12:9-14)

In the quote above from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, he offers a simple framework for how a Christian is to behave in daily life. If we could keep those directives in mind, we would have a good moral compass. Archimandrite Aimilianos might say that tradition would call this behavior always being aware of Christ’s presence in our lives, keeping the Lord in the forefront of our minds:

And your life before God should, according to the phrase of Saint Gregory of Nyssa, be ‘the contemplation of His face, an unceasing progress towards Him.’  . . .

You did not come here to flee from human beings but from human concerns. You did not come to break away from society, but from vanity and corruption. But even that is not what you came for, that is to flee human concerns and vanity. That’s not enough.

You must work wonders and ‘signs and wonders’ (Acts 5:12) in your lives, or else you are not disciples of Christ. These will be the signs that you are His disciples: learn to exercise the eyes of your souls to see God working in secret. Let your spirits become accustomed to and practised in searching out the depths of God. (THE AUTHENTIC SEAL, pp 86-87)

Look at what is before your eyes. If you are confident that you belong to Christ… (2 Corinthians 10:7)

Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your judgments are like the great deep; you save humans and animals alike, O LORD. (Psalms 36:6) 

By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation; you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas. By your strength you established the mountains; you are girded with might. (Psalms 65:5-6) 

Glorious are You, more majestic than the everlasting mountains. (Psalms 76:4) 

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (Psalms 90:2)

 

For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. (Psalms 95:3-4) 

From your lofty abode you water the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work. (Psalms 104:13) 

Praise the LORD from the earth … Mountains and all hills… (Psalms 148:7-9)

And when evening arrived they brought to him many who were possessed by demons; and he exorcized the spirits by word, and healed all those who were suffering; Thus was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah when he said, “He took away our infirmities and bore away our maladies.” (Mattew 8:16-17)

The Son of God, Jesus, became incarnate precisely to take away our infirmities and maladies. God became human to take upon Himself the sin and sins of the world and thus free humanity from enslavement to sin and death. St Neilos the Ascetic gives us some idea as to how this worked:

For if he is going to purify the actions of those who come to him, he must to some degree himself share their defilement, just as a basin of water, while cleaning the hands of those who wash, itself receives their dirt. (The Philokalia, Kindle Loc. 6592-94)

Christ cleanses us of sin by cleaning that sin off of us and taking it upon Himself. Neilos using water as a metaphor for how Christ cleanses us of sin is appropriate because we experience that cleansing in baptism.

St Basil the Great reminds us that when the Scriptures say Christ took upon Himself our infirmities and diseases, it is also referencing sin because sin is a sickness of the soul:

Now all vice is a sickness of the soul, as virtue is its health.  (A Patristic Treasury: Early Church Wisdom for Today, Kindle Loc. 3651)

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:16-17; read on the Eve of Theophany, Christ’s baptism)

When behold, they brought to Jesus a paralytic lying on a bed. When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, “Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you.” And at once some of the scribes said within themselves, “This Man blasphemes!” But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts? (Mattew 9:2-4)

By the time in His life when Jesus heals this paralytic, many of the religious leaders already hated Him and were looking for ways to condemn Jesus. Their accusation of blasphemy because Jesus expresses love and concern for the paralytic shows they are not willing to give Him credit for anything. Their view of what Christ does is totally shaped by their own hatred for Him – they have selectively blinded themselves by their own passions. Jesus is correct when he points out to his opponents that it is evil in their hearts which is blinding them. It is as St Thalassios the Libyan says: “for it is the man who is a storehouse of evil that thinks evil thoughts.” (THE PHILOKALIA, Kindle Location 21464-69)

Nikitas Stithatos, agrees with Thalassios, writing:

When because of our laxity we allow the demons to beguile us with suspicious thoughts about other people – that is to say, when we fail to control the abduction of our eyes – then they incite us to pronounce judgment on others, sometimes even those who are perfect in virtue. If someone is affable, with a cheerful, smiling face, we think him prone to pleasure and the passions; and we assume that anyone who looks downcast and sullen is filled with arrogance and anger. But we ought not to concern ourselves with people’s appearance.

Everyone is likely to judge wrongly in this respect; for men have various characters, temperaments and bodily features, the true assessment and study of which pertain only to those in whom the spiritual eye of the soul has been cleansed through deep compunction, who are filled with the boundless light of divine life, and to whom it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God (cf. Matt. 13:11). (THE PHILOKALIA, Kindle Location 37049-60)

Christ’s words to the scribes of His day are a rebuke to all of us who are eager to think ill of others, especially those we disagree with. When we engage in ad hominem attacks and disparage the good that others do, we are behaving exactly like those scribes who opposed Christ. We need to repent and cleanse our hearts of such malice so that we can behave as Christians – looking to see the image of God in each person. The Pygmalion Effect is real.

The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens… (Proverbs 3:19)

St John of Kronstadt, notes that nature is another “book”, like the Bible, from which we learn about God our Creator. God has conveyed His life and divinity to us through creation. All around us we can see signs of divinity, if only we have the eyes of faith to see.

The world, as the work of the living, Most Wise God, is full of life. There are life and wisdom in everything, and we find everywhere the expression of thought in the whole, as also in every separate part. This is the true Book, from which, though not so clearly as from revelation, we may learn the knowledge of God.

Before the world was, there was only the living infinite God. When the world was called into being from its nonexistence, God, of course, did not become finite; all the fullness of life and of infinity have remained in Him. But this fullness of life and Infinity are also expressed in creatures, living and organic, which are innumerable, and which are all endued with life. (MY LIFE IN CHRIST, p 45)

Be on your guard! If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive. (Luke 17:3-4)

Our Lord Jesus Christ makes a point that forgiveness is not a onetime offering, but something we may have to offer repeatedly to someone. And if they repeat their offense but apologize again and again, we are to forgive them – ‘you must forgive.’  But note also that Christ does allow us first to rebuke the offender in order to get them to repent. But once they express repentance, we are obliged to forgive them. [And note, God expects us to forgive those who repent, because that is what God does!]

Metropolitan John Zizioulas comments on the effects of forgiving others their offenses – we don’t continual deal with them as if they are the same person who misbehaved in the past, but rather we treat them as if they are a person from God’s Kingdom. Their past doesn’t define them, rather their life in the Kingdom does.

 What happens in forgiveness is a liberation from the past.

The crucial point in all of this is that we have to encounter the other person not as he was yesterday or is today, but as he will be in the future, in the last times, which means as a member of and our neighbor in the Kingdom. This is so because the future gives all things their true substance, their place in the Kingdom. And this is precisely what eludes our judgment, because the future belongs exclusively to God and to the other person’s freedom. . . .

In order for the Eucharist to be ‘for the forgiveness of sins and unto eternal life’ for those who take part in it and receive Communion, it must also be for forgiveness on our part of the sins of others and ‘unto eternal life’ with them in the gathering of the Kingdom. (REMEMBERING THE FUTURE, pp 309, 313)

When we hold onto our grudges against others, we trap ourselves and them in the past, in the world of the Fall. When we forgive, we move ourselves and the other into the future, into God’s kingdom – “a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of rest, where all sickness, sighing and sorrow have fled away” (as we pray for those who have departed this life).

[I will add that I take Christ’s words to apply to “normal” relationships we have with others. A different wisdom is needed if the other person is dangerously abusive, as forgiving them will not lead to their having a change of heart but will in fact feed the monster in them. It is better to flee those relationships following Christ’s teachings as in Matthew 10:23. Wisdom helps us know which teachings to apply to our lives in the different circumstances we find ourselves in. Christ came to free us from hell, not consign us to a relationship which is hell on earth.]

You sat down to malign your brother. (Psalm 50:20)

Gossiping about others is sinful behavior and bad enough in itself, but made worse when we gossip maliciously with the intent of hurting another person. Whether seeking revenge or just desiring that the other is defamed or denigrated, the behavior is unbecoming of a Christian. St John Chrysostom parses no words in condemning such behavior:

And do not bear dung in your mouth, like beetles (this is what slanderers do, you know: they are the first to be affected by the stench), but bear flowers like the bees, and make honeycombs like them, and be gentle to everybody.

Everyone feels revulsion for slanderers like a bad smell, as if they were some bloodsucker, fed on others’ problems like a beetle on dung. With the person bearing a word of condemnation, on the other hand, everyone associates like a member of their own body, their own brother, their son, their father. (SPIRITUAL GEMS FROM THE BOOK OF PSALMS, pp 98, 100)

Chrysostom says gossiping about and slandering others puts dung in your mouth. Instead, we should seek and point out the good in others which he compares to bees making honeycombs. He contrasts the slanderer, which he says everyone hates, with the person who patiently bears being slandered – that person is admired by all and the kind of person everyone wants to associate with.

This is the conclusion to yesterday’s post, Being Human: More Amazing than the Universe. We are awed by the vastness of outer space – galaxies, stars, planets. Yet in terms of awesomeness, each human being bearing God’s image is more amazing than the entire universe because of this relationship with divinity. Any human being spiritually is more marvelous than the entirety of the cosmos. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware says of us humans:

It is our vocation, then, not only to unify ourselves and the world around us, not only to hold together the material and the spiritual and to express them as an undivided whole; reaching out beyond created limits, we are also to unite ourselves and the world with God, and so to divinize the creation. This means that we are to discover the hidden spark within ourselves, the secret shrine that Scripture terms ‘the image of God’ . . . (IN THE IMAGE OF THE FATHER, pp 115-116)

What St Gregoy of Nyssa and Metropolitan Kallistos write might help us better understand the hymn:

It is truly meet to bless you, O Theotokos, ever-blessed and most pure, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the Cherubim, and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim, without defilement you gave birth to God the Word. True Theotokos we magnify you.

In this hymn we are recognizing that the Virgin Mary fully realizes in her person all that a human being was meant to be. She shows us what it is to be human and united to God. As a human she is greater not only than the empirical universe but also greater than the greatest of the angelic host. While we understand how unique her role is, we also know that she is simply being all that God intended all of us humans to be. So, she is both alone among all human beings and yet she is the example of what every human is to be. We honor her not because she is different than us all but because she is what we each are supposed to be: God bearers.