Rebuking the Tempter, and Following Jesus

 

Christ being tempted by the devil

Dear Parish Faithful, On Monday, we made the "Lukan Jump" into the third canonical Gospel. It was just yesterday, then, that the assigned reading was from Lk. 4:1-15: The Temptation/Testing in the Wilderness (also Matt. 4:1-11; Mk. 1:12-13) The nuances of the Greek word behind this event allows us to think in terms of “temptation” or “testing.” Perhaps we could say that Christ was tested when God allowed Him to be tempted by the devil. Either way – or with a combination of both terms – the forty days spent by Jesus in the wilderness will shape Him and His ministry to Israel and to the world by defining an image of the Messiah that He will reject and one that He will embrace. It is highly significant that it is the Spirit who “led” Jesus “into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” (Lk. 4:1). Nothing in the life of Christ is accidental. In all things He is led by His heavenly Father acting through the Holy Spirit, including this “face-to-face” encounter with the evil one. The austere and unsettling figure of the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky’s famous Legend embedded in his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, refers to the devil as “the dread and intelligent spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-being.” It is this dread spirit who will tempt Christ through the three questions that will test the fidelity of Christ to His unique messianic vocation as willed by His heavenly Father.  Dostoevsky, through the tragic figure of the Grand Inquisitor, further reveals the power and non-human source of these powerful temptations, when the Inquisitor says in his monologue: “By the questions alone, simply by the miracle of their appearance, on can see that one is dealing with a mind not human and transient but eternal and absolute. For in these three questions all of subsequent human history is as if brought together into a single whole and foretold; three images are revealed that will take in all the insoluble historical contradictions of human nature over all the earth.” In other words, these three temptations were not “invented” or “made up” by the evangelists for dramatic effect. The very “perfection” of the temptations posed by the devil reveal their veracity. And what are these three temptations? According to St. Matthew’s account (the account that we are probably more familiar with, at least in terms of the order of the temptations), they begin with the following as Jesus is fasting and experiencing hunger in the wilderness: “And the tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread’.” This was followed by the second temptation to test God’s fidelity to Him after the devil “took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, less you strike your foot against a stone’.” The final temptation was grandiose and sweeping in its scope: “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me’.”  In Dostoevsky’s particular and profound interpretation of Christ’s encounter with the tempter in the wilderness, Jesus refuses to receive obedience through miracle, mystery and authority as represented in these three tantalizing temptations. By compelling human beings to believe in Him by overwhelming them with the miraculous; by exploiting a sense of mystery to attract human beings to follow him; and by appealing to the human need for security through external authority; Christ would have accepted and approved of a distorted understanding of human nature. In Dostoevsky’s understanding of Christ, as attainable as these “powers” may be for the Son of God, each one in its own way violates the gift of human freedom given to us by God and appealed to by Christ. It is for this very reason that Christ did not come down from the Cross as He was “tempted” to do by those who mocked Him. Even if freedom is a burden as well as a gift, it is the true vision of humanity created “in the image and likeness of God.” We, in turn, freely choose to follow Christ, the crucified “Lord of glory.” Dostoevsky had his particular concerns when he resorted to the temptation in the wilderness to dramatize the dialectics of human freedom and coercion in an unforgettable manner in The Brothers Karamazov. Within the context of the Gospels, we can say that Christ had to overcome the temptation to be a particular kind of Messiah that was not in accord with the will of God. He was not declared to be His Father’s “beloved Son” at the Jordan River so as to be a militant Messiah who ruled through power. The words of God the Father at the Jordan were clear echoes from the Suffering Servant songs from the prophet Isaiah. And the Suffering Servant would heal us by His “stripes.” His very suffering would be redemptive. And therefore that suffering (on the Cross) was essential to the divine economy. To overcome such temptations as man, the Lord resorted to prayer and fasting in the wilderness – the spiritual weapons given to us all in the Church for precisely the same purpose in the “wilderness” of a fallen world: to strengthen the “inner man” against false and pretentious promises. We can accomplish this by relying on “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (DEUT. 8:3). We further heed the words, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God” (DEUT. 6:16). And we also follow Christ who reminded us:  “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve” (DEUT. 6:13).   Christ refuted the evil one’s false counsel by the power of the scriptural word. Another clear lesson for us in our relationship with the Holy Scriptures. Meaning that we, also, when tempted or tested need to turn to the Scriptures - the living Word of God, "active, sharper than any two-edged sword" - to rebuke the tempter as did Christ. Uttered with faith, the scriptural word has real power. As the “root” of a new humanity, Jesus re-enacts the history of Israel, but He “passes” the type of test that Israel “failed” to pass in its earlier forty-year wanderings in the wilderness. In fact, as the New and Last Adam He reverses the effects of Adam’s disobedience through His faithful obedience to the Father. It may sound startling to us today, but Jesus was “perfected” precisely through obedience!  Our human will was healed by the human will that the Son of God assumed and united to His divine will in the Incarnation. Before the Garden of Gethsemane, the perfect expression of that healing through obedience may just be the temptation/testing in the wilderness. As the final temptation was beaten back by Christ, He was able to say to the tempter: “Begone, Satan!” Our goal is to be able to rebuke the tempter with the same words when we are also tempted/tested – perhaps on a daily basis!

Fr. Thomas Hopko: 'Christ & His Church'

 

Christ & His Church

by Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko

A] Jesus Christ is the God-man, the “Second Person” of the Holy Trinity, the Son of God become fully human, “for us men, and for our salvation.” This is the essence of the Christian worldview, the essential truth to which all witness must be born and all service rendered. Christians know this and bear witness to it, to Christ as being “all in all,” because they experience Him in the Church – His living Body. They experience Him, here and now, in the life of his church, as He is in all the fullness of His divine humanity.

B] Christ is with us now: this is the Christian encounter and witness. God is with us in Him. Others may have seen and heard and touched Him as He was in the days of his flesh, but we know Him as He is now in the fullness of His glory. The days of His flesh show over and gone. We have no need to strive and revive, retrieve or relive them, certainly not by scholarly, psychological, or even by meditative means. Jesus Christ is no longer as He was in his days on earth - in the form of a slave. He is present now in and with His people, and with God, His Father, by the power of God, the Holy Spirit and "the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who feels all in all" (Eph. 1:23).

C] For this reason, Orthodox Christians have nothing to offer people and the world but Christ and His Church. It is our conviction that there is nothing else to be offered and nothing else that is necessary. Our witness to this conviction, to this end. In our time, however, there are specific human needs, and desires, which cry out for fulfillment, specific cries, which arise in the hearts of men which reach our ears, clamoring for concern and attention. If we say that Christ and His Church are the answer to these needs, we must be aware of what they are and be prepared to demonstrate how their ultimate satisfaction can be attained only by Christ and through His Church. We must be ready to make every effort to verify our claims by our actions, witnessing and serving with the love "not in words and speech, but indeed, and in truth." (1 John 3:18).

D] Jesus was not a relativist. Neither was He a sectarian. Whatever someone happens to believe about His person and nature, one should see that he was not a "peddler" of some religious doctrine or a "Crusader" for some religious sect. He was a man – the man Who was also the incarnation of the Son of God – Who witnessed to the unity of mankind in freedom, in Spirit and in truth. He spoke not about ethereal "spiritualities" or about the need for "religion," but about goodness, truth, virtue, light and life itself. He was not a "tyrant" of any sort. He exercised no power or force of any kind – political, social, economic, psychological, or religious. He wrote no books. He left no earthly monuments as a record to His many miracles and accomplishments. But He believed that people could know the truth and do good, and so be free. 

Coffee With Sister Vassa: THE POWER OF LONELINESS

Coffee With Sister Vassa

THE POWER OF LONELINESS

 

“Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’ Some of those who stood there, when they heard that, said, ‘This Man is calling for Elijah!’ Immediately one of them ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and offered it to Him to drink. The rest said, ‘Leave Him alone; let us see if Elijah will come to save Him.’ And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit.” (Mt 27: 45-50)

For many years I thought of loneliness as a poisonous state of mind, which one needs to avoid or fix somehow. But Christ’s loneliness on the Cross, which preceded His ultimate triumph over death, shows us how loneliness precedes new bursts of life and grace, when we allow ourselves to be led and bound and put on trial through it, on our cross-carrying journeys. 

Loneliness becomes for us a crucible for transformation, for a new freedom and new understanding of ourselves and others, when we let ourselves be alone before God’s silence. While our friends and others we may have previously relied on prove not reliable or not helpful, as many of those who stood around the Cross, God’s silence leads us to focus on or “listen” to His presence in our lives in a new way. We need not despair, because loneliness is God’s call to us, to take pause and re-focus, because He is renewing our sense of His purpose for us. If we hang in there, and I mean, literally “hang in there” on our cross, our loving God invariably leads us into new life and light and growth, through our loneliness. This is what I find to be true, anyway, nowadays when God leads me into loneliness, my old friend. “Hello darkness, my old friend,” I say, and listen in to the sound of silence. 

Happy feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, NC-friends! And Happy Church New Year, to those of us on the Older Calendar!

 

'Wood is healed by Wood!' - The Tale of Two Trees

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

As we anticipate and prepare for the Feast Day of the Elevation/Exaltation of the Cross of the Lord, perhaps a few words about the Cross might be appropriate.

The Feast of the Elevation of the Cross raises a myriad of themes - Biblical, historical, theological, etc. - for our meditation, to use that term. One such theme is what we call a typological reading of the Scriptures. This is a profound way of discovering the inner connection between persons, events, and places of the Old Testament - what we would call "types" - with their fulfillment as "antitypes" in the New Testament. Thus, Adam is a type of which Christ - the last Adam - is the antitype:  "Adam who was the type of the one who was to come" (ROM. 5:14).

Through typology we learn that the Old Testament can now be read as anticipating the Person of Christ and the saving events recorded in the New Testament, without undermining the integrity of the historical path of ancient Israel as the People of God entrusted by God with a messianic destiny. One such typological application is expressed in an intriguing and paradoxical manner through one of the hymns of the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross:

...For it is fitting that wood should be healed by wood, and that through the Passion of One who knew not passion should be remitted all the suffering of him who was condemned because of wood. (Sticheron, Great Vespers)

A truly wonderful phrase: "wood should be healed by wood!" Yet, what is this "wood" that is being referred to? How does wood "heal" wood? The wood in both instances is clearly the wood of two trees - the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil as found in GEN. 2; and the wood of the Tree of the Cross. In disobedience to the command of God, the man and woman of GEN. 2 - Adam and Eve - ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the one tree, the fruit of which, it was not safe for them to eat:

You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in that day that you eat of it you shall die. (GEN. 2:17)

The freedom and self-determination of the first man and woman were tested by this divine commandment. In a celebrated interpretation of this passage, St. Gregory the Theologian (+395) draws out the meaning of this command and its consequence:

[God gave Adam] a law as a material for his free will to act on. This law was a commandment as to what plants he might partake of and which one he might not touch. This latter was the tree of knowledge; not, however, because it was evil from the beginning when planted, nor was it forbidden because God grudged it to us - let not the enemies of God wag their tongues in that direction or imitate the serpent. But it would have been good if partaken of at the proper time. The tree was, according to my theory, contemplation, which is safe only for those who have reached maturity of habit to enter upon, but which is not good for those who are still somewhat simple and greedy, just as neither is solid food good for those who are yet tender and have need of milk. (Second Oration on Easter, 8)

This is also found in St. Athanasius the Great (+373)

Knowing once more how the will of man could sway to either side, in anticipation God secured the grace given to them by a command and by the place where he put them. For he brought them into his own garden and gave them a law so that, if they kept the grace and remained good, they might still keep the life in paradise without sorrow or pain or care, besides having the promise or incorruption in heaven. But if they transgressed and turned back and became evil, they might know that they were incurring that corruption in death that was theirs by nature, no longer to live in paradise but cast out of it from that time forth to die and abide in death and corruption. (On The Incarnation, 3.4.)

The theme of the initial innocence of Adam and Eve, their lack of maturity and need for spiritual growth and maturation was very characteristic of the Eastern Church Fathers, being found as early as St. Irenaeus of Lyons (+c. 200).

Therefore, the "wood" of this tree proved to be death-dealing, not because God made it such "in the beginning," but because it was partaken of in a forbidden manner and not "at the proper time."

Nothing created by God is evil by nature; rather, all is "very good." But misdirected free will can pervert the good into something that is evil. The gift of the promise of deification is a God-sourced gift, not a self-sourced gift. 

On the other hand, the Tree of the Cross is precisely the wood through which the first disobedience was undone by the One who died on it in obedience to the will of the Father. The Tree of Life that was in the Garden was the actual "type" of the Tree of the Cross on Golgotha. The last Adam - Christ - healed us of the sin of the first Adam. (As early as St. Justin the Martyr, it was taught that the Virgin Mary was the "new Eve" also because of her obedience to the Word of God). The Cross is therefore

... the blessed Wood, through which the eternal justice has been brought to pass. For he who by a tree deceived our forefather Adam, is by the Cross himself deceived; and he who by tyranny gained possession of the creature endowed by God with royal dignity, is overthrown in headlong fall. (Sticheron, Great Vespers)

According to a pious tradition, the place of the skull is the place where Adam was buried when he died. The blood that flowed from Christ "baptized" that skull as symbolic of the sons of Adam (and Eve) being given renewed and eternal life by the blood shed by Christ on the Cross - the Tree of Life.

The Tree of true life was planted in the place of the skull, and upon it hast Thou, the eternal King, worked salvation in the midst of the earth. Exalted today, it sanctifies the ends of the world... (Litiya, Great Vespers)

"Wood is healed by Wood!" This is the good news revealed in the typological interpretation found in the liturgical hymns of the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross together with the biblical exegesis of the Church Fathers. This is why we honor and venerate the Cross by literally bowing down before it in adoration. The Cross was at the heart of the proclamation of the Gospel, a instrument of shame in the ancient world. But this did not deter the Apostle Paul from proclaiming that Gospel as the power of God:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. (ROM. 1:16)

We also cannot be "ashamed" of the Tree of the Cross through which "joy has come into the world."

Fr. Steven

 

Coffee With Sister Vassa: THE SCANDAL OF THE CROSS

Coffee With Sister Vassa THE SCANDAL OF THE CROSS   “And I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why do I still suffer persecution? Then the offence/scandal of the cross (τὸ σκάνδαλον τοῦ σταυροῦ) has ceased. I could wish that those who trouble you (about circumcision) would even cut themselves off! For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another! I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” (Gal 5: 11-18) Those who “troubled“ the Galatians were dragging them into divisive, biting, and ultimately church-destructive arguments and concerns. These were concerns not of the Spirit, but of the flesh; concerns about the externals of the Law, made obsolete by “the scandal of the cross.” St. Paul urges them, and us, when we’re being dragged down into unnecessary battles with one another on the hot-button issues of the day, and away from the scandal of the Cross and its liberating “walk in the Spirit”: flee to the higher ground, he says, of “serving one another through love”. Let me not be “troubled” today, nor bullied into concerns that are of the flesh, however noble or just or patriotic they seem this election year. “For you have been called to liberty,” the Apostle reminds me today. I am free to decide to love, both myself and my neighbor, and my neighbor as myself, rather than remain stuck in anger.