'All That Is Needed'

 

Dear Parish Faithful, "God has gone up with a shout! The Lord with the sound of a trumpet!" "Pascha. Holy Week. Essentially, bright days such as are needed. And truly that is all that is needed. I am convinced that if people would really hear Holy Week, Pascha, the Resurrection, Pentecost, the Dormition, there would be no need for theology. All of theology is there. All that is needed for one's spirit, heart, mind and soul. How could people spend centuries discussing justification and redemption? It's all in the services. Not only is it revealed, it simply flows in one's heart and mind." - From The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann (1973-1983) _____ A succinct, but very eloquent plea, that we make our liturgical presence and awareness the very heart of our lives in the Church! And perhaps a timely reminder as we may still have remnants of Holy Week and Pascha within our minds and hearts.  Lex orandi, lex credendi - loosely translated as "what we pray is what we believe." The Feasts and their liturgical expression through the reading/hearing of Scripture and the Church's hymnography, is a whole "catechism" in and of itself. Our hearts and minds - organically united in our Orthodox Christian understanding of the human person - are simultaneously nourished and illumined. Being present in the services and somehow accomplishing the "miracle" of "laying aside our earthly cares" is our goal.  Fr. Schmemann is not being "anti-intellectual" at all. He knew that theology was the search for "words adequate to God." And that is a process of great intellectual achievement. Yet, that very theology is already there in the Church's liturgical worship and then comes to life in the act of communal prayer as we gather together as the Body of Christ.

 

The Ascension: Our Destiny in Christ

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

You were born, as was your will, O our God.
You revealed Yourself, in Your good pleasure.
You suffered in the flesh, and rose from the dead,
trampling down death by death!
Fulfilling all things, you ascended in glory ...
(Vespers of Ascension)

Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven,
and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate,
and suffered, and was buried.
And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father.
(Nicene Creed)

 

The two texts above - one from the Feast of the Ascension and the other a portion of the Nicene Creed - are wonderful expressions of the great mystery of the "descent" and "ascent" of the Son of God. The eternal Son of God becomes the Son of Man, descending into our world to live among us and to teach us about, and prepare us for, the Kingdom of God. This is what we call the Incarnation.

This movement of descent is only completed when Christ is crucified and enters the very realm of death on our behalf. There is "nowhere" further to descend (in)to. Thus, there are no limits to the love of God for His creatures, for the descent of Christ into death itself is "for our salvation." The Son of God will search for Adam and Eve in the very realm of Sheol/Hades. He will rescue them and liberate them as representative of all humankind, languishing in "the valley of death." Since death cannot hold the sinless - and therefore deathless - Son of God, He begins His ascent to the heavenly realm with His resurrection from the dead. And He fulfills this paschal mystery with His glorious ascension.

As St. Paul writes: "He who descended is he who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things." (EPH. 4:10) The One who ascended, however, is now both God and man, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the incarnate, crucified, risen, and glorified Jesus Christ who is now seated at "the right hand of the Father," far above the heavens. It is the glorified flesh of the Incarnate Word of God which has entered into the very bosom of the Trinity in the Person of Christ. As St. Leo the Great, the pope of Rome (+461) taught:

With all due solemnity we are commemorating that day on which our poor human nature was carried up, in Christ, above all the hosts of Heaven, above all the ranks of angels, beyond the highest Heavenly powers to the very throne of God the Father.

This is simultaneously our ascension and our glorification, since we are united to Christ through holy Baptism as members of His Body. Therefore, St. Paul can further write: "For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." (COL. 3:3) Out of our physical sight, we now "see" the glorified Christ through the eyes of faith. St. Leo further explains how important this spiritual insight is:

For such is the power of great minds, such the light of truly believing souls, that they put unhesitating faith in what is not seen with the bodily eyes; they fix their desires on what is beyond sight. Such fidelity could never be born in our hearts, nor could anyone be justified by faith, if our salvation lay only in what is visible.

The Feast of the Ascension is not a decline from the glory of Pascha. It is, rather, the fulfillment of Pascha, and a movement upward toward the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the joyful revelation of our destiny in Christ. To return to the opening theme of the marvelous acts of God moving from the Incarnation to the Ascension, I would like to turn to St. Leo one more time for his understanding of that entire movement:

It is upon this ordered structure of divine acts that we have been firmly established, so that the grace of God may show itself still more marvelous when, in spite of the withdrawal from men's sight of everything that is rightly felt to command their reverence, faith does not fail, hope is not shaken, charity does not grow cold.

It is always wonderful when a Feast is ... festal! And it is most festal when many faithful members are present worshiping and glorifying God. The Feast of the Ascension has a full octave, which means that we commemorate this great event until June 2 this year. According to St. Luke, once the disciples beheld Christ ascend into heaven, "they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God." (LK. 24:52) The "temple" is our common place of worship. Hopefully, we too, will continually be in the temple blessing God.

"God has gone up with a shout! The Lord with the sound of a trumpet!"

 

Science and Awe for the Healing of the Man Born Blind

 

Dear Parish Faithful,

Christ is Risen!  Indeed He is Risen!

Paschal Meditation - Day Thirty Seven

"Healing a person blind from birth was indeed an act of creation, not simply a repair. Contemporary medical science knows more clearly how difficult it would be than was known in the first century. When a boy is born, he can only see far enough to behold his mother's face when held in her arms. It will take several years of practice for him to learn to use his eyes, to make the connections among nerves and his brain that will enable him to see well. Medical technology is working on building an artificial eye that would enable a blind person to see at least light and darkness. This might work for one who lost vision in adulthood, but not for one who was blind, who never developed the infrastructure of nerves for seeing in the first place. Indeed, Chrysostom in his own way hints at these facts:

"'Furthermore, not only did [Christ] fashion eyes, not only did He open them, but He also endowed them with power to see. And this is a proof that He also breathed life into them. Indeed, if this vital principle should not operate, even if the eye were sound, it could never see anything. And so he both bestowed the power to see by giving the eyes life, and also gave the organ of sight completely equipped with arteries, and nerves, and veins, and blood, and all the other things of which our body is composed.

"This passage contains another echo of Adam's creation in Genesis 2:7: 'Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being'."

- Sister Nonna Verna Harrison from her article, "John Chrysosom on the Man Born Blind (John 9)."
______

This short medical/scientific digression into the function of the complexities of the eye can only enhance our admiration and awe at the great sign of Christ restoring sight to a man born blind! Interesting to read of St. John's own perception of what was involved. 

 

'A Human among humans...'

 

Dear Parish Faithful,

Christ is Risen!  Indeed He is Risen!

"The classic understanding of Christian orthodoxy - formed in the early church over seven or eight centuries of preaching and controversy and expressed in a growing stream of biblical commentary, theological argument, creedal confessions, and conciliar formulas - was and continues to be that Jesus is himself the Son of God: the eternal Word "by whom all things were made" (cf. John 1:3), who in time has become a human among humans, in order to transform and liberate the humanity he has made his own, even to offer humanity a share in the life of God. Classical Christian orthodoxy confesses that the Jesus who revealed God's will and God's love in works and words of power is "one and the same" as the Jesus who slept in a boat, who wept for Lazarus, and who suffered on the cross: God the Son, humanly "personalizing" the transcendent fullness of the divine Mystery in the body and mind, the relationships and limitations, of his own fully human life."

- Brian E. Daly, SJ

_____

I found this helpful paragraph in an article that Brian Daly wrote, entitled: "The Word and His Flesh: Human Weakness and the Identity of Jesus in Greek Patristic Christology." So, before plunging into the heart of his article, he offers us this fine, succinct summary of the paradoxical nature of the Person of Jesus Christ - both God and man. Brian Daly is a very prominent Patristic scholar, who has many of his translations published by SVS Press. He is a Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. If we turn back many centuries to the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553), we find this already expressed in that rhetorical and polemical style that marked that era:

If anyone says that the Word of God who performed miracles was someone other than the Christ who suffered, or says that God the Word was with the Christ "born of a woman" (Gal. 4:4) or was in him as one in another, but does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh and made human, is one and the same, and that both the miracles and the suffering which he voluntarily endured in the flesh belong to the same one, let that person be anathema.

This is the One who was both crucified and raised from the dead!

 

Rivers of Living Water

Dear Parish Faithful,


CHRIST IS RISEN!
INDEED HE IS RISEN!

“So the woman left her water jar, and went away into the city…” [John 4:28]

A Samaritan woman came to Jacob’s Well in Sychar, a Samaritan city, at the same time that Jesus sat down by the well, being wearied by His journey [John 4:5]. The evangelist John provides us with a time reference: “It was about the sixth hour” [John 4:6] - i.e. noon. The Samaritan woman had come to draw water from the well, a trip and activity that must have been an unquestioned daily routine that was part of life for her and her fellow city-dwellers.

The ancients had a much more active sense of equating water with life than we do today with the accessibility of water from the kitchen tap, the shower, or the local store. On the basic level of biological survival, Jacob’s Well must have been something like a “fountain of life” for the inhabitants of Sychar.

Therefore, it is rather incredible that she returned home without her water jar, a “detail” that the evangelist realized was so rich in symbolic meaning that he included it in the narrative recorded in his Gospel [John 4:5-42]. And this narrative, together with the incredible dialogue embedded in it, is so profound that every year we appoint this passage to be proclaimed in the Church on the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, the Fifth Sunday after Pascha. Why, then, would the Samaritan woman fail to take her water jar home with her?

Her “failure” was based on a discovery that she made when she encountered and spoke with Jesus by Jacob’s Well. For even though the disciples “marveled” that Jesus was speaking with a woman [v. 27], Jesus Himself began the dialogue with the woman perfectly free of any such social, cultural or even religious restraints. 

As this unlikely dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman unfolded by the well, it was revealed to the woman that Jesus was offering her a “living water” that was qualitatively distinct from the well-water that she habitually drank [v. 11]. This “living water” had an absolutely unique quality to it that the Lord further revealed to the woman:

Jesus said to her, "Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” [v. 13-14].

 

A perceptive and sensitive woman who was open to the words of Jesus, she responded with the clear indication that she had entered upon a process of discovery that would lead her to realize that she was speaking with someone who was a prophet—and more than a prophet: “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw” [v. 15].

Her thirst is now apparent on more than one level, as her mind and heart are now opening up to a spiritual thirst that was hidden but now stimulated by the presence and words of Jesus. Knowing this, Jesus will now disclose to her one of the great revelations of the entire New Testament, a revelation that will bring together Jews, Samaritans and Gentiles:

“But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” [v. 23-24].

 

A careful reading of Saint John’s Gospel indicates that under the image of water, Jesus was speaking of His teaching that has come from God, or more specifically, to the gift of the Holy Spirit. For at the Feast of Tabernacles, as recorded in John 7, Jesus says this openly to the crowds that had come to celebrate the feast:

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, "If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water." Now this He said about the Spirit, Whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified [John 7:37-39].

 

Overwhelmed and excited, inspired and filled with the stirrings of a life-changing encounter, the Samaritan woman “left her water jar, and went away into the city and said to the people, ‘Come and see a man Who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” [v. 28-29].

It is not that the contents of her water jar was now unimportant or meaningless. That would be a false dichotomy between the material and the spiritual that is foreign to the Gospel. The Samaritan woman will eventually retrieve her forgotten water jar and fill it with simple water in fulfillment of her basic human needs. For the moment, however, she must go to her fellow city-dwellers and witness to Christ! They, in turn, will eventually believe that Jesus is “indeed the Savior of the world” [v. 42]. Thus, the Samaritan woman became something of a proto-evangelist. Subsequent tradition tells us that she is the Martyr Photini.

There are indeed innumerable “wells” that we can go to in order to drink some “water” that promises to quench our thirst. These “wells” can represent every conceivable ideology, theory, philosophy of life, or worldview—in addition to all of the superficial distractions, pleasures, and mind-numbing attractions that offer some relief from the challenges and oppressive demands of life.

For a Christian, to be tempted to drink the water from such wells would amount to nothing less than a betrayal of both the baptismal waters that were both a tomb and womb for us; and a betrayal of the living water that we receive from the teaching of Christ and that leads to eternal life. It is best to leave our “water jars” behind at such wells, and drink only that “living water” that is nothing less than the “gift of God” [John 4:10].