HOW GOD WAS (AND IS) MADE CONTEMPTIBLE

THE RIVER OF FIRE by ALEXANDRE KALOMIROS

Copyright 1980 St. Nectarios Press

As presented at the 1980 ORTHODOX CONFERENCE
sponsored by St. Nectarios American Orthodox Church Seattle, Washington

A reply to the questions: (1) Is God really good? (2) Did God create hell?

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Reverend fathers, dear brothers and sisters:

There is no doubt that we are living in the age of apostasy predicted for the last days. In practice, most people are atheists, although many of them theoretically still believe. Indifference and the spirit of this world prevail everywhere.

What is the reason for this state?

The reason is the cooling of love. Love for God no more burns in human hearts, and in consequence, love between us is dead, too.

What is the cause of this waning of men's love for God? The answer, certainly, is sin. Sin is the dark cloud which does not permit God's light to reach our eyes.

But sin always did exist. So how did we arrive at the point of not simply ignoring God, but of actually hating Him? Man's attitude toward God today is not really ignorance, or really indifference. If you examine men carefully you will notice that their ignorance or indifference is tainted by a deep hate. But nobody hates anything that does not exist.

I have the suspicion that men today believe in God more than at any other time in human history. Men know the gospel, the teaching of the Church, and God's creation better than at any other time. They have a profound consciousness of His existence. Their atheism is not a real disbelief. It is rather an aversion toward somebody we know very well but whom we hate with all our heart, exactly as the demons do.

We hate God, that is why we ignore Him, overlooking Him as if we did not see Him, and pretending to be atheists. In reality we consider Him our enemy par excellence. Our negation is our vengeance, our atheism is our revenge.

But why do men hate God? They hate Him not only because their deeds are dark while God is light, but also because they consider Him as a menace, as an imminent and eternal danger, as an adversary in court, as an opponent at law, as a public prosecutor and an eternal persecutor. To them, God is no more the almighty physician who came to save them from illness and death, but rather a cruel judge and a vengeful inquisitor.

You see, the devil managed to make men believe that God does not really love us, that He really only loves Himself, and that He accepts us only if we behave as He wants us to behave; that He hates us if we do not behave as He ordered us to behave, and is offended by our insubordination to such a degree that we must pay for it by eternal tortures, created by Him for that purpose.

Who can love a torturer? Even those who try hard to save themselves from the wrath of God cannot really love Him. They love only themselves, trying to escape God's vengeance and to achieve eternal bliss by managing to please this fearsome and extremely dangerous Creator.

Do you perceive the devil's slander of our all loving, all kind, and absolutely good God? That is why in Greek the devil was given the name DIABOLOS, "the slanderer".

II

But what was the instrument of the devil's slandering of God? What means did he use in order to convince humanity, in order to pervert human thought?

He used "theology". He first introduced a slight alteration in theology which, once it was accepted, he managed to increase more and more to the degree that Christianity became completely unrecognizable. This is what we call "Western theology".

Did you ever try to pinpoint what is the principal characteristic of Western theology? Well, its principal characteristic is that it considers God as the real cause of all evil.

What is evil? Is it not the estrangement from God Who is Life? 1 Is it not death? What does Western theology teach about death? All Roman Catholics and most Protestants consider death as a punishment from God. God considered all men guilty of Adam's sin and punished them by death, that is by cutting them away from Himself; depriving them of His live giving energy, and so killing them spiritually at first and later bodily, by some sort of spiritual starvation. Augustine interprets the passage in Genesis "If you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will die the death" as "If you eat of the fruit of this tree, I will kill you".

Some Protestants consider death not as a punishment but as something natural. But. is not God the creator of all natural things? So in both cases, God — for them — is the real cause of death.

And this is true not only for the death of the body. It is equally true for the death of the soul. Do not Western theologians consider hell, the eternal spiritual death of man, as a punishment from God? And do they not consider the devil as a minister of God for the eternal punishment of men in hell?

The "God" of the West is an offended and angry God, full of wrath for the disobedience of men, who desires in His destructive passion to torment all humanity unto eternity for their sins, unless He receives an infinite satisfaction for His offended pride.

What is the Western dogma of salvation? Did not God kill God in order to satisfy His pride, which the Westerners euphemistically call justice? And is it not by this infinite satisfaction that He deigns to accept the salvation of some of us?

What is salvation for Western theology? Is it not salvation from the wrath of God? 2

Do you see, then, that Western theology teaches that our real danger and our real enemy is our Creator and God? Salvation, for Westerners, is to be saved from the hands of God!

How can one love such a God? How can we have faith in someone we detest? Faith in its deeper essence is a product of love, therefore, it would be our desire that one who threatens us not even exist, especially when this threat is eternal.

Even if there exists a means of escaping the eternal wrath of this omnipotent but wicked Being (the death of His Son in our stead), it would be much better if this Being did not exist. This was the most logical conclusion of the mind and of the heart of the Western peoples, because even eternal Paradise would be abhorrent with such a cruel God.

Thus was atheisrn born, and this is why the West was its birthplace. Atheism was unknown in Eastern Christianity until Western theology was introduced there, too. Atheism is the consequence of Western theology. 3 Atheism is the denial, the negation of an evil God. Men became atheists in order to be saved from God, hiding their head and closing their eyes like an ostrich. Atheism, my brothers, is the negation of the Roman Catholic and Protestant God. Atheism is not our real enemy. The real enemy is that falsified and distorted "Christianity".

III

Westerners speak frequently of the "Good God" (E.g., in France le bon dieu is almost always used when speaking of God.). Western Europe and America, however, were never convinced that such a Good God existed. On the contrary, they were calling God good in the way Greeks called the curse and malediction of smallpox, EULOGIA , that is, a blessing, a benediction, in order to exorcise it and charm it away. For the same reason, the Black Sea was called Eu xeinoV PontoV — the hospitable sea — although it was, in fact, a dreadful and treacherous sea. Deep inside the Western soul, God was felt to be the wicked Judge, Who never forgot even the smallest offense done to Him in our transgressions of His laws.

This juridical conception of God, this completely distorted interpretation of God's justice, was nothing else than the projection of human passions on theology. It was a return to the pagan process of humanizing God and deifying man. Men are vexed and angered when not taken seriously and consider it a humiliation which only vengeance can remove, whether it is by crime or by duel. This was the worldly, passionate conception of justice prevailing in the minds of a so-called "Christian" society.

Western Christians thought about God's justice in the same way also; God, the infinite Being, was infinitely insulted by Adam's disobedience. He decided that the guilt of Adam's disobedience descended equally to all His children, and that all were to be sentenced to death for Adam's sin, which they did not commit. God's justice for Westerners operated like a vendetta. Not only the man who insulted you, but also all his family must die.

And what was tragic for men, to the point of hopelessness, was that no man, nor even all humanity, could appease God's insulted dignity, even if all men in history were to be sacrificed. God's dignity could be saved only if He could punish someone of the same dignity as He. So in order to save both God's dignity and mankind, there was no other solution than the incarnation of His Son, so that a man of godly dignity could be sacrificed to save God's honor.

IV

This paganistic conception of God's justice which demands infinite sacrifices in order to be appeased clearly makes God our real enemy and the cause of all our misfortunes. Moreover, it is a justice which is not at all just since it punishes and demands satisfaction from persons which were not at all responsible for the sin of their forefathers 4 In other words, what Westerners call justice ought rather to be called resentment and vengeance of the worst kind. Even Christ's love and sacrifice loses its significance and logic in this schizoid notion of a God who kills God in order to satisfy the so-called justice of God.

Does this conception of justice have anything to do with the justice that God revealed to us? Does the phrase "justice of God" have this meaning in the Old and New Testaments?

Perhaps the beginning of the mistaken interpretation of the word justice in the Holy Scriptures was its translation by the Greek word DIKAIWSUNH. Not that it is a mistaken translation, but because this word, being a word of the pagan, humanistic, Greek civilization, was charged with human notions which could easily lead to misunderstandings.

First of all, the wordDIKAIWSUNHbrings to mind an equal distribution. This is why it is represented by a balance. The good are rewarded and the bad are punished by human society in a fair way. This is human justice, the one which takes place in court.

Is this the meaning of God's justice, however?

The word DIKAIWSUNH,"justice", is a translation of the Hebraic word tsedaka. This word means "the divine energy which accomplishes man's salvation". It is parallel and almost synonymous to the other Hebraic word, hesed which means "mercy", "compassion", "love", and to the word, emeth which means "fidelity", "truth". This, as you see, gives a completely other dimension to what we usually conceive as justice.5 This is how the Church understood God's justice. This is what the Fathers of the Church taught of it.

"How can you call God just", writes Saint Isaac the Syrian, "when you read the passage on the wage given to the workers? 'Friend, I do thee no wrong; I will give unto this last even as unto thee who worked for me from the first hour. Is thine eye evil, because I am good?'" "How can a man call God just", continues Saint Isaac, "when he comes across the passage on the prodigal son, who wasted his wealth in riotous living, and yet only for the contrition which he showed, the father ran and fell upon his neck, and gave him authority over all his wealth? None other but His very Son said these things concerning Him lest we doubt it, and thus He bare witness concerning Him. Where, then, is God's justice, for whilst we were sinners, Christ died for us!" 6

So we see that God is not just, with the human meaning of this word, but we see that His justice means His goodness and love, which are given in an unjust manner, that is, God always gives without taking anything in return, and He gives to persons like us who are not worthy of receiving. That is why Saint Isaac teaches us: "Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you. And if David calls Him just and upright, His Son revealed to us that He is good and kind. 'He is good,' He says, 'to the evil and impious'".7

God is good, loving, and kind toward those who disregard, disobey, and ignore Him.8 He never returns evil for evil, He never takes vengeance. 9 His punishments are loving means of correction, as long as anything can be corrected and healed in this life.10 They never extend to eternity. He created everything good.11

The wild beasts recognize as their master the Christian who through humility has gained the likeness of God. They draw near to him, not with fear, but with joy, in grateful and loving submission; they wag their heads and lick his hands and serve him with gratitude. The irrational beasts know that their Master and God is not evil and wicked and vengeful, but rather full of love. (See also St. Isaac of Syria, SWZOMENA ASKHTIKA [Athens, 1871], pp. 95-96.) He protected and saved us when we fell. The eternally evil has nothing to do with God. It comes rather from the will of His free, logical creatures, and this will He respects. 12

Death was not inflicted upon us by God 13 We fell into it by our revolt. God is Life and Life is God. We revolted against God, we closed our gates to His life-giving grace. 14 "For as much as he departed from life", wrote Saint Basil, "by so much did he draw nearer to death. For God is Life, deprivation of life is death". 15 "God did not create death", continues Saint Basil, "but we brought it upon ourselves". "Not at all, however, did He hinder the dissolution... so that He would not make the infirmity immortal in us". 16 As Saint Irenaeus puts it: "Separation from God is death, separation from light is darkness... and it is not the light which brings upon them the punishment of blindness". 17

"Death", says Saint Maximus the Confessor, "is principally the separation from God, from which followed necessarily the death of the body. Life is principally He who said, 'I am the Life'".18 And why did death come upon the whole of humanity? Why did those who did not sin with Adam die as did Adam? Here is the reply of Saint Anastasius the Sinaite: "We became the inheritors of the curse in Adam. We were not punished as if we had disobeyed that divine commandment along with Adam; but because Adam became mortal, he transmitted sin to his posterity. We became mortal since we were born from a mortal".19

And Saint Gregory Palamas makes this point: "[God] did not say to Adam: return to whence thou wast taken; but He said to him: Earth thou art and unto the earth thou shall return.... He did not say: 'in whatsoever day ye shall eat of it, die!' but, 'in whatsoever day ye shall eat of it, ye shall surely die.' Nor did He afterwards say: 'return now unto the earth,' but He said, 'thou shalt return,' in this manner forewarning, justly permitting and not obstructing what shall come to pass". 20 We see that death did not come at the behest of God but as a consequence of Adam's severing his relations with the source of Life, by his disobedience; and God in His kindness did only warn him of it.

"The tree of knowledge itself," says Theophilus of Antic, "was good, and its fruit was good. For it was not the tree, as some think, that had death in it, but the disobedience which had death in it; for there was nothing else in the fruit but knowledge alone, and knowledge is good when one uses it properly." 21 The Fathers teach us that the prohibition to taste the tree of knowledge was not absolute but temporary. Adam was a spiritual infant. Not all foods are good for infants. Some foods may even kill them although adults would find them wholesome. The tree of knowledge was planted by God for man. It was good and nourishing. But it was solid food, while Adam was able to digest only milk.

V

So in the language of the Holy Scriptures, "just" means good and loving. We speak of the just men of the Old Testament. That does not mean that they were good judges but that they were kind and God-loving people. When we say that God is just, we do not mean that He is a good judge Who knows how to punish men equitably according to the gravity of their crimes, but on the contrary, we mean that He is kind and loving, forgiving all transgressions and disobediences, and that He wants to save us by all means, and never requites evil for evil. 22 In the first volume of the Philokalia there is a magnificent text of Saint Anthony which I must read to you here:

God is good, dispassionate, and immutable. Now someone who thinks it reasonable and true to affirm that God does not change, may well ask how, in that case, it is possible to speak of God as rejoicing over those who are good and showing mercy to those who honor Him, and as turning away from the wicked and being angry with sinners. To this it must be answered that God neither rejoices nor grows angry, for to rejoice and to be offended are passions; nor is He won over by the gifts of those who honor Him, for that would mean He is swayed by pleasure. It is not right that the Divinity feel pleasure or displeasure from human conditions.

He is good, and He only bestows blessings and never does harm, remaining always the same. We men, on the other hand, if we remain good through resembling God, are united to Him, but if we become evil through not resembling God, we are separated from Him. By living in holiness we cleave to God; but by becoming wicked we make Him our enemy. It is not that He grows angry with us in an arbitrary way, but it is our own sins that prevent God from shining within us and expose us to demons who torture us. And if through prayer and acts of compassion we gain release from our sins, this does not mean that we have won God over and made Him to change, but that through our actions and our turning to the Divinity, we have cured our wickedness and so once more have enjoyment of God's goodness. Thus to say that God turns away from the wicked is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind.23 [Chap. 150]

VI

You see now, I hope, how God was slandered by Western theology. Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas and all their pupils contributed to this "theological" calumny. And they are the foundations of Western theology, whether Papist or Protestant. Certainly these theologians do not say expressly and clearly that God is a wicked and passionate being. They rather consider God as being chained by a superior force, by a gloomy and implacable Necessity like the one which governed the pagan gods. This Necessity obliges Him to return evil for evil and does not permit Him to pardon and to forget the evil done against His will, unless an infinite satisfaction is offered to Him.

We open here the great question of pagan, Greek influence on Christianity.

The pagan mentality was in the foundation of all heresies. It was very strong in the East, because the East was the crossroad of all philosophical and religious currents. But as we read in the New Testament, "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound". So when heresies flourished, Orthodoxy flourished also, and although it was persecuted by the mighty of this world, it always survived victorious. In the West, on the contrary, the pagan Greek mentality entered in unobtrusively, without taking the aspect of heresy. It entered in through the multitude of Latin texts dictated by Augustine, bishop of Hippo.

Saint John Cassian who was living then in the West understood the poison that was in Augustine's teachings, and fought against it. But the fact that Augustine's books were written in Latin and the fact that they were extremely lengthy did not permit their study by the other Fathers of the Church, and so they were never condemned as Origen's works were condemned in the East. This fact permitted them to exercise a strong influence later in Western thought and theology. In the West, little by little knowledge of the Greek language vanished, and Augustine's texts were the only books available dating from ancient times in a language understood there. So the West received as Christian a teaching which was in many of its aspects pagan. Caesaro-papist developments in Rome did not permit any healthy reaction to this state of affairs, and so the West was drowned in the humanistic, pagan thought which prevails to this day.24

So we have the East on the one side which, speaking and writing Greek, remained essentially the New Israel with Israelitic thought and sacred tradition, and the West on the other side which having forgotten the Greek language and having been cut off from the Eastern state, inherited pagan Greek thought and its mentality, and formed with it an adulterated Christian teaching.

In reality, the opposition between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity is nothing else but the perpetuation of the opposition between Israel and Hellas.

We must never forget that the Fathers of the Church considered themselves to be the true spiritual children of Abraham, that the Church considered itself to be the New Israel, and that the Orthodox peoples, whether Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, etc., were conscious of being like Nathaniel, true Israelites, the People of God. And while this was the real consciousness of Eastern Christianity, the West became more and more a child of pagan, humanistic Greece and Rome.

VII

What were the principal characteristics of this difference of thought between Israel and paganism? I call your attention to this very important matter.

Israel believes in God.

Paganism believes in creation. That is to say, in paganism creation is deified. For the pagans, God and creation are one and the same thing. God is impersonal, personified in a multitude of gods.

Israel (and when we speak of Israel we mean the true Israel, the spiritual sons of Abraham, those who have the faith given by God to His chosen people, not those who have abandoned this faith, The real sons of Abraham are the Church of Christ, and not those carnal descendants, the Jewish race), Israel knows that God and creation are two radically different kinds of existence. God is self existent, personal, eternal, immortal, Life and the Source of life, Existence and the Source of existence; God is the only real Existence: O WN, the Existing, the Only Existing; this is the meaning of the article 'O. 25

Creation, on the contrary, has no self-existence. It is totally dependent on the will of God. It exists only so long as God wants it to exist. It is not eternal. It had no existence. It was null, it was completely nothing. It was created out of nothingness. 26 By itself it has no force of existence; it is kept in existence by God's Energy. If this loving Energy of God ever stops, creation and all created beings, intellectual or non-intellectual, rational or irrational will vanish into non-existence. We know that God's love for His creation is eternal. We know from Him that He will never let us fall into non-existence, from which He brought us into being. This is our hope and God is true in His promises.

We, created beings, angels, and men, will live in eternity, not because we have in us the power of eternity, but because this is the will of God Who loves us. By ourselves we are nothing. We have not the least energy of life and of existence in our nature; that which we have comes entirely from God; nothing is ours. We are dirt of the earth, and when we forgot it, God in His mercy permitted that we return to what we are, in order that we remain humble and have exact knowledge of our nothingness. 27 "God," says Saint John Damascene elsewhere, "can do all that He wills, even though He does not will all things that He can do — for He can destroy creation, but He does not will to do so. (Ibid. I, 14) 28

In the Great Euchologion (Venice, 1862), a fundamental liturgical book of the Church, we read:

"O God, the great and most high, Thou Who alone hast immortality"
[7th prayer of Vespers, p. 15]
"Thou Who alone art life-giving by nature... O only immortal"
[Ode 5, Funeral Canon for Laymen, p. 410]
"Thou art the only immortal" [p. 410]
"The only One Who is immortal because of His godly nature"

[Ode 1, Funeral Canon for Laymen, p. 471]
This is the faith of Israel.
What is the teaching of paganism? Paganism is the consequence of the loss of contact with God. The multitude of the sins of humanity made men incapable of receiving the divine light and of having any union with the Living God. The consequence was to consider as something divine the creation which they saw before them every day.

Paganism considers creation as being something self-existent and immortal, something that always existed and will always exist. In paganism the gods are part of creation. They did not create it from nothingness, they only formed the existing matter. Matter can take different forms. Forms come into existence and vanish, but matter itself is eternal. Angels, demons, and the souls of men are the real gods. Eternal by their nature, as is matter itself, they are, however, higher than matter. They might take different material forms in a sequence of material existences but they remain essentially spiritual.

So in paganism we see two fundamental characteristics: (1) An attributing of the characteristics of godhood to the whole of creation, that is: eternity, immortality, self-existence. (2) A distinction between the spiritual and the material and an antagonism between the two as between something higher and something lower.

Paganism and humanism are one and the same thing. In paganism, man is god because he is eternal by nature. This is why paganism is always haughty. It is narcissism. It is self-adoration. In Greece, the gods had human characteristics. Greek religion was the pagan adoration of man. The soul of man was considered his real being, and was immortal by nature.

So we see that in paganism the devil succeeded in creating a universal belief that men were gods and so did not need God. This is why pride was so high in Greece and why humility was inconceivable. In his work The Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes the following words: "Not to resent offenses is the mark of a base and slavish man." The man who is convinced by the devil to believe in the error that his soul is eternal by nature, can never be humble and can never really believe in God, because he does not need God, being God himself, as his error makes him believe.

This is why, from the very first, the Fathers of the Church, understanding the danger of this stupid error, warned the Christians of the fact that, as Saint Irenaeus puts it: "The teaching that the human soul is naturally immortal is from the devil" (Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, III, 20. 1). We find the same warning in Saint Justin (Dialogue with Trypho 6. 1-2), in Theophilus of Antioch (To Autolycus 2. 97), in Tatian (To the Greeks 13), etc.

Saint Justin explains the fundamental atheism which exists in the belief of the natural eternity and immortality of the human soul. He writes: "There are some others who, having supposed that the soul is immortal and immaterial, believe though they have committed evil they will not suffer punishment (for that which is immaterial is also insensible), and that the soul, in consequence of its immorality needs nothing from God" (Dialogue with Trypho 1).

Paganism is ignorance of the true God, an erroneous belief that His creation is divine, really a god. This god, however, who is Nature, is impersonal, a blind force, above all personal gods, and is called Necessity (anagkhç). In reality, this Necessity is the projection of human reason, as a mathematical necessity governing the world, It is a projection of rationalism upon nature. This rationalistic Necessity is the true, supreme blind god of the pagans. The pagan gods are parts of the world, and they are immortal because of the immortality of nature which is their essence. In this pagan mentality, man is also god like the others, because for the pagans the real man is only his soul, 29 and they believe that man's soul is immortal in itself, since it is part of the essence of the universe, which is considered immortal in itself and self-existent. So man also is god and a measure of all things.

But the gods are not free. They are governed by Necessity which is impersonal.

VIII

It is this pagan way of thought that was mixed with the Christian teaching by the various heresies. This is what happened in the West, too. They began to distinguish not between God and His creation, but between spirit and matter. 30 They began to think of the soul of man as of something eternal in itself, and began to consider the condition of man after death not as a sleep in the hands of God, but as the real life of man, 31 to which the resurrection of the dead had nothing to add and even the need of the resurrection was doubtful. The feast of the Resurrection of our Lord, which is the culmination of all feasts in Orthodoxy, began to fall into second place, because its need was as incomprehensible to the Western Christians as it was to the Athenians who heard the sermon of the Apostle Paul.

But what is more important for our subject, they began to feel that God was subject to Necessity, to this rationalistic Necessity which was nothing else but human logic. They declared Him incapable of coming into contact with inferior beings like men, because their rationalistic, philosophical conceptions did not permit it, and it was this belief which was the foundation of the hesychast disputes; it had already begun with Augustine who taught that it was not God Who spoke to Moses but an angel instead.

It is in this context of Necessity, which even gods obey, that we must understand the Western juridical conception of God's justice. It was necessary for God to punish man's disobedience. It was impossible for Him to pardon; a superior Necessity demanded vengeance. Even if God was in reality good and loving, He was not able to act lovingly. He was obliged to act contrary to His love; the only thing He could do, in order to save humanity, was to punish His Son in the place of men, and by this means was Necessity satisfied.

IX

This is the triumph of Hellenistic thought in Christianity. As a Hellenist, Origen had arrived at the same conclusions. God was a judge by necessity. He was obliged to punish, to avenge, to send people to hell. Hell was God's creation. It was a punishment demanded by justice. This demand of justice was a necessity. God was obliged to submit to it. He was not permitted to forgive. There was a superior force, a Necessity which did not permit Him to love unconditionally.

However, Origen was also a Christian and he knew that God was full of love. How is it possible to acknowledge a loving God Who keeps people in torment eternally? If God is the cause of hell, by necessity then there must be an end to it, otherwise we cannot concede that God is good and loving. This juridical conception of God as a instrument of a superior, impersonal force or deity named Necessity, leads logically to apokatastasis, "the restoration of all things and the destruction of hell," otherwise we must admit that God is cruel.

The pagan Greek mentality could not comprehend that the cause of hell was not God but His logical creatures. If God was not really free, since He was governed by Necessity, how could His creatures be free? God could not give something which He did not possess Himself. Moreover, the pagan Greek mentality could not conceive of disinterested love. Freedom, however, is the highest gift that God could give to a creature, because freedom makes the logical creatures like God. This was an inconceivable gift for pagan Greeks. They could not imagine a creature which could say "no" to an almighty God. If God was almighty, creatures could not say "no" to Him. So if God gave men His grace, men could not reject it. Otherwise God would not be almighty. If we admit that God is almighty, then His grace must be irresistible.

Men cannot escape from it. That means that those men who are deprived of God's grace are deprived because God did not give His grace to them. So the loss of God s grace, which is eternal, spiritual death, in other words, hell, is in reality an act totally dependent on God. It is God Who is punishing these people by depriving them of His grace, by not permitting it to shine upon them. So God is the cause of the eternal, spiritual death of those who are damned. Damnation is an act of God, an act of God's justice, an act of necessity or cruelty. As a result, Origen thought that if we are to remain Christians, if we are to continue to believe that God is really good, we must believe that hell is not eternal, but will have an end, in spite of all that is written in the Holy Scriptures and of what the Church believes. This is the fatal, perfectly logical conclusion. If God is the cause of hell, hell must have an end, or else God is an evil God.

X

Origen, and all rationalists who are like him, was not able to understand that the acceptance or the rejection of God's grace depends entirely on the rational creatures; that God, like the sun, never stops shining on good or wicked alike; that rational creatures are, however, entirely free to accept or reject this grace and love; and that God in His genuine love does not force His creatures to accept Him, but respects absolutely their free decision. 32 He does not withdraw His grace and love, but the attitude of the logical creatures toward this unceasing grace and love is the difference between paradise and hell. Those who love God are happy with Him, those who hate Him are extremely miserable by being obliged to live in His presence, and there is no place where one can escape the loving omnipresence of God.

Paradise or hell depends on how we will accept God's love. Will we return love for love, or will we respond to His love with hate? This is the critical difference. And this difference depends entirely on us, on our freedom, on our innermost free choice, on a perfectly free attitude which is not influenced by external conditions or internal factors of our material and psychological nature, because it is not an external act but an interior attitude coming from the bottom of our heart, conditioning not our sins, but the way we think about our sins, as it is clearly seen in the case of the publican and the Pharisee and in the case of the two robbers crucified with Christ. This freedom, this choice, this inner attitude toward our Creator is the innermost core of our eternal personality, it is the most profound of our characteristics, it is what makes us that which we are, it is our eternal face — bright or dark, loving or hating.

No, my brothers, unhappily for us, paradise or hell does not depend on God. If it depended on God, we would have nothing to fear. We have nothing to fear from Love. But it does not depend on God. It depends entirely upon us, and this is the whole tragedy. God wants us to be in His image, eternally free. He respects us absolutely. This is love. Without respect, we cannot speak of love. We are men because we are free. If we were not free, we would be clever animals, not men. God will never take back this gift of freedom which renders us what we are.

This means that we will always be what we want to be, friends or enemies of God, and there is no changing in this our deepest self. In this life, there are profound or superficial changes in our life, in our character, in our beliefs, but all these changes are only the expression in time of our deepest eternal self. This deep eternal self is eternal, with all the meaning of the word. This is why paradise and hell are also eternal. There is no changing in what we really are. Our temporal characteristics and our history in life depend on many superficial things 'which vanish with death, but our real personality is not superficial and does not depend on changing and vanishing things. It is our real self. It remains with us when we sleep in the grave, and will be our real face in the resurrection. It is eternal.

XI

Saint John of the Ladder says somewhere in his work that "before our fall the demons say to us that God is a friend of man; but after our fall, they say that He is inexorable." This is the cunning lie of the devil: to convince us that any harm in our life has as its cause God s disposition; that it is God Who will forgive us or Who will punish us. Wishing to throw us into sin and then to make us lose any hope of freeing ourselves from it, they seek to present God as sometimes forgiving all sins, and sometimes as inexorable. Most Christians, even Orthodox Christians, have fallen into this pit. They consider God responsible for our being pardoned or our being punished. This, my brothers, is a terrible falsehood which makes most men lose eternal life, principally because in considering God s love, they convince themselves that God, in His love, will pardon them. God is always loving, He is always pardoning, He is always a friend of man.

However, that which never pardons, that which never is a friend of man, is sin, and we never think of it as we ought to. Sin destroys our soul independently of the love of God, because sin is precisely the road which leads away from God, because sin erects a wall which separates us from God, because sin destroys our spiritual eyes and makes us unable to see God's light. The demons want to make us always think of our salvation or our eternal spiritual death in juridical terms. They want us to think that either salvation or eternal death is a question of God's decision. No, my brothers, we must awaken in order not to be lost. Our salvation or our eternal death is not a question of God s decision, but it is a question of our decision, it is a question of the decision of our free will which God respects absolutely. Let us not fool ourselves with confidence in God's love. The danger does not come from God; it comes from our own self.

XII

Many will say: "Does not Holy Scripture itself often speak about the anger of God? Is it not God Himself who says that He will punish us or that He will pardon us? Is it not written that 'He is a rewarded of them that diligently seek Him' (Heb. 11:6)? 33 Does He not say that vengeance is His and that He will requite the wickedness done to us? Is it not written that it is fearful to fall into the hands of the living God?" 34

In his discourse entitled That God is not the Cause of Evil, Saint Basil the Great writes the following: "But one may say, if God is not responsible for evil things, why is it said in the book of Esaias, 'I am He that prepared light and Who formed darkness, Who makes peace and Who creates evils' (45:7)." And again, "There came down evils from the Lord upon the gates of Jerusalem" (Mich. 1:12). And, "Shall there be evil in the city which the Lord hath not wrought?" (Amos 3:6). And in the great Ode of Moses, "Behold, I am and there is no god beside Me. I will slay, and I will make to live; I will smite, and I will heal" (Deut. 32:39).

But none of these citations, to him who understands the deeper meaning of the Holy Scriptures, casts any blame on God, as if He were the cause of evils and their creator, for He Who said, "I am the One Who makes light and darkness," shows Himself as the Creator of the universe, not that He is the creator of any evil.... "He creates evils," that means, "He fashions them again and brings them to a betterment, so that they leave their evilness, to take on the nature of good." 35

As Saint Isaac the Syrian writes, "Very often many things are said by the Holy Scriptures and in it many names are used not in a literal sense... those who have a mind understand this" (Homily 83, p. 317).

Saint Basil in the same discourse 36 gives the explanation of these expressions of the Holy Scriptures: "It is because fear," says he, "edifies simpler people," and this is true not only for simple people but for all of us. After our fall, we need fear in order to do any profitable thing and any good to ourselves or to others. In order to understand the Holy Scriptures, say the Fathers, we must have in mind their purpose which is to save us, and to bring us little by little to an understanding of our Creator God and of our wretched condition.

But the same Holy Scriptures in other places explain to us more accurately who is the real cause of our evils. In Jeremias 2:17, 19 we read: "Hath not thy forsaking Me brought these things upon thee? saith the Lord thy God.... Thine apostasy shall chastise thee and thy wickedness shall reprove thee; know then, and see that thy forsaking Me hath been bitter to thee, saith the Lord thy God."

The Holy Scriptures speak our language, the language which we understand in our fallen state. As Saint Gregory the Theologian says, "For according to our own comprehension, we have given names from our own attributes to those of God." 37 And Saint John Damascene explains further that what in the Holy Scriptures "is said of God as if He had a body, is said symbolically... [it contains] some hidden meaning, which through things corresponding to our nature, teaches us things which exceed our nature." 38

XIII

However, there are punishments imposed upon us by God, or rather evils done to us by the devil and permitted by God. But these punishments are what we call pedagogical punishments. They have as their aim our correction in this life, or at least the correction of others who would take a lesson from our example and correct themselves by fear. There are also punishments which do not have the purpose of correcting anybody but simply put an end to evil by putting an end to those who are propagating it, so that the earth may be saved from perpetual corruption and total destruction; such was the case in the flood during Noe's time, and in Sodom's destruction.39

All these punishments operate and have their purpose in this corrupted state of things; they do not extend beyond this corrupted life. Their purpose is to correct what can be corrected, and to change things toward a better condition, while things can still change in this changing world. After the Common Resurrection no change whatever can take place. Eternity and incorruptibility are the state of unchangeable things; no alterations whatever happen then, only developments in the state chosen by free personalities; eternal and infinite developments but no changing, no alteration of direction, no going back. The changing world we see around us is changing because it is corruptible.

The eternal New Heavens and New Earth which God will bring about in His Second Coming are incorruptible, that means, not changing. So in this New World there can be no correction whatever; therefore, pedagogical punishments are no longer necessary. Any punishment from God in this New World of Resurrection would be clearly and without a doubt a revengeful act, inappropriate and motivated by hate, without any good intention or purpose.

If we consider hell as a punishment from God, we must admit that it is a senseless punishment, unless we admit that God is an infinitely wicked being.

As Saint Isaac the Syrian says: "He who applies pedagogical punishments in order to give health, is punishing with love, but he who is looking for vengeance, is devoid of love. God punishes with love, not defending Himself — far be it — but He wants to heal His image, and He does not keep His wrath for long. This way of love is the way of uprightness, and it does not change with passion to a defense. A man who is just and wise is like God because he never chastises a man in revenge for wickedness, but only in order to correct him or that others be afraid" (Homily 73).

So we see that God punishes as long as there is hope for correction. After the Common Resurrection there is no question of any punishment from God. Hell is not a punishment from God but a self condemnation. As Saint Basil the Great says, "The evils in hell do not have God as their cause, but ourselves." 40

XIV

One could insist, however, that the Sacred Scriptures and the Fathers always speak of God as the Great Judge who will reward those who were obedient to Him and will punish those who were disobedient, in the day of the Great Judgment (II Tim. 4:6-8). How are we to understand this judgment if we are to understand the divine words not in a human but in a divine manner'? What is God's judgment?

God is Truth and Light. God's judgment is nothing else than our coming into contact with truth and light. In the day of the Great Judgment all men will appear naked before this penetrating light of truth. The "books" will be opened. What are these "books"? They are our hearts. Our hearts will be opened by the penetrating light of God, and what is in these hearts will be revealed. If in those hearts there is love for God, those hearts will rejoice seeing God's light. If, on the contrary, there is hatred for God in those hearts, these men will suffer by receiving on their opened hearts this penetrating light of truth which they detested all their life.

So that which will differentiate between one man and another will not be a decision of God, a reward or a punishment from Him, but that which was in each one's heart; what was there during all our life will be revealed in the Day of Judgment. If there is a reward and a punishment in this revelation — and there really is — it does not come from God but from the love or hate which reigns in our heart. Love has bliss in it, hatred has despair, bitterness, grief, affliction, wickedness, agitation, confusion, darkness, and all the other interior conditions which compose hell (I Cor. 4:6).

The Light of Truth, God's Energy, God's grace which will fall on men unhindered by corrupt conditions in the Day of Judgment, will be the same to all men. There will be no distinction whatever. All the difference lies in those who receive, not in Him Who gives. The sun shines on healthy and diseased eyes alike, without any distinction. Healthy eyes enjoy light and because of it see clearly the beauty which surrounds them. Diseased eyes feel pain, they hurt, suffer, and want to hide from this same light which brings such great happiness to those who have healthy eyes.

But alas, there is no longer any possibility of escaping God's light. During this life there was. In the New Creation of the Resurrection, God will be everywhere and in everything. His light and love will embrace all. There will be no place hidden from God, as was the case during our corrupt life in the kingdom of the prince of this world. 41 The devil's kingdom will be despoiled by the Common Resurrection and God will take possession again of His creation. 42 Love will enrobe everything with its sacred Fire which will flow like a river from the throne of God and will irrigate paradise. But this same river of Love — for those who have hate in their hearts — will suffocate and burn.

"For our God is a consuming fire", (Heb. 12:29). The very fire which purifies gold, also consumes wood. Precious metals shine in it like the sun, rubbish burns with black smoke. All are in the same fire of Love. Some shine and others become black and dark. In the same furnace steel shines like the sun, whereas clay turns dark and is hardened like stone. The difference is in man, not in God.

The difference is conditioned by the free choice of man, which God respects absolutely. God's judgment is the revelation of the reality which is in man.

XV

Thus Saint Macarius writes, "And as the kingdom of darkness, and sin, are hidden in the soul until the Day of Resurrection, when the bodies also of sinners shall be covered with the darkness that is now hidden in the soul, so also the Kingdom of Light, and the Heavenly Image, Jesus Christ, now mystically enlighten the soul, and reign in the soul of the saints, but are hidden from the eyes of men... until the Day of Resurrection; but then the body also shall be covered and glorified with the Light of the Lord, which is now in the man's soul [from this earthly life], that the body also may reign with the soul which from now receives the Kingdom of Christ and rests and is enlightened with eternal light" (Homily 2).

Saint Symeon the New Theologian says that it is not what man does which counts in eternal life but what he is, whether he is like Jesus Christ our Lord, or whether he is different and unlike Him. He says, "In the future life the Christian is not examined if he has renounced the whole world for Christ's love, or if he has distributed his riches to the poor or if he fasted or kept vigil or prayed, or if he wept and lamented for his sins, or if he has done any other good in this life, but he is examined attentively if he has any similitude with Christ, as a son does with his father."

XVI

Saint Peter the Damascene writes: "We all receive God's blessings equally. But some of us, receiving God's fire, that is, His word, become soft like beeswax, while the others like clay become hard as stone. And if we do not want Him, He does not force any of us, but like the sun He sends His rays and illuminates the whole world, and he who wants to see Him, sees Him, whereas the one who does not want to see Him, is not forced by Him. And no one is responsible for this privation of light except the one who does not want to have it. God created the sun and the eye. Man is free to receive the sun's light or not. The same is true here. God sends the light of knowledge like rays to all, but He also gave us faith like an eye. The one who wants to receive knowledge through faith, keeps it by his works, and so God gives him more willingness, knowledge, and power" (Philokalia, vol. 3, p. 8).

XVII

I think that by now we have reached the point of understanding correctly what eternal hell and eternal paradise really are, and who is in reality responsible for the difference.

In the icon of the Last Judgment we see Our Lord Jesus Christ seated on a throne. On His right we see His friends, the blessed men and women who lived by His love. On His left we see His enemies, all those who passed their life hating Him, even if they appeared to be pious and reverent. And there, in the midst of the two, springing from Christ's throne, we see a river of fire coming toward us. What is this river of fire? Is it an instrument of torture? Is it an energy of vengeance coming out from God in order to vanquish His enemies?

No, nothing of the sort. This river of fire is the river which "came out from Eden to water the paradise" of old (Gen. 2:10). It is the river of the grace of God which irrigated God's saints from the beginning. In a word, it is the out-pouring of God's love for His creatures. Love is fire. Anyone who loves knows this. God is Love, so God is Fire. And fire consumes all those who are not fire themselves, and renders bright and shining all those who are fire themselves (Heb. 12:29).

God many times appeared as fire: To Abraham, to Moses in the burning bush, to the people of Israel showing them the way in the desert as a column of fire by night and as a shining cloud by day when He covered the tabernacle with His glory (Exod. 40:28, 32), and when He rained fire on the summit of Mount Sinai. God was revealed as fire on the mountain of Transfiguration, and He said that He came "to put fire upon the earth" (Luke 12:49), that is to say, love, because as Saint John of the Ladder says, "Love is the source of fire" (Step 30, 18).

The Greek writer, Fotis Kontoglou said somewhere that "Faith is fire, and gives warmth to the heart. The Holy Spirit came down upon the heads of the apostles in the form of tongues of fire. The two disciples, when the Lord was revealed to them, said 'Did not our heart burn within us, while He talked with us in the way?' Christ compares faith to a 'burning candle.' Saint John the Forerunner said in his sermons that Christ will baptize men 'in the Holy Spirit and fire.' And truly, the Lord said, 'I am come to send fire on the earth and what will I if it be already kindled? Well, the most tangible characteristic of faith is warmth; this is why they speak about 'warm faith,' or 'faith provoking warmth.' And even as the distinctive mark of faith is warmth, the sure mark of unbelief is coldness.

"Do you want to know how to understand if a man has faith or unbelief? If you feel warmth coming out of him — from his eyes, from his words, from his manners — be certain that he has faith in his heart. If again you feel cold coming out of his whole being, that means that he has not faith, whatever he may say. He may kneel down, he may bend his head humbly, he may utter all sorts of moral teachings with a humble voice, but all these will breathe forth a chilling breath which falls upon you to numb you with cold." 43 Saint Isaac the Syrian says that "Paradise is the love of God, in which the bliss of all the beatitudes is contained," and that "the tree of life is the love of God" (Homily 72).

"Do not deceive yourself," says Saint Symeon the New Theologian, "God is fire and when He came into the world, and became man, He sent fire on the earth, as He Himself says; this fire turns about searching to find material — that is a disposition and an intention that is good — to fall into and to kindle; and for those in whom this fire will ignite, it becomes a great flame, which reaches Heaven.... this flame at first purifies us from the pollution of passions and then it becomes in us food and drink and light and joy, and renders us light ourselves because we participate in His light" (Discourse 78).

God is a loving fire, and He is a loving fire for all: good or bad. There is, however, a great difference in the way people receive this loving fire of God. Saint Basil says that "the sword of fire was placed at the gate of paradise to guard the approach to the tree of life; it was terrible and burning toward infidels, but kindly accessible toward the faithful, bringing to them the light of day." 44 The same loving fire brings the day to those who respond to love with love, and burns those who respond to love with hatred.

Paradise and hell are one and the same River of God, a loving fire which embraces and covers all with the same beneficial will, without any difference or discrimination. The same vivifying water is life eternal for the faithful and death eternal for the infidels; for the first it is their element of life, for the second it is the instrument of their eternal suffocation; paradise for the one is hell for the other. Do not consider this strange. The son who loves his father will feel happy in his father's arms, but if he does not love him, his father's loving embrace will be a torment to him. This also is why when we love the man who hates us, it is likened to pouring lighted coals and hot embers on his head.

"I say," writes Saint Isaac the Syrian, "that those who are suffering in hell, are suffering in being scourged by love.... It is totally false to think that the sinners in hell are deprived of God's love. Love is a child of the knowledge of truth, and is unquestionably given commonly to all. But love's power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it" (Homily 84).

God is love. If we really believe this truth, we know that God never hates, never punishes, never takes vengeance. As Abba Ammonas says, "Love never hates anyone, never reproves anyone, never condemns anyone, never grieves anyone, never abhors anyone, neither faithful nor infidel nor stranger nor sinner nor fornicator, nor anyone impure, but instead it is precisely sinners, and weak and negligent souls that it loves more, and feels pain for them and grieves and laments, and it feels sympathy for the wicked and sinners, more than for the good, imitating Christ Who called sinners, and ate and drank with them. For this reason, showing what real love is, He taught saying, 'Become good and merciful like your Father in Heaven,' and as He rains on bad and good and makes the sun to rise on just and unjust alike, so also is the one who has real love, and has compassion, and prays for all." 45

XVIII

Now if anyone is perplexed and does not understand how it is possible for God's love to render anyone pitifully wretched and miserable and even burning as it were in flames, let him consider the elder brother of the prodigal son. Was he not in his father's estate? Did not everything in it belong to him? Did he not have his father's love? Did his father not come himself to entreat and beseech him to come and take part in the joyous banquet? What rendered him miserable and burned him with inner bitterness and hate? Who refused him anything? Why was he not joyous at his brother's return? Why did he not have love either toward his father or toward his brother? Was it not because of his wicked, inner disposition? Did he not remain in hell because of that? And what was this hell? Was it any separate place? Were there any instruments of torture? Did he not continue to live in his father's house? What separated him from all the joyous people in the house if not his own hate and his own bitterness? Did his father, or even his brother, stop loving him? Was it not precisely this very love which hardened his heart more and more? Was it not the joy that made him sad? Was not hatred burning in his heart, hatred for his father and his brother, hatred for the love of his father toward his brother and for the love of his brother toward his father?

This is hell: the negation of love; the return of hate for love; bitterness at seeing innocent joy; to be surrounded by love and to have hate in one's heart. This is the eternal condition of all the damned. They are all dearly loved. They are all invited to the joyous banquet. They are all living in God's Kingdom, in the New Earth and the New Heavens. No one expels them. Even if they wanted to go away they could not flee from God's New Creation, nor hide from God's tenderly loving omnipresence. Their only alternative would be, perhaps, to go away from their brothers and search for a bitter isolation from them, but they could never depart from God and His love. And what is more terrible is that in this eternal life, in this New Creation, God is everything to His creatures. As Saint Gregory of Nyssa says, "In the present life the things we have relations with are numerous, for instance: time, air, locality, food and drink, clothing, sunlight, lamplight, and other necessities of life, none of which, many though they be, are God; that blessed state which we hope for is in need of none of these things, but the Divine Being will become all, and in the stead of all to us, distributing Himself proportionately to every need of that existence. It is plain, too, from the Holy Scriptures that God becomes to those who deserve it, locality and home and clothing and food and drink and light and riches and kingdom, and everything that can be thought of and named that goes to make our life happy" (On the Soul and the Resurrection). 46

In the new eternal life, God will be everything to His creatures, not only to the good but also to the wicked, not only to those who love Him, but likewise to those who hate Him. But how will those who hate Him endure to have everything from the hands of Him Whom they detest? Oh, what an eternal torment is this, what an eternal fire, what a gnashing of teeth!

Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the everlasting inner fire of hatred," 47 saith the Lord, because I was thirsty for your love and you did not give it to Me, I was hungry for your blessedness and you did not offer it to Me, I was imprisoned in My human nature and you did not come to visit Me in My church; you are free to go where your wicked desire wishes, away from Me, in the torturing hatred of your hearts which is foreign to My loving heart which knows no hatred for anyone. Depart freely from love to the everlasting torture of hate, unknown and foreign to Me and to those who are with Me, but prepared by freedom for the devil, from the days I created My free, rational creatures. But wherever you go in the darkness of your hating hearts, My love will follow you like a river of fire, because no matter what your heart has chosen, you are and you will eternally continue to be, My children.

Amen.

NOTES

1 "This is evil: estrangement from God." St. Basil the Great, That God is Not the Cause of Evils, "ELLHNES PATERES THS EKKLHSIAS" [Greek Fathers of the Church) 7, 112 (hereafter cited as EPE). "As many... as stand apart in their will from God, He brings upon them separation from Himself; and separation from God is death." St. Irenaeus Against Heresies 5. 27.2. "Men, rejecting eternal things and through the counsel of the devil turning toward the things of corruption, became the cause to themselves of the corruption in death." St. Athanasius the Great On the Incarnation 5 (Migne, PG 25. 104-105). "For as much as he departed from life, just so much did he draw nearer to death. For life is God; deprivation of life is death. So Adam was the author of death to himself through his departure from God." St. Basil the Great (PG 31. 945).

2 "The redemptive sacrifice... was accomplished in order to re-establish the formerly harmonious relation be-tween heaven and earth which sin had overturned, to atone for the flaunted moral law, to satisfy the affronted justice of God." Encyclical Letter for Pascha 1980 of Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios, Episkepsis (in Greek), no. 229, 15 April 1980.

3 "Truly foolish, therefore, and lacking all understanding and mind is he who says there is no God. Alongside him no less in this madness is he who says that God is the cause of evils. I consider their sins to be of equal gravity because each one similarly denies the good; the former denies that He exists at all, while the latter defines Him as not being good; for if he is the cause of evils, He is clearly not good; so from both sides there is a denial of God." St. Basil the Great, EPE, op. cit., 7, 90.

4 "But someone will say, verily Adam fell, and by disregarding the divine commandment he was condemned to corruption and death, but how were the many made sinful on his account? What do his transgressions have to do with us? How is it that we who were not even born were condemned along with him, and yet God says, 'The fathers shall not be put to death for the children and the sons shall not be put to death for the fathers; everyone shall die in his own sin'? (Deut. 24:18). Surely, then, that soul that sins shall die; but we became sinners through the disobedience of Adam in this way: For Adam was created for incorruption and life, and his life in the Paradise of delight was holy, his whole mind was continually caught up in divine visions, and his body was tranquil and serene, since every shameful pleasure was calmed, for there was no disturbance of intemperate emotions in him. However, since he fell under sin and sank into corruption, thence pleasures and pollutions penetrated into the nature of the flesh, and so there was planted in our members a savage law. Nature became diseased with sin through the disobedience of the one, i.e., Adam; thus the many also became sinners, not as transgressing together with Adam ? for they did not exist at all ? but as being from his nature which had fallen under the law of sin... because of disobedience, human nature in Adam became infirm with corruption, and so the passions were introduced into it...." St. Cyril of Alexandria Interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans (PG 74. 788-789). "And furthermore, if they who were born from Adam became sinners on account of his sinning, in all justice, they are not liable, for they did not become sinners of themselves; therefore the term "sinners" is used instead of "mortals" because death is the penalty of sin. Since in the first-fashioned man nature became mortal, all they who share in the nature of the forefather consequently share mortality also." Euthymios Zigabenos, Interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans, 5:19.

5 It means something totally different from what we customarily mean by the term "justice." This ignorance has caused us to consider as touchstones of Orthodoxy some very strange theories, most particularly the juridical conception of salvation which is based upon a justice that resembles the Necessity (ANAGKH) of the ancients, and oppresses not only man but God also, and gives a gloomy aspect to Christianity. See the relevant study of S. Lynonnett "La Soteriologie Paulienne," Introduction a la Bible Il, (Belgium: Desclees Bc Bower), p. 840.

6 "If a man readily and joyfully accepts a loss for the sake of God, he is inwardly pure. And if he does not look down upon any man because of his defects, in very truth he is free. If a man is not pleased with someone who honors him, nor displeased with someone who dishonors him, he is dead to the world and to this life. The watchfulness of discernment is superior to every discipline of men accomplished in any way to any degree.

"Do not hate the sinner. For we are all laden with guilt. If for the sake of God you are moved to oppose him, weep over him. Why do you hate him? Hate his sins md pray for him, that you may imitate Christ Who was not wroth with sinners, but interceded for them. Do you not see how He wept over Jerusalem? We are mocked by the devil in many instances, so why should we hate the man who is mocked by him who mocks us also? Why, O man, do you hate the sinner? Could it be because he is not so righteous as you? But where is your righteousness when you have no love? Why do you not shed tears over him? But you persecute him. In ignorance some are moved with anger, presuming themselves to be discerners of the works of sinners.

"Be a herald of God's goodness, for God rules over you, unworthy though you are; for although your debt to Him is so great, yet He is not seen exacting payment from you, and from the small works you do, He bestows great rewards upon you. Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you. And if David calls Him just and upright (cf. Ps. 24:8, 144:17), His Son revealed to us that He is good and kind. 'He is good,' He says, 'to the evil and to the impious' (cf. Luke 6:35). How can you call God just when you come across the Scriptural passage on the wage given to the workers? 'Friend, I do thee no wrong: I will give unto this last even as unto thee. Is thine eye evil because I am good?' (Matt. 20:12-15). How can a man call God just when he comes across the passage on the prodigal son who wasted his wealth with riotous living, how for the compunction alone which he showed, the father ran and fell upon his neck and gave him authority over all his wealth? (Luke 15:11 ff.). None other but His very Son said these things concerning Him, lest we doubt it; and thus He bare witness concern-ing Him. Where, then, is God's justice, for whilst we are sinners Christ died for us! (cf. Rom. 5:8). But if here He is merciful, we may believe that He will not change [i.e., as regards the state after death, which St. Isaac mentions again a little below].

"Far be it that we should ever think such an iniquity that God could become unmerciful! For the property of Divinity does not change as do mortals. God does not acquire something which He does not have, nor lose what He has, nor supplement what He does have, as do created beings. But what God has from the beginning, He will have and has until the [uneoding] end, as the blest Cyril wrote in his commentary on Genesis. Fear God, he says, out of love for Him, and not for the austere name that He has been given. Love Him as you ought to love Him; not for what He will give you in the future, but for what we have received, and for this world alone which He has created for us. Who is the man that can repay Him? Where is His repayment to be found in our works? Who persuaded Him in the beginning to bring us into being Who intercedes for us before Him, when we shall possess no [faculty of] memory, as though we never existed? Who will awake this our body [Syriac: our corruption] for that life? Again, whence descends the notion of knowledge into dust? O the wondrous mercy of God! O the astonishment at the bounty of our God and Creator! O might for which all is possible! O the immeasurable goodness that brings our nature again, sinners though we be, to His regeneration and rest! Who is sufficient to glorify Him? He raises up the transgressor and blasphemer, he renews dust unendowed with reason, making it rational and comprehending and the scattered and insensible dust and the scattered senses He makes a rational nature worthy of thought. The sinner is unable to comprehend the grace of His resurrection. Where is gehenna, that can afflict us? Where is perdition, that terrifies us in many ways and quenches the joy of His love? And what is gehenna as compared with the grace of His resurrection, when He will raise us from Hades and cause our corruptible nature to be clad in incorruption, and raise up in glory him that has fallen into Hades?

"Come, men of discernment, and be filled with wonder! Whose mind is sufficiently wise and marvelous to wonder worthily at the bounty of our Creator? His recompense of sinners is, that instead of a just recompense, He rewards them with resurrection, and instead of those bodies with which they trampled upon His law, He enrobes them with perfect glory and incorruption. [St. Isaac speaks here of those who have repented, as is evident from other similar passages in his book.) That grace whereby we are resurrected after we have sinned is greater than the grace which brought us into being when we were not. Glory be to Thine immeasurable grace, O Lord! Behold, Lord, the waves of Thy grace close my mouth with silence, and there is not a thought left in me before the face of Thy thanksgiving. What mouths can confess Thy praise, O good King, Thou Who lovest our life? Glory be to Thee for the two worlds which Thou hast created for our growth and delight, leading us by all things which Thou didst fashion to the knowledge of Thy glory, from now and unto the ages. Amen." St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 60.

7 Ibid.

8 "'For God so loved the world as to give His Only-begotten Son unto death for it.' Not that He could not have redeemed us by another means, but He wished to manifest to us His boundless love, and to draw us near Him through the death of His Only-begotten Son. Indeed, if He had anything more precious than His Son, He would have given it for our sakes, in order that through it our race would be found nigh to Him. Out of His abundant love, He was not pleased to do violence to our freedom, although it was possible for Him to do so; but He let it be in order that we would draw nigh to Him with the love and volition of our own will." St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 81.

9 "In times of despondency, never fail to bear in mind the Lord's commandment to Peter, to forgive a person who sins seventy times seven, For He who gave this command to another will Himself do far more." St. John Climacus, Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 26, (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1978), p. 147.

10 "A man who is just and wise is like God because he never chastises a man in revenge for wickedness, but only in order to correct him, or that others be afraid." St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 73. "God granted this great benefit to man: that he not abide in sin unto eternity." Theophilus of Antioch To Autolycus 2.26.

11 "And God saw all the things that He had made, and behold, they were very good." Genesis 1,31. "[God) created everything which has good qualities, but the profligacy of the demons has made use of the productions of nature for evil purposes, and the appearance of evil which these wear is from them and not from the perfect God." Tatian Address to the Greeks 17. "The construction of the world is good, but the life men live m it is bad." Ibid. 19. "For nothing from the first was made evil by God, but all things good, yea, very good." Theophilus of Antioch To Autolycus 2. 17. "Pour l'hebreau, le sensible n'est pas mauvais, ni fautif. Le mal ne vient pas de la matiere. Le monde est tres bon." [ "For the Hebrew, perceptible things are not evil, nor are they deceptive (lit., erroneous). Evil does not come from matter. The world is 'very good.'"] C. Tresmontant, Essai sur la Pensee Hebraique (Paris, 1953). "There is nothing that exists which does not partake of the beautiful and the good." St, Dionysius the Areopagite On the Divine Names (PG 3. 704). "For even if the reasons why some things come about escapes us, let that dogma be certain in our souls, that nothing evil is done by the good." St. BasiI the Great,EPE, 7, 112. "For it is not the part of a god to incite to things against nature.... But God, being perfectly good, is eternally doing good." Athenagoras, Embassy, 26.

12 "The devil is evil in such wise, that he is evil in disposition, but not that his nature is opposed to good." St. Basil the Great, EPE, 7, 112. "Since God is good, whatever He does, He does for man's sake. But whatever man does, he does for his own sake, both what is good and what is evil." Philokalia, vol. 1, chap. 121, St. Anthony the Great.

13 "For God made not death, neither hath He pleasure in the destruction of the living; for He created aIl things that they might have their being, and the generations of the world were healthful; and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of Hades upon the earth." Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-14. "For God created man to be immortal and made him to be an image of His own eternity. Nevertheless, through envy of the devil came death into the world." Wisdom of Solomon 2:23-24.

14 "And so he who was made in the likeness of God, since the more powerful spirit [the Holy Spirit] is separated from him, becomes mortal." Tatian Address to the Greeks 7.

15 "For as much as he departed from life, just so much did he draw nearer to death. For God is life; depriva-tion of life is death. So Adam was the author of death to himself through his departure from God, in accordance with the scripture which says: 'For behold, they that remove themselves from Thee shall perish.'" Psalm 72: 27.

16 "Thus God did not create death, but we brought it upon ourselves out of an evil disposition. Nevertheless, He did not hinder the dissolution on account of the aforementioned causes, so that He would not make the infirmity immortal in us." St. Basil the Great (PG 31. 345).

17 "But as many as depart from God by their own choice, He inflicts that separation from Himself which they have chosen of their own accord. But separation from God is death, and separation from light is darkness,... It is not, however, that the light has inflicted upon them the penalty of darkness." St. Irenaeus Against Heresies 5. 27:2. "But others shun the light and separate themselves from God...." Ibid., 5. 28:1.

18 Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 27 (Greek edition), St. Maximus the Confessor.

19 "We became the inheritors of the curse in Adam. Certainly we were not punished as though we had disobeyed that command along with him, but because he became mortal, he transmitted the sin to his seed; we were born mortals from a mortal." St. Anastasius the Sinaite, 19. Vide I.N. Karmirh, SUNOYIS THS DOGMATKHS THS ORQODOXOU EKKLHSIAS, s. 38.

20 "Man's transgression against the Creator's righteousness brought the soul's death sentence into effect; for when our forefathers forsook God and chose to do their own will, He abandoned them, not subjecting them to constraint. And for the reasons we have stated above, God lovingly forewarned them of this sentence. But he forbore and delayed in executing the sentence of death upon the body; and while He pronounced it, He relegated its fruition to the future in the abyss of His wisdom and the superabundance of His love for man. He did not say to Adam: 'return to whence thou wast taken,' but 'earth thou art, and unto earth thou shalt return' (Gen. 3:19). Those who hear this with understanding can also comprehend from these words that God 'did not make death' (Wisdom 1:13), either the soul's or the body's. For when He first gave the command, He did not say: 'in whatsoever day ye shall eat of it, die!,' but 'In whatsoever day ye shall eat of it, ye shall surely die' (Gen. 2:17). Nor did He afterwards say: 'return now unto earth,' but "Thou shalt return' (Gen. 3:19), in his manner forewarning, justly permitting and not obstructing what should come to pass." St. Gregory Palamas Physical Theological Moral and Practical Chapters 51 (PG 1157-1160).

21 "The tree of knowledge itself was good, and its fruit was good. For it was not the tree that had death in it, as some think, but the disobedience which had death in it; for there was nothing else in the fruit but knowledge alone; but knowledge is good when one uses it properly." Theophilus of Antioch To Autolycus 2. 25. "The tree did not engender death, for God did not create death; but death was the consequence of disobedience." St. John Damascene Homily on Holy Saturday 10 (PG 96. 612a).

22 "'And what is a merciful heart?' It is the heart's burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons and for every created thing; and by the recollection and sight of them the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears. From the strong and vehement mercy which grips his heart and from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he continually offers up tearful prayer, even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth and for those who harm him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner he even prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns in his heart without measure in the likeness of God." St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 81.

23 "It is not God who is hostile, but we; for God is never hostile." St. John Chrysostom (PG 61. 478).

24 Vide.I.S. RWMANIDHS, TO PROPATORIKON AMARTHMA, (Athens, 1957).

25 "Therefore, we believe in one God: one principle, without beginning, uncreated, unbegotten, indestructible and immortal, eternal, unlimited, uncircumscribed, unbounded, infinite in power, simple, uncompounded, incorporeal, unchanging, unaffected, unchangeable, inalterate, invisible, source of goodness and justice, light intellectual and inaccessible; power which no measure can give any idea of but which is measured only by His own will, for He can do all things whatsoever He pleases; Maker of all things both visible and invisible, holding together all things and conserving them, Provider for all, governing and dominating and ruling over all in unending and immortal reign; without contradiction, filling all things, contained by nothing, but Himself containing all things, being their Conserver and first Possessor; pervading all substances without being defiled, removed far beyond all things and every substance as being supersubstantial and surpassing all, super-eminently divine and good and replete; appointing all the principalities and orders, set above every principality and order, above essence and life and speech and concept; light itself and goodness and being insofar as having neither being, nor anything else that is derived from any other; the very source of being for all things that are, of life to the living, of speech to the articulate, and the cause of all good things for all; knowing all things before they begin to be; one substance, one godhead, one virtue, one will, one operation, one principality, one power, one domination, one kingdom; known in three perfect Persons and adored with one adoration, believed in and worshipped by every rational creature, united without confusion and distinct without separation, which is beyond understanding. We believe in Father and Son and Holy Spirit in Whom we have been baptized. For it is thus that the Lord enjoined the apostles: 'Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." St. ]John Damascene Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 1. 8.

26 "He created without matter." St, John Chrysostom (PG 59. 308).

27 St. John Damascene, op. cit. 1. 14.

28 St. John Damascene, op. cit. 1. 8.

29 "The soul without the body can do nothing, whether good or evil. The visions which some see concerning those things that are yonder are shown to them by God as a dispensation for their profit. Just as the lyre remains useless and silent if there is no one to play, so the soul and body, when they are separated, can do nothing." St. Athanasius the Great.

30 "For each of these, after its kind, is a body, be it angel, or soul, or devil. Subtle though they are, still in substance, character, and image according to the subtlety of their respective natures they are subtle bodies." St. Macarius the Great, Fifty Spiritual Homilies, 4, 9.

31 "Let us go and behold in the tombs that man is bare bones, food for worms and a stench." Great Euchologion, (Venice, 1862), p. 415. "For just as the light when it sets in the evening is not lost, so man also is given over to the grave as if setting; yet he is preserved for the dawn of the resurrection." St. John Chrysostom.

32 "He who berates the Creator for not making us sinless by nature, does naught but esteem the irrational nature above the rational." St. Basil the Great, EPE, 7, 110.

33 Also, "Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward." Hebrews 10:35.

34 "For if we sin willfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries, He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace? For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Hebrews 10:26-31.

35 St. Basil the Great, op. cit. 7, 94-96. In this particular passage, St. Basil carefully makes a distinction between the Greek verbs ktizw and dhmiourgew, both of which are generally translated into English as "create." However, ktizw has a long history, beginning with the Sanskrit kshi, which, as in early Greek, meant "to people a country," "to build houses and cities," "to colonize." Later, in Greek, the word came to mean "to establish," "to build up and develop," and finally, "to produce," "create," "bring about." Having in mind these other connotations of the verb ktizw, St. Basil discerned the proper implication of the word in this context and hence made a point of emphasizing this distinction.

36 Ibid. 7.98.

37 St. Gregory the Theologian Fifth Theological Oration 22 (PG 36. 15 7).

38 St. John Damascene, op. cit. 1.11.

39 "Famines and droughts and floods are common plagues of cities and nations which check the excess of evil. Therefore, just as the physician is a benefactor even if he should cause pain or suffering to the body (for he strives with the disease, and not with the sufferer), so in the same manner God is good Who administers salvation to everyone through the means of particular chastisements. But you, not only do you not speak evilly of the physician who cuts some members, cauterizes others, and excises others again completely from the body, but you even give him money and address him as savior because he confines the disease to a small area before the infirmity can claim the whole body. However, when you see a city crushing its inhabitants in an earthquake, or a ship going down at sea with all hands, you do not shrink from wagging a blasphemous tongue against the true Physician and Savior." St. Basil the Great, op. cit. 7, 94. "And you may accept the phrase 'I kill and I will make to live' (Deut. 32:39) literally, if you wish, since fear edifies the more simple. 'I will smite and I will heal' (Deut. 32:39). It is profitable to also understand this phrase literally; for the smiting engenders fear, while the healing incites to love. It is permitted you, nonetheless, to attain to a loftier understanding of the utterance. I will slay through sin and make to live through righteousness. 'But though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day' (II Cor. 4:16). Therefore, He does not slay one, and give life to another, but through the means which He slays, He gives life to a man, and He heals a man with that which He smites him, according to the proverb which says, 'For thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from death' (Prov. 23:14). So the flesh is chastised for the soul to be healed, and sin is put to death for righteousness to live.... When you hear 'There shall be no evil in a city which the Lord hath not wrought' (cf. Amos 3:6), understand by the noun 'evil' that the word intimates the tribulation brought upon sinners for the correction of offenses. For Scripture says, 'For I afflicted thee and straitened thee, to do good to thee' (cf. Deut. 8:3); so too is evil terminated before it spills out unhindered, as a strong dike or wall holds back a river.

"For these reasons, diseases of cities and nations, droughts, barrenness of the earth, and the more difficult conditions in the life of each, cut off the increase of wickedness. Thus, such evils come from God so as to uproot the true evils, for the tribulations of the body and all painful things from without have been devised for the restraining of sin. God, therefore, excises evil; never is evil from God.... The razing of cities, earthquakes and floods, the destruction of armies, shipwrecks and all catastrophes with many casualties which occur from earth or sea or air or fire or whatever cause, happen for the sobering of the survivors, because God chastises public evil with general scourges.

"The principal evil, therefore, which is sin, and which is especially worthy of the appellation of evil, depends upon our disposition; it depends upon us either to abstain from evil or to be in misery.

"Of the other evils, some are shown to be struggles for the proving of courage... while some are for the healing of sins... and some are for an example to make other men sober." St. Basil the Great, op. cit. 7, 98-102.

40 Ibid. 7, 92.

41 "The devil became the 'Prince of matter.'" Athenagoras, Embassy, 24, 25. "They [the demons] afterwards subdued the human race to themselves... and... sowed all wickedness. Whence also the poets and mythologists, not knowing that it was the angels and those demons who had been begotten by them that did these things to men, and women, and cities, and nations which they related, ascribed them to God Himself." St. Justin Martyr Second Apology 5.

42 "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil." I John 3:8.

43 Fotis Kontoglou, "EKKLHSIASTIKA HMEROLOGIA," OrqodoxoV TupoV, "Church Calendars," Orthodoxos Typos] 131 (Athens), 1 January 1971.

44 St. Basil the Great, Homily 13. 2, Exhortation to Holy Baptism (PG 31. 428 and 95, 1272).

45 "BIBLIOQHKH ELLHNWN PATERWN" [Library of Greek Fathers], vol. 40, pp. 60-61.

46 "'I am father, I am brother, I am bridegroom, I am dwelling place, I am food, I am raiment, I am root, I am foundation, all whatsoever thou willest, I am.' 'Be thou in need of nothing, I will be even a servant, for I came to minister, not to be ministered unto; I am friend, and member, and head, and brother, and sister, and mother; I am all; only cling thou closely to me. I was poor for thee, and a wanderer for thee, on the Cross for thee, in the tomb for thee, above I intercede for thee to the Father; on earth I am come for thy sake an ambassador from my Father. Thou art all things to me, brother, and joint heir, and friend, and member.' What wouldest thou more?" St. John Chrysostom, Homily 76 on the Gospel of Matthew (PG 58. 700).

47 "'The end of the world' signifies not the annihilation of the world, but its transformation. Everything will be transformed suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye.... And the Lord will appear in glory on the clouds. Trumpets will sound, and loud, with power! They will sound in the soul and conscience! All will become clear to the human conscience. The Prophet Daniel, speaking of the Last Judgment, relates how the Ancient of Days, the Judge, sits on His throne, and before Him is a fiery stream (Dan. 7:9-10). Fire is a purifying element; it burns sins. Woe to a man if sin has become a part of his nature: then the fire will burn the man himself. This fire will be kindled within a man; seeing the Cross, some will rejoice, but others will fall into confusion, terror, and despair. Thus will men be divided instantly. The very state of a man's soul casts him to one side or the other, to right or to left.

"The more consciously and persistently a man strives toward God in his life, the greater will be his joy when he hears: 'Come unto Me, ye blessed.' And conversely: the same words will call the fire of horror and torture on those who did not desire Him, who fled and fought or blasphemed Him during their lifetime!

"The Last Judgment knows of no witnesses or written protocols! Everything is inscribed in the souls of men and these records, these 'books', are opened at the Judgment. Everything becomes clear to all and to oneself.

"And some will go to joy, while others -- to horror.

"When 'the books are opened,' it will become clear that the roots of all vices lie in the human soul. Here is a drunkard or a lecher: when the body has died, some may think that sin is dead too. No! There was an inclination to sin in the soul, and that sin was sweet to the soul, and if the soul has not repented of the sin and has not freed itself from it, it will come to the Last Judgment also with the same desire for sin. It will never satisfy that desire and in that soul there will be the suffering of hatred. It will accuse everyone and everything in its tortured condition, it will hate everyone and everything. 'There will be gnashing of teeth' of powerless malice and the unquenchable fire of hatred.

"A 'fiery gehenna' -- such is the inner fire. 'Here there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.' Such is the state of hell." Archbishop John Maximovitch, "The Last Judgment," Orthodox Word (November- December, 1966): 177-78.

Open the blinds & heal your Soul, Lk 22:24-30

Jesus intervened as the disciples bickered over who would end up greatest:

"Kings throw their weight around and people in authority give themselves fancy titles, but it's not going to be that way with you.

Let the senior become junior; the leader act the servant.”

Jesus is warning the disciples that by seeking positions of glory, they are in danger of breaking the unity he is bringing.

He is on the road to surrender and integrity, and ultimately to our salvation.

An earlier version of this same passage also occurs in Mark’s gospel.

There, Jesus says that even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Jesus is conferring a kingdom on the disciples in the same way that God has conferred one on Jesus.

A choice must be made. A distinction is being drawn by Jesus about what greatness entails in his way of seeing it, as opposed to the usual way.

Jesus faced an establishment for which religion was an arm of government. Roman rulers called themselves "Benefactors," as if the sole aim of their rule was the good of the people, while the Jewish leaders collaborated with the empire.

And in the world it is easy to convince oneself that one is doing something for the common good, when one is really glorifying oneself, with worldy feelings.

These worldy feelings thrill us, because they are invented by societies and cultures to make us productive and to give us a purpose.

But not so with soul feelings… Jesus’ kind of fulfilment.

The Jesuit Anthony De Mello explained it very well like this:

Compare your feelings connected to praise and applause with your feelings connected to seeing a sunset or hearing birdsong.

Compare your feelings of gaining a victory about something with your feelings of being absorbed in something.

Compare your feelings of being looked up to, with your feelings of intimacy.

Whenever we are motivated by the desire for self-glorification, attention, praise, approval, popularity, success, power or fame, or a million other worldly mentionables, we are gaining the world and losing our souls.

Jesus was on the road to surrender and integrity and ultimately salvation. But the English word “salvation” primarily means healing, and is related to its derivative, our word, “salve”, which we still use.

So how can we be healed?

There’s a very beautiful parable about worldy feelings along the journey we are all taking.

It goes like this:

“A group of tourists sits on a bus that is passing through gloriously beautiful country, lakes and mountains and green fields and rivers.

But the shades of the bus are pulled down. They do not have the slightest idea of what lies beyond the windows of the bus.

And all the time of their journey is spent in squandering over who will have the best seat of honour in the bus, who will be applauded, who will be well considered.

And so they remain, till the journey’s end.”

Salvation, or healing, may have been achieved by Jesus, but it only comes in us by responding to the invitation to open the blinds.

I remember when I was being confirmed, the curate was trying to teach me about Jesus as unique Son of God, and I mentioned that I believed that in the room we were all unique sons and daughters of God.

“Father Son and Holy Spirit”, he growled at me.

Well now I am a curate myself, and I still believe we are all unique sons and daughters of God, and that everything, and I mean everything, is embedded in God.

Father, that mystery which is beyond us, Christ, the experience which is within us, and Holy Spirit, the transformation and dynamic connection between us all, is in us.

With this understanding, greatness is not something we need to achieve or assert or defend or argue out, but something we just need to accept; we already are great.

In Silence let us worship the incomprehensible

THE TRUTH WILL NOT SECURE YOU TIGHT

“The truth shall set you free”, says Jesus Christ to his disciples in John’s gospel. Truth is precious in every discipline, and truth is a revelation not just to human beings, but also through them. Awareness of the way our own personal filters will colour the truth is called Critical Realism. This can encourage sceptical questions but retain unselfconscious humility.

Thanks to a cold virus I recently watched Carl Sagan’s utterly exhilarating TV documentary ‘Cosmos’, about the evolution of this amazing universe. If you have 13 hours to spare, it’s highly recommended. It ends with these words: “It is as if there were a God who said to us: I set before you two ways, you can use your technology to destroy you, or to carry you to the stars, it is up to you.”

Observation of the universe implies it is expanding outwards. The current consensus is that 15 billion years ago it could fit through the eye of a needle. In many cultures, asking how it began has led people to say a God created it out of nothing.

“But if we wish to pursue this question courageously,” says Carl Sagan, “we must ask the next question. Where did God come from? If we decide this is unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is unanswerable? If we say that God always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe always existed? Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries.”

God is not logically necessary, and the question of beginnings is not crucial, but truth shall set you free. Truth doesn’t evade thinking the uncomfortable, but it does respect the Mystery.

“The role of the creator,” says Anglican physicist Rev Dr John Polkinghorne “is not to light the blue touch paper of the Big Bang and start it all going, but to hold the world in Being. God is as much the creator of the world today as God was 15 billion years ago.”

A COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO REPENTANCE

Imagine we are in a classroom, but it’s no ordinary classroom. It is the complete idiots guide to repentance, and Jesus is the supply teacher, and as he enters the class, he says nothing.

He just writes the word REPENTANCE in capital letters on the board, followed by the phrase: “WHAT is it?”

He turns and looks at us.

Silence.

Hands go up around us to offer suggestions.

“Perhaps repentance is guilt”, someone says sheepishly.

“Perhaps repentance is a ritual act, looking somber and saying sorry but not actually ever living a different life.” adds another.

“Repentance is remorse and regret,” says a third pupil, while he is wondering if anyone ever feels it.

Just then Jesus the teacher writes something else.

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” it reads.

Jesus looks around the classroom and raises his eyebrows, forcing us all to ponder like a big focus group. So we put our heads together.

‘Where our treasure is’, we figure, is another way of saying ‘what we most value’.

And ‘where our heart is’ is a way of describing where our essential being is – ie. who we really are.

So we confidently elect a spokesperson.

“What we most value,” says our spokesperson, “is inevitably who we will become.”

“If we dwell on guilt, we remain guilty.

“If we value rituals, we become ritualistic, and if we value money most, we become avaricious.

But Jesus interrupts our spokesperson and suddenly writes a third message on the board.

“Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.”

He noiselessly opens the floor to our responses again. More hands go up.

“Perhaps,” says someone from the back, “if we value the impermanent and changeable, a turbulent natural world or an unstable financial market - that is what we ourselves can become, turbulent and unstable.”

Jesus goes back to the word Repentance on the board, underlines it twice, and adds a big question mark.

I can’t stand it any longer, so I have a go myself.

“In God we live and move and have our being Jesus, as it says in Acts, which I know wasn’t actually written in your time, but all the same, it is in repentance that we re-consider who we actually are, and in whom we do have our being.

“And is there any evidence for this?” says Jesus.

I consider pointing straight back to him, isn’t it that obvious? But apparently not to him, so instead I hold up the gospel.

“The Greek word translated into repentance in the English language is meta-noia, Jesus. Meta, meaning after or beyond or above, noia, meaning perceiving or thinking, noia coming from nous, nous meaning the mind. “Use your nouse!”, as the saying goes.

Jesus doesn’t move a fraction of a muscle. I waver but go on.

“So if repentance or meta noia means beyond the mind, then mentally knowing all about God is by no means the same as actually knowing God.”

Jesus looks interested and invites me to go on.

“Repentance must take us beyond mental feelings.

On a roll, I look at the saviour.

“So actually” I say to Jesus, “true repentance is being beyond what the heart and mind can picture and measure in this world, being where no moth can eat, no chemical reaction can rust, and no thief can steal. You said as much yourself Jesus, well, according to whoever wrote Matthew you did anyway.

“Providing we are able to let limiting patterns go, we see who we really are - turned away from temporary estrange­ments with our neighbours towards a superior state of being: God.

“Repentance is not identifying with decaying nature and thief prone material but with divine reality, in whom everything sits. Letting go of what we are not, and becoming who we are.”

Christ breaks his silence. “And is there any evidence of this from Church tradition?” he says enigmatically. But I’m not entirely sure if he is being serious, the Kingdom must be more important to him than Church tradition. So I think of pointing to him again, but as I sense the end of the lesson, I offer Church history, just to oblige.

"Repentance is salva­tion, but a lack of understanding is the death of [this] repentance.” - Bishop Basil the Great, 4th century.

Sure enough the bell rings for the end of the lesson. Jesus picks up a complete idiot’s guide book and reads:

“God holds each person by a string. When you sin, you cut it and seem to drop away from God, but God simultaneously ties it up in a knot – thereby bringing you closer. Again your sense of separation cuts the string – but with each new knot you are drawn closer still, and understand this,” Jesus says, putting the book down and looking at us: “In repentance, there is no dualistic feeling towards a Father who is separate from us. God is one, God both transcends this world and is the depth within it. Your Father is unseen; he sees what is in secret, and God will be your only reward.”

Jesus dismisses the class, in the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen

IMPERFECT AND JUST DIVINE

I was with trainee vicars recently – someone has to be. We met a lovely deaf woman called Hannah, who was asked through an interpreter if she thought she would be physically healed, or able to hear, before or after death.

“No”, she replied. “We are made in the image of God, and God is not a physically perfect human being.”

Hannah had accepted herself. Knowing we are divine can be hard, even and especially for religious people. But the message of Genesis begins by telling us how God created man in his own image, male and female, and God saw all that he had made, and it was good.

1 Corinthians 13 famously tells us how Love keeps no record of wrongs, but we bewail our sins as if God wants to be reminded of them:

“Remember not my sins, oh Lord!”

- “What sins? I forgot them long ago, you’ll have to prod my memory.”

We are aware of ourselves as evolved creatures who suffer, kill, eat, reproduce and die, which causes us immense anxiety. Perhaps sin should do, but we shouldn’t be stuck on it.

The Greek word for repentance: “metanoia”, means a turning of direction, a change of mind and heart, a new consciousness. In repenting we recognise original goodness, the grace of the living God. “The glory of God”, said Church Father Irenaeus, “is a human being fully alive.” Jesus’ type of life was full because he saw all this whilst in the world. But not everyone does.

“Why do you keep talking about mistakes?” said one spouse. “I thought you had forgotten and forgiven.”

“I have,” replied the other, “and don’t you forget it.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.....ATTENTION.....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On their golden wedding anniversary, a couple were kept busy all day with the celebrations and the crowds of relatives and friends who dropped in to congratulate them. So they were grateful when, toward evening, they were able to be alone in the porch, watching the sunset and relaxing after the tiring day.

The old man gazed fondly at his wife and said: ‘Agatha, I’m proud of you.’

‘What was that?’ asked the old lady.

‘I said I’m proud of you.’

‘That’s all right’ she replied with a dismissive gesture. ‘I’m tired of you too’.

We don’t always get back what we expect, and
paying attention can make the difference.

In Acts 3 1-10 we read that when the crippled man saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him. Peter said, "Look at us!"

I can’t help noticing that Peter has asked the crippled beggar to look at him, but the beggar hadn’t actually asked for that. People can avoid having to engage with what will heal them, and looking at someone is more than giving someone your attention, it is acknowledging and expanding their reality with an attention which is beyond being anyone's alone.

This is a healing grace, but the man wasn’t asking for healing, he was asking for money.

Peter couldn’t give the man what he was actually asking for. Perhaps it is just that the apostles didn’t carry silver or gold. Perhaps it is that our desire for money gets in the way and prevents our healing. Perhaps it was more than this.

"Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." Regardless of the money, Peter gave the man what Peter did have, and this resulted in the man becoming strong, where he had previously been weak.

Maybe you have walked past a Big Issue seller in a city and looked at him or her in the eye while saying no thank you, rather than just walking past and ignoring the same Big Issue seller. This provides real dignity, even without the money.

And what did Peter really give the beggar man, apart from his attention? Perhaps nothing else, perhaps this very act of attentiveness in itself is enough to make a crippled man become strong.

Taking him by the right hand, he helped him up, and instantly the man's feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk. Then he went with them into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God.

Sometimes it is in giving attention to ourselves that we notice where we are crippling ourselves. As I was writing this I suddenly noticed the slump in my back and sat up straight.

And it is in giving attention to others that we notice how they open up, how they are no longer begging for mercy in the face of existence, but all of a sudden appraising its wonder and being full of its life.

This very attention is a work of prayer. I was with someone suffering from Alzheimers the other day and noticed her spring back to personhood as a result of the renewed attention being payed to her in the form of an interested and inclusive three-way dialogue.

But sometimes speech is not needed, pure listening is just what brings that person back into the realm of life, and allows them to relate again.

I wonder what Florence Nightingale would have made of the recent suspension of a nurse simply because she politely offered to pray for a patient – I like to imagine that this work of attention would have actually been a requirement of the job of nursing for Florence Nightingale. Because prayerful attention renews our beauty.

The man in our story had been begging at the temple gate called Beautiful. When all the people saw him walking and praising God, they recognized him as the same man who used to sit begging at this temple gate, called Beautiful.

Having been given attention through Peter he no longer needed to beg for the Beauty of being alive, now he understood that he was beauty – and it was this understanding which enabled him to walk through the gate. No longer did he need to be carried there.

In the Symposium, Socrate’s pupil Plato said that one who contemplates absolute beauty and is in constant union with it will be able to bring forth not mere reflected images of goodness, but true goodness, because one will be in contact not with a reflection, but with the truth. Not with the ideas of God, but with the reality behind them.

The attention which enables us and makes us appreciate beauty was available to all during the life of Jesus. This attention must have lived on, because the writer of Acts was willing and able to to reflect upon it, and tell us these stories about the name of Jesus of Nazareth 4 or 5 decades after his crucifiction.

On recognizing a former beggar, he said, other people were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him – the divine work of attending had spread outwards, as it still spreads outwards today, because it is infinite.

The wonder and amazement of being had filled more people with that prayerful attention to the experience and existence and Being we have called God.

This miraculous and unexpected attention was offered to the disciples through the life of Jesus, and in this narrative of ours it was offered to the beggar through Peter and John, and it still offers itself to us now with an ability to heal.

It is a presence without which we can remain lame. But the paradox is that the beggar didn’t ask for it, he actually wanted something else.

God’s grace is gratuitous and unexpected because it comes to make us fully human despite our circumstances, not because of them.

May you live in Interesting times

I found myself saddened and shaken on discovering how a colleague had decided to leave the Church behind before even finishing his curacy. A former policeman ordained Priest, a popular affable capable and mature man married with several children, he was a formative influence on many others like me. He had sacrificed much and been a gift to the Anglo Catholic Church and I imagine he continues to regard himself as a priest. It was an unexpected twist, highlighting not just the hidden-ness of God, but the sometimes uneasy relationship between faith and fact.

Meanwhile another friend of mine was reminded of unpredictability by trying to organize the journey of some Los Posados figures through a busy English city. If you’ve never heard of Los Posados, it’s a Mexican tradition in which the nativity story is celebrated by passing small Mary and Joseph figurines along the street. Occupants of every business were to receive the figures and read some liturgy and prayer before publicly displaying Mary and Joseph for 24 hours and passing them to the neighbouring business the following day. The idea was for strangers to become acquainted over Christmas and observers to discuss the progress of the figures along the street. An otherwise fragmented community would thereby be connected by a Christian message of hope. But for my friend there was another unexpected twist.

The pubs and bookmakers and late night kebab shops would accept the Los Posados, while the Salvation Army shop said no, because the display was too religious for them.

The Chinese have an ambiguous saying: “May you live in interesting times,” and frankly I think we do. We need to look beyond the surface to read the signs and see into what’s hidden.

But so did the first hearers of John’s gospel. For a start they were becoming less Jewish. Their trusted route to God was beginning to look different.

Jesus the Jew read the Torah, the Jewish scripture. He had Jewish followers, and the first Christians were Jewish, but by the time today’s gospel was written, Christianity and Judaism were already parting company.

Remember, when Jesus saw Nathaniel approaching, he said of him, "Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false."
"How do you know me?" Nathaniel asked. 
 Jesus answered, "I saw you while you were still under the fig tree, before Philip called you."

Then Nathaniel declared, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel."

Jesus said: "You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that. I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man."

For the community who first heard this no longer was religion simply a case of passing on inherited meaning - it was about looking for hidden messages.

Messages like the fig tree under which Nathaniel sat, and the angels descending upon the Son of Man.

Figs growing upon the tree grow at staggered intervals. So the more often you search a fig tree, the more you are going to find on it. This is why Rabbinic tradition always had a fig tree symbolizing Torah. The more often you returned to read the Torah prayerfully, the more flavor you would find for your life.

Since the fig tree is Jewish scripture, and the true Israelite sits under a fig tree, the writer of John’s gospel is portraying Nathaniel as the enlightened reader who can recognize Jesus not just as Rabbi but as Son of God and King of Israel. Here, it is claimed, is the direction of a true Judaism.

Because in the Torah, a Son of God is any person who has a special relationship with God – an angel, a king, a judge, or a just man.

But in the New Testament, Son of God means a unique link between God and humankind for all types of people, Jewish or not.

So when Nathaniel is described as a true Israelite in whom there is nothing false, the relationship between faith and fact is shifting.

In Hebrew, Nathaniel means ‘God gives’, so the writer of John’s gospel uses Nathaniel to represent those Jews who understand what God gives, ie. the revelation of Jesus as unique Son of God for everyone.

Christianity was emerging as a new way to God.

These must have been interesting times. To his first readers, the author was saying that by accepting the Gospel as well as the Torah, a believing community would see the heavens existentially open.

Angels of God would ascend and descend, not just for Israel and upon a ladder as they had done back in Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28:12, but for all types of people, upon the risen Son of Man, Jesus.

But these must also have been uncomfortable times. In fact we know that people were being ejected from the synagogues in this period.

We too are in a time when the familiar patterns of religion are changing. There can’t be anyone here who hasn’t noticed the phenomenal pace of cultural change over the past 40 years, and we are now confronted with an unpredictable juxtaposition of secularism and religion.

In a recent and fascinating book called the Spirituality Revolution, the author claims the precious vase of inherited faith once carefully passed from one generation to another in our society has unfortunately been dropped onto the floor and smashed. What, he asks, are we to do next? Pick up the pieces of the old vessel and find some glue, or look for a new one in our-selves and in our community?

The landscape is changing.

What is for sure is that we are not going to be able to rest content to be merely Sunday Christians or weekend worshippers.

As I was driving past some of the new headstones on vivid display at an undertaker’s recently, alongside the stone Angels and the stone Crosses I saw a headstone in the shape of a stone football shirt, next to a large stone football shaped flower vase.

The landscape was also changing for the readers of John’s gospel - were they Jews, were they Jewish Christians, or were they Christians?

And if we are on a living journey, the landscape should change. But there are still revelations to be had by following Jesus, and there is still a deeper dimension underneath the play of opposites, an abiding presence, an uncaused Being. God the Holy Spirit still communicates with his secularized children.

But we need to be prepared to deepen and to revitalize and to expand our spiritual journey, and not to rest content. It has never been comfort that the gospel offers, but peace.

In John’s gospel Jesus calls Philip explicitly. He calls him in person, just as he had called Levi explicitly and in person in Mark’s gospel, saying: ‘Follow me’.

The gospel of Christ is inspired, but it can only live if it lives in us. It is we who must follow and be inspired if we are to bring faith and fact together.

An unexpected twist, but we will engage with the spirit or become irrelevant in the world.

Only by engaging prayerfully can we be inspired by the supernatural Love of the Father, the redeeming grace of the Son, and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, who has never been comfortably in the club, and cannot be confined to a text, a building, an organisation or a religious ritual.

May God bless you all.

................CHRISTMAS FOREVER...............

In an effort to avoid pontificating, here is a true story.

When I was a boy my Father used to take the whole family to work on Christmas morning.

Work was on the children’s wards, and in between the paintings of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, I could tell Dad was admired. Seeing young patients on this special day was odd, but it was good to see that sick children also had presents.

A hospital Santa would have one for us too. There was a drink and a mince pie. The nurses had tinsel on their hats and smiles on their faces. To this day I find the smell of disinfectant in a hospital welcoming, and Jesus can appear on the wards.

But what fascinated me as a boy was the special care baby unit, SCBU as the nurses called it. Christmas morning would find us peering at the premature babies. Their lives were as transparent as their incubators. Of course they weren’t generally awake but each near naked baby had transparent tubes leading into its nostrils or veins. Their bodies were no bigger than my own hands.

Purple feet and hands had toes and fingers so tiny that all of them might cover your fingernails. Wrists or ankles were tagged, which made the babies look so fragile they were like little birds without feathers.

Except these were humans. They might suddenly yawn or reveal a tiny tongue. There was a kind of interconnected interdependent relationship with the staff. Their very lives were open. In my mind these babies would become associated with the openness of the infant Jesus.

The word was made flesh, we say, and the fact Jesus was born means God is much more than a word, because he relates to me in the most intimate way possible, without words, he loves me through a human body as helpless as my own, and as helpless as the tiny babies.

Here is no tyrant God demanding a sacrifice, no fearful guilty conscience needing reassurance. Original goodness floods the world as perfect love drives out fear, fear which has to do with punishment.

Here God empties himself into human nature and identifies with my plight. We identify with one another. I am free to worship without fear, as we say in the Benedictus. God is lover. Two become One.

If I can get highfollutin' just for a paragraph, St Gregory of Nazianzus put it like this: “The very Son of God, older than the ages, invisible, incomprehensible, incorporeal, beginning of beginning, light of light, fountain of life and immortality … perfect likeness … he it is who comes to his own image and takes our nature for the good of our nature, and unites himself to an intelligent soul for the good of my soul, to purify like by like ... He takes on the poverty of my flesh, that I may gain the riches of his divinity. He who is full is made empty … that I may share in his fullness ... What is this mystery that surrounds us?”

But our society does away with mystery, the hospital wards have managers. Not just the hospital wards of course. Everything is measured and assessed. But the mystery of Being still surrounds us, unmeasurable.

Jesus related openly and intimately to this mystery in a very practical way. He spoke of Abba, which translates more like Daddy than like Father. And no true Dad wants his child to be dependent. To be open to the mystery is to be emptied, and to become part of something much much greater.

The incarnation of God means not just that God empties himself into a human being, but that a human being can reciprocate.

Yet often, instead of emptiness we find mundane thoughts. I might think: Am I going off message? Am I too clever? Am I not clever enough? Am I loved? Am I unloving? What do I do with these feelings? Does my backside look too big in this? We need to let this go gracefully.

It is hard to imagine Jesus asking these sorts of questions, because he is unself-conscious, which is why he commands us to lose ourselves. He relates openly and learns acceptance. He fully suffers our nature along with us, yet nature cannot be forced to fully explain Jesus, OR our own awareness.

Earlier I said that no true Dad wants his child to be dependent. But our saviour wasn’t independent either. “No man is an island entire of itself”, wrote John Donne, a Christian. And not even the Son of God, God who is a self existing being. He didn’t announce himself in physical might or temporal power. As a baby, God is interdependent, like reality itself.

That revolutionary non-violent Christian Martin Luther King once captured this: "For some strange reason” he said, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality".

Martin Luther King would talk about being beholden to half the world over his breakfast - his tea from India, his marmalade from Europe. Everything is interconnected.

And so our sustainer is born not only in a stable in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, not in the Bible, but in this body. We cannot divorce ourselves from incarnate reality. We are spiritual beings in communion.

Christmas is not just about buying presents we can afford, but accepting the presence which we cannot escape.
Being IS communion.

Our society talks of self-fulfillment and self-potential, of valuing ourselves, but preoccupation with the self cripples relationships and replaces true communion with mere politics and religion. The flesh becomes word again. This might just be a feeling of unease or it might be something much more tragic.

A child born in Bethlehem today is literally walled in by an unholy trinity of political military and religious apartheid.

God knows we are in communion, for better or worse. Interconnected. But we turn away and put our energy into keeping things constant when all the evidence is that in communion everything is in flux. The seasons change, our bodies change, people die and are born. We try to halt happy moments, we yearn for when we were younger, when so-and-so was here, when we will finally be able to relax on holiday. We pretend we are not going to die. Our first reaction to change is to ask how it might affect us, so we waste creative energy, resisting or reacting.

Our preoccupation with the self does not lead to compassion, which is why Jesus is unselfconscious and commands us to lose ourselves, and why the gospels affirm this message. It is why a rich man is sent away unable to cope with Jesus’ suggestions. It is why St Peter is rebuked for resisting rejection. It is why the disciples squabble over their own importance. It is all just so impossible to grasp.

But that’s exactly the point.

In verses 6 & 7 of Philippians 2 we read, ‘though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited - grasped - but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant … and God exalted him."

The crib in which our saviour is born is like an incubator, because Life is a gift which is impossible for an individual to measure. Life is a gift to be opened, not valued. It is priceless. Interconnected. Life is a gift to be shared, because it cannot be grasped. And life does not end.

William Blake once wrote: “He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself.”

So, a very, very, very Happy Christmas to you all, and not only for today, but forever.

+++++++WHEN THE SON FINALLY SETS+++++++

A priest walked into a pub, indignant to find so many of his parishioners there. He rounded them up and shepherded them into the church. Then he solemnly said: “All those who want to go to heaven, step over here to the left.”

Everyone stepped over except one man, who stubbornly stood his ground. The priest looked at him fiercely and said: “Don’t you want to go to heaven?”

“No.” said the man.

“Do you mean to tell me you don’t want to go to heaven when you die?”

“Of course I want to go to heaven when I die. I thought you were going now!”

We all want heaven, but just like the people stepping to the left with the priest, we can be in our religious traditions but fail to embody them. And just like the man staying in the pub, we can also just fail to even enter one at all. So what are we to do with our religious traditions?

Embodying his religious tradition all the way to heaven cost Jesus his life, while the disciples deserted him. If we seek eternal life out of our own self-interest, how is this salvation?

As even Rowan Williams has recognised: “Religious practice claims to offer liberation: but if God is conceived as just another bundle of stimuli for the greedy self, and if our relationship with God takes on the character of a personal love affair with longings and raptures, rows and reconciliations, how on earth can it liberate?”

In the towns of Galilee, John the Baptist had sent his disciples to ask Jesus a question: “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”

And to be able to demonstrate the truth to John’s disciples, Jesus had to refer back to the past, and to his own religious tradition. When he said; “the blind receive sight,” he referred to Isaiah 29:18; “the eyes of the blind shall see”. When he said; “the lame walk,” he referred back to Isaiah 42:18; “then the lame shall leap like a deer”. When he said; “the dead are raised”, he referred to Isaiah 26:19; “your dead will live”.

It was however not enough for Jesus just to refer back to his religious tradition. The tradition had to be embodied in the eternal present, and so somehow Jesus would end up helping people to be able to see, to be able to leap, to be able to live. As a Jew, Jesus was already acquainted with the scroll, but he was somehow coming to realise Isaiah in his own life.

And here is our lesson. As Christians, we are already acquainted with our own religious tradition, but to embody it we should be somehow coming to realise Christ in our own lives. We should be: “in Christ”, as St Paul put it. To quote St Theresa of Avila: Christ has no body now on earth but yours; No Hands but yours; No feet but yours: Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion looks out into the world; Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good; Yours are the hands with which he is to bless now.

The light of awareness should make our old texts suddenly, spiritually, present themselves anew. The word becoming flesh in us.

Meanwhile humanists have been putting posters on buses. The posters read: “There probably is no God. Stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

It is amusing that Christians are responding by creating websites called: “There probably is.” Because it is an irrelevant argument in many ways - God is being, he is the very presence giving you the ability to debate his existence or non-existence.

Therefore, as Theologian Paul Tillich has said; "to argue that he exists is to deny him."

If God is spirit, and if by Christ, we mean the divine come into human nature, a meeting ground of humanity and divinity in creation, then we can give ourselves to Christ by saying; “You are my life”. And this means the personal pronoun “I” can become a doorway to something much larger.

Not out of self-interest, but out of self-emptying.

However, this will inevitably bring us to the question of eternal life. Is eternal life what both evangelical and liberal theologians have called; “pie in the sky when we die,” or does eternal life really begin here and now? Or is that a false dichotomy anyway?

Let’s park that for a moment and come back to it.
Because I think to understand the answer to all this we need to understand sacrifice.

Embodying his religious tradition in the present meant more than death for Jesus. It meant sacrifice. Death is much more common than sacrifice. But sacrifice is rare. To understand sacrifice we understand that sacrifice isn’t giving something up, like giving up your time and your money, for example. Nor is sacrifice about being burned or stabbed on an altar. The meaning of sacrifice comes right out of two root words, sacer, meaning sacred, and facere, meaning to make.

So quite literally, when our lives are being made sacred, this is sacrifice. Now we can start to go back to eternal life.

I suggest an eternal life is a life that is being made sacred. Being made sacred is what the embodying of religion is all about. It is something done in us, rather than something which we do. So while we can help this to happen by being open to it happening, going all the way with it is generally a cost we don’t want to pay.

Hell, so to speak, is quite a common dilemma.

Take Woody Allen for example. “Would I ever be happy, if only I was happy,” he said. But we are cut off from happiness by the very hope which impels us to pursue it.

By the very definition of hope, we only hope for what we can’t currently have, and so to hope for the kingdom of heaven must necessarily mean it is beyond our reach.

But we are not beyond its reach, and this is what God’s liberating grace is.

The Celtic saints knew about it. As well talking about; “places of my resurrection”, the Celtic saints would also talk about; “thin places”, which were the places where the veil between earth and heaven lifts, and if this has ever happened to you, you will know it as a continuum, and as the very fulfillment of the Lord’s prayer - thy kingdom come, on earth, as in heaven. In other words, death is now.

Don’t take my word for it. “To live is Christ, and to die is gain”, wrote St Paul, who also said Love was greater than faith and hope.

In his Soliloques, Augustine said this of heaven; “Then it will no longer be faith, but sight”.

“In Christ,” wrote St Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, “there was perfect charity, but there was neither faith nor hope.” He didn't need them, he was in heaven.

So the answer to our question about eternal life being either now or not yet, is that the promise of eternal life not yet disappears along with our own enclosed and separated life. Life becomes God. “To live is Christ, and to die is gain”, wrote St Paul.

When God is all in all, hope and fear are gone.

If we really understand sacrifice we will not have worshipped a religious tradition, but like Jesus Christ we will have allowed one to embody us, to live us out, and to make us disappear.

This is called self-emptying, or coming to realise Christ in our own lives. This is what being made sacred is all about.

Phillipians Chapter 2 verse 5 - Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the very form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing.

God made himself nothing, therefore he was exalted.
But humans fear nothing.

If, in fulfilling a religious tradition, self-emptying is what God did for us, are we responding?

In the name of the creator, the redeemer, the sustainer. Amen.

Remembering Angels

As remembrance day comes each year, I remember my grandfather William, and also Einstein's statement that: "a problem cannot be solved using the same consciousness which created it."

William, see above, amazingly managed to survive the fighting in the Somme in WW1, the so-called 'war to end wars'.

His photo represents so many other soliders who (along with their families) heroically suffered and died, and still do so even today.

And yet William would also defend the rights of conscientious objectors, ironically telling one in particular to: 'stick to his guns.' The freedom to refuse to fight was one of the very freedoms which he was fighting for.

One of the very many abused WW1 objectors was shipped to France and kept in inhumane conditions which gave him dysentery before being brought before a military trial, where he was told that his papers were marked 'Death', and asked if he was going to continue to resist? 'Yes,' he said, 'Men are dying in agony in the trenches for the things that they believe in and I wouldn't be less than them.'



And as the cartoon above reminds us, humans only heroically die for their countries when other humans heroically kill for theirs.

The history of world conflict demonstrates that one man's terrorist is perceived by another man as a freedom fighter.

As our capacity for destruction grows, Einstein's quote suggests that if we wish to survive as a species, learning to inhabit other planets may not be enough.

Unless we can learn a different consciousness, the insects could outlive us on Mars too.

Non violence seems rare now, but there isn’t one early church Father who interprets Jesus as advocating anything but strict non-violence, and Christianity was a persecuted pacifist religion for hundreds of years before the Emperor Constantine adopted it as the official religion of a state built on military domination.

The sanction of the Roman Empire opened up huge areas of influence to Christianity.

But before this sanction, soldiers were not baptised. After it, only the baptised could be soldiers!

As the Professor of Patristics Andrew Louth recently put it on BBC Radio 4's 'In our time': “Christianity became the ideology of the empire, and that is something that Christians have not found easy to cope with. Christianity before Constantine was a largely pacific religion. There are lots of stories of Christians being persecuted because they refused to serve in the army. This changes dramatically in the 4th century, and the Church has to find some way of ending up blessing guns.”

Hence the just war tradition. A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered, and force may not be used for economic gain. The cause must not be futile, and it is not just if disproportionate measures are required for success.

Somehow I am reminded again of the value of a faith which is not based upon an ideology. Apophasis is the knowledge that we do not know God by affirming what he is, but by subtracting what he is not.

So in Rowan William's book: 'Wrestling with Angels", Williams describes Apophatic Christianity as a: "cross for human ways of thought" and says that the human person is: "a reality beyond the bondage of a closed conceptual system."

Apophatic Christianity is: "the fruit of the graceful indwelling of the Holy Ghost, and the fulfillment of the evangelical commendation of losing one's life in order to save it."

This comes in ecstasis - the going out of oneself - and also in contemplation - the "self revelation of God in silence", which shows us the root of all our sin.

Sin comes from our: "confusion of personality with individuality, the regarding of personal being as a bundle of repeatable natural characteristics deployed by a controlling independent ego, defined in terms of its opposition to and exclusion of other egos".

In other words, human beings are falsely separated and truly One, like it or not.

And whichever country we identify ourselves with, we remain truly One, for better or worse, so that whatever we do to others, we inescapably also do to ourselves. We do our best for our country, but we are more than children of a country.

That Child of God and Christian martyr for non-violent struggle Martin Luther King put it like this: "For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality".

The risen Christ to you all.

.........Being believed in

Most of us know how being believed in makes us feel real.

And according to Marcus Borg, a theologian, our English word believe comes from the middle English word spelled beleve or belieue. It means "to belove." Apparently if you read Shakespeare and Chaucer, and keep on replacing the word “believe” with the word “love”, it almost always works interchangeably.

Until the 17th century, when you beloved, you believed. It was to: "hold dear;" "prize," "love;" "give one's loyalty to;" "give one's self to;" "commit one's self." Belief is a relational term. No wonder then that being believed in can make us feel real.

But following the Enlightenment, the meaning of the word believe shifted and become more about giving your intellectual assent to a proposition. This sort of belief was tested and questionable. No longer was the object of relationship a person; now it was a hypothesis.

I heard someone recently questioning the virgin birth by saying: “Do you believe in the virgin birth?” Now to be sure, I do like questions. But working with the definition of “belief” above, which, remember, is “to belove”, it is one’s relationship with the Virgin Mary which matters, not one’s intellectual assent to a proposition about conception without a sperm cell. (Cloning techniques have already proven it possible anyway, but that’s beside the point!)

It’s a bit like the time I saw comedian Jimmy Carr joking on television. He said that when he was young he used to have an imaginary friend… but then when he grew up, he simply stopped going to Church. It raised a laugh.

But does imaginary always mean unreal?

Religious images are the images of a real presence. This is what makes the image of Jesus different from that of a vivid Dickensian character, or from Harry Potter. As “images” in the human mind, we think of Jesus, a Dickens character and Harry Potter as somehow “imaginary”. But Jesus is the odd one out, because his image is of a living although invisible Being.

In the sense that God is Spirit (Jn 4:24), God is not a physical visible “thing”, so God is “no-thing”. But God is still present, and though no one has seen ever seen God (1 Jn 4:12), Jesus has shown people what God would look like if anyone ever had done. A bit like lightning, which shows people electricity, or like a kite which shows people air, or like someone’s son who is “chip off the old block”, even though they have never seen his Father. Jesus is an image of the invisible. (Col 1:15)

Similarly, when we think about the Virgin Mary, we can go back to the middle English word spelled beleve or belieue, and see how “believing” in her is “holding someone dear”. We are “beloved” by the invisible Being who makes us real in the midst of life and death. As Theresa of Avila said: “All things are passing, God alone is sufficient.” That which is not in a flux, is God, and whoever remains beloved (believed in), remains real.

Fourth century Christian monk Evagrius emphasized the virtue of simplicity when he said that: “one who prays is a theologian”. And in Anglicanism, it is said that the tool used to work out belief is like a ‘three-legged stool’ made of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. As a stool sits best on the floor, I suggest that the floor is Experience.

So may you experience God’s gift as a presence who beloves (believes) in you.

............ ONE NATION UNDER CCTV .............

Picture the scene if you will.
A conversation between Jesus, James and John.

"What do you want me to do for you?" Jesus asked.
James and John replied: "Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

“You don't know what you are asking," he replied.

As they heard this story from Mark’s gospel, the original readers could well have recalled the actual crucifixion of Jesus. Because if Mark’s gospel was written between 65–70 AD, its readers may have witnessed the very scene 30 years earlier, and if not, they would have been told about the two robbers, one on Jesus’ right, one on his left. And so, by having James and John ask Jesus for these very same places in his glory, the author offers an ironic teaching for any disciples of Christ who go seeking glory.... suffering is likely to be involved.

Remember how Roman glory seeking meant conquest through force and guile, and crucifixion was a punishment designed to subjugate, to humiliate and to destroy, all in a public and drawn out manner. There was absolutely no glory at all in being pinned up naked to lose control of your bodily functions. There was only utter powerlessness, your body left up for the crows to peck at.

And this fills us with horror precisely because it was supposed to. Asking for a place at Jesus’ side rather throws your glory into question. You might seem like just another weak fool getting himself crucified. After all, a civilisation is built on power and wisdom.

This may be why in Mark’s gospel we meet a Jesus trying to explain to James and John, and by implication to all of us, that there is a cost to his particular kind of glory. Let’s not go overboard, it needn’t mean a crucifixion, or even a violent death. Indeed, Acts 12 tells us James was put to death under the sword but we don’t know what happened to John, and some traditions have him living to a ripe old age.

But Jesus’ message about the cost of glory is clear. Whoever wants to become great must be servant, whoever wants to be first among you must be slave of All. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Glory seeking fantasies easily end up with disillusionment and suffering.

There’s a wonderful story about a traveller who is lost at nightfall in a large wet forest, and he can see no way out of it. So in desperation he climbs up a tree, and from the top he spies a hilltop clearing with a cottage. A light is on inside and smoke is coming from the chimney. Delighted, he climbs back down and starts a very long faltering trudge towards the hilltop. Every now and again he has to climb up and down another tree to see where he is again before trudging on. It is hard work, and he is tired and hungry, so along the way he starts fantasizing about what will happen when he gets to the clearing, and how comfortable it will be in the cottage.

Maybe a man will greet him, and then there will be a roaring fire, and the man will ask his daughter to cook a warm meal. As the traveller perseveres through the dense wood his fantasy becomes more real for him all the time. Maybe after this meal by the fire the daughter is running a hot bath for him, making his bed, and even climbing into it alongside him once he is asleep. He is getting quite excited now, and his imagination is gloriously real for him. He can’t help fearing that the cottage owner will suddenly realize what has happened and burst into the room armed with a knife, and as he imagines this in his mind’s eye he is so terrified, he also imagines being forced to flee for his life, rushing half dressed back out of the cottage and into the night.

His whole self is on its guard, and just at this very moment he arrives exhausted at the cottage door, his breath visible in the cold night air. He knocks furiously, and a small smiling man with spectacles gently opens the door to him. But this is not what the lost man sees. His glorious fantasy has become his reality, and he presses his face close up to the bemused old gentleman’s and yells: “You can keep your so called hospitality, and as for your daughter, I wouldn’t go near her if you paid me!”

The implication is that many of us, much of the time, are living in our own glorious fantasy rather than living in reality, which is the glory itself, and this creates chaos and suffering - in and around us. We no longer simply trust things the way they really are, in all their glory, and we imagine we have to be on our guard instead, trying to preserve glory, or manufacture it.

Jesus tells us that if we do want glory, we must serve reality, not try to have it serve us. If you like, we should be one nation under God, not one nation under CCTV. Really participating in God, really serving God in and amoung us, and not serving our selves, valuable creations though we are, or serving our own ideas, useful tools though they can be for us.

The Cambridge theologian and liturgist Catherine Pickstock describes this experience as: “That broader context which sees the whole of reality as arriving from a divine creative source.”

“The human self,” she says, “is by definition a divided self when it is trying to enthrone its own constructs… it starts to lead a duplicitous existence … but a liturgical self acknowledges fully its complete dependence upon another being … a divine transcendent reality, and is so committed to that reality that it can’t admit any kind of division or internal contradiction … it simply says I am nothing, and I depend upon you and I worship you, and along with that comes a recognition that everything around us arrives as a gift from God.”

Jesus knows that to be truly great is to be part of that gift, and not just to belong to our suffering self, becoming the stories we manufacture, the stories which it manufactures in us. As we read in Isaiah 55:8; "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts".

Above and behind what visibly appears in our mind’s eye, on the closed circuit of our own personal CCTV systems, all shall be well, all is well.

When you look up at the night sky and consider your own place as a tiny fleeting speck within an unimaginably infinite cosmos evolving in God, don’t run away scared from this glorious realisation of your own insignificance. When your personal meaning dissolves and you feel lost in an empty sea of what is, this suchness makes space for a much greater glory, the kind of glory a resurrection experience must have required.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. What defines true glory and greatness is not our fantasy about it, but our trust in the invisible Other who is revealed in this very moment, where we are in a flux, and where we are, as Jesus puts it to James and John… servants of all, be a servant of All.

So the message is do be assured, and don't keep it to yourself.

CALMING of the WAVES

I must warn you I've been advised to tell some jokes and I don't know any.

But, I have brought you five or six genuine responses given to preachers at the church door by well meaning members of different congregations.

Good sermon vicar, you kept me on the verge of consciousness.

Did you know there are 240 panes of glass in the east window?

Has anyone told you what a good preacher you are? No? Think about it.

Would you say that interpretation was more pre than post millenial, and can we meet to discuss it?

Sorry I got a bit lost, who rose from the dead?

And my favourite... well it was quite a difficult passage, thanks for trying.

And public speaking can be very trying. Some years ago, at the start of a career in broadcast journalism, I went to try to interview the visiting Chinese first secretary to Hong Kong.

I was rushed and eager and trying to prove myself, and he looked so calm and happy when I arrived at the community centre that I just quickly took his arm and hurriedly went straight onto the airwaves microphone in hand to introduce him. Then I found out that he spoke only fluent Mandarin, live, and to the population of Middlesbrough, England.

But he tried his best for me by switching to pigeon English and repeating the phrase: "Hong Kong, capitalist, China communist", several times whilst looking, and sounding quite delighted with himself, and quite unlike the producer sounded, who I could hear shouting through my headphones. But when you are really trying, your mind is rushing, and I couldn't slow down, I was always rushing.

I would be meeting people I had never spoken to before, in places I had never been to before, and I never had enough time to arrange these meetings myself. For every mission assigned to me the answer to the question "When do you want this?" was 'yesterday', and the answer to "How do I get there" was: Find out on the way." Storms rose in the mind, I couldn't remember names, and I fussed over small details. This type of on the hoof last minute seat of the pants work may all be familiar to some of you too.

And it is really hard sometimes for us in our lives to know the difference between relying on ourselves and relying on God, and to know if there is a difference.

But there is a story in exodus in the Bible, where Moses asks God his name, so that Moses can tell the people who has sent him. God answers by saying to Moses: "I AM who I AM. Tell the people of Israel, I AM has sent you."

And this I AM exists in each and everyone of us, because he is the uncreated Creator who does not depend on anything, or anyone. It is no coincidence that Psalm 46 tells us to: "Be still, and know that I AM"
God, when you are still, does become clearer.

When we are each just overriding God like surging waves leaving the ocean, we each use our freewill to get lost in a big mess. After a lifetime of searching for meaning, the relentlessly questioning philosopher in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes tells us: "All I have learned is this: God made us very simple, and we have made ourselves very complicated."

In Luke's gospel, the disciples were sailing on Galillee, when a terrific storm came up suddenly on the lake. Water poured in, and disciples were about to capsize. They had to wake Jesus: "Master, Master, we're going to drown!" Getting to his feet, he told the wind, "Silence!" And the lake became smooth as glass. Then he said to his disciples, "Why can't you trust me?" They were in absolute awe, staggered and stammering, "Who is this, anyway?"

This is I AM, the inner Christ, in the middle of a raging storm. But how are we to understand this in our own lives? In my life I remember reading the story to my son, out of a huge old children's Bible I had not opened in a very long time. In it there was a picture of Jesus wearing a blue robe, standing on the bough of the boat, holding out his hand below overcast skies. After I had read the story, my son asked me if it was true. And I had just been going through a very turbulent storm of emotions in my own life, trying to navigate in the dark for some time, and things were finally calming down and lightening up. So was the story true?

I told my son that not everyone believed the story was true, but that I did. Truth can be a really hard thing to pin down, and we don't own it. Whenever I have problems with miracles in the Bible, I remember that if the I AM can create a universe, then the I AM can also still the storms which we will meet in that universe. So for me this story is not so much about believing in the idea of miracles as it is about trusting in the miracle behind all of this stormy universe, and beyond all this change in the universe.

The Greek translation of the Bible understands God as the fulness of Being. It says all creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is. He is that I AM. I AM is in you and in your neighbours. I AM is in me. I AM is also beyond the winds and the stormy sea. I AM will lead us beside the still waters.

When our will is God's will, we do not need calm conditions, because it is the trust which will make everything clear and still.
An old man, not the tall wiry looking Chinese first secretary to Hong Kong this time but a big slow Burmese man, once told me that there are four types of people in this world. There are those who are moving from darkness to light, those who are moving from darkness to more darkness, those who are moving from light to darkness, and those who are moving from light to more light.

We are all different but in the little boat of our own life experience, if we are always moving in one of these four directions, waves rise and fall and the boat can fill with water. It creaks and rolls. Spray and wind lashes and all can look lost as we try to own the truth. But in the same story, Jesus is just lying asleep in the boat. He trusts, and he asks each of us where our trust is when things are difficult. We sail into storms, and we sail out of them, providing we can show trust. And when we do trust, we won't sink.

Finally, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells us: "I AM with you always, even unto the end of the world."

- I am in that I AM.

TO CREATE EVIL - DWELL ON IT

"The theology of the devil is for those who, for one reason or another, whether because they are perfect, or because they have come to an agreement with the law, no longer need any mercy. With them (Oh grim joy!) God is "satisfied". So too is the devil. It is quite an achievement, to please everybody!

The people who listen to this sort of thing, and absorb it, and enjoy it, develop a notion of the spiritual life that is a kind of hypnosis of evil. The concepts of sin, suffering, damnation, punishment, the justice of God, retribution, the end of the world, and so on are things over which they smack their lips with unspeakable pleasure. Perhaps this is because they derive a deep, subconscious comfort from the thought that many other people will fall into the hell which they themselves are going to escape.

And how do they know they are going to escape it? They cannot give any definite reason except for the fact that they feel a certain sense of relief at the thought that all this punishment is prepared for practically everyone but themselves. This feeling of complacency is what they refer to as "faith", and it constitutes a kind of conviction that they are "saved".

The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them of the great evils of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which "God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of others."

"Let not their Jesus be a barrier between us, or they will be a barrier between us and Jesus."

- Thomas Merton (from "New Seeds of Contemplation")

APOCALYPSE NOW

"To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God's creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches."

Revelation 3:14 – end.

Our reading is from the book of Revelation, or the book of Apocalypse as it is also known. It was written towards the end of the first century, and it’s title, ‘Apocalypsis’, means to reveal, or to uncover. But, revealing and uncovering its meaning is not as straightforward as translating this ancient Greek word.

Because revelation, according to tradition, was written inside a cave, written by someone exiled, as it says in the text, upon the island of Patmos, where I have just been on holiday.

- Of course, it was all for research purposes on your behalf, you understand. I like to be well prepared for blogged sermons but secretly I couldn’t wait to return. [I look forward to preaching on the letter to the Jamaicans.]

Patmos, as one of the Dodecanese islands, is picturesque and peaceful, and marketed as the Jerusalem of the Aegean. It is a reasonably large place, very hot and very sunny, extremely beautiful, and surrounded by a bright blue sea. And half way up one of its mountains and below the castle-like Monsatery of St John the Theologian, you can still find the Holy Cave of the Apocalypse, tourist attraction and world heritage site.

Inside, out of the hot sun, an Orthodox priest tells candle lighting crowds about its traditions, provided no photographs are taken. The icon sellers do a roaring trade, and there is no hint at all of paranoia or persecution.

Not so at the time of the writer 20 centuries ago, when Patmos was part of the Roman Empire in the province of Asia, apparently used by the Romans as a place to send the empire’s convicts. In Roman Asia the emperors themselves were hailed with public inscriptions describing them in glowing terms, as ‘Saviours’ ‘Benefactors’, and even ‘Sons of God’. Emperor Domitian is said to have demanded worship as Lord and God.

And so the book of Revelation was written as a cryptic and coded re-reading of biblical tradition in the light of the death of Jesus.

Its writer, apparently stuck on Patmos, used his series of strange dreams and visions, perhaps to pose an ancient version of Monty Python’s famous question: “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

He was asking more than that, and certainly he was trying to reveal Jesus’ kind of rule as the truly immanent / imminent rule, whilst criticizing the worldy rule of the day by men such as the Emperor Nero, whom history depicted as a tyrant. Christians were to live differently.

But since then many people have interpreted Revelations strange symbols as predictions of the future, even of 21st Century geo-politics. Some of the more disturbing interpreters seem in hurry to try to force God’s hand and dispense with this world altogether.

Even putting them aside, please, there’s still no doubt that Revelations' message of a New Creation revealed by Christ has proved an enduring one right to the present day.

One children’s Bible puts it like this: “Its going to be alright,” John said, “God is making everything new again. He’s shown me his wonderful new world. One day, some day, we will all share it, God and his people together, as Jesus promised… Just as it was when the world began”.

Even the author of ‘Lady Chatterly’s lover’ DH Lawrence, who apparently referred to the book of Revelation as the “Judas Iscariot of the New Testament”, called his own dying work ‘Apocalypse’. In it, he offered his radical criticism of civilisation and his belief in a New Heaven and a New Earth.

Our reading highlights just one of a series of letters on this theme to churches of the day, the letter to the Church of Laodecia. 'He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says', it ends.

But the literal Laodecia has long gone – any remains of it are now modern day Turkey. It was a very wealthy city indeed, well known for its banking, its textiles, and its medical school and eye medicine. Life was good in Laodecia. Empire and all.

This meant people thought they didn’t need anything more than their wealth and comfort. So, back on Patmos they were being perceivied as compromising themselves, and were described, as we have heard, as neither cold nor hot, but lukewarm—a condition which would cause God to ‘spit them out’

To put it another way, they would be putting themselves beyond God's reach by thinking and acting self sufficient. We are not Laodecians, but here may be the relevance of the letter to us today.


I don’t know if you have ever been to bathe in a volcanic hot spring, but there are several around the Dodecanese. The one I was in whilst on holiday, continuing the research, had piping hot underground water flowing up and out through a long channel carved into the foot of a cliff.

Let's imagine it. The water must be at least 60 degrees as it leaves the channel before opening into a warm waist high pool on the beach, like a giant Jacuzzi surrounded by rocks. Finally this hot water flows out through the rocks and into the cold waves of the sea.

It all smells of sulphur, but it isn’t at all hell. As the water flows from almost too hot to handle to too cold for comfort, what you notice is how most people crowd into the warm part in the middle, where things are just right, and just comfortable.

Out near the edges where it is either challengingly hot or bracingly cold, only a minority go. They live differently.

These few adventurers go into the cold and then back into the heat, using the place like a plunge pool of extremes. At one point someone even wedges his whole body tightly into the hot channel, and closes his eyes too see how long he can stand it.

A passer by thinks he is dead or dying, and starts prodding him.

But isn’t it possibly only these extreme experiences of our lives that are able to force us out of our comfort, and our complacency, our satisfaction and our self reliance, where purely material things are quite enough thank you, where religion, if there is any, is tame and stale, and where our true selves are very well hidden away from us, so that the apparently un-needed love of Christ can make little difference.

The Christians in Laodecia are so satisfied that God is no longer their concern. Their prosperity has blinded them to the need for a new creation - ironic in a city with an opthalmic hospital.

What already works for them is too important to them, and this is one definition of idolatry – our grasping onto something good and already created, as if it is as important as God, someone better, beyond, in other words, uncreated, transcendent, still coming, not this...

Can we cling to something good SO hard that we fail to accept something far better? A little like our friends in Laodecia, where the piped water was lukewarm, and apparently nauseous to drink, a metaphor for a self-sufficiency which doesn’t recognize any spiritual need, and for a church which won’t venture into risks.

Of course, only we can really answer the question about whether this is us, but we should ask it. Because if we are each, as individuals and as a community, effectively insulated from death, conflict, failure, and guilt, all of which can point us beyond ourselves, then we may be sleepwalking into gaining the world and losing our lives.
Exchanging freedom in the One for security in something smaller.

Do we perhaps hide ourselves from any challenge, or from subtler, deeper reality? Do we care about what the originator of life might want us to be, and to do? If we comfort ourselves, as if our death is something which can be ignored and avoided, as if our questions can all be answered, and as if our suffering can simply be anaesthetized away along with our true selves, it is just possible that we may fail to co-operate with that otherness, that other energy and spirit here, Jesus Chris's energy, and spirit.

For all people, our temporary selves are not be enough in the end, and for this reason, despite being written in a very different era under a very different situation, the letter to the Church at Laodecia may speak to us still, should we wish to hear it now rather than at the end.

Or we could close the doors and be satisfied just the way things are, and go home for tea. The alternative is to listen to the challenge of scripture. Those whom I love, it says, I rebuke and discipline. Be earnest, and repent.

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice, and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.

What DOES this mean? To relate to God as if we were eating with him, and relate this way to others and to God in others. It means a relationship of I-Thou [as Jewish philosopher Martin Buber puts it] and not I-It. No-one is to be an object to be used, controlled, or overcome. Speaking to God, not about God. Speaking to one another, not about one another. Presentness, authenticity, responsiveness, related to an eternal Thou. This is a true REVELATION, a revelation, not in predicting the future, but in living one out now, without any limits.

There is an analogy about learning to swim. Standing on the bottom will help up to a point, but if we try it in the deeper end, we drown. To be in Christ is to be freed from comforting, controllable, predictable limits.