“At that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you: For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father… These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” John 16: 26-28; 33
“by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature…” II Peter 1:4
“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning…” James 1:17
If you were standing in the shadow of a great cathedral in a European village and let’s say you were standing there with your back to the cathedral and let’s say that you and everyone around you were incapable of turning around then all you would see is the shadow of the cathedral. Correct? You can see that in your mind’s eye — correct? You could look down and see the dark shape of what is at your back, but you cannot see the thing itself, the thing behind you that is casting the shadow.
Now if somehow the thing at your back, the cathedral, is removed and caste into the sea, the shadow will disappear but it will not be caste into the sea as well. Correct? The existence of the shadow is completely dependent on the cathedral. But the cathedral is in no way dependent upon the shadow; the cathedral is just as much a cathedral in the deep, dark sea, but there is no shadow swaddled around its foundation. The cathedral is everything, the shadow is nothing.
We continue with our study of God’s finality for man which is deification and how deification is supernatural, but not unnatural for humanity and furthermore how deification is effected through our participation in the divine life or as Peter put it:
“by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature…” II Peter 1:4
Here I want you to understand that in this set of sermons I have in mind two instantiations of participation. The first instantiation of participation is the existence of creation. All creation “lives and moves and has its being” by participation in the Creator who is in a sense Being itself. The other sense of participation is the participation of the Christian who is baptized into Jesus Christ and thus partakes of the divine nature that leads finally to our deification, that is it leads to our taking on the likeness of Jesus himself. There are those who say that participation in any instantiation whatsoever is like the relation of the shadow to the cathedral and many of those folk will take it several steps further and say that in fact all of creation is nothing but shadows. Only the Creator, only the Father “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning…” is really real. So lets say you turn around to see the cathedral behind you, and say you look beyond the cathedral to the village and you look beyond the village to see beautiful, green mountains far away — there are those who will say, what you see, all these created things, are just shadows of the real thing that you cannot see, touch, or experience. Furthermore, if you permit yourself to really delight in the Cathedral, or if you are smitten and fall head over heels in love with a girl from the village, or if you contemplate the beauty of the greenness of the green mountains too much, you are beguiled, bewitched by shadows. Salvation for such people lies only in being set free of the illusion that the creation has any worth in and of itself. The only way to be free is to look past creation to its Source which is the God who is God. Now that point-of-view, just to be clear, is incorrect to the core. Jesus said:
“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father…”
When the Word of the Father, the Logos “came forth from the Father” he did not descend from heaven to earth in a thunderous beam of light, but rather the Logos descended from heaven to earth entering into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and through her flesh, through the humanity of the Mother of God, God became flesh of our flesh. His “coming forth from the Father” is what we call the Annunciation of the Mary which we celebrate on March 24, nine months before nativity of Jesus. What the Annunciation declares is the fundamental reality of life which is that creation, and specifically created humanity far from being worthless is assumable, fashioned for union with the God who is God. And furthermore by actually uniting created humanity to his divine life God has perfected humanity’s own natural worth. God has raised us up to share in the eternal life of God, which is part of our deification because eternal life is a quality of God’s divinity. No creature created itself and no creature can sustain its own existence for even an instance much less may it do so eternally. How do we know that the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ, body and all, is worthy of sharing in the eternal life of the God who is God? We know that to be reality because when Jesus left his beloved disciples to return to his Father, he returned as the son of Mary, the Mother of God. He did not slough off his human nature as though he were scrapping mud from feet, but he entered his Father’s presence robed in flesh, the fruit of Mary’s womb. Because human nature, body and all, has been assumed into the life of God, we human beings have a way into the life of God. Not a way into the presence of a despotic lord where we cringe in fear, but a way into the bosom of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. All this above all has to do with love.
It is misguided to think that one has to be careful not to give too much love and reverence to created things because if you do you are taking love and reverence away from God. And it is just as misguided to think that I can actually look beyond created things, belittling and devaluing creation to creation’s Source. Creation is good and we encounter goodness not merely by looking beyond creation to its Source, but we also experience goodness as we encounter creation in all its thick, messy concretions, in its remarkable, irreducible, uniqueness and especially so as we encounter God’s creature man:
“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” I John 4: 20
The Beloved Disciple argues that the children of God cannot look past creation to its Source, the God who is God; much less may he love the God who is God while at the same time trivializing creation. Furthermore, St. Paul also argues that at the very least, entirely apart from special revelation, the creation reveals the power and glory of the God who is God:
“For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made…”
Romans 1:20
In fact he insists that the children of God get to the love of the Father by going through the creation. Not only is that true intellectually, but it is true for participation because participation requires a means of grace which is a material, external sacramental sign. The truly great material Sacrament of Sacraments, the uber-Sacrament, is the created humanity of our Lord Jesus, the humanity he received from his Mother Mary, the humanity that makes our participation in the life of God possible. This is reality: our human nature, material body and all that once hung upon the Cross is not a shadow of the real — but this day the irreducible uniqueness of a specific man named Jesus participates in the interior life of God the blessed Trinity. Human nature, body and all, has been assumed into the life of God, taken up into the life of the God who is God, without annihilating Jesus’ human nature. And we know that to be true because when he ascended to his Father, he ascended with that which he did not possess when he came down from heaven — namely, God’s own, true human nature, perfected but still true human nature. Grace perfects human nature, grace does not annihilate nature and that divine principle shined the brightest when the Word was made Flesh.
I want to make one last point about the estimation of creation and in particular the estimation of our human nature. Most of this sermon has been about the dismissal of creation based on the fact that it is creation and not God. That is the way of the gnostic. But for the creature man the dismissal also includes the ruining of his nature by the Fall. I was raised in a church that had such a low view of humanity, because of their belief in they called total depravity, that one came to see sin as a constituent, an essential part, of our nature. In fact sin was not far from being regarded as a faculty of our nature. John Calvin summed up that point-of-view:
“(The infant’s) whole nature is a seed of sin… (which is) only hateful and abhorrent to God.”
From such a point-of-view it is impossible, indeed it is absurd, to suggest that human beings could participate in the divine nature. Salvation according to perspective is entirely transactional. Salvation is a legal arrangement in which Jesus has taken the place of the sinner, but no substantive change occurs in the sinner. There is nothing like participation in the divine life, no deification, only forgiveness that is based on God not accounting the sin to the sinner. Nothing really changes in the Christian and actual sin continues to be unavoidable for the man who is “in Christ” just as much as it is unavoidable for non-Christians. Now once again let me say, just to be clear, that is not true, that is not the reality of things. We are wounded by sin and the wound is a wound unto death unless we can find a way to participate in the life of God, but sin itself is not an elemental part of human nature. And for those who are “in Christ,” baptized into Christ and infused with heavenly virtues — those children of God most certainly do not have to sin. Human nature is not “sin-nature,” our nature is wounded unto death, but it is not “a seed of sin” hateful to God, so the canon, “grace perfects nature without annihilating nature” means that our participation in the life of God washes, cleans, and heals the wounds of the Fall, and beyond that participation in the divine nature perfect our cleansed human nature. What Paul said is true: we are “more than conquerers” of sin through Christ, but the conquest of sin is not perfecting our nature. The conquest of sin is the elimination of the unnatural so that nature may be perfected. Grace does not make us something other, either more or less, than human beings. It enables us to achieve our full potential as human beings.