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…
If we were standing in the shadow of a great cathedral in a European village and let’s say we were standing there with our backs to the cathedral and let’s say that we were incapable of turning around — the only thing we would see is the shadow of the cathedral. 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 lets say that we are so mesmerized by the shape of the shadow that we stay right there till deep, dark night has fallen. The cathedral is still at you back but the shadow has disappeared. You know the non-existent shadow has not been frightened away by the darkness, because the shadow does not really exist, not on its own. The shadow is completely dependent upon 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 night, as it is in broad daylight. The cathedral is everything, the shadow is nothing.
We continue our investigation 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:
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
We are exploring what the Church means by participation, what she means by deification, and we also want to discover what part do desire and imitation play in reaching our destiny.
There are two types 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 source of all being. Moses asked God who he should tell the children of Israel had sent him:
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
The first instantiation of participation is the fact that everything that exist, exist by participation in God. No creature created itself and no creature can sustain its own existence for even an instance much less may it do so eternally. Only the Creator, only God, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning…” is self-subsistent.
The second instantiation of participation is the result of our baptism into Jesus Christ, by which we were grafted into Christ the Vine, planted together in Jesus, buried with him and raised with him. As a branch, cutting from a wild olive tree is grafted into a cultured olive tree and the grafted in cutting feeds upon the life giving sap of the cultured olive tree. So we, in a manner of speaking, feed upon Christ’s human and divine natures by being grafted into Christ which is accomplished in our baptism. With our baptism, we are on the road to our destiny. Feeding upon the life-giving substance of Christ, God’s Olive Tree — we are deified, we are being deified, we shall be deified and take on the likeness of Jesus himself as time rolls on.
Now there are those who say that participation is always like the relation of the shadow to the cathedral and many of those folk will take that to its logical extension and say that, in fact, all of creation is nothing but shadows. And that include us. 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. Only God is real. Furthermore, if you permit yourself to really delight in the cathedral, or if you are smitten and fall 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:
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…
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, 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 25, 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. 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 reality because of the Feast of the Ascension, which feast we will celebrate this Thursday at 12:15 at this Altar. We know that to be reality because when Jesus left his 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, each and all, have a way into the life of God.
Furthermore 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. Listen to me, if you think you love your wife or husband or children, or this beautiful world too much — remember this: Jesus loves them way more than you do.
And it is just as misguided to think that I can actually look beyond created things, belittling and devaluing creation in order to get straight 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 smeared and smudged concretions, in its remarkable, irreducible, sensual, messy uniqueness and especially so as we encounter God’s creature man. Furthermore, St. Paul 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 can truly love of the Father only 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 that has the power to effect what it signifies. 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 our humanity 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 in his true human nature, perfected — yes — but still true human nature. Grace perfects human nature, grace does not annihilate nature.
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 aimed at the dismissal of creation based on the fact that it is creation and not God. That is the way of the gnostic.
I was raised in a church that had such a low view of humanity, because of their belief in what they called total depravity, that one came to see sin as a constituent, an essential part, of our nature. In fact sin was practically 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 that point-of-view it is absurd to suggest that human beings could participate in the divine nature. Salvation according to this perspective is entirely transactional. Salvation is a legal fiction in which Jesus has taken the place of the sinner, but no change occurs in the sinner. There is nothing like participation in the divine life, no deification, only forgiveness that is based on God not reckoning the sin to the sinner. Nothing really changes in the Christian and actual sin continues to be unavoidable even 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 out of touch with reality. We are wounded by sin and the wound is a wound unto death unless we can find a way to heal and then 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, in fact St. Paul says that we have been set free from sin and death. “Grace perfects nature without annihilating nature,” which 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 perfects our cleansed & healed humanity. What Paul said is true: we are “more than conquerers” of sin through Christ — but the conquest of sin is not perfecting our nature. Sin is unnatural. 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 God’s finality for our life as his own children.