“Humble yourselves there under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time: Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you…”
What I want to do this morning is to launch us into our study of the Gospel of John and what I want you to understand is that we shall be building upon our study of Romans as well as our short and recent study of deification. Remember that St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans is not a set of theological concepts, not a lexicon of Paul’s specialized theological terminology, but rather it is a set of intertwined narratives. The ruling narrative, the canonical narrative, is the story of Abraham and his friendship with God. But I am getting ahead of the story. St. Paul began Romans with the story of humanity’s turn from the God who is God and humanity’s embrace of the illusion of atheism — that lead humanity away from reality. It also begat illusions of greater complexity that inevitably led to decline, disintegration and finally death. These warped patterns of recurrence are example of what Paul calls the “law of sin and death.” So when man turned from God he turned to the creature and worship him. The upshot of man’s state of being is that God has let go of man, released him to go his own way, which is the way of death. Then Paul introduced the turning point: God did not entirely give us up to our own way because he chose Abraham, and he promised Abraham that he would undo the ruin of sin and set creation free to grow into its God-given potential though his family:
“For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.”
Abraham, through God’s grace, would reverse humanity’s toxic relation to God: Where humanity dismissed God, the Creator; Abraham not only listened to God, but he believed his promise and he trusted in his power to perform his promise. Abraham loved him and worshiped him. Human beings dishonored God with their own bodies; Abraham believed God and his old body, good as dead, recovered the power to father a child. Deep within God’s promise to Abraham is his commandment to the first man and woman to be fruitful and multiply — to father forth the order of creation that God is renewing and blessing in Abraham’s trust. And in addition to that the miraculous conception of Isaac is also a hint of things to come for the Blessed Virgin Mary.
God called Abraham to undo humanity’s wreckage and Paul’s epistle to the Romans is the story of how it happened — it began with Abraham’s trust. God’s promise was confirmed and completed through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus the Messiah. We who believe in Jesus and are baptized are members of God’s covenant family and children of Abraham, siblings of Jesus Christ, saved by his faith. Regardless of how dark his world became, Jesus believe that God would keep his promise. This is the very distinctiveness of Christian faith and exactly what we observe in both Abraham and Jesus the Messiah. Their faith, their trust in God is unconditional and reverses humanity’s ruin.
What we should take away from our study of Romans is that we have been born into a community that is right with God and that community is the family of Abraham. To be right with God is to be a child of Abraham which is to be an Israelite. This is the manner in which God is saving the creature that bears his image — that would be we human beings — but this salvation does not end with us because God’s finality for us heralds his finality for his whole creation. We know that much from Romans. If you take this as the theme of the whole epistle to the Romans you will not be far off: To be a son of the covenant is to be a Jew and to be a Jew one must be a son of Abraham. So when we read “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved” we know that Paul is not speaking about some individualistic experience but rather being saved is being a child of the covenant community that God initiated with Abraham about 2,000 years before Christ, a covenant community that Paul refers to as the Promise. Jesus, as the seed of the Promise, is in Abraham and since we are in Jesus through baptism, we are in Abraham and thus children of the Covenant.
We have discussed how we Christians are made Christian by being baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and how baptism, as by an instrument, grafts us into the very life of Christ and thus we are said to participate in his life. That is our beginning and through that beginning we are equipped with the heavenly virtues of faith, hope, and love. We have also explored how living as Christians is a matter of intentionally and responsibly entering into the horizon of Jesus the Messiah. Our entry into Jesus’ horizon is a gift from God; yes it is a growing and maturing grasp of seeing the world of men and things the way Jesus sees the world, of valuing what Jesus values, making his ultimate concern our ultimate concern, which includes behaving the way he wants us to behave, and all that comes about through ever deepening conversions in faith, hope and love — conversions through our baptism into Christ was well as our cooperation with the Holy Spirit.
Besides looking at the new reality of our life in Christ through the sacrament of Holy Baptism, through the metaphor of being grafted into God’s olive tree, of becoming children of Abraham and thus making Abraham’s story our story, we have also explored how Jesus’ narrative as the Seed of the Promise, the New Israel, has become the most important narrative of our life and how our personal narratives have become part of Jesus’ narrative.
Jesus’ narrative goes all the way back before creation and it goes all the way forward to what we call the end of the world which is inescapable. As I have said before, every single probability that has, is and ever will emerge in every single human life is inevitably folding into the narrative of Jesus the Messiah. And furthermore all that has, is, or will be in the whole wide universe is moving, to a finality, a goal, a purpose which is the autobiography of Jesus the Messiah, our God. Everyone who has ever lived, believer as well as unbeliever, faithful or unfaithful, Caesar, slave, saint and sinner will be defined and given ultimate meaning in the life story of Jesus Christ. That is the reality of our world and the ultimate meaning of your life will be either one that is happily in accord with reality by making Jesus’ narrative your narrative or it will be one that ends in strife and discord toward reality. This is deeply and unavoidably personal and it all hinges on the Incarnation.
Jesus’ narrative is the narrative of the Incarnation. Everything that matters to Jesus, everything that matters to Paul and Peter the whole Church is completely dependent on the Incarnation. Our connection to the Son is intimate, the pearl of great price, because he has, in devoted solidarity to us, become a partaker of our flesh and blood. And that very thing was accomplished in the Incarnation through the flesh of his Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. God has become flesh of our flesh and thus we have a true connection, a material connection, a cherished connection in the flesh we share with Jesus. This is reality: our very human nature, body and all that once hung upon the Cross, this day 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. It makes all the difference that you understand what I have said — specifically two points. First of all the Incarnation is the event in which the Word of the Father entered into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and as Athanasius put it, our flesh “being knit into the (incorporeal) Word from heaven, may be carried into heaven by the Word.” What I want to you understand is that the flesh that Word assumed into his divine life was the flesh of Mary, the Mother of God. The flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, his human nature, came from his Mother. His flesh was not created out of nothing by fiat outside the body of Mary and then placed in her womb, as some people have taught. Absolutely any understanding of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ that invalidates Mary’s title as the Holy Theotokos, the Holy Mother of God, is not Christian.
It is because human nature, body and all, has been assumed into the life of God, that we human beings may now participate in the life of God. The human nature that our Lord Jesus Christ receive from the Blessed Virgin Mary even after even after his crucifixion, even after his resurrection, even after his Ascension remains human nature: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever.” The flesh of our Lord, his humanity, was perfected by being knit into the life of the Word; by participation in the life of the Word all the wounds of the Fall were healed — but Jesus’ humanity was not made more than human nor was he made less than human. Grace perfects nature, grace perfects human nature, grace does not annihilate human nature and that divine principle shined the brightest when the Word was made Flesh. And this brings us to the Gospel of John in which the life of God made Flesh is recorded so that we may know he is God and we may know what it means for us to become siblings of the Son, true children of the God who is God who intends, just as St. Peter declares, to exalt us to take our place in his life:
“Humble yourselves there under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time: Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you…”