Sarx

HE HOLY Trinity may be seen as God who is Transcendent, God who dwells with us, and God who dwells in us. The Bible refers to God, “in whom we live and move and have our Being”. That is the Father. The prayer that opens every service in the Eastern Rite refers to God as “Everywhere present and filling all things”. That is the Holy Spirit.But that prayer continues by asking the omnipresent God to “come and dwell in us”. Somehow we – humans – are seen as the one place where God is not. Where God is not, neither is there love, connexion, communion. Where God is not we are disconnected from all things. Everything is an object “over there” rather than in me – and me in it – all in God. Salvation, then, is the restoration of this communion – with God, with each other, with all. Salvation means, as I noted in the first post, to be made whole. This is why no one is saved alone: walking the hills on a sunny day may be salvific – but it’s not how you get saved. You have to be, must be, in a community of people. No one is saved alone. (Sorry to all the introverts out there: go sit in silence witha group.) It’s not “do your own thing” – but there is something more. We’ll get there.

Salvation then – at least the visible, conscious parts – is exactly this being together, this sharing, this grinding of our rough edges down into smooth edges and the polishing of our facets like stones in a river (or a rock tumbler). But in our world – even more than in Jesus’ day – we are individuals. Jesus, at least, was speaking to a community of people. “The Jews”. They had a tribal identity. “We” was, essentially, the first person pronoun. “Y’all” (by translation) was the important second person. Plurals. The NT words of Jesus are filled with plural nouns rather than singular ones.

This is important – even in the way we read the scriptures. One common issue amongst scholars is the translation of Jesus words that the Kingdom (“of God” or “of Heaven”) is “within you”. I’ve seen it poked about on New Age Groups as often as I’ve seen it on Fundamentalist KJV-Only sites. The general idea is that Jesus is saying God is within me. Isn’t that cool? God is within me! But no: the Greek “you” is really “Y’all” and however you translate the adverb, as “within” or “among”, when you have the second person plural, it can never be understood as “inside me!”

Jesus was, in his day, tearing down the tribal walls between groups of “us” and “them” and throwing God into the undifferentiated mix to create a new human family. 2000 years later we are so individualised that we have to start by tearing down the walls between each other. St Paul wrote “neither Jew nor Greek” speaking in very general, tribal, terms. Very few of us modern, Western folks would understand that language any more. Even the few tribes we have are made up of individuals. We have to start tearing down the walls by saying, “Neither you nor me”. The kingdom of God is Among us. We – not I, not you, but some collective us – are the kingdom of God in ways singular individuals cannot be.

Only later do we confuse this revolutionary idea of communion with “not going to hell”. We understand it as “God and Me and to Hell with Thee.” Like I said, we need to start by letting Jesus tear down the walls between each other.

That’s why salvation starts with Trinity.

Following the general platonic idea that what ever is “good” in humans must reach its maximum in God and whatever is bad in humans must be totally absent from God, the Deity cannot be an “individual” as we understand that. Deity is not a monad. Deity must be in communion in order to be, at all. For this reason I distrust the “Ethical Monotheism” of much liberal, modern Christian theology: even though Ethical Monotheism is a valuable part of other traditions, within a Christian context it’s simply a projection on God of our radical individualism.

The Church Fathers understood mankind to all be of one essence and nature – and that nature in communion with God. To violate that nature was to violate that communion with God and with each other. This was sin. The Fathers understood that to be and to be in communion were the same thing. It is impossible for an individual to be.

At all.

Yet we are all trying to be exactly that. In other words, we are all, each, individually, attempting to sever our bonds of communion, to ram our individual demands and “rights” down each other throats, attempting to make ME MYSELF AND I the model by which I judge you. Notice that I is always capitalised: you never is. Yet in the process of denying your being, of objectifying you the same process bounces back. If you are an object then so am I. The only way to be subjects is to be so together. The only way to be a full person is to be in communion.

So God must be this thing to the Nth degree.

When we see God as a Monad, we are left trying to be monads ourselves. We are left furthering our own damnation, our own division, our own destruction.

Each act of tearing away is sin. Each act of denial of communion, each act of rupture in the Divine Agape is a sin. We are torn away – from God and from each other. The Christian myth understands that Humanity at it’s inception in the mind of God was seen in communion with God. The Life that is God was passing in and through all. But we walked away from this. And it’s damn nigh impossible to return. God had to extend the offer again.

This is Incarnation.

Now, follow this: the purpose of collective humanity is collective communion with God and each other yet we have violated that communion, not once for all time, but over and over again. We do so even by our increasing sense of “individuality”, each act of greed and failure of altruism is a violation of this inter-human and divine-human communion. we, as individuals, are dead. So life had to come to us. But not as a divine blood offering to make peace with God’s honour that we had violated, not as some replacement accepting the divine lash in our place. Life had to come to us: Salvation – wholeness – begins to be restored at the Moment Mary says Yes to God’s message. Remember though: all humanity is one. Once God becomes a human, all humans share in that connexion. All.

Yes, it’s possible to walk away from that connexion, but not with any sense of finality: for God is now and will be for all future times a human being. God has entered time and put a divine stop to the walking away: for now, walking in love towards any human is a walking in love towards this divine being that is one of us.

Incarnation is important because it is forever. Jesus can be seen as just a good teacher, but he’s kind of meaningless as such – be the topic of his teaching morals, political revolution or even just religious (Jewish) reform. Lewis has shown that once we say “just a teacher” we have to edit out all the Gospel bits where Jesus is clearly a nut case claiming to be God. No good teacher is a nut case. We can certainly see those passages as the community’s understanding of Jesus rather than claims of Jesus himself. But is there a reason to distinguish between those two very ancient points of view?n The earliest Christians did not think so. I don’t think we need to, either.

Not only does it do away with the division between God and us, but Incarnation also does away with that damned division between “spiritual” and everything else.

This is eternally precious to us, because we too live ordinary lives, and the fact that the Lord lived such a life, sanctifies everything: from the difficulty, to waking in the morning, to the daily cares and labors of life. From now on, no one has the right to say that life is pointless because one has to cook, clean or wash. Such were the labors of the Mother of God; such was the daily work of her Divine Son. This means that there is nothing insignificant in our daily labors and chores.
Fr. Alexander Men

There is no way to say “I have a sacred job, you have a secular one.” There is no way to say “My job is unimportant to the Church.” All things become divine actions because God is now one of us.

We will pick this up with Eucharist and a conclusion next time.