As preached by Brother Christopher
Holy Wisdom Church
Next
week on Pentecost, for the first time in about 1200 years, the heads of the
autocephalous Orthodox churches are scheduled to meet in Crete in a great and
Holy Council. This has been in the planning for close to a hundred years;
everyone in Orthodoxy knows and agrees in principal that it is desperately
needed. And yet in recent months there are disturbing signs that all of the
planning and hard work is once again going to fall short of of realization: the
Church of Georgia stated recently that it could not sign one of the chief
documents on relations with the non-Orthodox churches; just this past week the
Church of Bulgaria said that it is not going to attend the Council at all, and
the Antiochene Church has also threatened to boycott the event due to a
jurisdictional dispute with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem over the Church in
Qatar... there are even reports of heated disagreements over seating
arrangements for the hierarchs that threaten the Council. It leaves one
wondering if we shall ever get beyond the pettiness that has so often crippled
Orthodox church life in recent centuries. Put cynically, “Where’s an emperor
when you need him?”
All
of this is strangely relevant to today’s celebration, when we honor the Fathers
of the First Ecumenical Council that was held long ago at Nicea in 325. That
Council was called by the Emperor Constantine and intended to establish clarity
and unity in Christian doctrine and church life. The issues were far more contentious
than those we’re carping about today: for example, whether Jesus was really one
essence with the Father -- whether he was the Eternal Word incarnate, or
whether he was, as Arius claimed, merely a magnificent creature, the nicest of
guys. Those Fathers also came out with a common creed that expressed the
essentials of Christian faith that have remained in place even to this day.
Those hierarchs met in council together throughout that year, argued
passionately for their beliefs and ultimately came to a common clarity of faith
through dialogue and discernment. What would Orthodox Christian faith be
without that initial Council? It leads one to wonder, “we claim that we are the
Church of the Fathers. Yet how faithful to the spirit of those Fathers are the
games we see being played out in advance of the coming Great and Holy Council?”
We will have to wait and see whether the movement of the Spirit at Pentecost is
able to rouse the Council set to meet in Crete, or whether we shall have to
simply put up with more frustration and embarrassment as a Church that cannot
seem to read the signs of the times as a true kairos moment. Lord have
mercy!
In
this morning’s gospel the high priest Caiaphas states, “You know nothing at all. You do
not understand that it is better to have one man die for the people than to
have the whole nation destroyed.”
Caiaphas doesn’t realize the true import of what he has said: this
passage has often been used to show that Jesus died for our sins. While that is
true, unfortunately it has been understood in a toxic way -- particularly in
the Christian West -- to reinforce an atonement theology grounded in
substitution. Jesus is the one who dies in our stead. He is the scapegoat, the
perfect victim who appeases the Divine anger for all of our sins. It is a
strange concept: God requires Jesus to die on the cross to free the debt we
owe, to pay the penalty for our own sin and disobedience. God demands payment,
and so Jesus‘ sacrifice becomes a juridical transaction. If that’s what it means
to be saved, then it turns God into something of a legalist.
But
there is another way of looking at Jesus’ sacrifice that seems to me much more
in harmony with the gospel. The salvation offered to us by Jesus is contingent
on revealing just how completely, how unconditionally we are loved. Jesus was
put to death because he preached a message that was at variance with the Jewish
status quo. His was a true Gospel, good news, a message that revealed God’s
kingdom as one of inclusion, as open to
all who repent. By challenging the hypocrisy, rigidity and narrowness of the
scribes and Pharisees, Jesus angered them to such an extent that they conspired
to put him to death. And they did. But Jesus on the cross reveals the extent
that God will go to help us understand God’s limitless love for us. He will go
even to the death. And that is just the mystery of Christ that Paul understood
and was transformed by, that he speaks of in his letter to the Ephesians when
he prays that we will have
“the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and
length and height and depth, 19 and to
know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled
with all the fullness of God.”
That is what the Fathers at Nicea
were ultimately about, what they saw in Jesus and what they intended to pass on
to us. Please God, may the Fathers at this coming Great and Holy Council be as
faithful and vigilant as those who met at Nicea so long ago.
