Here's some encouragement from Holy Scripture as we approach the mid-point of the great fast.
"And you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach" Isaiah 58:12
According to the Genesis 3 account of the fall of Man, the first and most immediate result of Adam and Eve’s consumption of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil was the realization that they were naked.
According to St. Ambrose of Milan: "Whoever has lost the covering of his nature and virtue is naked."
The law written by the hand of God on stone tablets represents the law’s inability to enliven the dead, for when Moses descended the mountain, the people had already created the golden calf. Therefore, the tablets were remade and Moses wrote on the stone tablets. But Christ, who fulfilled the law and took His life back up again, now writes the law on living hearts of flesh.
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This episode focuses on sharing the afflictions of Christ through bearing our own cross.
Sacrifice was established as soon as mankind was expelled from paradise where Adam and Eve did not sacrifice their own will, but instead took the fruit for themselves.
Love in sacrifice and sacrifice in love are the cornerstones of true Life. Without love, sacrifice kills; without sacrifice, love is barren sentiment.
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This episode delves into the concept of the cross as baptism from the Old Testament to the New, in which Christ calls His crucifixion a baptism.
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Like the wooden horse given to the city of Troy, the Cross of Jesus Christ is not at all what it seems. It is dead wood that produced the ripened fruit of eternal life; it's a sword disguised as gallows.
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Your life, beloved, is a war and temptation precipitates each battle.
Saint Theophan the Recluse said it this way: “The arena, the field of battle, the site where the fight actually takes place is our own heart and all our inner man. The time of battle is our whole life.”
St. James tells us that every man is tempted from within, being lured away by his own lusts and passions, and is enticed. (James 1:14)
In Mark 7, our Lord says this:
“Hear Me, everyone, and understand: There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man.”
In its ancient understanding, technology (“techne” in Greek) is a form of spiritual knowledge and skill granted to humans by the divine for their empowerment. Although we tend to think of technology as its physical application, it universally originates from the spiritual realm. Therefore, the use of technology doesn’t just have physical repercussions but spiritual ones as well.
St. John of Damascus, in the “Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” writes:
“Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God. But when you pray, you should seek with your whole heart and not be slothful, employing a certain skill (techne) in the art of prayer.”
Because we are witnessing the continuous and exponential growth of technology, which will provide the type of power necessary to bring Transhumanism from a dystopian nightmare into reality.
The only viable response to transhumanism is to become truly human, to become by grace what God is by nature. As those around us are inevitably deceived into transforming their nature in accordance with the demons, Christians must be discerning and seek to become like God.
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Humility is the preeminent Christian virtue. It is a disposition of the heart and mind, which recognizes one’s true self and one’s complete dependence on God. According to St. Isaac the Syrian, “The sum of all virtues is humility. By it, the soul is made like God." In this episode, we will briefly explore ‘humility’ from an Orthodox perspective, and discuss how to begin its cultivation.
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We are terrestrial beings, being made from Earth. Therefore we have physical bodies, but we are enlivened with God-breathed souls. Therefore, mankind is made from a unique combination of earth and spirit. We have physical bodies, but we are not primarily earthen.
While there is no official Orthodox dogma on the subject, Sts. John of Damascus and Gregory the Theologian thought Angels were the first things created, because, according to St. John, “it was fitting that the mental essence should be the first created, and then that which can be perceived, and finally man himself, in whose being both parts are united.”
The “spiritual” body is not a pale shadow of the material world we now know; the opposite is true. The resurrection body is the fulfillment of what God intends for our present body. It is the material fulfilled, not dematerialized.
St. Gregory Palamas teaches that “[God] is not revealed in his essence (ousia), for no one has ever seen or described God's nature; but he is revealed in the grace (charis), power (dynamis) and energy (energeia) which is common to Father, Son and Spirit … Distinctive to each of the three is the person (hypostasis) of each… Shared in common by all three are not only the transcendent essence - what is altogether nameless unmanifested since it is beyond all names, manifestation and participation - but also the divine grace, power, energy, radiance, kingdom and incorruption, whereby God enters through grace into communion and union with the holy angels and the saints. “
In the book, The Orthodox Way, we learn that God “is outside all things according to his essence’, writes St Athanasius, ‘but he is in all things through his acts of power.’ ‘We know the essence through the energy’, St Basil affirms. ‘No one has ever seen the essence of God, but we believe in the essence because we experience the energy.’”
St. Maximus the Confessor put it this way: "God - who is truly none of the things that exist, and who, properly speaking, is all things, and at the same time beyond them - is present in the logos of each thing in itself, and in all the logoi together, according to which all things exist …”
Orthodox Christian Andrew Williams beautifully distills St. Maximos’ teaching. He says:
“Without God, nothing is just nothing. And yet with God, out of nothing comes everything. He creates ex nihilo. In a sense, we can say that he imagines everything into being… Just like the icon painter, he puts the veils over nothing, and we come into being… individual, real persons in the image of God, each of us a veil over the face of God; each of us an icon of ultimate Reality.
For Orthodox Christians, man as an icon of God may seem obvious at first glance, but let us consider this carefully.
So what does it mean to be fashioned as an icon of God?
In Colossians 1:15 St. Paul tells us that Christ is the “icon” of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
St. Gregory the Theologian says of this verse, “He is called “image” because he is of one substance with the Father; he stems from the Father and not the Father from him, it being the nature of an image to copy the original and to be named after it. But there is more to it than this. The ordinary image is a motionless copy of a moving being. Here we have a living image of a living being, indistinguishable from its original.”
This ability to apprehend the knowledge of God and to participate in His divine energies is that likeness of being, which renders us icons. Our souls, enlivened by the breath of God, have the capacity to receive the sacraments of the Church, by which God imparts to us His grace and His very life to those who have been given “the right to become sons of God.”’
But to what end?
St John of Damascus says that “although man, by reason of the infirmity of his body, is capable of repentance, the angel, because of his incorporeality, is not.”
Both Angels and man possess reason, intelligence, knowledge and agency. But only man is subject to mortality, which allows for his repentance. Man was expelled from the garden before eating of the tree of life, so that he would not attain immortality and solidify his corruption.
For Christ taught that resurrected men are immortal and equal to the angels. Luke 20:36
It is the capacity to repent, to return to God and be healed of the wounds of sin that God preserved in mankind so that, according to St. Paul, his body could be sown in corruption and raised in incoruption by receiving the energies of God.
Pride was the first sin to enter the world through man. Adam and the woman desired to “be like God,” and consumed, without a blessing, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
St. James tells us, God is neither tempted nor does He tempt, but “each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown brings forth death.” James 1:14-15
The words of the serpent, according to St. Athanasius, averted man’s attention from the contemplation of the Divine Word and lowered it to the contemplation of the self. Mankind considered what it could obtain for itself by ingesting then forbidden knowledge.
Adam, with his earthen body enlivened by the breath of God, brought a curse upon the earth bringing death instead of life into the world. According to the Fathers, this was not by disobeying the commandment not to eat, but by refusing to repent when confronted.
Fr. Spyridon Bailey says that “suffering, accepted in the right way, will lead us to humility. It will strip us of the false belief that we are in control or the idea that peace may come through comfort…"
And St. Paul affirms, “for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? Hebrews 12:6-7
After pronouncing the curse in the garden, God said to Adam, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Genesis 3:19.
St. Ephrem The Syrian observes that God is intimating that “Since you originate from dust and you forgot yourself, "you shall return to "your "dust " and your true being shall be recognized through your low estate."
Thus, St. John Chrysostom says that “Salvation begins and ends with humility.”
We might ask, what is the nature of salvific humility? St. Mark the Ascetic teaches us that “humility consists, not in condemning our conscience, but in recognizing God’s grace and compassion.”
Adam, being chastised by God, did not despair of his plight, he did not “kick against the goads” (Acts 9:5), or fall into a state of despondency (Genesis 4:5). Instead, He humbled himself, and he remembered his proper place, and immediately resumed his initial vocation.
“And Adam called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all the living.” - Genesis 3:20
St. Porphyrios instructs us that holy humility is “Complete trust in God.”
Adam, having endured his chastening, and finding himself, although subject to corruption, yet not destroyed by sin, trusted that God would bring about the restoration of his life, not through him, but through his wife, whereby God would bring new life.
Adam chose death. But God in His great love, chose to send the Son to show us true humility, by which death is transformed into life.
St. Paul says in Hebrews 12:10 that God chastises us “that we may be partakers of His holiness.” Cyril of Alexandria says that “He became like us that we might become like him. The work of the Spirit seeks to transform us by grace into a perfect copy of his humbling.”
True humility is transformative. It is, according to St. Paisios, “the only thing God is asking of us.” If we will humble ourselves, we can, by the grace of God, ascend far above the garden of Eden to “Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels.” Hebrews 12:22
St. John Climacus says that “humility is the chariot by which we ascend to God.”
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