Why is it that we want to be heard? Ultimately, what is it we want to say?
As listener, where is it we wish to take the speaker, to guide that speaker?
Why is it that Jesus asked questions? He knew the answer, he wanted to take the person with whom he was speaking there on their own.
Limits...
If we are trying to be humble we will fail because our efforts are mixed in there. Philippians 2.
What is it we, as speaker, wish to share?
Jesus knows the thoughts of men...
Limits...
He who knows me best loves me most.
So if we talk in limits, extremes, we come to the Incarnation: God Himself (to be technical, the second Person of the Trinity) willingly chooses to become enfleshed, enhypostatized, and relinquishes claim to His divinity. Though He is the acting subject in this flesh, He operates with the human faculties, minus the sin. Do I fully grasp that? Kind of. Any questions about Him 'cheating' because He is divine leads us down the road of discussing various doctrines deemed heretical and this isn't the place for that. I take the statement as fact, as, to use Lossky's term (which resonates with me in the quality field) as datum.
So God, the ultimate we can conceive of, takes on human flesh, and empties himself (kenosis) to the lowest of low, to the utmost extreme: death. His (divine) will wills to utilize or work within the constraints and limits of a human will. But without sin. Is that cheating? Or is it that he accomplished what we are not only unable to but cannot even fathom due to the taint of sin? Is this belief? It stretches us because we still wish to conceive of it, to grasp it, to control it?
I think this is where such tired cliches as 'he came to die' and 'God send His Son to die' lose their impact. It sounds, recalling James' "One Of The Three" track, like a mere suicide mission. It may get those in the know excited, especially through interpretive and conditioned filters, but from the outside this is a statement that sound like Jesus was a good dude who became a martyr and nothing more. The lingering question, I suppose, is why everyone in the know gets so worked up over this.
But if we get radical, as the Fathers have said, and believe that God took 'into' His Being (or person or hypostasis, need to flesh that one out) something He did not previously 'have', i.e. the 'experience' of what it means to be a human being that has 'created' its own independence and has to live with the impassible barrier to God.
It is the 'person' of the Word that experiences this, that assumes this. His human will aligns with the divine will (sounds crazy, right?) in the single subject of the second Person of the Trinity, and His battle is with a human will to do the will of the Father. Whether or not He could have sinned was a debate tackled during the centuries of formulating doctrine.
He struggled with the human will and 'tamed' it to the point of death. We all die. So to say He came to die in and of itself doesn't mean much as a standalone statement. We all die. It is inherent in our nature. But He knew human nature and He knew about power and that the power men seek is in contrast to that of the Divine which is why many others before Him had been killed.
So again, taking this to a logical extreme, the ultimate power of men, from a human perspective, is to take life; in this case it is to kill God. Men want to be God so when their power in pursuit of that goal is interrupted it leads to violence which, ultimately, means death. That is the Power that men seek.
So God, Life, surrenders and ultimately sacrifices that Life in human flesh and dies. Yet 'death', as an absolute, finds in Him nothing and death dies. The limit has been reached. Death, man's ultimate fate, is rendered powerless, objectively, within time. It is not an abstract concept; a Person has accomplished this and we see it. We see what it means for there to be no death.
We die. That hasn't changed. And the 'eternal life' as some pie in the sky with us floating around in wings is silly and, arguably, minimally - if at all - what Scripture says. This is the version what makes faith seem like a fairy tale and is not sustaining. Once the initial 'fix' of my salvation is in, what then? Without substance we will go forward with an altar call every week.
I was in Church as my grandbabies graduated from pre-K to Victory Kidz. They were watching a movie and it was so simple and so sweet. Even in the children's cartoon there were efforts to make those seemingly conflicting stories between the four Gospel writers seamless. They did a good job and, cynicism aside, I felt the impact of such a great story. It is truly a great story.
And it dawned on me that it is a faith that is at once simple to grasp and, as happened over hundreds, even thousands, of years, has added layers in its encounter with the depths of the human mind. Even today it is wrestled with when encountering the various philosophies of men.
But for children it is simple.
During worship today with all the adoration given to Jesus it seemed to fit. We worship Him but, in truth, as we worship toward Him we are actually worshiping through Him as He, guided by the Spirit, takes our praises purified, so to speak, unto the Father. It is a symphony. He takes what we have and as a mirror, our Image, shows us who we truly are and that is what is rendered unto the Father. It isn't our mess that the Father 'sees' but our heart, in the Spirit directed through the Son, as if cutting through all the mess within us, to take that which is truly in His image, i.e. His Son, into His court.
And in reverse, the Father's will, through the Son, by the Spirit returns unto us to purify the perichoresis of us as a body, through the Son, to interact and relate to the Holy Trinity.
So if we talk in limits, extremes, we come to the Incarnation: God Himself (to be technical, the second Person of the Trinity) willingly chooses to become enfleshed, enhypostatized, and relinquishes claim to His divinity. Though He is the acting subject in this flesh, He operates with the human faculties, minus the sin. Do I fully grasp that? Kind of. Any questions about Him 'cheating' because He is divine leads us down the road of discussing various doctrines deemed heretical and this isn't the place for that. I take the statement as fact, as, to use Lossky's term (which resonates with me in the quality field) as datum.
So God, the ultimate we can conceive of, takes on human flesh, and empties himself (kenosis) to the lowest of low, to the utmost extreme: death. His (divine) will wills to utilize or work within the constraints and limits of a human will. But without sin. Is that cheating? Or is it that he accomplished what we are not only unable to but cannot even fathom due to the taint of sin? Is this belief? It stretches us because we still wish to conceive of it, to grasp it, to control it?
I think this is where such tired cliches as 'he came to die' and 'God send His Son to die' lose their impact. It sounds, recalling James' "One Of The Three" track, like a mere suicide mission. It may get those in the know excited, especially through interpretive and conditioned filters, but from the outside this is a statement that sound like Jesus was a good dude who became a martyr and nothing more. The lingering question, I suppose, is why everyone in the know gets so worked up over this.
But if we get radical, as the Fathers have said, and believe that God took 'into' His Being (or person or hypostasis, need to flesh that one out) something He did not previously 'have', i.e. the 'experience' of what it means to be a human being that has 'created' its own independence and has to live with the impassible barrier to God.
It is the 'person' of the Word that experiences this, that assumes this. His human will aligns with the divine will (sounds crazy, right?) in the single subject of the second Person of the Trinity, and His battle is with a human will to do the will of the Father. Whether or not He could have sinned was a debate tackled during the centuries of formulating doctrine.
He struggled with the human will and 'tamed' it to the point of death. We all die. So to say He came to die in and of itself doesn't mean much as a standalone statement. We all die. It is inherent in our nature. But He knew human nature and He knew about power and that the power men seek is in contrast to that of the Divine which is why many others before Him had been killed.
So again, taking this to a logical extreme, the ultimate power of men, from a human perspective, is to take life; in this case it is to kill God. Men want to be God so when their power in pursuit of that goal is interrupted it leads to violence which, ultimately, means death. That is the Power that men seek.
So God, Life, surrenders and ultimately sacrifices that Life in human flesh and dies. Yet 'death', as an absolute, finds in Him nothing and death dies. The limit has been reached. Death, man's ultimate fate, is rendered powerless, objectively, within time. It is not an abstract concept; a Person has accomplished this and we see it. We see what it means for there to be no death.
We die. That hasn't changed. And the 'eternal life' as some pie in the sky with us floating around in wings is silly and, arguably, minimally - if at all - what Scripture says. This is the version what makes faith seem like a fairy tale and is not sustaining. Once the initial 'fix' of my salvation is in, what then? Without substance we will go forward with an altar call every week.
I was in Church as my grandbabies graduated from pre-K to Victory Kidz. They were watching a movie and it was so simple and so sweet. Even in the children's cartoon there were efforts to make those seemingly conflicting stories between the four Gospel writers seamless. They did a good job and, cynicism aside, I felt the impact of such a great story. It is truly a great story.
And it dawned on me that it is a faith that is at once simple to grasp and, as happened over hundreds, even thousands, of years, has added layers in its encounter with the depths of the human mind. Even today it is wrestled with when encountering the various philosophies of men.
But for children it is simple.
During worship today with all the adoration given to Jesus it seemed to fit. We worship Him but, in truth, as we worship toward Him we are actually worshiping through Him as He, guided by the Spirit, takes our praises purified, so to speak, unto the Father. It is a symphony. He takes what we have and as a mirror, our Image, shows us who we truly are and that is what is rendered unto the Father. It isn't our mess that the Father 'sees' but our heart, in the Spirit directed through the Son, as if cutting through all the mess within us, to take that which is truly in His image, i.e. His Son, into His court.
And in reverse, the Father's will, through the Son, by the Spirit returns unto us to purify the perichoresis of us as a body, through the Son, to interact and relate to the Holy Trinity.
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