https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=htTOdFpgZNE
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I’ll keep that there. Thank you to Metropolitan Jordan of Toronto. I just wanted to quickly say that following Father Jeffrey’s talk, we will have a question and answer period. So five minutes from now, we’ll have people walking by the aisles and reading your question sheets as well as on the balcony. So after Father Jeffrey’s talk, we’ll have the question and answer period. And if you have more questions after that, we’ll collect those as well, just pass them up. And if you’re on the balcony, just give them to Aidan. Thank you very much. And Father Jeffrey. Good evening. Father Ted and I have had a very long debate over the last few weeks as to what would be worse, going first or going last? How do I follow that? We’ll see. The second century church did something rather strange and quite astonishing. Stories about Jesus, which had been circulating orally for some generations, began to be written down in the second half of the first century. There were numerous versions in circulation which came over time to be associated with the traditions of one or another apostolic witness to the risen Lord Jesus. And at a certain point, a choice had to be made. The church could have come up with a definitive account, the single canonical version. And that approach was certainly a temptation. One of the first to do this was a very important mystic heretic called Marcy. He settled on one gospel, the gospel of Luke, as it happens. He liked that one, which he redacted, however, to suit his vision. Incidentally, he also rejected the entire Old Testament and the process teaching that matter was evil and therefore the creator God of the Old Testament was responsible for it all. But the point here is that he was not a salvation from this material world. That was a heretic. This idea of a single gospel continued to be a temptation even for those within the canonical church. In the middle of the second century, an otherwise quite orthodox believer, Tation, apparently scandalized by the plurality of the gospels, created his famous Ghiatesero. In this, he wove the gospel to a distant narrative and had some traction. In fact, for some centuries, particularly among the Syriac tradition, this was the main gospel use. But the church rejected both of these attempts. And from the beginning of the process of the canonization of the New Testament, it accepted that there should be different gospels. Leading the charge was the what we call the Evangelion Tetramorphon, the four-fold gospel. Already in his day, those were the four gospels we have in our New Testament today. This is important. Fully aware of the significant differences in the accounts, not only different emphases and theological visions, but contradictions, the church chose to canonize diversity. It chose to retain four separate and distinctive literary compositions witnessing to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This is interesting for all kinds of reasons. And of course, it points to the experience of Jesus being more profound than any one account could capture. But not least, and for our purposes and theme tonight, it also says something about the meaning of what it is to be represented. As Timothy Johnson writes, the diversity of the gospel accounts signifies the infinite replicability of the story of Jesus in the lives of human beings. The story of Jesus is not simply the past, the church declares, but continues as the spirit of Jesus transforms the lives of human beings according to the mind of Christ. But in what sense can the story of Jesus be replicated? Surely not in the specifics of his ministry, which are irretrievably in the past. It’s not about being a celibate, bearded Jewish male growing up in Galilee in the first century Palestine, a techno, someone who works with his hands like his foster father. Such historical elements are not repeatable, neither are they important to repeat. Rather, the plurality of the stories in their variety of and contradictory historical details points beyond all this to a deeper significance. That is to the meaning of the story of Jesus contained in these narratives. It’s not the facts of Jesus’ life that matter and find new expression in the lives of others, but rather the pattern of his existence. Jesus’ existence as one of radical obedience towards God and selfless service towards others forms a pattern for all humanity that can be written in the heart by the Holy Spirit. It’s this pattern that Paul designates as the nomos Christu, often translated the law of Christ, but it’s better understood perhaps as the pattern of Christ, the pattern of the Messiah. As an aside, this concept of the pattern of Christ etched into the multi-form narratives that witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was also the reason for the limits that were placed on what could be considered gospel. You see, if diversity was not just allowed but a requirement to express the fullness of truth, there was nevertheless a bridge too far, and the rejection of the so-called Gnostic Gospels with which I’m sure many of you are familiar, was precisely that they were not narratives, but often just collections of sayings. And that makes sense. The Gnostics were not interested in the material world, and to have a story requires materiality. Their sacred text, as much as they purported to be about Jesus, lacked precisely the narrative element of the pattern of Christ. Now time does not suffice for us to explore together this evening how across all the various writings of the New Testament, this underlying pattern of Christ emerges. Permit me to outline the very briefest of sketches. In the four Gospels, in the letters of Paul and the other early apostles behind all the collected facts, there’s a deep consistency in the earliest Christian literature concerning a focus not on wondrous deeds or even wise words, but on the character of Jesus as Messiah, on the meaning of his life and death. They all reveal the same pattern of radical obedience to God and selfless love towards other people. They reveal a journey that plunges to the depths of alienation and solidarity with all, and then rises in glorification, having not nearly overcome suffering, sin, and death, but emptied of their power. They reveal a pattern of joyful sacrifice, voluntary death, and glorious resurrection. And they also all agree on this, that discipleship is to follow the same Messianic pattern. They don’t emphasize that followers of Jesus perform certain deeds or learn certain doctrines. They insist, rather, on living according to the same pattern of life and death shown by Jesus. To be a Christian, therefore, is not about dogma or even morality, although there are dogmatic and ethical implications. And it’s not about all that religious baggage we so often associate with it. It is to live. It is for each of us to enact in our unique human existence the nomos Christu, the pattern of Christ. Now there are numerous ways we can describe this pattern of Christ. For instance, the Eastern Fathers’ principal mode of exegesis of understanding scripture is typology. So we can add to pattern, the word pattern, another word, tipos or type. A type is a person, an object, or an event that is connected across space-time to others. Without losing its own historical reality and identity, it shares in a greater reality of meaning, that greater reality which it points, a greater reality called the antitype. This is how the Apostles and the Church Fathers read the entire Old Testament, for example. Adam, Saint Paul says, is a tipos, a type of Christ, the first created man pointing forward to the recreation of the human race in Christ Jesus. The Exodus narrative as an event is a type of the true Passover or Pascha, Christ’s deliverance of all people from suffering and death. And anyone who’s familiar with the writings of the Church Fathers or of the liturgy of the Orthodox Church will know how abundant types are within them. But this is the key. Typology is not just a way of reading and understanding history and texts, seeing how people and events point towards Christ. Typology is, for Eastern Fathers, the fundamental structure of reality, of a world that is symbolic, of an epiphany or theophany of God, and of our own apprehension of this reality, our own finding of meaning within it. So it’s not just figures from scriptural history that are types. We, too, are called to typify Christ, to be symbols of Christ, participants in his archetypal journey and life, his descent in self-offering and his ascent in glory. If we are to be truly human, we must follow what distinguished scholar of this University, North Reply, calls the U-shaped story that is the foundation not only of biblical narrative and the Christ story, but of story after story, myth after myth. In Christ, the archetype of archetypes we have in the words of C.S. Lewis, myth become fact. As we’ve already heard this evening in the Gospel of St. John, of course, this pattern is above all called Logos. It’s not an abstract pattern, but it’s a direct and in these latter days, in the fullness of time, a direct, incarnate expression of God himself. The Logos is the principle of order and creation, as we’ve heard. It’s through the Logos that God speaks and all things are made. It is Logos, God’s verb, perhaps better than verb, in whose image we are created, whose likeness we are called to attain. And the lesson here is simply this, that a properly ordered human life is one lived in accordance with the Logos. The concept of Logos has a long and venerable history and it did even before the Greek translators of the Old Testament and the New Testament writers appropriated it. And one of the first, or the first of the Greek philosophers to speak of Logos was the pre-Socratic Periclytus, and he said this, To logu de eendos, sinu zo usin i polli. Although Logos is common to all, all have the Logos, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own. In other words, Logos may govern the universe, the macro cosmos, and our own inner world, the micro cosmos, but most people don’t choose a properly ordered life, a life aligned with the compass built into the fabric of the world, built into their own hearts and minds. We’ve heard already we are now in the season of great Lent, the great forty days, as it’s called. And this has many significances, it’s a season of course of ascetic labor, of renewal of faith, redoubling our commitment to prayer and the service of others, it’s also the season of preparing catechumens for baptism. Above all though, it’s the season we’re called to come to our senses, and to awake to the fundamental meaning, shape, and pattern of our lives. We realize our alienation, we repent, metania, we embark on our journey of return, a journey which involves self-sacrifice, a journey which necessarily passes through our own voluntary death and resurrection. Lent is in essence the totality of our life, but it requires the remembrance of death. There was a famous practice in ancient Rome as a general came back victorious from a battle, and during his triumphant parade, he received compliments and honors from the crowd of citizens, he ran the risk of being the falling victim to his own pride and delusions of grandeur, and to avoid that, a slave would be placed just behind him, whispering into his ear, saying, Vespice poste ominem te momento, look after you to the time of your death, and remember you’re only a man. Thereafter, he was enshrined and picked up in Christian tradition as memento mori, remember that you will die. But better yet, remember to die. Remember to die. I mightn’t think we need that remembrance, but eventually all of us will probably prove equal to the task. But remember to die, because remember to find and follow the logos, the pattern of our true life, which passes through death to resurrection. It’s a very frequent theme in patristic tradition. St. Gregory the theologian often repeats the saying of Plato, which suggests that the present life ought to be a meditation upon death. And he advised his friend Philagrius to live instead of the present, the future, and make this life a meditation and practice of death. You could go on from the Church Fathers, the focus on death is front and center. Remembrance of our journey that passes from death to life, this is also the connection of Lent with the preparation for baptism. Baptism in its deepest and primary sense signifies death and burial and resurrection with Christ. This is very clear in Romans chapter 6, the epistle which we read on the eve of Easter, Pascha. We have been baptized into Christ’s death. We have been buried with him by baptism into death. We have been united to Christ in a death like his and united to him in a resurrection like his. So baptism means death and resurrection. St. Gregory of Nyssa says the font is both tomb and mother. The orthodox theologian Paul Erdokimov writes about this theme. It’s an extended quotation if you’ll bear with me. Baptism he says means sharing mystically in Christ’s death and his burial but also in what happened between his burial and his resurrection, in his descent into hell. What is the meaning of the incarnation? God becoming truly human in Christ identifies himself with all human anguish, alienation, and despair. In the Garden of Gethsemane he says my soul is exceedingly sorrow even unto death. He shares in the fullness of human pain. He enters into the fullness not only of human life but of human death. And we are to understand Christ’s descent into hell as being the full expression of God’s solidarity with our human alienation. Christ descends into the hell of human suffering and of human loneliness and human despair. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows as we read in the book of Isaiah. And we may add that Christ has borne all our griefs, all our sorrows. There is a total identification here, an unreserved solidarity of Christ our God in our human fallenness. He who is sinless yet became sin for us, became one with us in our fallen state as Saint Paul says. And that is part of the meaning of this descent into hell. All things are full of God, even hell. Though I go down to hell thou art there also, we read in Psalm 1, 2, 38. So when we are baptized as Dokimov continues, we descend with Christ into hell. We also commit ourselves in solidarity with Christ to the same total unreserved identification with those who suffer. Each of the baptized becomes by virtue of his descent into hell with Christ a man or a woman for others. Each of us is called to bear the griefs of others and to carry their sorrows. To be a Christian, to be a Christian, to be a Christian today, to be a human, requires us to journey to hell. It is in Jung’s terms to journey to hell and become hell oneself. That’s how we can make sense of the words of a great elder of the 20th century, Saint Sofroni, who when a young monk asked him how will we be saved, answered keep your mind in hell and despair not. Why this archetypal descent before ascending? Why the U pattern of Christ that we must follow? As an amateur of physics, if you will indulge me, let me offer a metaphor from physics, and I’m borrowing this from a scholar of orthodox Christian liturgy, David Begerberg. Archimedes was a Greek physicist who was fascinated by the mechanics of the lever. And you may remember from your science classes and simple machines that a lever is used to exert a large force over a small distance by exerting a small force over a greater distance at the other end. A child can thus lift with one hand a man standing on the short end of the beam if the child presses down on the long end of the beam. Archimedes was so fascinated by the lever’s potential that one day he famously exclaimed, give me a lever and a place to stand and I shall move the earth. And he realized he needed three things in order to move the earth, a long enough lever, a correctly placed fulcrum point, and a place to stand. But that, of course, was the problem when it comes to moving the earth. How could he apply leverage to the world when he himself was standing on the world? How could he step off the thing he lives on in order to move it? He has no footing. So in philosophy, the riddle becomes known as searching for the archimedean point. That is an objective standpoint removed from the object of study. This hypothetical point of perspective is thought to be far enough removed from something in order to afford an outsider’s view of it. But how can we remove ourselves to a point outside ourselves? This is our human condition. Augustine defines sin as incurvatus in sen, being curved in upon oneself, a light oriented inwardly towards self rather than outwardly towards God and others. Our egocentrism exerts so strong a gravitational pull that it bends the light of glory back on ourselves, that light that should be glorifying God. How can we move ourselves off center when we are the center of our universe? We have no leverage over sin. We have no standpoint outside our vanity and pride. We have no rock on which to stand that is beyond our self-interest. Whoever desires to get outside himself needs some sort of archimedean point beyond himself. Our self-offering and our descent to hell is precisely this archimedean point. If we are to lift the world, if we are to transform the world to a true symbol, an epiphany of God’s own life, then we must first descend. We cannot lift up the world in sacrificial praise so long as we place our footing on the world alone. It is like trying to lift the carpeting while we stand on it. Archimedes’ problem was applying leverage to a world that he could not step off of in order to move it. But we can. By dying with Christ, we are freed from the world. We leave the world for the sake of the world. We die so that we and the world with us may live. This is not merely our spiritual life, our religious vocation, some crazy notion dreamed up by men in black dresses. It is our true life. It is our proper life. It is our life ordered according to the logos. And it is a journey we must undertake. We undertake not on our own, but only in Christ. For Christ and Christ alone is the one who took that journey so that we could be reconciled to God. In closing, I would like to turn to one of the greatest, in my own estimation, poets of the past century, one who saw deeply into these realities of logos, a journey through death and resurrection. In his poem, The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot depicts a bleak and sterile world. It’s a world in which we fail to take up our journey, where we stay put amidst the civilization that’s been reduced to a wasteland that has lost its fertility and its ability to bring forth life. The world is filled, he says, with a heap of broken images. And the dead tree gives no shelter. There is no easy fix. And certainly nothing in that civilization or society could offer. There is no leverage. Does such a world sound familiar to us today? We need to look at Eliot’s final work, the Four Quartets for Hope of Renewal and Spiritual Replenishment. Tellingly, above this series of four poems, the last that he wrote, he’s inscribed those words of Heraclitus that I mentioned before. Although logos is common, the many live as if they had wisdom of their own. Eliot gets it. The solution to our wasteland is not renewed civilization, per se, on its own terms, but a journey undertaken in the pattern of the logos. He says this. It’s a symbol perfected in death. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, by the purification of the motive in the ground of our beseeching. He goes on to evoke an image, this beautiful image of the fire of the Holy Spirit purifying the world as it descends, as it does. And he ends with this, in a hopeful language, in which descent to death is the source of life and meaning and transformation. We die with the dying. See, they depart and we go with them. We are born with the dead. See, they return and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration. A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments. So while the light fails on a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel, history is now and in good. With the drawing of this love and the voice of this calling, we shall not cease from exploration. The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, end in the beginning of the summer, and know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate when the last of the earth left to discover is that which was the beginning, at the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree not known, because not looked for, but heard, half heard, in the stillness between two waves of sea. Quick now, here, now, always, a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. And all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well when the tongues of flame are enfolded into the crown if not a fire, and the fire and rose are one. Thank you. Thank you.