What return can I make to the Lord?

Our Lord has given himself to us. Have we given ourselves to the Lord? 

Just four days ago, it was Annunciation – God became man, taking flesh from the Virgin. God became man. Have we become God? Not yet, right? Yet, that is why he joined our human nature – so that we may become partakers of his divine nature because he loves us and wants to be with us.

To love someone you have to go out to meet them where they are – like the father who ran out to meet his prodigal son returning home to him at last. To love someone you have to see yourself in them – to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Now, when God looks at humanity, he does see himself – because now he is also human. He has run out to meet us where we are. He has given himself to us completely. He offers us actual union with himself if we will but take the first few steps toward home. Tonight he prays to his Father for us who believe in him: that we may all be one, as he and his Father are one, and that we may be one in them (John 17:21).

Do we take up this offer? Do we do our small part of showing up, of turning to him, of cooperating with his grace? This is called synergy. As Paul says, “We are fellow-workers (synergoi) with God' (1 Cor 3:9a). It’s really all the work of the Lord because we are the work of the Lord. We are “God’s field [and] God’s building” (1 Cor 3:9b).

But he’s given us freedom. Without freedom, there is no love and no repentance (and the Lord is in love with the beauty of repentance). So, if we will join with God, we must freely work with God rather than vainly strive against him. Tonight, he shows us how to work with him. Tonight, he freely gives himself to us and in so doing shows us how to freely give ourselves to him.

Cathedral of Monreale

Tonight, he washes his apostles’ feet. Do we wash each other's feet? This becomes a way for us to give ourselves to our creator and our God.

Behold: the creator washes the feet of his creatures. It is clear at this moment, that the creator of all things has emptied himself completely for the love of his creatures. He washes even the feet of Judas, whom he knows will betray him. Are we selective about who we will serve and humble ourselves before? Jesus is not.

“He who made the lakes, the springs, and the seas… washes the feet of his disciples; in his infinite mercy, he lowers himself, and he draws us up.”* The maker of water shows why he truly made it. “The Wisdom of God, who holds back the great waters… today pours water into a basin.”† He lowers himself and serves those whom he loves with water. He makes all things for love.

Jesus’s example of emptying himself and lowering himself is nothing less than a path to theosis for us. To become one with God above, we must lower ourselves as he did. He “humbled [himself] and washed the feet of [his] disciples, thus preparing them to walk in the divine footsteps.”‡ To walk this path is to walk “the most excellent way of humility”§ in imitation of the one “who wraps the heavens with the clouds [and yet] now wraps himself with a towel.”** This is truly “the model of humility,” which any who would follow Christ must imitate.†† If we would imitate Christ Jesus, we must have in us “the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, who emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” and then we will truly become the body of Christ (Phil 2:5).

Tonight, he gives us his body and blood to eat and drink. Have we become the body of Christ?

With Eucharist, Jesus radically breaks down our perceived barriers and divisions and fills all creation with his grace. He comes like a bridegroom in the middle of the night. Unexpectedly, in the midst of the darkness of this Holy Week, there shines the brightness of this Great and Holy Thursday. The “bridal chamber” is “completely engulfed with light.”‡‡ Though until this day we have been wearing dark garments – not wedding garments – in penitence, now, tonight, at his last supper, the Lord gives us the Eucharist, which is – in no small way – a consummation of God’s marital union with humanity.

 “The true Wisdom of God initiates his friends into the mysteries. He prepares a table filled with spiritual food, and, for the faithful, He fills the cup of immortality.”§§ The mystery of the Eucharist is nothing less than the bread of eternal life, given to us today. This is the very means of union with God.

Jesus says,

“Take and eat, this is my Body; you shall find food for your faith;”

“Take and drink, this is my Blood; you shall find food for your faith;”

“Dwell in me, and you shall find food for your faith.”***

We eat and drink the body and the blood of Christ so that we may come to dwell in him. Jesus gives us the Eucharist in order to bring his people into himself.

He gives us himself in this way. We take of him and eat and drink. By this means and by the descent of the holy spirit upon us, we become the body of Christ. As the body of Christ, we may give ourselves completely to God, as he does upon the cross.

Tomorrow, he dies for us. Can we even stay awake to watch and pray with him for one hour?

He gives us everything and gives us himself completely. Do we give him anything? Do we accept even inconvenience for him, let alone death? Is it too much to ask that we spend time with him? Can we be bothered at all? Or, are we like the disciples who keep nodding off in the midst of his agony as he awaits his betrayal?

He delights even in a small movement toward him on our part. If we but begin to move toward him, he runs out to meet us. We must cooperate with his grace, but there is nothing symmetrical about this relationship. Even our cooperation is enabled by his grace. His grace is everything and is altogether trustworthy.

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[*] Sessional Hymns at Matins, Triodion 565

[†] The fifth ode, Triodion 566

[‡] Triodion 565

[§] From the dismissal at every service for Holy Thursday, e.g. Triodion 572

[**] Triodion 566

[††] Triodion 566

[‡‡] Hymn of Light

[§§] The first Ode of Matins, Triodion 564

[***] From the third ode, Triodion 565

To take up a cross

On Mark 8:34-9:1

We know – most of us – what happened on the cross.

For example, just last week, I asked my five year old nephew what happened on the cross and first he said, "You mean the cross on top of the church?" And I said, "No, I’m asking about the reason we put a cross on top of the church. I mean, what happened on the real cross? Do you know?" And he said, "They nailed Jesus to it."

That is indeed the awful and awesome truth – that Jesus, our Savior and the Savior of the world, hung upon the cross and there he died for us and for our salvation. “[He] ascended the cross in [his] human nature, to deliver from the enemy’s bondage those whom [he] created,” as we pray quietly before the Divine Liturgy. The one who is life himself – the way the truth and the life (John 14:6) – died. Life died – life entered into death – so that, though we die, in him, we may live (John 11:25) – and live forever.

We know this – most of us. We have the inestimable benefit of living in a post-resurrectional cosmos. We know and partake of the life that comes after the cross and through it. The cross for us has rightly been bejeweled. The cross for us is the tree of life. For us it no longer symbolizes death and ignominy, but life and glory. “The King of Glory” we write on icons of the cross. And now, if we glory, let us glory “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to [us], and [we] to the world,” as Paul writes to the Galatians (6:14).

“We bow to your cross, O Lord, and we glorify your holy resurrection!” We will sing this for the last time tomorrow, on the leave-taking of the exaltation of the holy cross. 

This action is itself a beautiful image of death and resurrection. We bow or prostrate as we sing of the cross. Our bodies are lowered to the ground as they will be in death. Then, we stand upright again as we sing of resurrection, as we will stand up again from our graves when the Son of man “comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38).

So when Jesus says today, ""If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Mark 8:34), all of this imagery should come to our minds, given the benefit of our vantage point.

But what can Jesus' disciples and the multitude have thought when he preached this to them? This is the first time that Jesus directly mentions the cross. This is the case in the gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is the first time Jesus uses the word “cross,” and he’s not talking just about his own cross, but about the crosses of those who would be his followers – about our crosses. Isn’t that something?

Now Jesus had just foretold his own death and resurrection, so I suppose we could presume that he also described how he would die, but the gospel doesn’t tell us that. Regardless, how confounding the idea of taking up a cross must have sounded to those who first heard it! In a way we have an advantage over these first hearers, but in a way they have an advantage over us.

They perhaps could not see the good and beauty of the cross, as well as we. Even though Jesus had just told them that he would rise again from the dead, I imagine that it still would be difficult for them to conceive of this instrument of torture and death (to which Jesus is calling them) as a life-giving thing.

We, on the other hand, knowing the outcome, having read the last page of the story, may fail to see sometimes the suffering and scandal the cross represents as it lies before us on the tetrapod in bright pigments and enwreathed with flowers. We may expect to skip straight to the resurrection and forget about how the way to resurrection is through the cross. We may be tempted to skip straight to the feast of Pascha without first observing the black fast of Good Friday.

But when Jesus told the multitude that, if they were to follow him, they were going to need to follow him to the cross, they’d have had no illusions about what this meant. They knew what crosses were for and they had witnessed crucifixions, which were all too common in that time and place.

To carry a cross is to suffer. To take up a cross, is to accept or even embrace that suffering. Here’s the thing: we all have a cross whether we accept it or not. There’s no escape from suffering in this life. Most of those crucified went to the cross very much against their will. The end of suffering can only be fully realized in the life to come, if we choose to go that way. 

This is our choice, then: to reject the cross and die anyway or to accept the cross with love and, through death, live forever. We can react to suffering as Job’s wife recommends, that is to curse God and die (Job 2:9). Or we can respond to suffering as Job does, not without questioning, but without sin anyway (Job 1:22), and with love anyway (Job 10:12), blessing the name of the Lord anyway (Job 1:21).

Our Lord heals us, but he does not always and immediately take away all our suffering. Everyone here has suffered. Some more than others. And there is nothing just about its distribution. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike (Matt 5:45), and so does pain afflict us all physically, psychologically, spiritually. And there is no understanding it, as far as I can tell.

Sometimes suffering is the direct result of sin – for example, gluttony, and drunkenness, and violence all result almost immediately in some kind of suffering either for the self or for others. Dying by the sword, Jesus says, results from living by it (Matt 26:52). But then sometimes children as innocent as doves are cut to death this way for no reason. And there is no understanding that, as far as I can tell.

It is possible only by the grace of God for us to be freed from sin, and even then we will not be freed from suffering and affliction and persecution by the evil spirits and by the enemies of God. Jesus was without sin, yet in his great love for us, he suffered greatly. He suffered so that, through suffering, we can be united to him. He has given suffering, which was meaningless, the only meaning that it can have. God, by becoming a man who suffers, has transfigured suffering into grace – into a way of living the life of God.

Because Jesus takes up his cross, we must take up our crosses if we are to follow him – if we are to become like him, which is what it means to be his follower. Our crosses are made up of all our difficulties and all our pain and suffering. And Jesus is present to us in these. By his cross, Jesus has transformed our suffering, as Metropolitan George of Mount Lebanon writes, “into a creative force, a means of drawing near to God, so that we can make it into a ladder by which we climb up to heaven.”

Controversial Religious Art

Dr. Christopher Allen of Sydney recently resigned from the judging panel for the Blake Prize for Religious Art (Australia's highest award for this kind of work) over his objections to a crucifixion painted by the artist Adam Cullen: Religious art prize judge quits in disgust

I happen to agree with Dr. Allen's assessment of Cullen's work: "It has a kind of deliberate ugliness which has been exploited as a gimmick." But I can't help but wonder whether he'd level the same attack against some of my work:

Similar words have been used to describe the above painting, which I painted in 2002. In 1998, some of my work was banned from an exhibition in a Wesleyan church because it was "frightening people." Like Cullen, I've "become used to strong reactions to [my] work."

There is a stylistic similarity between our works, but I believe there is a profound difference of intent. If I intend to shock, it is with the reality of the crucifixion. Cullen works with disrespectful flippancy, quipping, "It's just a Jew on the cross." My hope with this kind of work is to reawaken the viewer to the violent sacrifice of God's Son made Man. Pretty, pastel, stiff figures on the cross may have a place, but I try to express the pain and ugliness He endured in becoming our Paschal Lamb.

Update 12-2-2015: I have continued to paint like this now for many years. Examples of my work may be found here: The Artfinder Shop of John R.P. Russell