On Acts 20:16-18, 28-36 and John 17:1-13
Sunday of the Fathers at the
First Nicene Council
Today,
(did you hear?) Paul was hurrying to Jerusalem in order to get there for Pentecost
(Acts 20:16). Pentecost is coming next Sunday, and with it our commemoration of
the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles. Already, the Spirit is with
us. And today we remember the fathers of the first ecumenical council, which
met in Nicaea in 325, and who were also inspired by the same Holy Spirit.
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| The First Council of Nicea, wall painting at the church of Stavropoleos Bucharest, Romania |
At every
Divine Liturgy and at every Compline, we repeat the Nicene Creed which these
fathers began to craft under the inspiration of the Spirit. The Nicene faith is
our faith, the God-inspired faith, the faith of our fathers and mothers.
The Holy
Spirit inspires the Church. God is with us. Some fall into a trap of confining
the presence and action of God to historical events like Pentecost or to
historical documents like Scripture. Or, toward another extreme, some limit
their understanding of the Spirit to private individual ecstatic experiences.
In truth, the Holy Spirit inspires the Church.
In truth, the Holy Spirit inspires the Church.
The
Church is, but is not only, historical. It is also the living and breathing
body of Christ. It is fully present here where we are gathered in the name of
Jesus Christ, where the Holy Spirit descends upon us and upon our gifts, where
the Father hears our prayer. And it is present throughout the world wherever
orthodoxy is believed and wherever orthopraxis is observed.
In the
Church, our experience of God is, but is not only, private and personal. We
encounter God alone in our prayer closets, but we also encounter Him in one
another, in the least of his brethren, and in our communal prayer, in the
mysteries of the Church and in the public proclamation of His Word.
In that
public proclamation today we, with the apostles, overhear Jesus say to his
Father, “This is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus
Christ whom you have sent.” (17:3).
There are
ten thousand sermons in this one verse, but today I am struck by an odd turn of
phrase: Jesus Christ calls himself Jesus Christ in the third person. This
points to an intriguing possibility. It is possible that this prayer of Jesus at
his Last Supper was long remembered liturgically before it was committed to
writing, which could explain why the prayer is both from Jesus Christ and about
Jesus Christ.[i]
The gospel of John is the latest gospel to be written and it benefits from the
longest theological reflection. Its prose and rhetoric are finely polished. Chiefly
for this gospel’s sake, John, whose feast is today, is rightly called the Theologian.
These
facts call to mind the reality that while for a while there were Christians
without any written gospels, there were never any Christians without worship,
without liturgy, without anamnesis/remembrance, without Eucharist/thanksgiving.
The inspired Divine Liturgy precedes
the inspired written gospels.
Today Jesus
says to His Father, “I have given them the words you gave me and they have
received them” (17:3). But Jesus did not write down these words. The gospels
tell us that Jesus could both read
and write. But the only writing that he does, mysteriously, is in the sand –
letters that the wind could blow away – perhaps a wind like that wind that
blows in the upper room where the apostles hide.
Jesus
does not give us a manuscript, but rather the testimony of women and men. He
writes his revelation on their hearts. He chooses to reveal himself through
people – the people of God - that is, through the Church.
The Holy
Spirit inspires the Church, and we
must follow the Church, never the Scripture alone. The Scripture is the
inspired word of God and the Holy Spirit inspires it in and through the Church,
never apart from or against the Church. Decontextualized from the Church, the
Scripture can be distorted and perverted to any false teaching or wicked
purpose the interpreter desires. Thank God, God did not leave us with the
Scripture alone, but also gave us His holy Church.
Today in
Acts, Paul tells the elders [that is, the presbyters] of Ephesus that “the Holy
Spirit has made you overseers [that is, ἐπίσκοποι, bishops] to feed the Church
of the Lord which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). The same Holy Spirit
that inspires Scripture and that descends upon the apostles at Pentecost also
makes presbyters and bishops for the Church. Ordination is an act of God, a
holy mystery, an epiclesis. This isn’t a different Spirit, but the same Spirit.
There is one Holy Spirit, one God, one faith, one Church. The Holy Spirit gives
us the Scripture and he gives us the bishops too. We don’t get one without the
other. We need them both absolutely.
This
doesn’t mean that bishops are always good and holy. In fact, if we study the
history of the ecumenical councils we discover an uncomfortable amount of
all-too human politics, rivalries, and intrigues. Despite this, the Holy Spirit
works through these councils, just as he works through Peter, who denied him,
and through Paul, who persecuted his Church. Truth is expressed by God from out
of the midst of human failings. God is with us, in the midst of us. The Holy
Spirit inspires the Church.
When a presbyter, Arius, begins to lead people astray, teaching that Jesus is
not of one divine essence with the Father, but rather some kind of exalted
creature of God, the Holy Spirit inspires the Nicene council which we
commemorate today.
The Arians
misread today’s gospel. When Jesus says to his Father that he is “the only true
God,” the Arians thought that this must mean that Jesus himself was not the
true God. This is what I mean. How quickly the human mind can stumble into
error when reading the Scripture alone unaided by the Church. The Holy Spirit
has given us both because we need both in order to come to orthodoxy.
The
Nicene Council provided the needed corrective. As we say in the Nicene Creed, Jesus
Christ is “Son of God, the only-begotten, born of the Father before all
ages. Light from light, true God from
true God, begotten, not made, one in essence with the Father.” Our Christology
couldn’t get any higher.
Our holy
father Athanasius, who was present at the Nicene Council as a deacon and who spent
the rest of his life defending its teachings against the world, provides the true
understanding of the word “only” in today’s gospel. He writes against the
Arians,
“If
then the Father is called the only true God, this is said not to the denial of
him who said, "I am the Truth…” And so the Lord himself added at once,
"And Jesus Christ whom you have sent." Now had he been a creature, he
would not have added this and ranked himself with his creator. For what
fellowship is there between the True and the not true? But as it is, by
including himself with the Father, he has shown that he is of the Father's
nature.”[ii]
The Holy
Spirit was inspiring the Church before the gospels were written, and he
continues to inspire the Church after they are written. This is never more
evident than when there is an ecumenical council. At the council of Nicaea, the
Holy Spirit taught the Church a new word: homoousios,
that is, of one essence. The Son is of one essence with the Father. Jesus
Christ is not less than God. He is God. And there are not two Gods, but one
God. Many of the fathers of the council were reluctant to accept this word at
first because it appears nowhere in scripture and because it had been employed
in the past by heretics. But guided by the Holy Spirit and for the benefit of
all the people of God, accept it they did.
A priest
once told me that there are only two words I must never say from the pulpit.
One of them is “change.” I’m not going to say the other word. But sometimes the
Holy Spirit inspires change. Homoousios
was a new word, once.
We must
not forget the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church at all times, without whose
presence we are not the Church.
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