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From Death to Life by Fr. Gregory "... that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead." (Philippians 3:10-11) Without a shadow of a doubt Orthodox Christianity is lived in two connected gears ... personal experience and commitment in the Church. We must know of what we speak and we must relate in what we know to others. It is possible of course to have a sound grasp of the principles of the Orthodox faith without having much care to live out that faith on a personal basis. It is possible to have a privatised version of the faith where we connect with the Church and God on our terms. These travesties of faith are severely condemned in the Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church. ... and the Lord said: "Because this people draw near with their mouth and honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote; (Isaiah 29:13) So, if our Lord teaches us that we must deny ourselves and take up our cross daily and follow him, we have no excuse: we must do just that. This is a command, even a law; because it is the law of the Love of God ... ever sacrificing itself for the world. This is why St. Paul teaches in Philippians that we are to be conformed to his death in order to attain to the resurrection. The self sacrificing love of the cross is the only door to newness of life, for us and for all people. All the spiritual disciplines of Great Lent are dedicated to this end ... that our love may grow more Christ like, that we might pass from death to life and bring many with us into the kingdom of God. So, how are we to be "conformed to his death?" First we need to behold death without undue fear or apprehension but not by sanitising its impact with some kind of unfeeling fatalism. Death is always an enemy in Orthodox Christianity, not part of God's original design for creation, but brought upon that creation by the disobedience of our primal parents in Eden. Here is the paradox of believing. We cannot behold this enemy, death, without reckoning it an enemy vanquished by the resurrection of Christ. In short we cannot make the first steps toward conformity with Christ's death unless and until we believe that this ancient foe has lost its sting. No one would walk up to a ravenous crocodile unless its jaws were wired shut. We can look upon death without fear and even walk toward it because Christ has sewn up the mouth of hell tight shut so that it might not harm his friends. Next we need to look upon not death in general but two particular deaths:- (a) The death of Christ Looking upon the death of Christ is not pleasant for we have here not a serene acquiescence in the face of the inevitable but a titanic struggle between good and evil in which the main combatants are God and Satan himself. As our Lord dies the earthquake opens the tombs and the Temple curtain is torn in two. Heaven itself is shaken as Hell is tamed. What amazing power accomplishes this overturning, this reversal of Eden's curse? LOVE .... nothing but Infinite, Pure, Transcendent, Inexhaustible Love ... forgiving sins, restoring lives, granting saving endurance in the face of the unrelenting suffering of human darkness and promising a life against which the gates of hell are utterly powerless. That is what it means to look upon the death of Christ. But what of our death? Why is it necessary to look upon our own death? There is such a thing as a "good death" and it is by this preparedness that we can live a "good life." Jesus taught as much in the parable of the rich fool and his barns, (Luke 12:16-21). "He spoke a parable to them, saying, "The ground of a certain rich man brought forth abundantly. He reasoned within himself, saying, ‘What will I do, because I don’t have room to store my crops?’ He said, ‘This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns, and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. I will tell my soul, "Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry."‘ "But God said to him, ‘You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared—whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God." Looking on our own death in the context of the resurrection of Christ is no morbid activity. It is making peace with God in life. It's enabling us to live fully in God mindful of the transitory nature of this life, it's fragility, its givenness; not ours to own but to hold in trust. Precisely because death does not have the final word life can be lived righteously, sacrificially, faithfully. This, therefore, is how Christians live, die and live eternally. So, what of Great Lent? How can this fast help us to be better conformed to the death of Christ? Spiritually, behind all the surface manifestations of fasting, repentance, study, prayer, acts of charity we have one defining principle … letting go, surrendering obsessive control of our lives, submitting to God out of love and hope. For this reason Great Lent has been called a joyful sorrow, a spring time for the soul, and so it is. We can let go in this manner when we cease to fear and we cease to fear as we are perfected in Love. Indeed this whole process has its beginning and end in the Love of God but the fast helps us to deepen and strengthen that commitment by its very intensity. It is a call to a deeper walk with God; to plumb the depths. Let us finish on this note with another teaching of St. Paul for this describes perfectly the goal of our Christian living and dying. “For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man; so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:14-21). |
