Second Terrace

what we do is what we believe

Truth will Out

"I believed, thus have I spoken."

The Apostle Paul wrote this in 2 Corinthians 4.13, quoting Psalm 115.10 LXX.

The meaning is clear. Just as truth will out, so will belief. T S Eliot (and St Paul) once said that it doesn't matter what creed is said in church on a Sunday -- give him instead a week to observe how one lives and Eliot will then know -- accurately and certainly -- what that person really believes.

St Paul said that we are like earthenware vessels holding treasure -- that truth that will out: "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies."

All that speaking, that manifestation "in our bodies," comes out inexorably from the truth that "we too believe, and so we speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence."

There is no Christian ethic without theology. Without the certainty that the Messiah, the Son of David, is the Son of God Who died on the Cross and rose again, then that lack of theology will necessarily show up in all kinds of deficiencies in behavior, in speech, in ethics and in politics.

In a recent study, the evangelical Ligonier group found that while 94 percent said that sex outside of traditional marriage is wrong, 91 percent said that abortion is a sin, of this same group over 50 percent agreed (with Arius) that “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God." Amazingly, 43 percent said that Jesus was a great teacher, but not God.

I suggest that this failure to recognize Jesus for Who He is, and the Kingdom of God that He is bringing, has resulted in deeply troubling real-life deficiencies. This Christological failure, I suggest, explains the partisan drift into extremism, the tendency toward authoritarian Christian nationalism, the state-religion imposition of culture war agenda.

The truth will out. If there is partisan affiliation and a determined push to overturn democracy, there is a theological bankruptcy that accounts for it.

Make Israel Great Again

After the Triumphal Entry of Palm Sunday, Jesus went to the Temple and drove out the moneychangers and pigeon-sellers. “My house shall be called a house of prayer," He proclaimed, "but you have made it a den of thieves.”

Then the blind and the lame came to Jesus for healing, which is the real business of the Temple, and of "true religion," as St James would write later on.

This troubled the chief priests and the scribes – the Temple administration, and they complained about “Hosanna to the Son of David!”

Jesus quoted Psalm 8: “Out of the mouths of babes You have brought perfect praise.”

He left for Bethany, then on His way to the Temple the next morning. 

Matthew says that He was hungry, and tried to search for some figs from a fig tree – He found none. This became a symbolic moment, a parable story.

He cursed the fig tree, and the tree withered at once. The disciples were just amazed by the miracle, but they missed the whole point.

The figs that weren’t there stood for prayer in the Temple that wasn’t there – Jesus had searched for it, but found moneychangers, pigeon-sellers, and a Temple administration that didn’t care for prayer at all.

If they had, they would have recognized Him.

In Matthew chapters 21 and 22, there is a long series of Jesus dealing with the Temple administration and the leaders of the Jewish religion.

He told them the parable of the unwilling son who ended up working for his father, whereas the willing son ended up not showing for work.

Then He told them about the vineyard where the vineyard workers tried to possess all the fruits, and ended up killing the son of the owner of the vineyard when he came to collect the owner’s portion

The next parable was about a great wedding feast that the king invited everyone to come – the expected people, the ones with the religious pedigree, the people of position and weight, had better things to do, so the king invited the unexpected people – the poor, the halt, the lame, the street people, just anyone

Then the Pharisees – who were like fundamentalists – made a coalition with the Herodians whom they had hated but united with them against Jesus, and tried to trap Jesus about taxes: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” – they missed the point: prayer and life and love are what we render to God.

Then the Sadducees, who were the ritualists who didn’t believe in the resurrection or the spiritual world or even the Prophets, tried to trap Jesus about marriage in heaven (which they didn’t believe in either): Jesus told them that God is the God of the living, and that the resurrection is the goal of life. Their problem, Jesus said, was that they "know neither the scriptures nor the power of God."

After a long series of confrontations with the chief priests and the scribes, the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the Herodians, who laid out one entrapment and leading question after another, we have this last, climactic interchange:

"At that time, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. 'Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?' And He said to him, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.'”

Then He continued: “Who is the Christ, the Messiah?” – because they in particular had been preaching about the Messiah who would come and "make Israel great again."

They said “The Son of David”

Then Jesus quoted Psalm 109 LXX – which was the most important Psalm to the Apostles and first Christians: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies Your footstool.”

And Jesus posed this riddle to them after they had tried to trap Him with their conundrums over and over again:

“If David calls Him Lord, how is He his son?”

The only answer, then, was that Jesus Christ already existed in heaven long before David, and that Jesus Christ is God the Son with God the Father and the Holy Spirit.

This, the Pharisees, could not admit, so “No one was able to answer Him a word, nor from that day did any one dare to ask Him any more questions” (Matthew 22.46).

If the Temple had been faithful to its calling from God, it would have recognized Jesus as the Son of God -- which was the whole idea and destiny of the Law of "justice, mercy, and faith" (Matthew 23.23).

They would also have recognized the Good Shepherd in the faces of the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked poor, the sick, and the imprisoned. Again, the real business of the Temple.

But the Temple preferred, instead, political power and the oppression of rules and regulations.

They refused to believe that God, the Absolute and Transcendent, is essentially Father, and that the Son of God came to serve ...

... simply because the greatest commandment is to "be ye perfect as the Father is perfect" -- the greatest commandment is Love. Love is perfection: perfection is not complete adherence to rules and regulations.

Failing this call to be the House of Prayer will eventually end up like the withered fig tree.

And there's been a lot of withering these days.

The Next Chapter

The 23rd chapter of St Matthew is a wildly dramatic turnaround from the previous chapter of leading questions and entrapments. The religious leaders exposed their hand. They not only failed to recognize Jesus and the Kingdom of God that He embodied, but they also revealed why they were so blind.

They were distracted. They had traded out religiosity for religion. They had codified asceticism into legalistic regulation. They had stripped out the living God from Scripture and thus were free to harness religion for wealth and power. They loved titles and degrees and honorifics. They garbed themselves in religious garments and ritual behavior. They reduced morality into technical jargon that was self-justifying and politically self-aggrandizing. They turned faith and ethics into a political brand.

So they could not see Him when they should have. As the last verse of the entrapment chapter ended with Jesus posing His own riddle, the last verse of the "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees" ends with a terrible, bleak sentence. As Jesus cursed the fig tree as a sign of what would happen to the Temple as it did not bear the fruit of prayer, so Jesus describes the self-incurred curse that would come down on anyone who fails to recognize the God Who gathers us together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings:

"Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate" (Matthew 23.38).

We ourselves, clergy who "sit on Moses' seat" (Matthew 23.2) are subject to the woes of this chapter.

Too often in American Orthodoxy, we have made coalition with fellow conservatives in the Evangelical and Roman Catholic communities. We have allowed them to form and fill the content of our political ethics, our "moral imagination." We have adopted the agenda of the culture wars and the "moral majority" (which is a mutation of Nixon's "silent majority"). 

We have permitted, on our watch, a steady deformation of the New Testament moral calling. Morality is a calling to a holistic righteousness that is characterized by the peace and beauty of the Kingdom of God. It is a joyous and disciplined yearning toward theosis.

But we have allowed morality to become a partisan identity. We have signed our names to a political platform that backs up Christian moral discipline with state prosecution. Some of us clergy, even, are working enthusiastically to make Christianity the state-enfranchised religion, and would even happily watch secular democracy overturned.

"My house shall be called a house of prayer." God have mercy on us if we have made it a den of thieves, or partisans, or legalists, or extremists and insurrectionists and conspiracy theorists.

"For I tell you," Jesus said at the end, "you will not see Me again, until you say, 'Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord.'"

That Name, that is above every name, is the Name of One Who pours out Himself in love. Love is the greatest command because the Trinity is what Love is. Because the distance of the eternal Trinity is Beauty and its difference is Peace, then that must be what we are. 

If we're not -- and obviously, we have not been enough -- then we must become so, even when things wither, even when the axe is taken to the roots, even when the foundations are being shaken.

Let us become so, then: because then, and only then, will we say "Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord."

Because then we will so speak, because have finally believed.

raising the Cross beyond the imperium

Raising the Cross:  beyond the imperium

“In this sign conquer”

The troparion of the Elevation of the Holy Cross that we sang today is famous worldwide. But that fame has nothing to do with the meaning of the Feast itself, nor of the Holy Cross.

It is famous because the great Russian composer Tschaikovsky spotlighted it in his masterpiece, “The 1812 Overture.” 

The Overture was written to celebrated the victory of the Russians over the French in 1812. Napoleon had marched into Russia, overconfident of victory, as his army was vastly superior in numbers, weapons, and leadership.

At the Battle of Borodino, on 7 September 1812, the French remained masters of the field at the end of the day. But they were shocked (as was the rest of the world) by the cost inflicted on them by the much lesser Russian army. And a few months later, in the unforgiving Russian winter, with overextended supply lines and nothing to be pillaged from burnt Russian fields and storehouses, the once-grand French army had to retreat back to France in utter and shameful defeat.

You can hear, in the Overture, this battle being played out. First you hear the triumphant peals of the French Marseillaise. But then you hear the straints of “O Lord Save Thy People” in Russian Tone 1 begin to swell, and completely take over in the triumphant conclusion, underscored by trumpet and cannon blast.

Tchaikovsky was being consistent with an old custom. For long, the Cross was used as a standard of military and imperial victory. Constantine himself, the first Christian Roman Emperor, dreamed of a vision in the sky of the Cross with the words “In hoc signo vinces” (“in this Sign conquer”) emblazoned with it.

From that time on in the Christian Empire, the Cross was used on military banners. Victory on the battlefield – whether at the Milvian Bridge, Borodino, or thousands of other places – was how our festal tropar was interpreted:

“O Lord save Your people and bless Your inheritance, grant victory to all Orthodox Christians over their adversaries, and protect Your people by Your Cross!”

It’s easy to understand how such an interpretation was made.

But that was then. This is now.

There may have been a time when a Christian Empire was necessary. My best “historical” guess is that an Empire was necessary for the secure development of Christian doctrine and liturgy, for Christian civility and society. The ideas of individual rights, healthcare and social welfare, were all legacies of the Christian Byzantine Empire. We would not have the legacy of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, along with all the Orthodox liturgical development that was able to grow and beautify for a thousand years.

That said, the Church is not meant, in essence, to take up the authority of the sword. The Apostle Paul said that only the secular State is ordained by God to wield the power of death (which is the meaning of the sword in Romans 13.4) in order to restrain evil. 

That is not and should never be the role of the Church. After all, Jesus told us to bless and forgive our enemies and pray for them. It’s hard, if not impossible, to square this command with the use of the Cross on the battlefield.

Whether or not that was ever appropriate neither I nor anyone else can say.

But if it ever was, those days are gone. That was then (maybe), this is now.

Because in this day and age, in this real world, we have to take up the Real Cross for what it really means.

It no longer means military victory or imperial power. 

The Cross has nothing to do with the Sword. It is not possible to bless swords or cannons, guns or tanks or submarines or – God forbid – missiles with nuclear warheads.

The Cross means something else entirely.

Lift the Cross, lower the self

Jesus makes clear the meaning of the Cross, and just how to elevate the Cross in the right way:

“If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.”

“Self-denial” is the only way to elevate the Cross.

And this is so simply because it was precisely “self-denial” that Jesus did on the Cross. Jesus poured out His life – divine and human – on the Cross, the outpouring of His blood and water that flowed from His Side. 

Jesus denied Himself the prerogatives of His heavenly and royal divine power and dignity, and He entered into His life-long Crucifixion of the flesh – His endurance of fatigue and hunger and thirst, limitation and frustration, horror, even pain and death.

Self-denial is the only way to beat sin and death – which are the only real enemies. No, the enemy is not Muslims or secular humanists. No, the enemy is not “woke” people or illegal immigrants or anyone in the political and partisan opposition. No, the enemy is not Communists or cultural Marxists. 

And for the Russians, the enemy was not really the French. For the Byzantines, the enemy was not really the Sassanids or the Ottomans.

The enemy was always sin and death.

For sin is the self-centered rejection of God and His Fatherly Love for all His children and creation.

Death is simply the destiny of sin, and its duration. 

And Hell? Hell is the completion of selfishness. Hell is wherever, and whenever, sin is. Sin is the establishment of Hell, even in the here and now.

The real Cross and the real victory

Self-aggrandizement and self-centeredness and selfishness are the same as Pride, which is the first sin ever committed in Creation (committed by the devil, of course).

Pride and self-denial cannot happen in the same soul. It’s either one or the other. Self-denial alone makes room for the Cross of Jesus Christ.

The self-denial of the Cross, the bearing of one’s Cross in following Jesus, is the only path out of selfish Hell.

“You are the rock, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Nothing can stand against the cosmic Tide of the Father’s Love.

That is why we must always also sing the second hymn (i.e., the Kondak) of the Feast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross. It completes the meaning of the "elevation." 

“Lifted up of Your own Will upon the Cross, You bestow Your mercy upon the new people that bear Your Name. Make the Orthodox people glad in Your strength, giving them victory over their enemies. May Your Cross assist them in spiritual struggles, weapon of peace and unconquerable standard of victory.”

a plea for a new pastoral therapy

A note to clergy and those who share that burden (which is about everyone):

We need to develop ways for helping people out of ideological confinement.

That would involve diagnosing such pathology, and helping people to recognize it, to be self-aware.

It would involve what the Athonite Fathers call the "refutation of logismoi" -- that is, a better way of thinking that argues, in sermons and in one's own mind, against the mystification that is crucial in every ideology.

Authoritarianism -- probably the most threatening and prominent ideology at present -- is based on the fallacy that state power must be invested in a single individual, and removed -- forcefully -- from the populace.

We need a logic and a rhetoric that would act as "antibodies" against this virus. In this country, at least, we must be able to say that this democratic republic is morally superior to all forms of authoritarianism, whether a monarchy, dictatorship (i.e., fascism, nazism, communism), or whatever Viktor Orban is doing in Hungary.

Other ideologies that are of major pastoral concern:

Nationalism. Racism (even anti-Semitism, which is growing). Materialism -- not just a secularist problem, but is present in non- or even anti-sacramental conservative circles, and libertarian economics.

A clear, robust theology is the only therapy for ideological pathology. I wish I could say that Bible verse memory is effective by itself, but it's not: it's as ineffective as Patristic passage memory. Both of these are often cherry-picked out of context, and neglect long and difficult Patristic writings that are actually more helpful.

I wish I could say that history is effective by itself. But the same problem arises here, too. American history is famously susceptible to "re-editing and revision." In many popular histories, there is no mention that the Constitution is an Enlightenment document. Church history is often presented sentimentally, with nostalgic longing for Byzantine Emperors and Russian Tsars, with little, if any, reference made to the onerous realities inflicted on the population -- wars, slavery, taxation.

Cherry-picking and "eisogesis" (Biblical, Patristic, and historiographical) are the chief instruments of mystification.

Theology is the place where ideology cannot be mystified so easily. A god who permits enslavement will have to be clearly depicted as a voluntarist god who exacts predestined, eternal torture.

But a God Who washes the feet of His friends can only be witnessed to in a theology that is personalistic (and thus democratic) just because of the unity of the Three Persons in the Trinity ... just because of the unity of divinity and humanity in the Theanthropos, the God-manhood of Jesus Christ ... just because that Godman died in torture (God doesn't torture: He only gets tortured) on the Cross, just so He might raise all of us with Him on the third day, to sit at the right hand of the Father.

Authoritarianism, nationalism, racism, and materialism all wither in the severe light of true theology.

We clergy have a job to do. We must not take the easy and cowardly way of so many clergy and other "nice people" in Germany and Italy of the 1920's and 1930's, or else we'll find ourselves in their 40's.