By Fr. Antony Hughes
But the Cross and Resurrection present an unprecedented challenge to us. The coming of Jesus is the invasion of Reality into our fallen world. To embrace the message of Christ means the end of delusion, the opening of new doors, the renewal of the mind. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost punctuates the invasion even more, making it strikingly personal. Looking back I’ll bet the apostles said to themselves more than once, “How could we have been so blind?” We must be careful not to cling so tightly to what we think we know that we actually close our eyes to the truth. Faith that doesn’t grow and change is dead.
This is where I turn to Thomas Merton’s essay entitled “The Mystery of Christ.” In it he writes that the mystery of Christ in the Gospel is like a magnifying glass that concentrates all the power of the sun “into a burning knot of heat” that “sets fire to the spirit of man. For in Christ God is made man. In Him God and man are no longer separate, remote from each other, but inseparably one, unconfused and yet indivisible. Hence in Christ everything that is divine and supernatural becomes accessible on the human level” to everyone. He continues, “But the glass of… Christ… seeks out spirits that are well prepared, dried by the light and warmth of God, and ready to take flame in the little knot of fire that is the grace of the Holy Spirit.” We will not be ready to take flame if we are afraid to burn. If we are afraid to change, then we cannot know God.
But here’s what trips us up. We are caught up in imagination. We imagine who and what Christ is in ways that are comfortable to us, but imagination does not save, faith does! We think we know Him and yet what we know are our images of Him. They may be nice, but they fall far short of the Truth. We are not called to form for ourselves mental images of Christ. We are called to let go of them and to allow Christ to form Himself in us. The real Christ is alive and living in us. “Christ forms Himself by grace and faith in the souls of all them who love Him,” Merton writes. If Christ is Risen and Alive then our fantasies, our personal interpretations simply won’t do. Instead, we must stop relying on ourselves and wed ourselves to the reality of Christ, not as we think Him to be, want Him to be, or even believe Him to be. We must be wedded to the overwhelming desire to know the Living Christ as He really is in direct, unmediated encounter.
Thomas Merton reaches the same conclusion reached by the God-mantled Fathers and Mothers of Holy Orthodoxy and it is this: “…if you want to have in your heart the affections and dispositions that were those of Christ on earth, consult not your imagination but faith.” How? Merton continues, “Enter into the darkness of interior renunciation, strip your soul of images and let Christ form Himself in you by His Cross.” A “broken heart, O Lord, Thou wilt not despise,” writes the Psalmist. Jesus teaches that the pure in heart will see God. Purity means, among other things, emptiness.
Keeping in mind the need to divest ourselves of “impure” and wholly inadequate images of the Savior no matter how wonderful they may appear to be here is a quote from St. Maximus the Confessor: “It is for this reason that the Savior says, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God’: for He is hidden in the hearts of those who believe in Him. They shall see Him and the riches that are in Him when they have purified themselves through love and self-control; and the greater the purity the more they will see.” What is left for us is to pray continuously with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, “Come, Lord Jesus.”
~St. Mary Orthodox Church, Cambridge, MA (Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America) http://www.stmaryorthodoxchurch.org/orthodoxy/sermons/2008/stmaryofegypt.
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