The Intimacy of God
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, June 16, 2024
Today's Gospel reading comes from the section of John's Gospel known as the High Priestly Prayer. It is a very dense reading and difficult to understand, so forgive me if I get a little too theological in my sermon today. Since it is a prayer, I also cannot help but speak about prayer. I know I often do and that is because it has come to be supremely important to me.
In the High Priestly Prayer Jesus draws the curtain back a little to give us a glimpse of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. He speaks of his relationship with his Father. This is a glimpse into the mystery of mysteries, the interior life of the Holy Trinity the beginning and the end of all theology.
"I glorified you on earth," Jesus prays, "having accomplished the work you gave me to do and now Father, you glorify me in your own presence with the glory I had with you before the world was made."
This prayer is a Theophany. God is revealed as relationship. A communion of Divine Persons sharing the same essence and yet different in this respect. The Father has no beginning. He is Unoriginate. The Son or Logos is begotten from the Father from all eternity. The Holy Spirit is not mentioned here specifically and yet we learn, again in John's sublimely mystical Gospel, that he proceeds eternally from the Father. The One who has no beginning, the Son who is eternally begotten and later Incarnate, and the One who Proceeds eternally from the Father. A relationship of One-in-Three and Three-in-One. Divided, as the Liturgy tells us of the Eucharist, but not Disunited.
And then Jesus prays for his disciples and Apostles, those who will share the Lord's Gospel with the world and for those who will believe because of them including us. This means the Church.
What is more, we learn here and in other places that the Lord's incomparable intimacy with his Father mirrors the intimacy the Holy Trinity desires to share with us - a real union, a radical communion far beyond anything we could ever hope for or imagine. The theophany of God as divine relationship includes us. Jesus, through St. John, invites us to sit at his table and dine with him. The Eucharist is that table from which we all share and there is another altar in the closet of the heart where we are invited to commune with him everywhere and in every place.
It is at this point that words and concepts lose their ability to describe, analyze and explain and we are left in silent wonder. We find ourselves like Lazarus' sister Mary who discovered the one necessary thing, to sit at his feet and listen. I so love the pearl of great wisdom in Exodus 14:14. Perhaps you do not know the verse. It is short. I recommend that you put this on a sticky note for your refrigerator.
"The Lord will fight for you; you have only to be still."
Connect that with Psalm 46:10, "Be still and know that I am God," and you have the fundamental foundation of Pure Prayer.
In my first Systematic Theology class that was taught by an Orthodox professor I remember being astonished at what I was hearing. We cut our teeth on Vladimir Lossky's IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF GOD, THE DESERT FATHERS and Gustaf Aulen's CHRISTUS VICTOR. This was all very new to me. And then came THE ECCLESIASTICAL HIERARCHIES by St. Dionysius the Areopagite and that put me over the edge and right into the mystical theology about which Jesus spoke, Lossky wrote and by which the Desert saints lived.
One of the things that threw me for a loop right off the bat was the idea that God is fundamentally unintelligible. I had never heard such a thing and all of a sudden some previously obscure scriptures (at least to me) gradually began to make sense. For example, I Timothy 6:16. "He alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light. Whom no one ever saw nor ever can see..." And there it is. Fundamental unintelligibility. I was way out on a very dead limb and it was starting to break.
At the same time God also reveals himself in intelligible ways. He is love, he is compassion, he is Truth, he is life, he is light, he is humble and all-powerful and far more. These qualities we call energies. And they are truly God's expression of himself. And yet, at the same time, those characteristics described in words do not and cannot exhaust the identity of God. All words are metaphors and limited. That is why Evagrius of Pontus wrote, "if you pray truly, you are a theologian."
The mystery of God is not a puzzle to be figured out, but Reality itself to be held in deepest awe. It is infinitely beyond our capability to understand and yet not beyond our capacity, by his unconditional Grace, to experience. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me," is the goal of Christian spirituality. (Galatians 2:20)
With what then are we left? We are left with an invitation to become "partakers of the divine nature," that is to die to ourselves and let God be God in us. The door to fellowship with the Holy Trinity is now wide open. The curtain has been torn in two. And, I believe, it will always remain open because our Lord Jesus has opened it forever. And although the journey begins with words and concepts, as we stare into his eyes and grow in relationship with him words become superfluous. Words and concepts are old wineskins. The Truth is too much for them. Silence is the only container big enough and flexible enough for pure theology.
There is a story Fr. Schmeman used to tell which I often use at weddings. He was walking along the Seine in Paris at dusk and there he saw a very old couple sitting together watching the sunset. He watched them a good while and noticed that they did not say a single word to each other. They just held hands in the splendid silence of the approaching night.
His interpretation was that all the words had been spoken, all the arguments concluded, the fire of youthful romance had died down. There was nothing left to say or do. What was left was love pure and simple expressed in the rich communion of silence. For Father Schmeman that was the perfect icon of marriage.
Metropolitan Antony Bloom tells another story about this. A priest in France noticed that every morning without fail an older man would come into the. church and sit in a pew for a while in silence. He didn't appear to be praying and services were not in progress. He just sat there. Finally, the priest decided to ask what he did there every morning. He answered, "I look at him and he looks at me."
As I have said many times silence is the only truly adequate language to use in speaking of the Godhead. Language takes us only so far. Dare to be still. Dare to embrace. Dare to listen. We must dare to pay attention to the voice of God and to stop listening to our own voice. Dare to become one with God in Christ who is both infinitely beyond us and infinitely near us. Faith Iies in the space between the words.
The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ has destroyed the power of death and so the power of the Cross and Empty Tomb extends for all eternity backward and forward. On Saturdays of the Soul we pray for all the departed including those who have yet to die. Time is no longer our master because death has been destroyed. Our only Master is the Alpha and Omega, Christ our Lord, God and Savior. He has accomplished all he was sent to do and, as the poet Mary Oliver gives voice to the Trees, "It's simple, they say, to have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine."