Christ the Hope of the World
by Fr Georges Florovsky
Feast of St Agrippina the Martyr of Rome
Anno Domini 2020, June 23
Christ the Geometer, illumination from Bible c. 1252-70. Cathedral Museum, Toledo, Spain.
The Christian hope is grounded in the Christian faith. It is grounded in the belief that God takes interest in human life and in human history. It is much more than a general belief in the Divine Providence or in a sovereign Lordship of God. “God so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son.” The Son of God came down; He dwelt among men, or rather He established His abode in their midst: “And was made man.” The ultimate meaning of the august mystery of the Incarnation is precisely in that paradoxical identification of God with the needs and concerns of man. The Christian message of love is not so much a commandment or a moral imperative as a witness, a grateful acknowledgment of the Love Divine. And the climax of this love was that the Prince of Peace died on the tree of the Cross that man might have life, and have it abundantly.
In Christ, God’s Lordship was manifested in an intimate and personal manner. The Lord of Creation, Himself, has appeared among men and was made man. And He is still, and forever, with men in the Church, because “the Church is His Body,” to use the glorious phrase of St. Paul. The Church is not just a company of believers; not just a community of men, united by the same allegiance and by the same convictions, but precisely the Body of Christ, the place in which He is ever present and is continuing His “ministry of reconciliation.” Man is not alone. And this is not only because he is under the paternal care of the Creator, but because he is taken into God’s own possession, in the Incarnate Lord, perfect man and perfect God.
There is a divine pattern of human history. It is much more than an abstract scheme or just a plan. God is taking part in the making of history, from day to day, even if man cannot always discern clearly the ways of God in that making. History has its divinely established aim and goal, which will be accomplished on the “last day.” History is not just a chaotic display of the blind forces of nature, nor is it
a product of human planning and desire, nor is it an indefinite process in time, which may go on without ever reaching any completeness. History is much more than a stage on which personal destinies are played out. History itself is the “history of Salvation,” to be ultimately “consummated.”
In the Biblical and traditional interpretation, human history is conceived as a finite process which is moving towards an established purpose. It belongs organically to the essence of the Christian faith that Christ, the Lord Incarnate, is to “come again,” in Glory and for Judgment. This “coming” will be the end of history, a “judgment” and a “consummation” at once. A judgment and therefore a discrimination, a consummation or a “recapitulation,” in which all scattered values of human existence will be integrated and all true achievements will be gathered together. Eternal treasures are being gathered already in the course of history, to be ultimately summed up. Thus, there is an element of a confident expectation implied in the Christian faith. It is here that the hope of Christians is ultimately rooted. God had once sovereignly acted when Christ came into the world. The same Christ is continually reigning in the world. He will manifest His rule ultimately in a manner which transcends all human imagination and yet will fulfill and accomplish the deepest desires and aspirations of man. He is
coming…
“The hour is coming, and now is. . .” Man is not alone in this world, if he is with Christ, by faith and obedience, as lonely as he may feel himself to be in a hostile world, which is lying in the evil. And he is not left to his own whims and efforts. Not only in the sense that, after all, the world is still God’s world, even in its estrangement, and God is its Sovereign and Master, in spite of human rebellion and resistance, but rather in the sense that God, as it had been manifested in Christ, is intimately associated with human endeavors.
It is of utter importance that we understand and recognize this deep dependence of our hope, of all our hopes, upon our faith. It is only in Christ and through Him that we have any title for hope. Nothing can be done or achieved without Christ, or except in His name and by His power. We are entitled to hope at all, because we are given assurance in our faith, because in Christ the counsels of God were revealed to be counsels of the Redeeming Love.
Accordingly, Christian hope is intrinsically a call to action. It is precisely because the Son of God was made man, to accomplish the will of the Father, that man should become the Son of God and to behave as a son, and not as a hireling, i.e. to do the will of the Heavenly Father, and not to be guided by his own self-will. Man should die unto himself, die unto the world, and rise in Christ, to dwell in Him, and to allow the Lord to shape his life, by the Spirit. Human planning must be done in the perspective and in the context of the Divine rule, as it had been manifested and disclosed supremely on the Cross and in the glory of the Resurrection. We are entitled to hope. But precisely for that reason we have to justify or to manifest our hope in our deeds. There is no room for an idle or passive expectation. In the present world, so sorely disturbed and discouraged, it is not enough just to proclaim or to preach the hope. We have to evidence our hope by our faithful and devout cooperation with the Divine purpose. We may discern it but by faith. We should grow in faith, and then our confidence would grow also. It is from “little faith” that doubts and despair do come. And it was in the light of his triumphant faith that St. Paul knew that he could do all, in Christ helping him. Only by serving God can man restore his confidence and hope and apprehend the meaningfulness of his existence.
God has identified Himself with man in Christ. Now we have to identify ourselves with Him in Christ, by a greater acknowledgment of His love and by a more devout and self-renouncing service. Our hope will mature and grow in the measure in which we strengthen and increase our faith and grow in our understanding of God’s abiding presence, in our midst, in Christ, our Lord, and in His Holy Church, which is His Body, “the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.” “In the world, ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world. . .”
*Originally published in St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, Vol. 3, Nos. 1-2, (Fall-Winter 1954-55): 2-4.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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