You have often planned your future according to your current interests which you see at the present time without seeking to fill that future with what comes down upon you of inspiration concerning the affairs to come. As such, your future at the present, appears to be revolving around yourself without expecting anything from God. In Christianity, hope dwells in faith because it is the expectation of what God’s grace would bring into the future.
It is foolish to think that the future times are better than what you are at in the present. The betterment of your affairs does not come from the running of the days but from the improvement of your present through what is eternal. Escaping a present reality to one that is better is not in your capacity.
The days to come your way are often like those of your present time. They are of the fabric of this world or the fabric of people in your life; and they would be people who either love you or hate you in case you do not make of your future a realm for a truth that descends on you from above, a truth which will be a salvation for us all. If your sufferings do not lead you to God’s face, your life will be dissipated in the “fogginess” of this world. What is steadfast is not the world but what descends on it from above. If it is true what the Bible says that “every human being is a liar” then you have to deal with the “liars” as they are, an inseparable part of this world or, as the Apostle says, you have to exit this world.
We live our hope that comes down on us from above in this world, but we have no hope from this world since we are not of it and it is not of us.
They blame me for being pessimistic. When you see people as they are, you are going to find ugliness in some of them. But is there such a problem with the pure in heart who fly away from the ugly and as such the Lord has made them to dwell in Light?
If you have a penetrating vision of things you will see the ugliness of this world. And that is not wrong. What is wrong is to let that vision of the ugly become an obstacle between you and hope. And hope in Christianity is not some wishful imaginative thinking. It is to be drawn to the face of the Lord who sculpts our faces according to His face and through that sculpting, He makes us divine. His face is all; and also what is “drawn” of Him on us.
When Jesus of Nazareth says: “Take courage, I have overcome the world”, does He mean to say that He has overcome the ugliness of the world as Bible interpreters say or does He mean to say that He is the One who establishes beauty in this world in place of its ugliness?
God did not create the world in His image. He only created Man in His image in the sense that Man is like God since Man is free like Him; that is how some of the Fathers interpreted that. And some others of them said that to be in God’s likeness is to be loving. And some others also said that Man is free like God or He is loving like Him. In Orthodox theology, Man in fact has all the qualities of God except that of creating; but being creator is not a quality. Being creator is an action. The truth is that you do not have any quality that is considered noble unless it is like its counterpart of God so that Humanity is realized, not only in the individual, but also in the bonding of the community together and in its seeking together the Divine Promises which have been foretold by the prophets and also promised by the Savior.
All times are similar in what they have of good or evil and what they have of love and violence. Perhaps with us the bad is inevitable so that we can hope for Truth to descend upon us from Heaven. This is Man’s tragedy: his presumption that he can create himself by himself and that he can till the ground with all what it has of power. Unbelief is making God so distantly high that you do not feel His bending over on you with His kindness. There is in the Bible words about God’s transcendence and His self-emptying in Christ Jesus. And the One who emptied Himself is the One who soared up; and you also soar up with Him. “He who descended is the one who ascended” to the highest heavens and He gives us to sit with Him on the throne at the right hand of His Father because the incarnation of the Son of God leads us to our deification without which His incarnation becomes meaningless and purposeless.
The uniqueness of Christianity is that God would not have moved towards Humanity except to move Man from “below to above”. And the aforementioned moves were realized through Jesus Christ. All talk about a god who stays way up on the mountain is talk of ancient Greek thought and also of Judaism.
In Christianity, this God we are talking about, though He remains above, became Man like each one of us so that no chasm remains between God and Man forever.
The whole question related to our bond between us and God is the following: Does God, who remains in Heaven, after He has descended in the flesh in His only Son, still descend to us in a move which we call Grace? And do we ascend to Him in a reciprocal move so that we sit with Him on the throne? If the throne is not God’s goal and also ours, then we cannot say that we have bonded with Him.
Is Divinity only above or is it below also? That is the question. And Christianity has provided an answer to that saying: “No one has ascended to Heaven except He who has descended from Heaven, the Son of Man who is in Heaven”. The matter is not a move in space and time since God is not defined in a space or in time. The whole matter is the descent of Grace.
And that is not an indwelling of God in His essence or nature, or else we would fall into paganism. That is an indwelling of love, and love does not break God down or makes Him plural. Love speaks of His love and does not fall apart. Love alone reveals Him as one. Love stretches Him but does not make Him many. God spreads Himself by His giving and remains one in essence. Grace spreads but remains concomitant in Him. So if He spreads, He remains in Himself at the same time. His love spreads. It does not get dissipated with time. Time gets filled with God and in this He pastors it though its essence remains temporal.
Time comes in with all its historicity and creativeness and God is in it but time is not God; but what is produced in time is from God. And on the Last Day, God takes “time” to Himself and gathers humanity with all what He has generously bestowed on them in all times to Himself; and in that sense God ends history and completes it in reconciling all in the human body of Christ.
And the ending of History is its crowning in the glory that God pours down on it; and when History enters the glory of God that would be the change of “time”; and as such we inherit the “Kingdom which was prepared for us before the beginning of the world.”
Translated by Riad Moufarrij
Original Text: “الزمان الآتي” – An Nahar – 06.04.2013
