Gnostic America

This is My Body. This is My Blood of the New Testament.

These words strike at the heart of the entire Gnostic message and all its heirs. These were the words that caused second century bishop Irenaeus, writing against the Gnostics, to remark, “But if [the flesh] indeed does not obtain salvation, then neither did the Lord redeem us with His blood, nor is the cup of the Eucharist the communion of His blood. [And when] the mingled cup and the baked bread receive the Word of God, and the Eucharist of the blood and the body of Christ is made . . . how can they [the Gnostics] maintain that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God?”

Indeed. The Eucharist is not just an affirmation of the body as something redeemable – if God Himself took on flesh, the body cannot be irredeemable – but an affirmation of the whole creation, for Jesus took of the earth’s elements to deliver His body.

The Real Presence is a non-negotiable as far as an orthodox church does. Historically, we have those words just quoted, from the second century bishop Irenaeus. If this was the “apostate church” at work setting forth man’s traditions in place of God’s Word, that’s quite a bit of negligence on the Holy Spirit’s part that quickly.

And if you’re a “Bible-believing” Christian, we can’t get much more clear thank “This is my body.” If that’s not enough, we get, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” Finally, there’s St. Paul, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?”

It takes an act of will to make both these historical and biblical witnesses to be something other than what they are. What is that will? It’s the underlying theological ideology – otherwise known as “man’s traditions” – forcing the historical and biblical data to serve the idea that salvation is an internal, spiritual, psychological occurrence happening in the subjective faculties of heart, mind, and soul, or that God cannot be contained by finite, physical things.

The Gnostics at least were respectful enough simply to deny the historic Church’s witness as ignorant and cut out 3/4 of the Scriptures. Today’s Neo-Gnostic, Real-Presence deniers actually have the gall to claim their position is Bible-based and supported by history. Like I said, given the clear testimony of Scripture, this is a willful act of self-delusion.

But why is the Real Presence so important?

The answer is, because to deny it is to release God from His promise where He is to be found, and leave the locating of Him to our own devices, to find Him lurking all over the place, mingled in our own psychological or spiritual faculties. That has huge problems we’ll get to in a bit. But let’s first contemplate why we shouldn’t “release God from His self-imposed box.”

The whole beauty of God becoming flesh is it locates for us where God is to be found, and not just found in general, but found in His mercy. God is everywhere, very true. But where is God “for me”? The bordered, delineated, defined body of Jesus Christ answers that question. If you were a leper seeking help from God, you didn’t go six feet to the left of Jesus, or six feet to the right. You went to the one outlined by His flesh and blood.

Well, when Jesus ascended into heaven, it’s not as if He leaked out of His body and, like a radio signal, became out there for anyone to access by adjusting their spiritual antennae correctly. No, He ascended in the flesh and blood; He sat down at God’s right hand in flesh and blood; He is present in the Church as flesh and blood; and the Church today is “of His flesh and of His bones.”

It’s still a body defined by borders! And that Church, that body, is the boxed, bordered, delineated location of the promise.  It’s the box where God in His mercy is to be found. For what other words do you hear connected to the Body and Blood of Christ other than, “Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins.”

Outside of the church, like the leper hunting for God outside of Christ, you’ll certainly get God. God is everywhere after all. But there are two “works” of God, His primary work and His alien work. His primary work – Who He is – is to create, love, give life, and have mercy. His alien work – What He does in response to man’s action – is justice, wrath, the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence, and so on.

Satan himself is managed by God’s alien work, as we see in the two accounts of David’s census of Israel, where in one account we hear Satan moved him to do the census, and in the other one we hear it’s the Lord’s wrath that did it.

If this all sounds harsh and capricious on God’s part, keep in mind that His primary work is always, well, primary.  Also, remember that, as St. Paul wrote, God works all things for the good of those who love Him.

Meantime, Luther’s statement stands, that if you would seek God – and it’s implied you’re seeking God’s mercy here – outside of Christ, you will only find the devil.

Well, back to the Real Presence. That’s what the Real Presence assures us of. At communion, because it’s truly Christ’s body and blood, we will always find our loving, merciful, forgiving Lord.

To deny the Real Presence allows the location of God to leak into all sorts of subjective areas – our hearts, our minds, our wills – and yes, very often we will confuse God with those dark satanic temptations and motives that lurk within.

Does God love me? Go to communion and get a clear answer, because there Jesus is waiting for His lepers. Go to your inner Self and listen to silent whispers you think are God talking to you, and who knows what you’ll get. You’ll get a lot of deceit, that’s for sure, a lot of antichristian voices claiming to be Christ.  For who is the antichrist, St. John writes, but he who denies that Christ HAS COME (perfect tense:  once done with continuing effect) in the flesh.  Isn’t that exactly what inventing words of a Christ outside of His ordained flesh and blood means is doing?

But inner voices are not what the Lord left behind for His Church. He left behind the gift, His body and blood, through which He gives the word and promise that cannot change: My body, given unto death for you; My blood, shed on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins.

His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about Him and that they had done these things to Him. Therefore the people, who were with Him when He called Lazarus out of his tomb and raised him from the dead, bore witness. For this reason the people also met Him, because they heard that He had done this sign. The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, “You see that you are accomplishing nothing. Look, the world has gone after Him!”

In the Gnostic salvation program, remembering plays a key role. Once trapped in the flesh and born of this world, the human spirit – the spark of divinity that had descended from above into this false, material world – becomes slovenly, forgetful, and ignorant of its origins. It needs an act of awakening at which time it remembers from whence it came and to where it must return.

Notice the remembering is all an internal action, as is the entire Gnostic program and all its heirs. What’s going on inside? What sort of psychological mechanisms are at work? Where’s your heart at? Where’s your will at? What sort of knowledge do you have?

As someone once commented about Puritanism, it took the soul off the treadmill of indulgences and put them on the iron couch of introspection. Such is the by-product of an overly Gnostic faith.

Significantly, in Gnosticism and its heirs, one’s act of remembering actually is the cause of salvation, even the salvation of the entire world. For Gnosticism in particular, one’s own remembering is the very act of God drawing his lost sparks back into himself. That’s quite a burden on the Self!

This week’s Palm Procession Gospel mentions the disciples “remembering” something. “His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about Him and that they had done these things to Him.”

Notice the shift in focus. The remembering is directed toward something external, the written Word, the “things…written about Him.” Here, “remembering” is but another word for “witness,” which is actually far more in keeping with how a faith would work that rests on external, physical, objective truths, rather than internal, spiritual, subjective things.

That leads to the next verse, where we learn, “Therefore the people, who were with Him when He called Lazarus out of his tomb and raised him from the dead, bore witness. For this reason the people also met Him, because they heard that He had done this sign. The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, ‘You see that you are accomplishing nothing. Look, the world has gone after Him!’”

Notice, their action of “going after Jesus” is rooted in their witness of something outside of themselves, something external, the objective happening of Lazarus’ resurrection. That is where faith is most established, in the witness, or in a remembered witness (as in, “Oh yeah, Jesus says death is just sleeping. Cool!”).

Of course, setting up for Maundy Thursday, the central act of “remembering” is what happens at the Lord’s Supper, which is an ongoing testament to Christ’s death for the forgiveness of our sins, and the giving of His flesh for us to eat unto eternal life. “Do this in my remembrance.”

The fact that there is ambiguity about this statement – whether it’s the Lord’s memory or our memory referenced here – is due precisely to the sheer externality and objectiveness of the gift. Holy Communion is the Lord’s work, and if we take the remembering as the Lord’s, it would be in the same spirit of the Lord remembering His promise every time He sees a rainbow.

Understood that way, the comfort of Holy Communion is not that there we remember what the Lord has done, or perhaps better put, the focus is not on the quality of our remembering. The comfort rather is that our faith is confirmed in His remembering of His promises to us. Yes, that gets sort of fuzzy when contemplating the involvement of our hearts and minds. What, after all, is the difference between “remembering the Lord’s gift” and “being confirmed in faith that the Lord has remembered His promise”?

Perhaps it’s the question on what undoes the gift. Does our act of forgetting undo what the Lord has done? If the focus is on our act of remembering – the Gnostic way – then it would undo it. Many traditions actually run this way, and turn communion into an exercise of strained piety.

But if our little mental lapses – like the disciples had – don’t undo what the Lord has done, then that would be because the gift is doing its thing, outside of us, at an objective level, without regard to our mental input. But Jesus still finished the disciples’ salvation even though they forgot, and Lazarus still lived even if people forgot what they witnessed.

So also us. Communion is a weekly gift that we constantly have to be reminded of, but that doesn’t take away the fact that Jesus is 24/7 the One given and shed for us on the cross, for our forgiveness.

To remember or not? As far as we go, whatever. As far as the Lord goes, He doesn’t forget, and that’s what truly matters.

“You who destroy the temple and build it in three days, save Yourself! If You are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”

Beautiful churches burning down was something with which the Jews were all too sadly familiar. Josephus comments about Solomon’s temple, “the temple was burnt four hundred and seventy years, six months, and ten days after it was built.” 470 years isn’t 800 years, but it’s still a long time.

The second temple was built under Zerubbabel and lasted 580 years. It was beautifully restored and refurbished by King Herod (yes, that one) and destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. 580 years also isn’t 800 years, but combined with the first temple, we’re talking 1050 total years of a beautiful structure at the heart and center of a nations cultural, religious, and political life.

Buildings being what they are, they can be rebuilt. It’s what man does. Made in the image of the Chief Architect, building stuff is what His children do. Anybody know a famous carpenter Whose dad is God?

As we watched Notre Dame cathedral burning down last night, countless souls were contemplating tomorrow. Craftsman, financiers, politicians, and religious leaders will muster and make something rise from the ashes. It will happen, and 800 years from now this fire will be a sad footnote. Evidently, like the human body, most of the cathedral has at some time been renewed or restored anyway, so that while the DNA – the blueprint so to speak – endures, the physical stuff comes and goes. (And it’s not as if the physical stuff doesn’t matter as the Gnostics said, but that the blueprint “becomes flesh and dwells among us”; or to rephrase Jesus’ words, the physical stuff profits nothing, the blueprint gives life, to stone, wood, marble, and glass.)

Here’s something that can’t be rebuilt: the human body. There was something profound going on in the telecasts of the cathedral fire, when we heard on several occasions, “Thankfully no one was injured or killed,” or when the pope said he was praying for the fire fighters. Ask anyone if, given the choice between their child dying or the Notre Dame cathedral burning down, what they would choose.

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up…He was speaking of the temple of His body.”

There’s only one who can rebuild the religious structure that is the human body, and that is Jesus. In Him is the rebuilding of the structure burned down by the “dust and ashes” curse given to man. And from Him is the source of that rebuilding, the elements of water, blood, and spirit – body and blood – that rebuild the human body. It’s what issued out from Him as He died, what He “handed over” at His death, when He said “It is finished,” and at that moment could it truly be said, “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished.” The re-creation by the Chief Architect – so critical in John’s Gospel – is complete, complete at the moment of Christ’s glory, when He draws all people to Himself, the source of re-creation. And a new Sabbath Day dawned, an eight day of creation, when the light pierced the darkness and the world was renewed.

For Christians there is sadness over Notre Dame, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s in the spirit of “sorrowing not like those who have no hope,” or if the non-religious are actually grieving more deeply over the loss of what in their minds was something like Babel, a triumph of man.  They comment about the loss of this triumph of human spirit, and they are quick to add something to the effect of how the cathedral “transcended the religious significance.” They talk of its cultural and national significance, its importance for the French people and for the world, its visit by 12 million people every year.

I can’t help but hear Jesus say, “Don’t cry for me. Cry for yourselves and your children.” France is one of the most irreligious nations on earth. Would that they embraced what this so-called icon of their national identity really means.

God allowed the gorgeous second temple to be destroyed by the Romans when the Third Temple – His Son, the Church – was built, after a generation had passed. God allowed Notre Dame Cathedral to start on fire in His wisdom. Sorry, but that is true else God is not Almighty. Perhaps this can be a wake-up call for France, and for that matter, all of Europe.

At the foundation of every Christian’s heart are those words of the hymn, “Crumbled have spires in every land, Bells still are chiming and calling, Calling the young and old to rest.” Christians enter the most beautiful temple and cathedral ever – their beautiful Savior – every time they gather for worship. I’ve led divine service in the woods with Soldiers, in classrooms with students, and in church buildings no one would give a thought to if they burned down.

But the one who is the rebuilt temple, built in three days, is the one who renders all other temples unnecessary. Gorgeous cathedrals are wonderful, and building them most certainly speaks something about the faith priorities of those building them. Mirroring on earth the beauty our faith contemplates in heaven should be the goal of every Christian in their building of churches, as opposed to the “What can we get for the cheapest value?” we’ve been getting the last several decades, as coincidentally, the priority of faith declines.

But at the end of the day, “Built on the Rock, the Church shall stand, Even when steeples are falling.”

We do not do the faith, the faith does us. We do not do the liturgy, the liturgy does us.

As an Army Chaplain, I often teach why we “liturgical Protestants” do what we do, by making using that phrase: “We do not do the faith, the faith does us.” And then I use the Army itself as an analogy they all understand: “We don’t do the Army, the Army does us.” What does this mean? It means that the idiosyncratic and personal feelings about individuals in the Army must submit to the greater “body” that is the Army. Why? Because only as a single-minded body, the Commander in Chief as the head, is the Army truly effective. So also the faith. And it’s the liturgy where the rubber of this principle hits the road.

(Interesting, but very related, the Army classifies its chaplains in three categories, Roman Catholic priest, liturgical Protestants, and non-liturgical Protestants. You’ll also hear the latter two classifications in the colloquial terms of “baby-baptizers” and “non-baby-baptizers.” It’s actually quite a profound testimony to the reality. The liturgy somehow is more conducive to infant baptism. Why? Precisely because of that principle, that the liturgy is how and where the “faith does us.” If the faith is running the show, there’s no reason to be confused why babies can be baptized. Think of the liturgy as a cosmic architecture created by its words, or, a verbal ark. Did Noah build the ark or did the ark – defined as the needs and requirements to float for a year with the world’s species in it – dictate its own assembly through the Lord’s revelation to Noah? Now, consider a baby born on the ark. Was it saved?)

This week we get the source of important freight that’s loaded into the liturgy that does our faith. “Hosanna. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” This is the second half of the Sanctus, which begins with “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabbaoth, heaven and earth are full of Thy glory.”

Those words, the first half of the Sanctus, come from Isaiah’s call as a prophet. He was in the temple when he saw the Lord lifted up, surrounded by at least two Seraphim crying to one another, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.”

If that is what the angels in heaven are singing, it makes sense these words would make it in the liturgy. After all, the angels rejoice when one sinner repents. What is Church but lots of sinners repenting. We have very few other words given in Scripture that describe what the angels are singing. Here’s one example; the other one is at Jesus’ birth, which reveals the other words that make it into the liturgy, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace goodwill toward men.”

Further, if Jesus is truly present in the Church (which He is) bodily (which He must be, else we embrace an antichristian teaching, as St. John teaches), and is siting in heaven (which we confess Him to be), then we must be with the angels in heaven during the liturgy. The point is, the Gloria in Excelsis and Sanctus – those being the only words we know angels are singing in heaven (along with “This is the Feast”) – are going on whether we, or the creative worship team on Thursday night, decides to put them there or not. The question is whether we will confess and join this reality or not.

In any event, the words of Isaiah were expanded. Why? Because old wine skins can’t pour new wine. Jesus and the Gospel have fulfilled the words of Isaiah and expanded them.

Isaiah’s words said, “The whole earth is full of thy glory.” The liturgy says, “Heaven and earth are full of thy glory.” Well what happened so that the angels and we can also attest to God’s glory filling heaven? What happened is we are there now! Before we couldn’t be there because of our sins, and as Jesus said, “No one has ascended to heaven.” That is, until He Himself ascended back to heaven, and opened the gate of heaven for all believers, so that we can testify that yes, heaven is full of God’s glory just as earth is. (It’s also related to the Lord’s prayer petition, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Through Christ we have access to the Father in heaven and can speak of such divine mysteries.)

Also, the liturgical form adds the words of children on Palm Sunday. Hosanna in the highest, blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.

The song of heaven becomes the song of children. Of course! Because heaven and earth are brought together as one in Christ.

The Sanctus truly has everything in it, like the liturgy in a nutshell. It begins with the Trinity. “Holy, Holy, Holy” it begins, and then refers to “His” (i.e. One) glory. Three in one. It teaches the incarnation. For, who is He who “comes in the name of the Lord.” About the first third of the liturgy is about the name of the Lord, from His invocation, to the Kyrie, to the Gloria in Excelsis, to the Creed. Jesus is the “one who comes” in the flesh down to us, in this Triune Name.

It teaches Christ’s salvation for us. For He Who is among the “Holies” comes in the name of the Lord to save us. Hosanna is Hebrew for “Please save us!” based on the Hallel hymn sung by Jews on the way to Passover (from Psalms 113-118).

It teaches the power of Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. For how it is possible we are able to be in heaven in the midst of a Holy God joining the angels? Isaiah almost died when he was in this situation. We are granted this through Christ’s blood, and in His resurrection and ascension, we are lifted up to God’s right hand in Christ, at “Ground Zero” of this mystery.

And the fact that this beautiful canticle comes just before communion validates everything. Communion is the powerful, public “testament” to this truth. It’s Jesus’ Body and Blood, His resurrected Body and Blood, which is given and shed for us, which we take into ourselves, becoming in communion with Him. The holiness of heaven itself goes to the heart of our being, lifting up our hearts, minds, and bodies to where Jesus is. For where the head is, there the members be as well.

Getting back to Palm Sunday, those words place us among the children awaiting their Lord. This is our Passover. This is our Messiah. This is our account: Jesus coming as King to give Himself for us, for our salvation, to answer our hosanna. The liturgy is the time warp that puts us right there in the past, as well as in the heavenly realms of the future, all right now in the liturgical present.

So is it Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday? Which Gospel do we meditate on this week? Well, the answer is “both.” If you follow the tradition, you do the Palm Sunday reading with the procession of palms, and then the passion reading during the Gospel. This week we’ll be drawing from both Gospels, which provides for a lot to meditate on, given the two chapters involved in the passion reading.

Today, given the greater purpose of this daily project – combating neo-Gnosticism in the world today – we’ll contemplate the difference between orthodoxy and Gnosticism as it pertains to Christ’s death.

Keep in mind the foundational difference between Gnosticism and orthodoxy. Gnosticism sees the creation as essentially evil, created by an evil god. God did not create us in the flesh. Rather, we fell into the flesh. The evil is not that we as created beings broke off from God; the evil is that we exist. Therefore the evils of this world – the sin, the death, the warfare, famine, diseases, struggles – are unredeemable.

By contrast in orthodoxy, we believe that God the Father made all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. The physical world is a manifestation of His very Being, the product of His Word, and all the various, multiple physical things and beings are like His lexicon. And Adam, the one in His image, was mustered into service of this creation, to name it and have dominion over it, being its steward. The evil of this world is everything that the created order is not. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil promised knowledge of something beyond the totality of what God has created, which was “very good.” Adam’s temptation was whether he’d be content with this totality or whether he’d choose to find out what this “evil” was all about. Well, if curiosity killed the cat, so did curiosity – or better, his desires – bring Adam, his progeny, and the whole creation back to dust. That’s the work of sin.

Given which foundation you begin with, you have what the Savior saves. Given the Gnostic foundation, Jesus came to save the fallen spirits from the entrapment in the material world. There’s no point in making sense of the evils of this world, the sufferings, death, wars, famines, and struggles. There’s no redemption; it’s just a matter of rescuing the fallen spirit from this mess. In orthodoxy this is not the case. No, the creation is the Lord’s work, and as Jesus repeated in the Gospel of John, His work was not finished, and Jesus had to finish His work. It’s a work of redemption.

This brings us to Passion Sunday. When Jesus suffered, what was the nature of it? Some Gnostics believed the suffering wasn’t real. Oh, it was real for Christ’s body, but Christ’s body at best was a temporary vesture, or at worst only an illusion, something that “seemed” to be physical but wasn’t really. (These were the Docetists, from the Greek word doceo, “to seem.”)

Not so with us. We believe that Christ’s sufferings were real. This was part of the mystery of the incarnation, that Jesus embraced the fullness of human suffering. Because Jesus embraced them, we can trust that God has immersed Himself into our world, into the depths of its suffering and sorrow, our sin, into the depths of Sheol. As. St. Paul wrote, “He who descended is also the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.”

Because Jesus fills all things, He is the foundation for a new creation (even as He was the foundation for the first creation). He is the life source for new life. For this week, we consider what this means for us. Because He fills all things, even the depths of our suffering, sorrow, sin,, and death, we know that behind these elements of our lives – for we all suffer, have sorrow, sin, and die – Jesus is working redemption. He is present with us in these moments, ready to grab us by the hand and lift us up with Him into His exalted status at God’s right hand.

So the question is this, did Jesus come to help us escape our suffering, or to redeem it? The answer should be obvious now. Jesus didn’t bid us to leave our cross behind and follow Him up and out. He bade us to take up our cross and follow Him.

For this reason the martyrs are often depicted with their means of struggle, their means of death. Their suffering becomes part of their identity. Why? Because through them, the Lord brings them to their exaltation.

The same is true with us. Very often our sins, our struggles, our diseases, become wrapped up into our identity. Gnosticism says, “You have to either escape these or just indulge them because they don’t matter.” Orthodoxy says as St. Paul says, quoting the Lord, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” That’s the true glory and mystery of the cross in our lives.

Saturday of Judica: What Sort of Flesh did Jesus Have?

Then they took up stones to throw at Him; but Jesus hid Himself and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.

Several times in the Gospel (John and Luke both give accounts) Jesus was able to escape a sticky situation by “passing through” the people who were about to stone Him or throw Him off a cliff. And then we have the account where Jesus appeared among the disciples after His resurrection, or disappeared from the two disciples on the day of His resurrection in Emmaus.

To enter into a brief meditation on this subject, let’s consider the following. So much of theology is done in the negative. Better put, so much of theology is reactive. It’s sort of like rejoicing in a mystery, and then when someone wants to stake a claim on some aspect of that mystery and run with it according to his own biases (otherwise known as an idol, or heresy), the rest of the Church has to say, “No, it’s not that.” It’s negative, or reactive.

By way of example, consider the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s rooted in expressions like, “I and the Father are one.” It’s a logical impossibility to say two defined subjects – “I” and “Father” – are “the same.” Yet, they are one. How do we explain that?

Well, some will emphasize the oneness, like certain Pentecostalists who don’t believe in the Trinity and believe God simply put on different masks and had different titles, the way I am a dad and husband at the same time. But Jesus clearly speaks of the Father as an independent Person, whose will He submits to for instance. So are there two? Nope. “I and the Father are one.” So what then? There’s your doctrine of the Trinity, a mystery.

So much of theology runs this way. Are we sinners or saints? Is our redemption complete yet or not? How are all the company of heaven with us? What’s the relationship between justification and sanctification. On and on. Very often problems happen when some heretical group stakes their ground on some aspect of a mystery and excludes other aspects of the mystery that don’t fit.

The nature of Jesus’ flesh is similar. What is the nature of Jesus’ flesh?

Based on a hyper-understanding of God as Spirit, the Gnostics and others conclude everything material is as non-God as can be, even evil. They couldn’t fathom anything flesh and blood could be anything good. To support their understanding, they point to passages like, “The flesh profits nothing” or “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” or “God is Spirit.”

But clearly flesh and blood is hugely important. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And “Take eat, this is my body.” And “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” And “the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus needles this thread by teaching, “The flesh profits nothing; the spirit gives life,” after teaching about His flesh and blood, emphasizing that while His flesh and blood give life, they do so because the Holy Spirit is “working it.”

Likewise do we make a distinction between “eating Jesus’ body” and “chomping on His flesh,” known as the Capernaitic eating of Jesus’ flesh. No, that’s not what’s happening. We leave it at the mystery. We eat bread, which is the Body of Christ. Amen.

Now, as we’ve been guarding against Gnostic teaching these past months, we might run the risk of “staking our ground” on Jesus’ flesh and blood, understood as we understand our own flesh and blood, and get very earthy about it. The extreme of this is to turn Jesus into a divinely animated flesh and blood person, like a prophet or great teacher, who focused on flesh and blood, earthly concerns. That is indeed how many liberal theologians run with their critiques of Gnosticism.

Our words for meditation today from the Gospel serve as an antidote to this “claim staking.” Jesus is flesh and blood. He’s also God. That means that yes, He does things like disappear and pass through peoples and walls. It’s a glorified flesh. And though St. Paul says “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” he teaches we will have a glorified flesh, a new flesh that, well, is different in some way from the flesh we have here. It’s still our flesh and blood, but just…different. Who knows what this means. It’s a mystery, even as it’s a mystery how Jesus passes through walls as a solid, material being.

But that’s the nature of theology, very often, to affirm two truths that don’t seem to mesh well together, but which are true in mysterious ways that are beyond our comprehension now.

It is My Father who honors Me, of whom you say that He is your God. Yet you have not known Him, but I know Him. Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad. Then the Jews said to Him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.”

Before going into the whole “I Am” theology, which is beautiful, let’s focus a few moments on Jesus’ statement, “You say [the Father] is your God. Yet you have not known Him.” Once again, Jesus is being offensive. How dare someone go up to another person and say, “Yeah, I know you say you understand and know God, as a Father, but you don’t really know Him. But I do.” Isn’t this the basis for divisions and denominationalism? Isn’t Jesus “building walls,” as Pope Francis, Christ’s supposed vicar, keeps telling us we shouldn’t do?

The typical liberal way of dealing with such “offensive” verses is to write them off as laid down by the patriarchal, apostolic church. But for all those racist, sexist, homophobic, white men telling us what Jesus said – otherwise known as the Bible – we’d get the true, historical Jesus and his true, historical words. And what words are those? Well, of course, they’re whatever Jesus said that supports progressivism. The closer a word of Jesus (ahem, found in the Bible) says something to the effect of, “Just love and tolerate others, do justice, and feed the marginalized,” the more likely it is a candidate for inclusion in “what Jesus really taught.”

Those of a more subtle, Gnostic character will claim the apostolic witness represents the organizing of Jesus’ teaching in a particular framework which fosters the perspective of “this world’s god,” the chief Archon. What sort of framework is that? One that emphasizes names, dogma, borders, delineations, “this is true; this is false” ways of thinking, etc. In other words, a framework that, again, builds walls. By these terms, pretty much all of Scripture save a few random seemingly esoteric words of Jesus melts away.

Of course, this is bunk. And it would be hard to write off John’s witness of Jesus in today’s words. Jesus is teaching the mystery of the Trinity and drawing out the implications of it. To know God is to know Jesus. This is oft repeated in the New Testament. The concept of knowing God through someone/something else is laid down in the Old Testament. If someone wants to write off this teaching, he has to write off the entire Scriptures and invent a Christianity based on a projection of his own heart and mind. So enough of that. Jesus has built a wall. It’s a wall that says, “Only on my property, within these walls, do you truly know God. And those walls are my flesh and blood.”

Now, to the I Am.

In fact, the I Am lays down the entire foundation for “building walls”! We go to the beginning. After the Lord God created ex nihilo the matter that makes up our universe, He sent His Word – His “Let there be” (which is grammatically related to “I Am”; it’s what happens if you apply what belongs to One to cause something else to be; for instance, “I run. Let you run.” – into it, by the Holy Spirit, to divvy and divide up the material into various beings – to build walls, say, between this star and that star, the sun and moon, the birds and fishes, etc. Each being is a reflection of God, like a three dimensional speech He’s giving, each being communicating something about our creator.

Imagine there’s someone behind you about whom you don’t know. You turn around, you see his face, he speaks with you, gives you his name, and provides lots of bodily movement to supplement his words with non-verbal cues. After some time, there now exists for you something which previously did not exist, we might call it a communion, or community – based on communication (the word!) with this person. The evangelicals would call it a “relationship,” although (Nestorians that they are) it’s something more than two beings “related” to one another like planks of plywood. No, the two beings commune in objective quanta of conceptual stuff sourced by each. There’s a “communi-” going on!

And again, the basis for this “communi” is really the Word. Faces and actions deliver a lot, but only communication creates the communion of persons and lays the basis for community. And what of this word? Each word delivers something about us. Each word is a reflection of who we are in our inner person. Of course, with the fall there’s a lot of Babel-perversion going on, but that is our divine image and we still have this image at the foundation of our beings.

Well, our Lord Himself laid the foundation for this. By Him sending forth His “I Am” into the formlessness and void, He caused “I Am” to be multiplied, that is, for new beings (by grace, not by nature like Jesus) to in essence be able to say “I am too now!” Jesus is the foundational I Am. He’s the I Am at the source of it all. This is why all things are held together in Him, and why we confess that all things were made through Him. The creation is God’s lexicon, and as we participate in that lexicon – Adam naming the beings and we communicating them – we reflect the image of God.

Let’s back up for a moment and keep things simple. Jesus is the life of particular, individual beings. To say “I am” is to be alive. It’s as simple as that. Now notice the importance of “walls” to life. I can’t know life outside of certain walls in which is “me” and outside of which is “not me.” Those walls are my flesh and blood. Jesus, the “I Am,” is the basis for this truth.

Like someone (Chesterton?) said, if you see an old fence, before tearing it down you might want to find out why it was put there in the first place. Or as the saying goes, “Good fences make good neighbors.” No fuzzifying between beings and properties as there arises confusion where one ends and another begins, and then conflict.

There’s more that the Gospel of John gives us in particular about the “I Am.” In the Gospel of John, Jesus fills out this idea what it means. In His re-creative role, redeeming the creation, He seven times lays down an “I Am” – just as in the beginning God laid down seven days of “let there be” – that lay down the elements which rebuild the cosmic architecture of the new creation. These are bread, a vine, a door, a shepherd, a path, a light, and the resurrection. These are the elements of the new creation and these are the Church: Holy Communion (bread/vine); Holy Baptism (door/resurrection); Minister (shepherd); and the Word (path/light).

Once again, these “I Am” infused elements send out from the Lord God and share their “I Am”ness with us, formless and void that we are. It causes us to be new creations, prepared for the eternal Sabbath Day, the eternal rest in the New Eden.

Abraham did not see death, but saw “Jesus’ day.” Abraham lives. This is why the Jews showed themselves to be of their father Satan when they said, “Abraham is dead.” No he’s not. For as Jesus argued, God appeared to Moses and said, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

So, of course, we assume that when Abraham died, his body was buried, but his spirit floated off into heaven and there he saw the promised Messiah, so yes, he saw Jesus’ day and was not really dead.

Hold on for a second. When Jesus made His argument about God being the God of the living, He wasn’t making an argument for the immortality of the soul. He was specifically making a case for the resurrection of the body. Spend a moment or two contemplating that, because it’s an important point: To prove the resurrection of the body, Jesus pointed out how God said He’s the God of Abraham, and because God’s a God of the living, Abraham must be alive yet, this being understood as resurrected!

Here’s another problem, and that’s the assumption that when Abraham died, his spirit floated up into heaven. For Jesus says, “No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven.”

So, how is that Abraham lived to see “Jesus’ day” and never tasted death, and that he was in a state of resurrection when God appeared to Moses at the burning bush?

We are dealing with mysteries here, particularly with time and space, but lets lay down some basic concepts.

Let’s first stipulate that the western mind has always been seduced by a more Greek than Hebrew understanding of the body’s relationship to the spirit or soul. The Greek understanding is dualistic, which leads to our idea that at death the spirit floats off somewhere, fully conscious, while the body gets put into the ground, and then at the resurrection, the spirit will reunite with the body. The Hebrew understanding is more body-centered. God formed the body and breathed His life into it. We are not incarnate souls (the Greek understanding); we are animate souls (the Hebrew understanding).

Understanding that, we can understand a bit more clearly what it means to die and rise again. To die is when your body ceases to have the spirit animating it. To live is to have the spirit animating it once again. What of the time after death and before resurrection? Who knows? The Gospel doesn’t really focus on this period but for a few fuzzy references that may or may not be symbolical (for instance, in Revelation 6), that is, the Gospel doesn’t focus on this period very much at an objective level, meaning, at a doctrinal “What happens between death and resurrection” level. It more focuses on the resurrection.

But here’s what’s interesting and what the Gospel does focus on, and that’s the subjective level. That is, what happens to me, or to Abraham from Abraham’s perspective, or to any believe from their own perspective. Here’s what we know for sure.

First, you will not die. In this week’s Gospel, the two words are “taste” and “see.” You will not taste death or see death. You won’t die. Everyone else will think you’ve died, but from your perspective, the day of your death will be the day of your resurrection. Abraham lived to see the day of Christ’s return. So will we. (So did Stephan, I’d argue. He saw Jesus standing just before dying. We confess Jesus to be sitting; when will He stand again?)

I imagine it will be something like, “Hey, I’m dying, dying, dying…here I go…whoa! Jesus returned just as I was about to die! What a coincidence He showed up to save me just before I died! Who would have thunk!” And this will be the experience of all believers.

Second, you will be “with Jesus.” That’s how St. Paul puts it. From your perspective, the moment you die you will be at the resurrection, have your resurrected body, and be physically with Jesus. You will see your Lord, just as Abraham did. And remember Jesus argued Abraham was resurrected as well! (Else God wouldn’t have said He was a God of the living.) In some mysterious, time-warpy way we can’t possibly understand, those who die and experience their resurrection – yes, the second coming of Christ – can be said (as Jesus said of Abraham) to be in a resurrected status.

Now, people will say, what about from the outside perspective, from the perspective of those who see the body lowered into the grave. On one hand, who cares. I mean, of course we care about their sadness and grieving, but as far as the life of the one people lowered into the grave, what they experience is as relevant as the experience of those who remain awake during someone’s surgery. Their experience has no bearing on what the one operated on experiences.

What matters is what our Lord says. The one who believes in Him will not see or taste death. (They will taste and see that the Lord is good!) Sure, the rest of us will see death, the death of the one lowered into the grave. But really, this issue is between the one who we perceive to have died and the Lord. And for them, there is nothing but life.

Or put another way, as ridiculous and counterintuitive as it may appear, the one being lowered into the grave is just sleeping. Yes, that’s the proper way to look at it. We see someone sleeping being lowered into the grave. They themselves have sort of skipped over this whole part, experiencing their resurrection already in some time warpy way. Whatever it is, Jesus’ words stand. They don’t see or taste death. They see “Jesus’ day,” the day of His return. So it was for Abraham, so it was for Stephan, so it is for us.

Which of you convicts Me of sin? And if I tell the truth, why do you not believe Me? He who is of God hears God’s words; therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God.”

There are times in the Gospel of John, particularly when Jesus is expounding His relationship with the Father, that you wonder, “How is it that Jesus is able to say all this stuff?” I mean, if someone were to come up to you and say, “I and the Father are one, therefore you should listen to me,” we’d think they were delusional. Yet, so much of what Jesus teaches in the Gospel of John runs this way.

Today’s meditation is an example. Jesus asks His opponents, “Which of you convicts Me of sin?” He goes on, with the assumed answer of “none of us,” saying “And if I tell the truth.”

This is an interesting juxtaposition of concepts. To be convicted of sin is to tell a lie; to not be convicted of sin is to tell the truth. Again, notice the flow, “You can’t convict Me of sin, and [therefore] if I tell the truth…” In other words, to understand the passage correctly, we should understand Jesus saying, “You can’t convict me of lying.”

But again, how would you accuse someone of lying who comes up and says, “I and the Father are one. Prove me wrong.” That’s a demand for credulousness exceeding what most people are willing to do. So you have to trace back in the Gospel what’s going on here, and when we do, Ground Zero serving as the basis for Jesus’ claim is His baptism.

We begin earlier in the chapter from which this week’s Gospel comes. According to Jewish Law, no single person could simply make a claim and have everyone believe it just because he says it. No, he needs a witness of at least two men. Jesus claims proof of His claims does come down to two men, that being He and the Father: “It is also written in your law that the testimony of two men is true.  I am One who bears witness of Myself, and the Father who sent Me bears witness of Me.”

So there it is. But this could only exasperate the possible delusion. “Hey, guys, I’m God! You don’t believe me, will then what do you say about the fact that God and I agree I’m God, huh?”

No, there needs to be some witness, some visible proof that Jesus in fact is the Son of God, and this was given at Christ’s baptism. As Jesus says, “If I bear witness of Myself, My witness is not true. There is another who bears witness of Me, and I know that the witness which He witnesses of Me is true. You have sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth.”

And if you’re wondering what Jesus is referring to, there’s this: “And John bore witness, saying, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and He remained upon Him….And I have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.’”

We know from the other Gospels as well that the Father testified there, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

So very clearly, the baptism of Jesus is intended to be the foundation of His teaching, the testimony that He is the Son of God, one to be heard, one to be believed, one who speaks the Truth. And as Jesus goes on in the Gospel for this week, if this is the case, why don’t His enemies believe Him?

But let’s look at the big picture again and analyze it according to our bigger project of countering Gnosticism, and the spirituality of our day. Gnosticism could not offer sensory proof of anything because the senses – ears, eyes, etc. – only took in the physical world, which is an evil delusion. The senses can only be deceptive according to Gnosticism, conforming our thinking to the cosmic architecture of a fundamentally evil world.

So how do you verify a true Gnostic? It all boils down to personal charisma, inner feelings, getting the glimpse of “gnosis” and whatnot. This, again, is the “inside out” way of validation.

Jesus falls in line with Jewish Law, which could not depend on inside-out validation. No, it needed visual testimony, proof. There had to be something witnessed, seen, for it to be true. And this is why at some point in Jesus’ ministry, there needed to be the witnessed proclamation of the Father declaring Jesus to be His Son. His baptism certainly fulfilled this, but so did His transfiguration, so foundational to the apostolic witness.

In our age today, so much boils down, once again, to people’s personal feelings and beliefs, or to some charismatic person’s claim to the truth, without any validation that what they say is actually true. “This is just what I believe,” you’ll hear. And if you say, “Prove it,” they’ll look at you blankly as if you’ve just broken the rule about what faith is. Faith is blind, evidently.

Meanwhile, science has monopolized the arena of proof standards and validation, as if the only way to prove something is with an experiment and numbers (itself a gross presumption and something often not proven accurate).

No. Christian faith is rooted in provable events and provable occurrences. In a certain sense it is very “scientific.” It’s an “outside in” model of validation. All the lines of the Apostles’ Creed were witnessed by others, save perhaps the descent into hell. It’s easy to see how the crucifixion, ascension, resurrection, and virgin birth were witnessed (that last one is an interesting discussion!), but how was it witnessed that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, our Lord? That comes from His baptism first, and His transfiguration.

So yes, Jesus and the Father are two witnesses validating that what He says is true. Which leads us back to the question Jesus asks, if that is the case, why would everyone not hang on everything that comes out of His mouth? He gives the answer, because not all are “of God.” But we are of God, for we believe in the one whom He has sent. That being so, we most certainly do hang on every word of Christ.

“Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word. You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.”

This Gospel has a series of contrasts between God the Father of Jesus and Satan the father of His Jewish enemies. Against the truth that Jesus brings by His word, the devil stands for lies. Against the life Jesus gives out, the devil is a murderer.

There’s another expression in this Gospel that invites some probing. Jesus says to His antagonists, “The desires of your father you want to do.” What are the devil’s desires?

At face value, of course the devil has always been one to tempt us with “desires” (or better, “lusts”). It was his first temptation. “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise [knowing good and evil].”

Surely based on this use of the word “desirable” St. Paul twice called covetousness “idolatry.” It’s the foundational sin that sets us against God. Further, idols are nothing more than the phantasms projected by human desire, “otherized” in concrete forms and terms to give us the illusion (the deceit) that they are something. As the Psalm says, “Those who make them are like them.”

In the Gospel for this week, Jesus connects the devil’s lusts and desires with murder. We can see how this relates to the devil’s original temptation. Adam’s giving in to the desire for the fruit led to the curse of death – Satan thus “murdered” man with his “desires.”

But let’s probe the issue a bit more deeply. At the completion of God’s creation, everything was very good. It was lacking in nothing. There was nothing Adam lacked. What was there to desire? What even is desire when you have everything? Contentment isn’t a virtue; it’s just what you have by virtue of existence in God’s creation!

Again, we’ve brought it up before that the Lord’s introduction of a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil introduced something “beyond the good.” So, in Adam’s mind there was the “very good” creation, created through the Lord’s Word, named and under the dominion of Adam, completely given by the Father’s grace, a place of pure, unwilled contentment. Adam lived in this creation, and he could have lived in this contentment.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil surely caused Adam to wonder, “What’s evil? It must be something beyond ‘everything that exists,’ which is good, right?” But how can you go beyond “everything that exists”? “Everything” is pretty all inclusive, and it’s a logical impossibility to grasp beyond all that exists.

On one hand the temptation to evil is the desire for a chimera, an imagined thing that is unattainable, because it doesn’t really exist. It’s a phantasm, a nothing-dream formulated by our mind to be a something, an idol, but because it has no greater basis than our own “knowledge,” our projecting into the void, it only deceives. How much of sin and lust is rooted in this? It’s the materialistic soul ever seeking that world suggested by the magazine ad, or the lover ever seeking that world suggested by porn (or romance novels/movies), or the philosopher or scientist ever seeking all-encompassing system, or the politician ever seeking that utopia.

On the other hand, the temptation to evil is existence-denying, being-denying, because all these chimeras have the slow effect of corroding what actually is. The desire for a humanistic utopia leads one to ignore the human that lives next door. The desire for the perfect spouse leads to awful effects on the spouse one actually has. The discontented desire for that fantasy house and fantasy life undoes what you actually have. How many millions were murdered on the march to utopia? This is Satan’s murder.

Of course, Satan loves all this, because He hates God’s material creation. He wants it to return to a state of non-being. That’s the triumph of evil, the work of evil to undo “everything that exists,” which God had declared very good. Frederick Nietzsche, Satan’s loyal servant, once wrote, ““Nothing is ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions.” This is the ultimate deceit in which we live today, the idea that “everything that exists” is nothing more than the product of our desires and passions. If ever there were the triumph of “evil as such (the negation of God’s good creation),” the deceit that the desires for “beyond what exists” is actually the only thing that really does exist, this is it.

Jesus is the antidote, the Seed in which – in the midst of a world returning to nothingness – “everything that exists” resides – the “I Am” – like a capsule guarding the DNA and designs of everything God created. Jesus is the “very good” creation all wrapped up in Himself, as St. Paul says, “in Him all things consist.” And from Him the new creation will come into existence, the I Am doing what He has been doing from the beginning.

And against Satan’s “desires” and Nietzsche’s “nothing is given but those desires” we have Jesus, the Lord, Who affirms that the opposite is true. All we have and all we are is by God’s given-ness, and that is not nothing, but everything.