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The holiday of undeification
The
holidays are a smile of a nation. There are however sincere smiles and
forced and weedy smiles. Each people has some holidays which represent
it. The holidays with religious content have a special place among them.
In the Republic of Moldova it became already a tradition that each
summer “The Congress of Jehovah’s witnesses” be convoked. Apparently
this is a religious holiday. The members of this organisation can even
call it Christian. However these men deny the divinity of Christ,
considering Him only as a superior creature. And then it becomes a real
dilemma, in case Christ is not God, if it makes any sense to celebrate
the “God of Israel” otherwise than Jews used to do it.
For us
Christians, the single reason for celebration is the receiving of bright
immortality, through the death of Christ, the deification of human
nature. “Let the heavens rejoice-the Church sings on every Sunday - and
the earth be glad, for the Lord has shown the power of his reign: he has
conquered death by death, and become the first born of the dead. He has
delivered us from the depths of Hades, and has granted the world great
mercy”. The joy is caused particularly by the regaining of the divine
appearance, through Christ: “Dance Adam, and rejoice together Eve, for
the clothes that you wore into decay long time ago in Paradise, hoping
for undecay, He who created you took them to Him and displaced them into
undecay in a miraculous way, and raised you together today and thorough
the sitting together with the Father, honoured you” (Pentecost, Week VII
after Easter, Wednesday : Vespers, steeh.II ).The divine nature uniting
with the human nature, in an inseparable and unblended way through the
person of Christ, in the mystery of incarnation, honoured the latest so
that “The groups of angels were frightened to see the fallen human
nature placed on the Parental chair”(Octoih, voice VIII, Sunday : Can.
of Cross and Resurrection, ode I, steeh. II). The dogma of God’s
incarnation, stated by the fathers of the First Ecumenical Synod (325 )
is very simple: “Without cessing to be God, He began to be man”.
If
Christ in not perfect God and perfect man, two natures in the same
Person, unblended and inseparable, then His coming was useless. The
meaning of the Christ’s coming was not only to preach the gospel, as the
Jehovah’s witnesses state, God could further herald trough angels, as He
did in the Old Testament. To sacrifice Himself on the cross? But if
Christ is not God, doesn’t it follow from this, that God Father assisted
with cruelty the death of His one and only Son, and for this forgave the
sins of the world? Forgave God the Father the humankind just for the
fact that He committed the most abominable crime? How God, Who is love
(1 John 4, 8-16), and love means to “to lay down your life for your
neighbour” (John 15,13), could not accomplish this commandment,
preferring instead to lay down the life of someone else? In a word, if
Christ is not God, then the Bible is the most sadistic story of the
world.
This is He who “being in very nature God, did not consider
equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness”. In
order that this quotation from apostle Paul ( Philippians 2, 6-7) and
the others with which the New and the Old Testament is full, do not give
the impression of polytheism, it is necessary to accept the dogma of the
Holy Trinity, of one God in three Faces, of one essence and inseparable:
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Whom the Scripture calls with
multiple names, for instance Lord Almighty or Jehovah .
Thus, from Friday to Sunday, last week, on the republican stadium, one observed a kind of “joyous mourning”. The gathered people there celebrated with a lot of verve, the undeification of human nature. They tried, through passionate discourses, to banish the God from the history, because He, Witnesses believe, finished His mission once he ascended to Heaven, and cannot anymore be present in our millenary tradition. They celebrated the triumph of colourful magazines and of kitsch over the Christian genius, from which we quoted above. In these magazines you will never find such pearls as this, when a being is expressing his love for another being, transfigured by the most direct touch of God: “As a rose from valleys, Pure, as a sweet smelling lily, our Creator, the Lord, knowing you, loved your beauty, Pure, and now is going to incarnate from your blood, as for the goodness to chase the bad stink of the deception” . (Men. March ,in 24 days , ode VIII, steeh. III).
FLUX, 10 July 2001