St. Botolph’s Parish, Fathers of the 4th Oecumenical Synod, 18 July 2010
‘Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them’. (Matthew 5.17)
When you are young, you can afford to be an atheist. When your body is still supple and strong, your hair dark or brilliantly bright, you imagine that you own your life. So you can afford to believe in nothing but your own ego. Even in the prime of life, when your status in your chosen profession is secure, your mortgage paid off, and your income exceeds, say, fifty thousand pounds, you can still afford not to believe. You are utterly at home in the world. You do not need ‘church dogma’ to tell you what to believe. You can buy and sell whatever beliefs you wish. If you believe in anything at all, you tailor it to suit your self-interest. The perfect consumer: you shop around in a marketplace of beliefs. All that is, exists for you to choose from, as you wish. If the ‘idea’ called God strikes your fancy, you do not have to commit yourself. Look at all those religious teachers to choose from! Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus – mix and match, take your pick. If you settle on Jesus, you can decide for yourself who you want him to be. An ‘inspired moral teacher’ or maybe ‘a guerrilla fighter from El Salvador’. Why not a ‘cosmic Christ’ that you can paint black or yellow, male or female, trans-gendered or hermaphrodite? Whatever ‘turns you on’: and when you have become agnostic but still go to church, you can call yourself ‘a liberal’. It sounds a bit nicer than ‘hypocrite’. After all, you do not believe in dogmas. None of your beliefs is consecrated, set apart, independently of how it can serve your interests. It is all about you. Your only unquestionable ‘dogma’ is you right to believe whatever you wish. You do not believe in God; you believe in yourself.
That is how heresy begins. You pick and choose whatever you want ‘God’ to be. You do not deny him like an atheist; you re-create him in your own image. Would you prefer that ‘God’ were different? Trade him in for a cheaper model. Do you know how heresy ends? When you meet God, in his Church – not ‘the denomination of your choice’. Heresy ends when it is not you who choose God but God who chooses you.
Does it take stiff joints or grey hair to make you figure: ‘If God exists, maybe he existed before I did’? Does it take bankruptcy, or a stroke, to convince you: ‘If God really is God, maybe I should meet him on his terms, not mine’? If you are old, poor, and sick, it does not automatically make you an Orthodox believer. But if you are old, poor, and sick, you face one truth that the young, rich, and healthy forget: you are limited. You have to face limits: you face the fact that faith is limited by one factor – it is not whatever you want it to be. It is just what it is. But is not God limitless? ‘Ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible’. How can you set limits to God? So how can you say ‘dogmatically’ who God is? Because God is limitless, not you. It is not about you. If God is ‘ever-existing’, you did not invent him – so you have no right to re-invent him. If God is ‘eternally the same’, you cannot ‘update’ him. All that you can do is recognise him.
For the Jews who first recognised him, God set limits: the Torah, the law, precisely to set them apart from Gentiles who did not recognise him. When they overstepped those limits, he sent prophets to remind them. And, in the fullness of time, God limited himself.
God the ineffable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, became an actual man of flesh and blood. A man called Jesus the Christ. God in the flesh: eternal God came down to earth in order to found the Church – to set us apart, to consecrate us as his own, so that we could see him as he is.
Who do you say that he is? An ‘inspired moral teacher’? What is Christian about that? If you believe it, you are an imitation Jew: a Gentile follower of a dead rabbi. What if he is a miracle-working mouthpiece of God? What makes that so Christian? You are only a watered-down Muslim: an infidel disciple of a dead prophet. Or perhaps he is simply the greatest human being that God ever made? Then you are a deluded follower of a false messiah, who ended up on a cross. Christians do not worship a dead teacher or a false messiah. Christians worship Christ.
But why limit Jesus Christ? Why not imagine him as whatever you want him to be? Is he not limitless? He is limited: by who he truly is. You did not invent him; he invented you.
Fifteen hundred years ago, a synod of five hundred bishops that met in Chalcedon near the shores of the Black Sea did not invent Jesus Christ. They recognised him. Christ as he revealed himself in every detail of his life. The Son of Man, born in Palestine, to bring home the lost sheep of the house of Israel. A real man, forsaken, flogged, crowned with thorns, left hanging from a cross as only a real man could – and, at the same time, the ever-existing, eternal Son of his Eternal Father, begotten before eternity. God in the flesh, who pierces the wall of death and pulls us through. ‘The Son of Man came down from heaven; the Son of God ascended the Cross’ – all because they are one and the same Christ. Thus, the holy bishops of the fourth universal synod ‘defined’ the Christian faith. They set ‘limits’ to what Christians may believe: because ‘to define’ is to set limits. Thus, they consecrated the Orthodox Church, the New Israel, to God and set it apart for all time from those who do not recognise him. Overstep the limits of who he truly is and you may call yourself a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jew, an agnostic – but, if you are honest, you will not call yourself a Christian.
But did not Jesus Christ come to destroy ‘dogmas’, to abolish the law and the prophets? ‘I came not to abolish them but to fulfil them’.
Brothers and Sisters in Christ: we did not choose Christ but Christ chose us. We came, hungry and weary in body, to a lonely place of unbelief. We had nothing to eat but five loaves and two fishes. But when Christ consecrated the loaves and fishes, setting them – and us – apart, he gave us a sign of who he is. Five loaves, for the five books of the law: bread that he would consecrate in the midst of his disciples, saying, ‘Take, eat, this is my Body: the law of God incarnate, fulfilled’. Two fishes: his own two natures, human and divine. Two natures of Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour. The dogma of Chalcedon. ‘Never compromise the least of these commandments’, he warns, the least of dogmas that set the limits of the Orthodox faith. ‘They testify, not to themselves, but to me’.
If you believe only in your ego, believe in any Christ you wish. You worship yourself, not him. But if you believe in Jesus Christ, our true God, recognise him as he truly is.