7th Sunday of Pascha “That we may be One” -Fathers of the 1st Ecumenical Council, Gospel: John 17: 1 -13

This is the Sunday of our great and venerable Fathers in Christ of the 1st Ecumenical Council. These 318 bishops from every part of the Christian world gathered in the first large universal meeting since the earliest days of the Church. They came to faithfully pass on the fullness of agreed tradition with which they had been entrusted by those who went before them – all the way back to the apostles. We see echoes of the creed they formulated at Nicaea in Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch in the first century who learned directly from the Apostles, in Polycarp, Melito of Sardis, and Irenaeus in the second century, and continuing with Origen, and Athanasius in the 3rd and early 4th centuries. This particular council established for all time that Christ is fully human and fully God and that any other definition is describing a different God and not Christ. This council did not come to invent theology, but to faithfully pass on and record that which had been given to us the Church from the beginning, and which will stay as our guiding principles and boundaries, and the gates of hell will not prevail on until the second coming of Christ. That’s our heritage in the Orthodox Church.

In today’s gospel we hear Christ pray to his Father, (John 17: 11) “that they may be one as We are.” Here at St. Aidan’s in 2018, we continue to understand our very existence as continuing in this same Apostolic tradition and seek to ever more completely understand that our entire life is truly hidden in Christ. This prayer in John Chapter 17 is known as the “High Priestly Prayer” and is worth spending much time reading and meditating upon. It is the last prayer before “He was given up – or rather gave Himself up – for the life of the world” in the garden. A few verses later in this prayer we hear, (John 17: 21-23) “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word. That they may be one, as You Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they may also be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. ‘And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.”

This is mind blowing stuff! Christ is saying that He will be present and united with us, His followers here at St. Aidan’s– “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word.” – That’s us! As much as we are in Christ, allowing our wills to be united with His, we are all one with Christ and His Father.  He is now much more available and visible to the world than when He physically walked among us, as He is present in each of us Who follow Him. When He was present physically with His Apostles and the people around Jerusalem for the 3 years of His ministry, did they really understand who He was? Sometimes we are tempted to think when we read the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, “O those dummies, if only I could have been there I would have known He was the Christ.” I’m not just talking about the pharisees who took up stones to stone Him and told Him he must have a demon. The Apostles followed Him for three years, they saw the miracles, they saw the storms obey him and the 5000 fed from 5 loaves, they even saw Him raise the dead, but did they understand? Peter finally seems to get it and says, (Matt. 16: 16) “You are the Christ the Son of the living God.” Christ says that His Father has revealed this to Peter and upon this knowledge will He build His Church. Christ then tells His disciples how this all works, that the Christ must suffer and die and be raised again on the third day, that for this very reason He came. Peter tells Him, “Far be it from You, Lord; this shall not happen to You!” and Christ immediately tells Peter, (Matt 16:23) “Get behind Me, Satan! You are an offence to Me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.” Clearly anyone who tries to understand Christ apart from the cross represents Satan. His closest disciples only saw Christ “given up” at the garden, they fled, and Peter denies Him 3 times. Even though they had been told repeatedly and saw countless miracles they still didn’t understand that Christ wasn’t “given up” in the garden but “rather gave Himself up” for them and us and for “the life of the world.” In missing the very purpose of Christ’s incarnation, the passion and the cross – they missed everything, and fled away in confusion and discouragement. When Christ resurrects from the dead He shows them that all O.T. scriptures can only be understood in the light of His death on the cross for the life of the world. He came to free us from death’s grasp through His sacrificial death on the cross.

We can not understand any scripture properly without seeing it from the perspective of the cross. All through our reading of the three synoptic gospels we see the disciples don’t understand what is really going on. They are writing it from the vantage point that we usually adopt when we are considering Christ’s life – What happened? What did they see with their physical senses? How did this unfold chronologically? A kind of play by play account. But they can’t fathom the passion of Christ being the whole purpose of His coming.

We read in Matthew, Christ saying in the garden of Gethsemane, (Matt. 26:39) “O My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.” On the cross we hear Him say “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” As if somehow Christ Himself didn’t understand. They are reporting their pre-Pentecost perspective.  Matthew, Christ’s Apostle had fled with Peter and the other Apostles, so he is reporting what he heard from others. Mark and Luke are reporting what they in turn had been told by others who weren’t there. Mark by Peter and Luke by Paul. They are reporting as third-hand eyewitnesses, not as those who were in on what was truly going on in the economy of God and the working out of mankind’s salvation. After Pentecost their entire perspective changed and they died as Martyrs.

Only John the Apostle “whom the Lord loved” remained at the foot of the cross with the Theotokos and heard Christ say “(John 19: 26 -27) “…Woman, behold your son!” to His mother and to John “…Behold your mother.” John, the Apostle outlived all the other Apostles, living into the beginning of the second century, and he wrote a very different gospel from a very different perspective. We read in the first verses of John (John 1:1-4) “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” There is no veiling, no guessing or discussing of Who this Christ is. It is understood from the very first sentence in John that this is God – the Crucified One who came for the salvation of all men. In John, before going to His voluntary death on the cross we hear Christ say, (John 17: 1) “Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son that Your Son may also glorify You.” And (John 18:11) “…Shall I not drink the cup which My Father has given Me?” And on the cross He says, (John 19:30) “It is finished!”

Quite a different perspective. It is the perspective that all things are understood only in light of the passion of Christ, in the light of the cross. What is finished? God’s plan which was started before all time and included the creating of man in His own image in Adam and Eve, the fall and sentence of death in man, the entering of God, He whom has always existed and been with us and holds all of life and creation together, being always and even before and after always, everywhere present and filling all things, coming into human history to complete the formation of a human being, begun in Genesis with Adam and completed on the cross with Christ, the true human being. Trampling down death by death. And in us also we will experience true life at our death, for death has been defeated and turned into a victory, our death becomes our birth into true life. (1 Cor. 15:55) (Hos. 13:14) “O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?” We see in the resurrection icon, Christ is pulling up man into life, grabbing Adam and Eve in each arm and dragging them from death to life. It is us who are resurrected. The icon shows Christ, whose divinity could never experience death, resurrecting us in the icon. As St. Athanasius said, “Christ put on a body that He might find death in the body and blot it out.” The icon shows the resurrection of the human race as we join Christ as it says in todays gospel reading from (John 17: 11) “…keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.”

This is the secret of the Martyrs. This is why we celebrate their death date as their saint’s day or birth into true life day.  They knew their death in Christ was their true birth. The completion of their going into the waters of baptism in death and coming out unto life and resurrection. They became Christ in their Martyrdom. This is why all must be seen through the victory of the cross which completed man’s formation and allowed us all to enter into the fullness of true life. This is the original purpose and plan when God created us to dwell with Him, and it was never lost or in question. The cross and our death has always been from the beginning – the end; completing our formation into sons of God. Death becomes life! Everything is as usual a paradox, and if we find our life and live only for ourselves we lose it; but if we lose our life – in laying it down, serving others and not living for our own passions and selfishness, in the end through death itself, in Christ we find true and everlasting life.

This is the gospel, this is the teaching of the fathers of the 1st ecumenical council and this is the great mystery of life and death itself as understood in the Church.

Christ is Ascended! He is ascended in glory!