What Christ Accomplished on the Cross
By Hieromonk Damascene
A talk delivered at the Annual Lenten Clergy
Confession of the New Gracanica Metropolitanate and the Western American
Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Jackson, California, March 17, 2004.
The topic
of today’s talk—what Christ accomplished on the Cross—is of course a prime
subject of contemplation during the Lenten season, as we prepare to prayerfully
commemorate Christ’s passion, death, and the inevitable consequence of His
death: His holy Resurrection. As we call to mind and repent of our sins during
the Holy Fast, we also call to mind that which has saved us from the eternal
consequences of sin. We call to mind Christ’s life-creating death on the Cross,
which He underwent for the salvation of each one of us.
The
Orthodox dogma of our redemption—which includes the doctrines concerning
Christ’s incarnation, death and Resurrection—is the chief dogma of our Faith,
together with the dogma of the Holy Trinity. I have been especially
contemplating and reading Patristic writings on this subject for a few years
now. It is a vast subject. In this lecture I will try to outline its main
points in a linear and chronological fashion. I will speak about the state of
man before the Fall and after the Fall, and then speak about how Christ saved
us from the consequences of the Fall through His incarnation, death and
Resurrection. Finally, I will summarize all the present and future
accomplishments of Christ’s redemptive work.
1. The Primordial State
According
to the Patristic interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, before the Fall man’s
body was not subject to death and corruption. He was made potentially immortal,
that is, if he had not sinned he could have lived forever in an incorrupt body,
partaking of the Tree of Life in the Garden. Before the Fall, man knew no pain,
no sickness. He was not subject to old age. He was not subject to the elements;
he could not be physically hurt. He knew no decay. His body, while still
material and sensual, was more spiritual than the body we inhabit now. It was
not grossly material, like the body we now have.
At his
creation from the dust of the ground, man was created in Grace. The Holy
Fathers (such as St. John Damascene) say that Adam’s body and soul were created
at the same time, and that when God breathed a living soul into him, He
breathed also into him the Grace of the Holy Spirit. Before the Fall, the first
man and the first woman had the Holy Spirit abiding within them.
The first
man was not deified at the time of his creation, but he was created for
deification, for union with God. By drawing ever closer to God in love, by
seeking spiritual pleasure in God rather than physical pleasure through His
senses, man was to become ever more holy and spiritual, ever more in the
likeness of God, ever more transformed and deified by the Grace of God. Since
God is limitless and unfathomable, the path of union with God was never to end.
Man was created a little lower than the angels (Ps. 8:5, Heb. 2:7), but he
eventually was to become higher than the angels, higher even than the highest
ranks of the angels: “more honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious beyond
compare than the Seraphim.”
Moreover,
as man became more spiritual and divinized by drawing closer to God, he was to
make all of creation more spiritual and divinized as well, drawing everything
closer to God. Many Holy Fathers—such as St. Macarius the Great, St. John
Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Sinai and St. Maximos the Confessor—teach that the
entire creation was incorrupt before the Fall just as man was incorrupt: for
the entire creation had been made for man. St. Symeon the New Theologian states
explicitly that not only Paradise was incorrupt before the Fall: everything,
the whole creation, was without death and corruption. Because he possessed both
body and soul, man was the link between this incorrupt material world and the
noetic world of the angels. As such, he was to unite the material world with
the noetic world through his own ascent to God.
2. The Consequences of the Fall
The whole
story of the Fall and why it occurred lies outside the scope of this lecture.
What concerns us here, as we contemplate the theology of redemption, is the
consequences of the Fall. Just as we must understand what we fell from in order
to understand what Christ restores us to, so also we must understand what we
fell into in order to understand what Christ delivers us out of.
To put it
another way: through His death on the Cross and through His Resurrection,
Christ gives us life. In order to understand what it means to be given life, we
must understand the death into which we have been born.
As you
will recall, in the book of Genesis God told Adam: Of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil thou shalt not eat: for in the day that thou eatest thereof
thou shalt surely die (Gen. 2:17). Now, we know that Adam did not die on the
day he ate from the tree: according to the Scriptures he lived to be 930 years
old. But according to St. Gregory Palamas and other Fathers, God’s words were
true: Adam did die on the day he ate the fruit. He died spiritually. He lost
the Divine Grace in which he had been created. He no longer had the Holy Spirit
abiding within him. Because his nature had become corrupted, deifying Grace was
now foreign to it. Before, God Himself abode within him through His Uncreated
Energy. Now man became empty, devoid of Grace. He was separated from God. And,
according to St. Gregory Palamas, this spiritual death made Adam subject to
physical death, which in his case occurred after 930 years.
At the
Fall, man’s nature was changed. He still had the image of God in him, but now
he had become corrupted. His spiritual corruption made his body more grossly
material, subject to physical corruption or decay after death. Also, his
spiritual corruption made his soul unable to partake of eternal union with God
after death. Paradise had been barred to Adam during his earthly life, and both
Paradise and heaven remained barred to him after death. After their death,
Adam, Eve, and all their posterity went down into hades: a place of waiting, of
separation from God.
Also, at
the Fall, all of creation fell into corruption along with man: decay and death
were introduced into the creation. In Romans 5:12 St. Paul says that By one man
sin entered the world, and death by sin, and a little later, in Romans 8:20-21,
he says that the creation entered into corruption because of man’s sin.
We are
all the inheritors of the death and corruption that entered into man’s nature
at the Fall. St. Gregory Palamas says that, through Adam’s one spiritual death,
both spiritual and physical death were passed onto all men. This is because
human nature is one: we are all of the family of Adam.
Between
the time of Adam’s fall and the coming of Christ, there were many righteous men
and women, whom we read about in the Old Testament. But they, even through
their godly lives, were unable to reverse the consequences of the Fall. Grace
could act on them from the outside, as it did on the Prophet Moses, so much so
that he had to cover his radiant face as he descended from Mount Sinai.
However, this was only a temporary radiance, as the Holy Scriptures and Fathers
say. He and all the Old Testament prophets did not have the Grace of the Holy
Spirit abiding within them, as their personal strength and power. And after
death, everyone, even the most righteous, went down into hades, being cut off
from Paradise and heaven.
During
the Old Testament period, God gave laws to the Hebrews to help them live
righteous lives. He instituted animal sacrifices, which the Hebrews were to
make as offerings for sin. These sacrifices were a prefiguration of Christ’s
sacrifice, to prepare the people of God to understand and accept the meaning of
Christ’s death on the Cross. But neither the sacrifices nor the laws were able
to restore mankind to the state he had lost at the Fall.
A
perfect, blameless sacrifice was needed—a man who was without sin—in order to
destroy the consequences of sin. That was why Christ came. The first Adam fell
from his original designation, bringing everything into ruin. Therefore Christ,
Who is called the Second Adam or the New Adam, came into the world to fulfill
man’s original designation and restore what was lost. But Christ did even more
than that. He not only restored man to what Adam was before the Fall: He gave
man the possibility to become that which Adam was supposed to become, what Adam
could have become had he not fallen.
3. The Means of Redemption
The how
of the redemption, like the nature of God the Holy Trinity, is ultimately a
mystery. And yet the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers help us to approach
this mystery. They enable us to understand and believe in our redemption by
Jesus Christ in such a way that, believing, we can receive the gift of
salvation.
Our
redemption by Jesus Christ began with His incarnation. When He took flesh, He
became like us in everything except sin (cf. Heb. 4:15). In assuming human
nature, He deified it. Since human nature is one, this gave us the potential of
being deified as well: not deified by nature and Sonship, as Christ was, but
deified by Grace and adoption.
But with
Christ’s incarnation, man was still not able to actualize the potential for
deification. Because of his spiritual corruption, man was an impure vessel.
Because of the barrier of sin, man could not receive and keep the Grace of the
Holy Spirit within himself. So Christ, having overcome the barrier of nature at
His incarnation, now had to break down the barrier of sin. He would do this
through his death. As St. Nicholas Cabasilas says, Christ broke down the three
barriers that separated man from God: the barrier of nature by His incarnation,
the barrier of sin by His death, and the barrier of death by His Resurrection.
As God,
Christ knew He had come to earth to die for man, and in dying to rise from the
grave. On the day before His crucifixion, He said: Now is My soul troubled; and
what shall I say? Father, save Me from this hour. But for this cause came I
unto this hour (John 12:27).
Remember
the statement of St. Gregory Palamas which I mentioned earlier: Through his
single spiritual death (at the Fall), Adam brought a twofold death into the
world—spiritual death and bodily death. St. Gregory goes on to say, “The good
Lord healed this twofold death of ours through His single bodily death, and
through the one Resurrection of His body He gave us a twofold resurrection. By
means of His bodily death He destroyed him who had the power over our souls and
bodies in death, and rescued us from his tyranny over both.”
This,
again, is because human nature is one. St. Paul writes: If by one man’s offence
death reigned by one [that is, Adam], much more they which receive abundance of
Grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign by one, Jesus Christ (Rom.
5:17).
Following
the words of Christ and St. Paul in the Scriptures, the Holy Fathers use a
juridical or legal model to explain how Christ broke down the barrier of sin
separating man from God.
The
juridical explanation can be expressed in basic terms as follows: At the Fall,
death was the sentence for sin. When He died on the Cross, Christ took upon
Himself that sentence, but since He was without sin and thus undeserving of the
sentence, the sentence was abolished for all mankind, and mankind was freed
from the consequences of the primal transgression.
Christ
paid the debt of sin that man himself could never pay. The Apostle John writes
in his first Epistle: He [Christ] is the propitiation for our sins, and not for
ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world (I John 2:2). And the
Apostle Paul tells us: Ye are bought with a price (I Cor. 6:20, 7:23). St. Paul
even says that Christ was made to be sin for us and made a curse for us (II
Cor. 5:21, Gal. 3:13). Being totally without sin, He bore the penalty of sin on
our behalf, so that we would be forgiven and purified of sin and freed from its
curse. St. Gregory Palamas says: “Since Christ gave His Blood, which was
sinless and therefore guiltless, as a ransom for us who were liable to
punishment because of our sins, He redeemed us from our guilt. He forgave our
sins, tore up the record of them on the Cross and delivered us from the devil’s
tyranny.
Out of
His infinite love for us, Christ died in place of us, so that we could be given
life. St. Paul says: ... That He [Christ] by the Grace of God should taste
death for every man (Heb. 2:9); and elsewhere he says, God commendeth His own
love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Rom.
5:8). St. Athanasius the Great explains this as follows: “Taking a body like
our own, because all our bodies were liable to corruption and death, He
surrendered His body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father.
This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and
the law of death thereby be abolished.
Together
with the juridical model of explaining how we are redeemed by Christ’s death,
the Holy Scriptures and Holy Fathers use the model of sacrifice. As mentioned
earlier, the Old Testament sacrifices were a prefiguration, a “type” of the one
true Sacrifice that would be offered for the whole world: Christ, Who was
sacrificed on the Cross. In the first Epistle of St. Peter we hear Christ
described as a spotless sacrificial lamb: Ye were redeemed with the precious
Blood of Christ, as a lamb without blemish and without spot, Who was
foreordained before the foundation of the world (I Peter 1:19-20). And in the
Epistle to the Hebrews we read: Now once at the end of the world Christ hath
appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself (Heb. 9:26).
Many of
the Holy Fathers wrote on this theme of Christ as sacrifice. Origen (who is not
a Holy Father) and, following him, St. Gregory of Nyssa, posited that the
sacrifice was offered to the devil. But St. Gregory the Theologian and all the
Fathers after him rejected this idea. They often spoke of the sacrifice as
being offered to God the Father, and sometimes they spoke of it as being
offered to the Holy Trinity, since the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit are One
God. St. Symeon the New Theologian writes: “God, Who is incomparably higher
than the visible and invisible creation, accepted human nature, which is higher
than the whole visible creation, and offered it as a sacrifice to His God and
Father.... Honoring the sacrifice, the Father could not leave it in the hands
of death. Therefore, He annihilated His sentence.
St.
Gregory Palamas sheds more light on this question. He says that God could have
found other ways of saving man from sin, mortality and servitude to the devil.
But He saved man in the way He did—by coming to earth, dying and
resurrecting—because this was according to justice and righteousness. As the
Psalmist says: God is righteous and loveth righteousness ... and there is no
unrighteousness in Him (Ps. 11:7, 92:15). Death was the just penalty for sin,
and Christ paid that penalty. But because He was sinless, His death was unjust.
Therefore, He justly destroyed death. This was God’s economy, completely in
accordance with His righteousness.
The devil
thought He could destroy Christ by inciting people to put Him to death. But
Christ’s death proved to be the devil’s undoing because, unlike every other
person who had ever lived, Christ did not deserve death. St. John Chrysostom
offers us a vivid image to highlight this teaching: “It is as if, at a session
of a court of justice, the devil should be addressed as follows: ‘Granted that
you destroyed all men because you found them guilty of sin; but why did you
destroy Christ? Is it not very evident that you did so unjustly? Well then,
through Him the whole world will be vindicated.”
Christ
saved us in the way He did not only to manifest His justice and righteousness,
but also to manifest His love. St. Isaac the Syrian writes: “God the Lord
surrendered His own Son to death on the Cross for the fervent love of creation.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son to death for our
sake (cf. John 3:16). This was not, however, because He could not have redeemed
us in another way, but so that His surpassing love, manifested hereby, might be
a teacher unto us. And by the death of His only begotten Son He made us near to
Himself. Yea, if He had had anything more precious, He would have given it to
us, so that by it our race might be His own.”
4. The Consequences of Christ’s Redemptive
Work
Now,
having looked at how Christ redeemed us through His death on the Cross, let us
turn to the saving fruits of Christ’s death. What does it mean for mankind to
be ransomed from guilt, to be forgiven of sins? It means, in the words of St.
John Damascene, that “the road back to the former blessedness [i.e., before the
Fall] has been made smooth, and the gates of Paradise opened.” Through Christ’s
death, we can be forgiven and cleansed of sin so as to receive what we would
otherwise not be worthy of receiving: the Grace of the Holy Spirit within
ourselves, as Adam had it before the Fall. Moreover, we can go where we would
not otherwise be worthy to go: Paradise and heaven. The first to receive this
gift was one who was clearly unworthy, but who nevertheless believed in Christ
and thus was redeemed through His death. This was the repentant thief on the
Cross, to whom Christ said, Today you will be with Me in Paradise (Luke 23:43).
The
saving fruits of Christ’s death were made available not only to those who lived
after Him, but also to those who lived before Him; for during His three-day
burial Jesus Christ harrowed hell and brought to Paradise those righteous ones
who had lain in hades throughout the ages. “Christ’s death,” writes St. Symeon
the New Theologian, “was an indispensable sacrifice also for the pious ones who
died before His coming in the flesh.”
At His
death, Christ broke down the barrier of sin. But there was one barrier left:
death itself. This Christ broke down at His Resurrection. As in Adam all die,
writes St. Paul, so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man according
to his order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at His
coming (I Cor. 15:22-23). Through Christ’s Resurrection, all mankind has been
made subject to future resurrection: physical, bodily resurrection. Those who
receive Christ’s gift of salvation are resurrected unto eternal life, as He
says; while those who reject it are resurrected unto damnation (cf. John 5:29).
Once again, this is because human nature is one. St. Paul affirms: For since by
man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead (I Cor. 15:21).
Christ’s
death and burial can never be separated from His Resurrection. His Resurrection
was an inevitable consequence of His death, since, as it is said in the Divine
Liturgy of St. Basil, “it was not possible for the Author of Life to be a
victim of corruption.” With Christ’s death and His Resurrection, all the
consequences of the Fall are overcome: both spiritual death (the loss of the
Grace of God) and physical death. What we sing in the Paschal hymn we mean
quite literally: “Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by
death.”
In Christ
alone there is true life. He offers us eternal life: first of all true
spiritual life by having His life-giving Grace abiding within us; secondly,
eternal spiritual life in His Heavenly Kingdom; and thirdly, eternal physical
life in our resurrected bodies.
Let us
look at these three in order. First of all, what does it mean to receive the
life-giving Grace of the Holy Spirit through Christ’s redeeming death? St.
Symeon answers this with a remarkable statement—that it is like receiving a new
soul. He writes: “The souls of those who believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of
God, in His great and fearful Sacrifice [on the Cross] are resurrected by God
in this present life; and a sign of this resurrection is the Grace of the Holy
Spirit which He gives to the soul of every Christian, as if giving a new soul.”
St. John
Chrysostom, in his commentary on this Gospel, explains further. When the
Apostle John said Jesus was not yet glorified, he meant that Jesus had not yet
been crucified. Christ was glorified in His sacrifice on the Cross, and through
this He made man open to receive the Holy Spirit in his soul, in his inward
being, so that the Grace would flow out of him like rivers of living water.
Later, in
His last talk to His disciples before His passion and death, Christ tells them:
I will pray the Father and He will give you another Comforter, that He may
abide with you forever, even the Spirit of Truth (John 14:16).
According
to St. John Chrysostom, “Christ said this to show the time of the coming of the
Spirit. For when He had purified them by His sacrifice, then the Holy Spirit
would descend upon them. Yet why did He not come upon them while Jesus was
still with them? Because the Sacrifice had not yet been offered up [that is,
Christ had not yet died on the Cross]. But, when at length sin had been
destroyed, and they themselves were being sent into danger and were preparing
for the contests, it was necessary for the Comforter to come.”
A little
later Christ says to His disciples in order to comfort them before His
crucifixion and burial: It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not
away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send Him
unto you (John 16:7).
“But why
did He not come before Christ had departed?” St. John Chrysostom asks
rhetorically. “Because He could not come, since the curse had not yet been
lifted, sin had not yet been forgiven, but all men were still subject to the
penalty for it. ‘Therefore,’ He said, ‘that enmity must be destroyed and you
must be reconciled to God, and then you will receive the gift.’”
When
Christ first appeared among His Apostles after His death and Resurrection, His
first act was to breathe upon them and to say: Receive ye the Holy Spirit (John
20:22). He could say and do this at that point because He had purified them by
His sacrifice on the Cross; He had loosed them from sin. And then, after He had
ascended to heaven and seated our human nature on the right hand of the Father,
Christ sent down the Holy Spirit on His Apostles at Pentecost, as He had
promised.
“One
Person of the Holy Trinity, namely the Son and Word of God, having become incarnate,
offered Himself in the flesh as a sacrifice to the Divinity of the Father, and
of the Son Himself, and of the Holy Spirit, in order that the first
transgression of Adam might be benevolently forgiven for the sake of this great
and fearful work, that is, for the sake of this sacrifice of Christ, and in
order that by its power there might be performed another new birth and
re-creation of man in Holy Baptism, in which we also are cleansed by water
mingled with the Holy Spirit. From that time people are baptized in water, are
immersed in it and taken out from it three times, in the image of the three-day
burial of the Lord, and after they die in it to this whole evil world, in the
third bringing out from it they are already alive, as if resurrected from the
dead, that is, their souls are brought to life and again receive the Grace of
the Holy Spirit as Adam had it before the transgression. Then they are anointed
with Holy Myrrh, and by means of it are anointed with Jesus Christ, and are
fragrant in a way above nature. Having become in this way worthy of being
associates of God, they taste His Flesh and drink His Blood, and by means of
the sanctified bread and wine become of one Body and Blood with God Who was
incarnate and offered Himself as a sacrifice.”
The aim
of the Christian life, says St. Seraphim of Sarov, is to acquire the Grace of
the Holy Spirit. We receive the seed of that Grace within us at Baptism. And
then, through our sacramental life in the Church, through a life of prayer and
virtue, practicing the commandments of Christ, we are to cultivate and nurture
this seed of inward baptismal Grace so as to acquire a greater measure of
Grace. In being ever more filled with God’s Grace or Energy, we grow ever more
in the likeness of Christ. Then, after our death, Christ will recognize us as
His own and will receive us into His Kingdom.
At the
beginning of this talk I mentioned that Christians are given the potential of
attaining to a state even higher than Adam’s state before the Fall. Through Christ’s
incarnation, death and Resurrection, man can not only be restored to what Adam
lost; now he can attain to what Adam was meant to attain. Man can be filled
with God’s Energy to such an extent as to be deified by Grace. Vladimir Lossky
writes that “In breaking the tyranny of sin [through His work of redemption],
our Savior opens to us anew the way of deification, which is the final end of
man.”
St.
Symeon the New Theologian, who experienced the Grace of deification, speaks of
this as participation in the life of God Himself. “He Himself is discovered
within me,” writes St. Symeon, “resplendent inside my wretched heart,
enlightening me from all sides with His immortal splendor, shining on all of my
members with His rays. Entirely intertwined with me, He embraces me entirely.
He gives Himself totally to me, the unworthy one, and I am filled with His love
and beauty. I am sated with pleasure and Divine tenderness. I share in the
Light. I participate also in the glory. My face shines like that of my Beloved
and all my members become bearers of the Light.”
What St.
Symeon describes, as marvelous as it is, is only a foretaste of the future life
in heaven that is promised to Christ’s true followers. It is only the beginning
of a progress that will never end. “Indeed,” says St. Symeon, “over the ages
the progress will be endless, for a cessation of this growing toward the end
without ending would be nothing but a grasping at the ungraspable. The One on
Whom no one can be sated would then become an object of satiety. By contrast,
to be filled with Him and to be glorified in His Light will cause unfathomable
progress.”
Furthermore,
the glory that now exists among the saints and angels in heaven is only a
foretaste of the glory that will be revealed at the General Resurrection, when
all the saving fruits of Christ’s incarnation, death and Resurrection are to be
fully revealed. Adam, it will be remembered, was supposed to raise the
first-created world closer to God, to make it more spiritual through his own
spiritual ascent to God. Adam failed in his purpose, so the New Adam, our Lord
Jesus Christ, came to fulfill it. His redemptive work was already accomplished
with His death and Resurrection. But the fruits of that work unfold over time.
As Christians we have already tasted some of those fruits, but we are to know
them in their fullness after the General Resurrection. For through Christ’s
Resurrection, not only will man be resurrected in a renewed, spiritual body:
the entire creation will be renewed and become spiritual. As the book of the
Apocalypse says, there will be a New Heaven and a New Earth (cf. Apoc. 21:1).
The Body
of the resurrected Christ was incomparably more spiritual than the incorrupt
body of Adam before the Fall. Christ’s resurrected, spiritual Body was like the
spiritual body that Adam was supposed to attain by ascending to God in
Paradise. Likewise, the New Heaven and the New Earth will be incomparably more
spiritual than the incorrupt creation before the Fall. Through Christ the New Adam,
the renewed creation will be what it would have been if the first Adam had
raised it to God.
In his
Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul writes of the future age of the renewed
creation which will come into being after the General Resurrection:
I reckon that
the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory
which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation
eagerly waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God [that is, us]. For the
creation was made subject to futility, not willingly, but because of him [Adam]
who subjected it [to futility] in hope [that is, in hope of the General
Resurrection]. Because the creation itself also shall be delivered from the
bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we
know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until
now. And not only the creation, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits
of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the
adoption, that is, the redemption of our body (Romans 8:18-23).
We can
experience the redemption of our souls even now. But what exactly will the
redemption of our body mean—that redemption which was made possible through
Christ's Resurrection? We can find no better description of this than in the
words of St. Symeon, who undoubtedly beheld something of this future age in
prophetic Divine vision. St. Symeon writes:
"You
should know likewise what is to be the glory and the brightly shining state of the
creation in the future age. For when it will be renewed, it will not again be
the same as it was when it was created in the beginning. But it will be such
as, according to the word of the divine Paul, our body will also be. Concerning
our body the Apostle says: It is sown in a natural body, but is raised a
spiritual body (I Cor. 15:44) and unchanging, such as was the body of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, after the Resurrection. In the same way also the
whole creation, according to the commandment of God, is to be, after the
General Resurrection, not such as it was created, material and sensuous, but it
is to be re-created and to become a certain immaterial and spiritual dwelling,
surpassing every sense, as the Apostle says of us, We shall not sleep, but we
shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye (I Cor. 15:51).
Thus also the whole creation, after it shall burn up in the Divine fire, is to
be changed.
"The
heaven will become incomparably more brilliant and bright than it appears now;
it will become completely new. The earth will receive a new, unutterable
beauty, being clothed in many-formed, unfading flowers, bright and spiritual.
The whole world will become more perfect than any word can describe. Having
become spiritual and divine, it will become united with the noetic world; it
will become a certain mental Paradise, a heavenly Jerusalem, the inalienable
inheritance of the sons of God. Such an earth has not been inherited as yet by
a single man; we are all strangers and foreigners. But when the earthly will be
united with the heavenly, then also the righteous will inherit that already
renewed earth whose inheritors are to be those meek ones who are blessed by the
Lord."
All this,
the glory of the future age, has been made possible by Christ's death and
Resurrection. Christ, being both God and man, already dwells in this glory,
being in heaven in His glorified, resurrected body. But we have another who
already partakes of the glory that is to come after the General Resurrection.
This is the Most Holy Mother of God. In her we see all the fruits of Christ's
work of redemption, for not only has she been deified in soul, she has been
resurrected by Christ in a spiritual body like His own. She has already been
fully glorified by God, with the glory that the saints will know only after the
General Resurrection. Vladimir Lossky writes that the Mother of God "is
the perfection of the Church already realized in a human person fully united to
God, beyond the Resurrection and the Judgment. Like her Son, she was raised
from the dead and borne up to heaven—the first human hypostasis in whom was
fulfilled the final end for which the world was created." [36] She has
already become that which the first-created man and woman were supposed to
become. She has been raised higher than the angels, and become "more
honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the
Seraphim." She is the crown of creation, the testament of the glory of the
future age which will come into being through Christ's redemptive work. Again
Vladimir Lossky writes: "In the two perfect persons—the Divine person of
Christ and the human person of the Mother of God—is contained the mystery of
the Church."
This,
then, is the whole of what Christ accomplished through His incarnation, death
and Resurrection. In the words of St. Gregory the Theologian: "We needed
an incarnate God, a God put to death, that we might live. We were put to death
together with Him, that we might be cleansed; we rose again with Him, because
we were put to death with Him; we were glorified with Him, because we rose
again with Him."
Through
the totality of Christ's work of redemption, man is spiritually united with God
and deified, and man's body and the entire creation are to be renewed as a
spiritual and divine dwelling place. Truly, as we see affirmed over and over
again in the writings of the Fathers: "God became man so that man might
become god."
