“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” These must be the most recognized words of the gospel in the United States. We see John 3:16 everywhere: on bumper stickers, t-shirts, in cartoons, in the eye-black under Tim Tebow’s eyes. I once saw a coupon that offered $15 dollars off a full-service oil change if the customer could quote John 3:16. I saw a church sign for a church named “John 3:16 Church.” If it were a Byzantine Catholic parish, I suppose it could be named something like, “Christ the Lover of us all,” but only in America could you see it named after the chapter and verse.

At some point, almost everyone in America has probably looked up this verse. I once heard a priest quip that maybe it’s time we start writing John 3:17 everywhere. Then, after a while, we could move on to John 3:18, and so on. That way, maybe, before they die, people would make it through a whole chapter of scripture.

We quote John 3:16 in our Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. You’ll hear it just after the “Holy, Holy, Holy….” These words have been popular among us Byzantines since before there were chapters and verses to cite. (We liked it before it was cool).

And they tell us that God loves the world. We hear these words so often that maybe they go in one ear and out the other. We might begin to lose a sense of their significance, even of their scandal.

The word for “world” here in Greek is κόσμος. God so loved the cosmos. This word is potent and loaded in the Christian tradition, and particularly in John, who uses it more than anyone. Its meanings are complex and varied and seemingly contradictory. The lexicon gives it no less than eight definitions.

Today we hear from Jesus that God loves the world. But John tells us in another place “Do not love the world or the things in the world.” And, “If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). This may be confusing. We’ve just heard that the Father loves the world, but now we hear if we love the world we do not love the Father?

And anyway, how can God love this world? In this world, some children are murdered before they’re born and others are abused. In this world, men crash airplanes into skyscrapers and kill thousands, as we remember from twenty years ago yesterday. In this world, we drop nuclear bombs on our enemies, and their families and children. The ruler of this world is the devil. We see this wickedness all around us and we don’t love it.

At the root of all these evils is our passions. St. Isaac the Syrian writes that “The world is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them ‘the world.’” The passions, you know, are like greed and sloth, lust and vainglory, envy and resentment, and so on.

When we say that God loves the world, let’s be clear that we are not saying that he loves these things. He does not love the passions and the horrors that impassioned people carry out. God forbid the thought. The word “world” carries many senses, then. And we must carefully consider what is meant.

Jesus is not of the world but is above the world (John 8:23). He creates the world and yet becomes of the world to save the world. We are taught both to love the world and to hate our lives in the world (John 12:25). The devil is the ruler of the world but Jesus is the king of kings and lord of lords. The world brings up these parallels and opposites. And only Jesus Christ and his cross can reconcile opposites.

It’s like we have two worlds here. And I think that’s it really. We live in two worlds at the same time. There’s the world as God creates it and there is the fallen world, enslaved to sin. We must be aware of both worlds – both the cosmos and the chaos – both the way of life and the way of death.

God enters into the midst of both of these by becoming man. By his humanity, he saves, redeems, glorifies, and brings us humans into unity with God – us and also the cosmos, the world. By his incarnation, Christ is cosmically present to the universe. And the whole universe stands in need of his salvific presence, because the whole universe is disordered and suffering from destruction and death of many kinds.

And, make no mistake, death is what we’re being saved from. That’s the whole point of all this here.  God gave his only Son so that we would not perish but have eternal life. Death is an evil. Some of us are accustomed to thinking about moral evil only and we forget about physical evil. We sometimes fail to understand physical evil as evil. We even call it good.

And it has been made good in Christ and in his cross. But we must not forget that this is a paradox, lest we forget all our Lord has done for us. In Christ, all things are new. In Christ, death becomes the means of life, because in him, life goes into the place of the dead, into Hades, so that there is nowhere God is not. Hades was thought to be the place where God is not, the place of the dead. “Will the shades stand and praise you?” asked the Psalmist (Ps. 88:10). He may have thought the answer was no. But now, God is even where God is not.

God is impassible, yet in his humanity he suffers the passion. God is immortal, yet in his humanity he dies. God creates the cosmos, yet in his humanity he is created in the cosmos. God loves the world.

The world is the whole cosmos that God creates. Yet the world is also the passions, the sins, the suffering, and the death. So it gets convoluted sometimes when we’re talking about “the world.” We see the passions and the weakness, the suffering and the death, all of which is evil, and it gets hard to see what’s good about the world.

All of this is reconciled only in the cross. We exalt the cross when we say that we love the world. When we say that God loves the world – that can only make any sense in the context of exalting the cross. God is making the sign of the cross over the whole world. He is blessing us with the cross.

The cross unifies opposites, you see. There’s a vertical bar and there’s a horizontal bar, intersected. The divine intersects the human, in Jesus Christ. Heaven comes down to earth. Life enters into death. Unified, death becomes the way to life through resurrection. The cross is the cosmos as it really is. All of it, in all of its senses, unified.  Opposites are made one in the cross, this wonderful and holy sign.

Sermon on Matthew 22:35-46

If we are practicing Byzantine Catholics, then we are well acquainted with the Book of Psalms. If we are not well acquainted with the Book of Psalms, then we have not yet begun to practice our Byzantine tradition. Our Byzantine tradition of prayer is positively steeped in the Psalter. We pray the Psalms constantly and at every liturgical service, including this Divine Liturgy, though, interestingly, least of all. All of our other services include even more Psalmody. We truly follow the instruction of Saint Paul, when he tells us to “greet one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all [our] heart[s]” (Eph. 5:19). This apostolic tradition is here very much alive.

And remember that tradition is a living thing if it is anything of value at all. The great scholar of history and theology Jaroslav Pelikan said from experience, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; [whereas] traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.”[i]

So while we keep the good tradition of singing Psalms, it is good also for us to find a way of doing it that we will actually do, rather than insisting that only one of the ancient ways is worthwhile. Often, if we take that tack, we soon discover that these ancient ways are rather cumbersome, as it turns out, and so we give up the whole thing. Better, as I say, to sing the Psalms according to a rule we will actually keep in our actual real lives.

And one piece of guidance I would give you, whether you asked for it or not, is that your prayer should include at least some psalmody. Not overmuch, necessarily, but some. It is not necessary for lay people to keep the Byzantine monastic cycle of psalmody, which goes through the entire book, all 150 Psalms, each and every week, and twice a week during the Great Fast. That’s a bit much for most of us who are living in the world and, if we try to do it, we may soon burn out and give up the whole thing. Rather, the tradition that stands there to inspire us. If the monks and nuns of our tradition can keep this great discipline, perhaps we can at least pray a psalm each day. That would be a good thing. Don’t be intimidated. Some of them are quite short. Here is a Psalm in its entirety, which we always pray at Vespers:

Praise the Lord, all you nations, acclaim him all you peoples! Strong is the love of the Lord for us; he is faithful forever (Psalm 116).

There, you see? That’s not too much. You can pray a Psalm each day. And it is worthwhile to do so.

The Book of Psalms contains the revelation of God. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit. And it is the prayer book of Jesus Christ himself. This book in a unique way contains the prayers of God to God. For example, when we pray Psalm 21, we are praying a prayer that was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and which was prayed to our Father in the heavens, by his only begotten Son in his humanity as he hung upon the cross and cried out, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?” “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” This Psalm therefore connects us into an unfathomable inner experience of Christ our God like no other prayer can.

We know this from the gospel. Now, if we were to pray that same psalm apart from its gospel context, we would fathom it even less. In fact, this same great and holy book becomes so unwieldy if divorced from the gospel, that it can even begin to lead some people astray. That which is holy and edifying and divinizing could be confused and distorted and manipulated by the enemy to mean in some cases the very opposite of what God means by it. Never forget that the devil quoted the Psalms while tempting Jesus in the desert (Matt 4:6; Ps. 90:11, 12).

I will give you an extreme example. In the Psalms we proclaim, “Do I not hate those who hate you? abhor those who rise against you? I hate them with a perfect hate and they are foes to me” (Ps. 138:21-22). This is a psalm that we Christians pray. As I said, our monks and nuns pray this prayer every week, and twice a week during the Great Fast. Meanwhile, Jesus has given us a new teaching: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:44). We have here a contradiction, it would seem. Some Christians have been so perplexed by this, that they have removed this Psalm and others like it from their own cycle of prayer. We Byzantines do not do this. Rather we seek to know what God means by it.

Speaking about this very Psalm, St. Basil the Great says, “It is not hard for us, if we wish it, to take up a love for justice and a hatred for iniquity. God has advantageously given all power to the rational soul, as that of loving, so also that of hating, in order that, guided by reason, we may love virtue but hate vice. It is possible at times to use hatred even praiseworthily.”[ii]

And then he quotes the same verse I have already mentioned. It’s clear, I think, that Basil is starting with Christ and his gospel, and is understanding the psalms he’s praying only in that context and from that perspective. Therefore, and only because of this, he is able to see that the “ones” we are to hate are no fellow humans or creatures of God, but only vice and iniquity, which God did not make. In interpreting the Psalms this way, St. Basil is following the example of Jesus himself, as we heard in the gospel this morning.

Today, Jesus reveals a manner of understanding the Psalms to the Pharisees he is talking with. He quotes Psalm 109: “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool” (Ps 109:1). He reveals this to be a Messianic psalm about himself, the son of David who is none-the-less also the Lord of David. In fact, he is the Lord God who created David and knit him together in his mother’s womb.

Apart from the guidance of Jesus Christ, this psalm would never have been understood that way. The Jews were expecting a Messiah, but that he would be God incarnate went well beyond their expectations, even though that truth was already being proclaimed in their own Psalms. They could not see it there. And neither would we be able to see it if we did have Christ to open our eyes to it.

And so, in addition to praying the Psalms each day, which I encourage you to do, also read something of the gospel. Because it is only in the gospel that the revelation of the Psalms is made manifest. We need both if we are to commune with God in our prayer. “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” says St. Jerome, so let us immerse ourselves in them day and night to grow in our relationship and intimacy with our Lord.

 

 

[i] Carey, Joseph (June 26, 1989). “Christianity as an Enfolding Circle [Conversation with Jaroslav Pelikan]”. U.S. News & World Report. 106 (25). p. 57.

[ii] Homilies on the Psalms