For This We Were Created

Date: 02 September 2006 08:12:43

I took a walk down to a park along the Georges River, which forms the eastern border of the city of Liverpool. A number of people were also there, enjoying the weather: as were a number of birds, including Australian Magpies, Magpie-Larks, Australian Wood Ducks, Mallards and what I think were Purple Swamphens.

I took the book The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death with me, which I have just begun reading. I am up to Chapter 3, For This We Were Created, which is proving to be a very interesting chapter: and I'm barely one-third of the way through it.

The author, John Behr, begins the chapter by discussing the disciples' abandoning of Jesus, and he points to two Gospel incidents that I had not linked before: and links them, and an Old Testament passage, in a way I had not linked either. I enjoy discovering things like this: the Scriptures do continually open new insights.

The Gospel incidents linked are Peter's three-fold denial in John 18 while he is warming himself by a charcoal fire and then Christ's asking him three times in John 21, "Do you love me?" -- and this profession is also done by a charcoal fire. Behr believes this is also meant to recall the experience of Isaiah who, after his vision of the Lord enthroned in the heavens and his crying out, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!", sees one of them Seraphim take a burning coal from the altar and place it on his lips saying, "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for."

This encounter with the Lord, recognition that one is a sinner, but "a forgiven sinner", is Behr writes, "the basic movement for theological reflection". He then moves on to provide a very interesting quote -- and one that causes me to completely re-think my thoughts on why we were created -- from St Irenaeus of Lyons:

Since he who saves already existed, it was necessary that he who would be saved should come into existence, that the One who save should not exist in vain.

Against the Heresies, 3.22.3, quoted on p. 77

I am still pondering this quote, and Behr's explanation, but what I believe I have gained from it is a view that the Incarnation was not simply a solution thought up by God after things went pear-shaped after the Fall: in some sense I have known this, or at least believed it, without thinking too much about it: but reading this is forcing me to ponder this topic more. Christ's Incarnation, and His Death and Resurrection, are the very centre of history and were always the plan of God: and in fact everything, including the Old Testament, including Creation itself, must be seen from the point of view of Christ: all things were created for Him. As Behr writes:

Theologically speaking, creation and its history begins with the Passion of Christ and from this "once for all" work looks backwards and forwards to see everything in this light, making everything new. Christian cosmology, elaborated as it must be from the perspective of the Cross, seems the Cross as impregnated in the very structure of creaton: stat crux dum volvitur orbis -- the Cross stands, while the earth revolves. The power of God revealed in and through the Cross brought creation into being and sustains it in existence.

p. 90

Plenty for me to ponder: and may God bless me in understanding His plan of Salvation more and more. I have a feeling I may be re-reading this chapter a few times.