What is it like to be divine? We are privileged to hear in
today’s Gospel our Lord revealing something of the relationship between God the
Father and God the Son. Our Lord is responding to opposition amongst the Jews to
what He is saying about His own equality with the Father.
The accusation “making himself God’s equal” is an accusation
of some sort of megalomania, or we might say, “delusions of grandeur”. But our
Lord is keen to emphasise that His relationship with the Father is not that of
a wayward son drunk with power, but a relationship of both complete unity and
also hierarchy. In God the Trinity there is both perfect unity and equality,
but also hierarchy. As with much of our understanding of the life of God in the
Trinity it is tricky to get our heads around it. We tend to try to project our
own experience on to God which always results in dodgy theology. We tend to
think equality and hierarchy are opposite and we have to choose between the
two. We see this for example in politics with communism/socialism and feminism
essentially rejecting hierarchy as something intrinsically wrong.
Our Lord does not project human ideas onto God of course,
but is revealing to us the way the relationship is. The Son does nothing independent
of the Father but does the Father’s will. The Father loves the Son and reveals
to the Son everything the Father does. Just as the Father raises the dead and
gives them life, so the Son gives life to anyone He chooses. Judgement has been
given to the Son by the Father. And so those that honour the Son, honour the
Father. And those that refuse to honour the Son refuse honour to the Father. The
Father is the source of life and has made the Son the source of life. And
because the Son is incarnate, because He is both divine and human, the Father
has made the Son judge. Though as judge the Son judges as the Father tells Him
to!
The inner life of the Holy Trinity as revealed by God the
Son is also our goal as Christians, for we are called to divine life which is
heaven. And so because the Church on earth (Church militant) is those
journeying towards this divine life, the Church is structured both with
hierarchy and with equality of communion. But this is a necessary part of
preparing for heaven. Of course the Church militant gets it wrong* and we can develop
the Church structure to make it closer to the divine life (especially through
greater holiness), but nevertheless we cannot restructure the Church in order
to fit in with modern ideas.
The Father has made the Son our judge because the Son knows
what it is to be human. Judgement is not to do with a fearful figure wagging
his finger in our direction, but our deeds themselves judging us and showing to
what extent we were willing to cooperate with the grace our Saviour brings us
through His self-giving on the Cross.
So let us continue our Lenten journey in the secure
knowledge of God the Son’s giving of Himself for our salvation, and that our
work is to cooperate with all the grace He is pouring on us, grace that is life
for us.
Fr Ian
* Our Lord
warned the Apostles against “lording” it over others – though they were high up
in the hierarchy of the Church they were to consider themselves servants. And
this has been echoed recently by our Popes, not least, Pope Francis. Authority
and power are given not to “lord” it over others, but in order to be able to
serve them, more specifically, to bring them grace and order. That does not
mean the hierarchy is greater than the laity, nor that the work of the
hierarchy is more important than the laity. This is where clericalism comes in –
trying to make the laity like clerics is clericalism. But for the Church to
function well the laity need to be the laity, served by the clerics with the power and authority given them.
