Yesterday, Fr Kenneth Tanner shared this vintage “sermon in a hazelnut”:
In the wilderness temptations, Jesus is cajoled by satan to leave the limits of existence, to do magic tricks, to defy nature.
It’s tempting to remain at the surface of the gospel accounts of the wilderness experiences but at their core satan’s enticements are invitations to Jesus to stop being human.
None of us can make bread from rocks and none of us can fly without external aids, and Jesus is exactly one of us in all the limitations humans share.
Jesus is not Superman. Jesus is not Merlin.
Remaining human, accepting limitations, binding oneself in humility to created boundaries is a sacred vocation.
Jesus is the Word through whom the Father spoke all rocks into existence—all orchids, all stars, all things that fly, and all things that are a delight to the eye and good for food.
Jesus is the human God who calls all things into being, and protects them in their existence precisely as the things they are.
Jesus could of course have made bread from stones but not without ceasing to be human. And not—this might surprise you—without ceasing to be God.
When we stay with these wilderness encounters awhile we begin to understand that Jesus remains not just human in the exchanges with the devil, he also remains divine.
The sort of gods we project, whether in ancient lore or in our contemporary cinematic universes, are the sorts that wield “powers” to control persons or outcomes, personas who might change the nature of things or trespass boundaries to suit their ends, but they are not the living God revealed in the Scriptures.
In Jesus Christ to stop being human is to stop being God, and to stop being God is to stop being human, because in Jesus Christ there is no separation between remaining human and remaining God. In him they are one and the same thing.
Comments suggest a few people were left puzzled or stumped by what Kenneth+ said. So, this morning we talked briefly about it, exploring the disconnect and weighing out how best to talk about the miraculous, given that “to be God and to be human cannot be separated in Jesus.”
I told him that I first encountered this truth in George MacDonald (thanks to C.S. Lewis’ anthology). Here’s how MacDonald articulated it:
The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a loaf. No one creative fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before… There was in these miracles, I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us… Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once—immediately—than through the countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield.
I read that sometime in the 90’s, and not long after, I shared it in a sermon. I received then exactly the kind of pushback Fr Kenneth is getting now.
It bewildered me, that pushback, because what MacDonald said seemed not the denial of the miraculous but the denial of violence. To my mind, it established the difference between evil magic and good.
Of course, MacDonald (like Origen or the Cappadocians or Maximus or Eriugena) would say some of the miracles described in the Scriptures do suggest violation, but they are not to be taken literally. No more than, say, the slaughtering of the Canaanites is to be taken literally. But set that aside for now. Our issue, I’m convinced, is this: we cannot read Scripture well or make any sense of the work of the Spirit in our lives because our imaginations have been so totally de-sacramentalized.
Sadly, tragically, for most of the people we love, nature and grace exist at odds with each other, so that nature is necessarily set aside by grace. We’ve been taught to think the divine as an abstraction, defined by its difference from the human. As a result, we cannot help but think of the incarnation as a humiliation for God, an absurdity. We talk as if Jesus, in order to be human, had to “surrender” his divinity. As if his affirmation of humanity came at the price of his refusal to be God.
Here’s what I know: so long as our minds remain in this mystified (!) state, so long as our hearts are gripped by the fear that such confusion creates, our only hope seems to be in a violating God, a God who must eventually rip apart the nature of things to save us. (Hence, our violent, blood-soaked readings of Revelation, our nightmarish accounts of “the rapture,” and our dread of the Last Judgment.) Hope can be stripped of its feathers, and when it is, it’s an unsightly thing.
Where does that leave us, then? Given the communion of creation and Creator in Christ, I think we can say of miracles, as we say of every act of God, that it can be an act of force but never violence. A miracle may transform one thing into another, but it never deforms a thing by undoing or abusing its integrity. That is true both because God, as love, cannot do evil, and because creation, called into being and sustained by the love of this always-only-good God exists in reciprocity with itself and with its creator. He was disfigured by what we did to him. But he, in his goodness, never disfigures us or anything his Father has made. He only ever transfigures. And those transfigurations always establish, never efface, creaturely integrity.
The poets teach us this, do they not? Metaphorically, anything can be another. An old man can be a thundercloud or a stack of newspapers or the spray of the Red Sea over Pharaoh’s head. And the best theologians tell us that metaphors work like that because, thanks to the Triune God, all things are mystically in each thing—the entire cosmos fits inside the hazelnut in Julian’s hand.
Miracles, in other words, are poetry, just as poetry itself is a miracle. And both are possible because God has taken our humanity as his own so that he is not himself apart from us and we are not ourselves apart from him. He is both the bread of life and the stone that the builders rejected; he can, therefore, make bread stones for us and stones bread—just in the way that the bread becomes even more bread-y and the stone stonier.
A few weeks back, Fr Bill asked me if Jesus did not in fact end up turning stone into bread. Didn’t the stones the accusers dropped become the bread of life for them and for her? Didn’t the stone tables of the law became bread for us in the hands of Christ? Yes, I said. He is bread to all things—sustaining them. He is stone to all things—upholding them. And he can make bread stones and stones bread in ways that do no evil to anyone or anything. As Kenneth+ said today in response to one of the comments:
It’s not a violation of the created integrity of water to make it wine, or of the nature of water to walk upon it, and walking on water serves the vocation of reaching and serving the apostles, as turning the water to wine serves the wedding guests… These things are good because they are not violations of what it means to be God (Jesus and the Father are one), or of what it means to be human, as we are in Jesus one with him (God)… To heal any human and restore them to wellness, as in most of the miracles, or to feed them, or to deliver them from bondages, as in others, is also not violating their integrity but restoring it, and taking care of them.
This, then, is why we can and should say Amen to Kenneth’s sermon: Christ is the one who makes all things what they are in their goodness, and he acts in and upon each of us in ways that draw out the goodness of all other creatures, revealing our capacity to glorify others as our deepest happiness, our being at its truest.
Knowing all that, we know why the Devil’s temptation to turn stones to bread had no purchase on him: he had an infinitely better way of doing it already in mind.
The Macdonald quote is very helpful - as was father Kenneth’s original post. Thanks for your additional context
My God