The Cross Enfolds All Possible Love

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

1. God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)

2. He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)

3. God Could Not Not Save Us (Athanasius, On the Incarnation)

4. What Happens with Jesus is How God is God (Jenson, Systematics Vol 1)

5. He Does Not Suffer the Fact That He Suffers (Cyril, On the Unity of Christ)

6. Christ is Not a Principle (Yannaras, Elements of Faith)

7. The Israelite Heals—That’s All You Need to Know (McCarthy, The Passenger)

8. Jesus is Not Christ without Us (Symeon the New Theologian, First Ethical Discourse)

9. Empty Tomb, Empty Throne (Williams, On Christian Theology)

10. Holy Jesus, Gentle Friend (Broom of Devotion)

11. He Makes Us by Simply Being Himself (Eriugena, Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John)

12. The Father Did Not Want the Son to be Crucified (McCabe, “The Mystery of the Cross”)

This entry is from a Good Friday sermon, “Moreover, For Our Sake He Was Crucified,” by Nicholas of Cusa, preached in April 1457. In it, the bishop imagines a conversation between his congregation in Brixen and Mother Mary and John the Beloved, who take turns instructing the church on the truth of what they witnessed at the foot of Jesus’ cross. You can learn more about Cusanus and his work here and here.

Church: You know, O most merciful Mother, how necessary it is for our salvation that [we] be acquainted with the Life of your Son, in whose Life is the life of all living beings. We fear lest the remembrance that is necessary for us summon up again in you the wounds of empathetic-suffering. We wish for things that are for our salvation; we do not wish that because of us the very bitter pain of a penetrating sword once again take possession of your virginal and maternal heart.

Mary: The memory of the pain of giving birth is joyous when the living child is seen. It is not grievous to me to hear the voices of compassion which you devout ones emit—yea, rather, it delights above all things when this results in your salvation and in my Son’s glory. By the gift of my Son I am henceforth of an impassible nature. For He (who through His death brought to impassability the nature that He had from me) made my nature in itself to be impassible. And so, as long as you do not lay aside that mortal nature through death, you are passible and can commiserate with my Son, by means of whose suffering you who suffer empathetically with Him will—when freed from the body of death—arise after the likeness of Him and will put on with an impassible nature. The death of my Son will cause this in you if you will be found in His death through compassion.

Church: We understand, O mother of godliness, that the remembrance of the death of Jesus is necessary for all people for obtaining impassibility.

Mary: You understand rightly. For although my Son died once, nevertheless He wills that this very bitter death be present to the eyes of believers in order that it always merit life for those who [thus] die with Him. For he who dies with the Son of God lives with Him; they are associates in His suffering and associates in His consolation. No death merits this eternal life except the death of the Immaculate Christ—which is designed by Him to the end that He share life with all who die with Him. For eternal life, which is spiritual, enlivens all partakers of it, even as justice justifies all partakers of it and enlivens and renders flavorful all meritorious works. For even as all food, although valuable, is tasteless without salt, so too my Son, the Salt of the earth, underwent a death that is the Salt that saltifies every martyr’s death and makes it flavorful…

Later in the (very long) sermon, John is asked by the church to speak, and does so, with Mary’s permission:

John: Hence, He, being willing to show in Himself all these evidences of love of God and of neighbor, chose death (while being innocent) in order to manifest how much He loved God (on account of obedience to whom He willed to die) and how much he loved man (on account of whose salvation He died). Therefore, all the Divine mysteries are enfolded in the crucifixion of innocent Christ. For thus is God to be loved with entire strength of soul, so that all things—even life itself—are to be regarded as nothing, for the sake of showing God’s glory. The salvation of the neighbor’s spirit is to be cherished in such a way that temporal [and] most contemptible death is to be deemed as nothing on account of the neighbor’s very great good. The death of most innocent Christ merited eternal life, which rightly is bestowed on Him. For He suffered only on account of His love of God and of neighbor—not in order to wash away sin, of which He had nothing in Him…

Therefore, so great is the intensity of love that is shown in Christ’s death that no greater is possible as concerns God and neighbor. And so, since it includes within itself all possible love, it includes the complete fulfillment of the Law and includes every promise for observance of the Law. Therefore, Christ is the Bridegroom who has the bride and the delights of the spirit. Hence, it is evident that just as no soul can be just without Justifying-Justice, so no [soul can be] alive without that Enlivening Life. And justification is not anything other than enlivening. Thus, Christ, through the merit of His death, is Justice that justifies—and Life that enlivens—all Christlike believers. Hence, those who walk in light, as did Christ—these He cleanses by His blood from all sin. For they are His neighbors, for whom He died, for whose salvation He gave Himself over unto death.

A few reflections:

1. I am deeply moved, blown back really, by Nicholas’ compassion for Mary, expressed in the congregation’s worried prayer: “We fear lest the remembrance that is necessary for us summon up again in you the wounds of empathetic-suffering.” For Nicholas, the Mother of God is no abstraction, no ideal, no bloodless “saint.” She’s not a symbol—she’s someone, a flesh-and-blood woman he holds in highest respect and honor, a friend he loves. That is the only way, finally, to avoid superstition and magical thinking about the communion of saints.

2. I’m struck, too, by what Mary is made to say about compassion. As she had learned and proven by long experience, it is by co-suffering as she did that we enter into Christ’s death, making it our own so that we at last come alive to God and to neighbor, becoming ourselves for the joy of God and the good of our neighbor. That is the truth I was trying to get at in this sermon.

3. The heart of this passage, it seems to me, is John the Beloved’s avowal that the cross enfolds all possible love. Dying as he did, Jesus loved both God and me, you, and everyone else who has ever lived or ever will live; not only that, also he loved us with all the love that has been or will ever be, loved divinely and humanly, just so divinizing human-love and humanizing divine-love. In that way, he also created for us a participation in the uncreated love that is his nature, making it so that we can love God and love our neighbor with the same love by which God loves them and by which God loves God. Tbese are staggering claims, are they not?

4. It is not an accident, obviously, that Cusanus speaks this unbelievable truth in the voice of the Beloved Disciple. Again, as with Mary, he’s showing us how to relate rightly to the saints, directing our attention to the goodness of God as it has been received and realized in a particular life and its lived witness.

5. Cusanus, like Maximus, is everywhere insisting that in Christ all opposites coincide. So here we see him say that Christ is both justice and mercy, and that his death is our life. This awareness or capacity for perception allows Cusanus to hold together as complementary what to us surely seems contradictory. Because he has seen the truth of the drawing together of all things, he can recognize how it is that God is not God apart from creation, and why it is that creation cannot be itself apart from its deification. As he puts it elsewhere (Ignorance 3.12.261), quite provocatively, “each of the blessed, while the truth of each’s being is preserved, exists in Christ Jesus as Christ and through him in God as God, and God, remaining the absolute maximum, exists in Christ Jesus as Jesus and through him in all things as all things.” Read that sentence again! Think of what it must mean! And remember what I said in the previous post: Christ is not unequally yoked in his marriage to us!

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