The Image of a Man, the Likeness
God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology
God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology
God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)
He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)
God Could Not Not Save Us (Athanasius, On the Incarnation)
What Happens with Jesus is How God is God (Jenson, Systematics Vol 1)
He Does Not Suffer the Fact That He Suffers (Cyril, On the Unity of Christ)
Christ is Not a Principle (Yannaras, Elements of Faith)
The Israelite Heals—That’s All You Need to Know (McCarthy, The Passenger)
Jesus is Not Christ without Us (Symeon the New Theologian, First Ethical Discourse)
Empty Tomb, Empty Throne (Williams, On Christian Theology)
Holy Jesus, Gentle Friend (Broom of Devotion)
He Makes Us by Simply Being Himself (Eriugena, Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John)
The Father Did Not Want the Son to be Crucified (McCabe, “The Mystery of the Cross”)
The Cross Enfolds All Possible Love (Nicholas of Cusa, “Moreover, For Our Sake He Was Crucified”)
I Let Him Hold My Hands Up (C.H. Mason, “Testimony”)
This selection is from Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Chariot that Prophet Ezekiel Saw, lines 1012-1022 and 1041-1044. To learn more about Mar Jacob and this work, start here.
Before creation, the Father had drawn the image of His Son, and depicted Him, and showed him how He would shine forth on all on earth. The Father gazed at the likeness of His Son and molded Adam since He was going to give the Son to the world, He delineated Him beforehand. For this cause He said, “Let us make man in our image," in this same likeness in which Mary gave birth to the Only One. The Father willed to send Him into the world as a man, and drew beforehand His form, the Great Image, in Adam. And Ezekiel saw the likeness on the chariot as a man higher than the summit of the heavens... Whom did Ezekiel, son of the Hebrews, see on the throne? For whom is this throne needful, if not for Him? For Him, who was ready to come to the womb and be born, and become a man. For Him a throne was also most appropriate.
A few reflections:
Mar Jacob says Adam is the likeness drawn before the Incarnation, but he also says that Adam was made in the likeness of the Great Image, Christ, drawn before creation. He also asks not what but whom Ezekiel saw on the throne. The upshot is, we can’t make sense of this poem without a “revisionary metaphysics” that allows us to affirm that Jesus of Nazareth, Mary’s son and Pilate’s victim (as Jenson identifies him) is uncreated and eternal.
What Jacob says is no more astounding than what’s already said in the New Testament. Again and again, Paul identifies Jesus as “Lord”—an astounding claim in its own right—and also situates Jesus '“before” creation in the divine decision. Titus 1:2, for example, says the saints live “in the hope of eternal life that God, who never lies, promised before the ages began.” And Ephesians 1:4 says we have been chosen “before the foundation of the world” to exist in him, and that we have been blessed with “every spiritual blessing” in the “heavenly places.”
Because of who Christ is, he draws opposites together. Thus, his throne is heavenly and earthly at once, and contains Mary’s womb and the church’s altar, which in their own way contain him. As Mar Jacob says:
Heaven together with the worlds and their principalities do not contain Him, yet the throne held Him, as indeed Ezekiel bears witness to us. The ends and the extents and all the directions do not contain Him, yet, because He chose it, the womb contained <Him>, and Mary bears witness... Before He was to become what He became in the latter times, He willed to show, in a great wonder, how He would become it (675-686)... Within the chariot were holy coals of fire, in the holy altar are precious pearls. On the altar is the Body, and on the chariot, fire abides, for both above and below there is a single mystery of the Only One (1115-1118)
Mar Jacob’s homily sounds a lot like the Jewish chariot mysticism of his rabbinic contemporaries. Needless to say, however, it differs dramatically in one regard: how it identifies the Man on the Throne. As Alexander Golitzin explains in his introduction to his translation of the homily,
Both Jacob’s homily and the rabbinic-era literature of the hekhalot, the heavenly palaces—together I might add, with the Nag Hammadi trove—share common roots in the much earlier, Second Temple-era literature of those Jewish apocalypses which featured an ascent to heaven and a vision of the divine throne. Both Jacob and the Jewish mystics are concerned with the contemporary possibility of experiencing Ezekiel’s vision of the enthroned Glory of God, and in this they share with one of the oldest passages in apocalyptic literature, the ascent and visio gloriae of Enoch in 1 Enoch 14. Jacob, though, differs from the Jewish merkabah tradition in certain fundamental respects, most notably of course in his identification of the enthroned Glory with Christ, but also, secondly, in his assertion that the place of the Glory’s abiding is the altar of the Christian Eucharist. For our preacher, heaven and earth have been joined in Christ, who has broken down the “wall of enmity” (Eph 2:14–15) between those above and those below. Jacob, therefore, writes precisely against the possibility or necessity of the “ascent to heaven”…
There’s no need for such an ascent because Jesus has become Christ, making the creation wholly transparent and responsive to the Spirit so that God is—exactly as promised—all in all.