The holiday of undeification

The holidays are a smile of a nation. There are however sincere smiles and forced and weedy smiles. Each people has some holidays which represent it. The holidays with religious content have a special place among them.
In the Republic of Moldova it became already a tradition that each summer “The Congress of Jehovah’s witnesses” be convoked. Apparently this is a religious holiday. The members of this organisation can even call it Christian. However these men deny the divinity of Christ, considering Him only as a superior creature. And then it becomes a real dilemma, in case Christ is not God, if it makes any sense to celebrate the “God of Israel” otherwise than Jews used to do it.
For us Christians, the single reason for celebration is the receiving of bright immortality, through the death of Christ, the deification of human nature. “Let the heavens rejoice-the Church sings on every Sunday - and the earth be glad, for the Lord has shown the power of his reign: he has conquered death by death, and become the first born of the dead. He has delivered us from the depths of Hades, and has granted the world great mercy”. The joy is caused particularly by the regaining of the divine appearance, through Christ: “Dance Adam, and rejoice together Eve, for the clothes that you wore into decay long time ago in Paradise, hoping for undecay, He who created you took them to Him and displaced them into undecay in a miraculous way, and raised you together today and thorough the sitting together with the Father, honoured you” (Pentecost, Week VII after Easter, Wednesday : Vespers, steeh.II ).The divine nature uniting with the human nature, in an inseparable and unblended way through the person of Christ, in the mystery of incarnation, honoured the latest so that “The groups of angels were frightened to see the fallen human nature placed on the Parental chair”(Octoih, voice VIII, Sunday : Can. of Cross and Resurrection, ode I, steeh. II). The dogma of God’s incarnation, stated by the fathers of the First Ecumenical Synod (325 ) is very simple: “Without cessing to be God, He began to be man”.
If Christ in not perfect God and perfect man, two natures in the same Person, unblended and inseparable, then His coming was useless. The meaning of the Christ’s coming was not only to preach the gospel, as the Jehovah’s witnesses state, God could further herald trough angels, as He did in the Old Testament. To sacrifice Himself on the cross? But if Christ is not God, doesn’t it follow from this, that God Father assisted with cruelty the death of His one and only Son, and for this forgave the sins of the world? Forgave God the Father the humankind just for the fact that He committed the most abominable crime? How God, Who is love (1 John 4, 8-16), and love means to “to lay down your life for your neighbour” (John 15,13), could not accomplish this commandment, preferring instead to lay down the life of someone else? In a word, if Christ is not God, then the Bible is the most sadistic story of the world.
This is He who “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness”. In order that this quotation from apostle Paul ( Philippians 2, 6-7) and the others with which the New and the Old Testament is full, do not give the impression of polytheism, it is necessary to accept the dogma of the Holy Trinity, of one God in three Faces, of one essence and inseparable: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Whom the Scripture calls with multiple names, for instance Lord Almighty or Jehovah .

Thus, from Friday to Sunday, last week, on the republican stadium, one observed a kind of “joyous mourning”. The gathered people there celebrated with a lot of verve, the undeification of human nature. They tried, through passionate discourses, to banish the God from the history, because He, Witnesses believe, finished His mission once he ascended to Heaven, and cannot anymore be present in our millenary tradition. They celebrated the triumph of colourful magazines and of kitsch over the Christian genius, from which we quoted above. In these magazines you will never find such pearls as this, when a being is expressing his love for another being, transfigured by the most direct touch of God: “As a rose from valleys, Pure, as a sweet smelling lily, our Creator, the Lord, knowing you, loved your beauty, Pure, and now is going to incarnate from your blood, as for the goodness to chase the bad stink of the deception” . (Men. March ,in 24 days , ode VIII, steeh. III).

FLUX, 10 July 2001

Translated from Romanian by Veronica - epistola7@yahoo.com