Talks on the Prologue to John's Gospel, by Vladislav Rozentuller
Part 7 (From session of January 31, 2008)

Last time we saw that the temptation and fall resulted in two tasks for mankind: to be reborn from the spirit, freeing ourselves from dependence upon the body, and to make the flesh transparent to the moral power of the Word. We talked about the achievement of the first of these tasks and how it was pictured in the Christmas birth. Now we will consider the second one, which carries us toward Easter: And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. The little conjunction "and" here signifies a further necessary step. We cannot simply become the children of God and then say that all is finished. We confront the flesh and the demand that we dwell in it. We cannot succeed in this without transforming the flesh.

Interestingly, in place of the Light that has been spoken of throughout the preceding several verses, we now have the Word becoming flesh. This carries us back to "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1), before life and light were created, pointing us toward the true origin of the flesh. You will recall that the Word, as the highest moral power, was responsible for "all things" — for existence as such, for the very substance or being of all things. In order to transform flesh we have to come to the very beginning, because the deeper we descend (in flesh), the higher we have to ascend (in spirit). We transform flesh by finding its spiritual origin in the Word.

How do we experience our bodies today? On one hand, we know well how much delight we can experience through the flesh, whether it is enjoying a sunbath, eating a favorite dish, getting a well needed rest, or whatever. Or, conversely, think how difficult it is to function in a spirit-centered way — and how easy it is to be hurt by others — if we are physically exhausted or terribly hungry. And again, think of how pain so readily intervenes between us and our highest intentions. All this testifies to how we have gained, through the flesh, "our own" life. Before the temptation we did not have our own life; we were in complete harmony with the universal life. But after the temptation we became dependent upon the state of what we now experienced as our own separate being.

Looking at the same situation from a different angle, we notice how little we can experience the pain of the other person, no matter how sympathetic we might want to be. It is very easy to be distracted away from the pain of another — far easier than it is for the person who is directly feeling this pain! We can't crawl out of our own skins and into the skin of someone else in order to experience his pain. Probably the closest thing to an exception here is the relation between mother and child. The mother really does take inside her own skin the life of her child, and this doubtless contributes to the degree to which she experiences the pain of the child even after birth. But of our own free will we are helpless to take the life of another into ourselves. The Orthodox priest and scholar, Alexander Schmemann, tells in his diaries of the time his wife was suffering greatly from cancer. He prayed fervently for her, but otherwise could only say, "I would take it upon myself if I could, but I cannot."

There's a story related by the German author, Remarque. He described an experience during the First World War, when he and a friend were young soldiers. They were both wounded in the stomach, he more lightly and his friend more seriously. The friend was experiencing great and increasing pain. At one point, at a time of great hunger and exhaustion, they were given soup, and Remarque confesses how, despite the knowledge that his friend was in such horrible pain and might indeed die on that very day, he nevertheless had never experienced such profound pleasure as that soup gave him. We can see that his pleasure was certainly not a matter of immorality in any usual sense, but it does testify to how we are limited by being shut up in our own flesh.

Remarque adds to his story the comment that it is because we have so much difficulty getting inside the flesh of others that evolution goes backward so quickly and forward so slowly. And this is indeed how it would be if Christ had not come into the world.

So what did Christ bring? You will recall our consideration of life in nature as originating with the creative activity of spirit, which is at the same time love. In the second day of the Genesis narrative we had the upper waters and the lower waters. The lower waters signified manifest life itself, the entire life-organism of earth through which all the living beings of nature — plants, animals, and humans — received their life and form. And the waters above were the substance of love, from which all life can come.

We also saw that one of the laws of life is metamorphosis whereby, for example, the leaf is transformed into the sepal, the sepal is transformed into the flower ... and ultimately the entire plant is transformed into the seed. If we bring our own soul and consciousness to this process, we will have the experience, "I am dying in order to become something new." For example, "I am dying again in order to become fruit," and so on. It's a dying not only in thought and feeling, but at the roots of one's existence. Something like this process of becoming a new creature is also experienced when we let go of ourselves — die to ourselves — so completely and deeply that we can experience another person's life as our own. This, I think, is the kind of reality the gospels speak of as the kingdom of heaven. To be in the kingdom of heaven is to be able to be united with another being and find no boundaries, no principle of separation, hindering this union.

This kingdom of heaven is what Christ brought to earth. The central Christian precept, "love your neighbor like yourself," does not just mean to be kinder to others. It's also a simple statement of what life is like in the kingdom of heaven. Rudolf Steiner remarked that the time will come when no one can sleep if he knows that someone, somewhere, is suffering. That's what will happen when the power of compassion goes much deeper than we can experience it today. In the kingdom of heaven we will share not only our feeling and good wishes, but our very life, with other persons.

The miracles we see described in the gospels are the result of such a life. They testify to the presence of the kingdom of heaven in our midst, through Christ. In miracles we see a restoration of the original relation between the moral-spiritual realm and the natural, fleshly realm. Through love, the spirit creates flesh anew, overcoming the sins of egotism that first ruptured the unity of flesh and spirit. Creative agency again becomes a moral movement from spirit through soul to the flesh. This is the essence of healing. It is an expression of that grace referred to in the passage we have been considering:

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

And so it was that, as witnesses of the coming of the kingdom of heaven, the disciples saw Christ himself not merely "in the flesh" but as a being of radiant glory, suggesting his original union with the moral-spiritual foundation of the world — the Father. Certainly they did see him physically, but the stronger impression was of that which radiated through him — the moral-spiritual Word through which all things came into being. This is the Word that, in the story of Christ's temptation, we are told can sustain us as bread cannot. Not the flesh first of all, but the inner, warming, sustaining reality of the Word is what they experienced in Christ.

Now let's look briefly at the next verses:

John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me. And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. (John 1:15-16)

John could have said not only that "he was before me," but that "he was before everyone," since he was in the very beginning with the Father. And he brought this power of beginning — the original power of sacrificial love — with him to the earth.

In the last sentence of our passage we have three key words: fulness, received, and grace. The fulness here points to something quite different from the fulness we may have in mind, for example, when we speak of a barn full of grain. For when enough people come, the grain will be gone. But the fulness of Christ is a fulness that can never be depleted. It's a fulness coming from within, never-ending, creating a new world out of nothing, which is to say, out of a pure power of giving. And the more it gives, the more it has, which is a central miracle of Christianity. "Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it" (Luke 9:24). In giving our life away, we gain more life.

Something similar is true of the receiving. We cannot receive and hold what comes to us through love. In the moment we hold it, the gift disappears. It must keep streaming toward us, through us, and on to others. There is nothing of "ours" in the gift of love. We see a picture of this in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand: Christ as a radiating presence in the center, surrounded immediately by his disciples, and then in wider circles the five thousand. And when feeding was done, the disciples collected much more than they had started with. The more we can accept the grace of Christ, the more a creative force enters the world, mending, healing, creating the world anew, ever broadening the stream of grace: "grace for grace."

One more point. It is no accident that the author of the gospel says "we" received of his fulness. In the kingdom of heaven no one will say "I". It is an ultimately social place. We can say "I am" when we are born as children of God, because this is a matter of individual consciousness. No one can take the step of becoming a child of God for us. But in the kingdom of heaven we all exist like brothers and sisters. So it is that in the Lord's Prayer we say "our Father," "give us...," "lead us...," and so on. Everything is for the whole community.

We have considered two "opposite" movements. In one direction we become as children, with the light-consciousness of children. In the other we come through the pain of fleshly existence to a point where we can transform pain into compassion for the suffering of others. On one side we unite ourselves with the realm of senses around us, experience the world's soul and its light, and open our own souls toward the joy of freedom. On the other side we contract ourselves in order to go through pain and feel compassion, thereby entering that deep place within ourselves where we find God as the soul's foundation.

These two "directions" are really different aspects of one path. In one regard the path carries us toward a new birth — that is, toward the dawn-light we experience before birth, toward the light-filled forces of nature, and toward Christ as the light that enlightens every man. But the path also heads inexorably toward the challenge of death with its hope of resurrection. Here we experience Christ as a Word that transforms flesh, bestowing eternal life.

Some human beings may be more inclined toward the conditions of birth — toward experiencing the world as light-filled soul and spirit. Others may find it in their destiny to experience most strongly pain, suffering, and death, so as to discover the long-suffering and resting deeps of the soul, rooted in the divine. In these two directions we can recognize very different qualities. You could view it as seeking purification of our consciousness on the one hand, and seeking resurrection on the other. And I think that some of the central stories of the Christian tradition, such as the stories of Cain and Abel and of the shepherds and kings, can be illuminated from these complementary sides, although this is not a topic we can consider now.

We continue with the prologue:

For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. (John 1:17)

We are given a contrast. There was a condition of mankind before Christ, and this condition came to a certain culmination in the law of Moses. This was the greatest height humanity could achieve before Christ. Then something new came through Christ.

First, we can experience in the very form of the expression, "the law was given," that it is referring to something coming from outside. The law was given, and everyone subject to this law should obey it. The law represents a particular understanding of human affairs, and this understanding needed to be realized in society.

Then, on the other hand, we read that grace and truth "came" (or, in a fuller rendering of the original text, "became") through Jesus Christ. Here we see something less fixed and given, something more in a stream of becoming. In this becoming we cannot expect to find something we can grab hold of and say, "This is it." We can't simply take something as given and then make it our task to fulfill it. We have to become part of the stream. It's more like being born, or reborn, in one respect or another: we always have to leave something behind, allow something to die, in order to become something new.

The Ten Commandments, with some exceptions, consisted of things one must not do. That, at least, was their general mood, however we interpret the details. The need, it seems, was to restrict the egotistic impulses rooted in the human being, who should become an instrument for carrying out the divine purposes on earth. For the Israelites this was not so much an inner moral initiative as a matter of holding themselves in a certain moral state informed by law. Their trust in God needed to be a trust that allowed God to guide them, as if from outside, toward the realization of His plan for Israel, a people through whom "all nations" were to be blessed (Genesis 26:4).

It is worth comparing the Ten Commandments with the Sermon on the Mount, and particularly with the Beatitudes. "Thou shalt not" in the former becomes "Blessed are" in the latter. This is a profound shift. Everything has been changed. It's not any more a mere restraining of our fallen nature, but a joyful call to the highest moral creativity, without predefined goal. This becomes especially clear when we take into consideration that in the Beatitudes a blessing is pronounced upon those very conditions of the soul and spirit that constitute our constraint and suffering — poverty, meekness, persecution, and so on. We are blessed in our suffering because in our freedom we can ennoble it. Compare: "Don't do this, or else you will suffer" and "Blessed are you if you are suffering."

In the case of the Law, the people's prosperity depends on obedience, whereby they become the instruments of God's creative purposes. If they disobey, they will be punished until, amid their suffering, they return to God and fulfill His will. They will be punished, not because God is cruel, but because suffering will be for them the only way to become aware of their sins (which hinder the will of God) and to regain the right path so that God could fulfill His task through this people. And so in the Old Testament we find that obedience leads to prosperity, and disobedience to suffering.

By contrast, in the Beatitudes we find suffering "guaranteed" for the righteous in any case, and it is precisely this suffering that is blessed. (Blessed are the persecuted, the poor in spirit, the reviled, the thirsty.) Pain follows for those who consciously live in a fallen world, encountering egotism, untruth, evil, and death. Here we have suffering not from God, but from a world lying in darkness.

But the new message is: if you can withstand all the suffering, you will find yourself in a new relationship to the world. This relationship characterizes the kingdom of heaven. There will be no prospering in an outward sense; it's not that your folk will enjoy plenty and increase in numbers. No, what we gain through the right acceptance of our suffering is not a natural or outward thriving, but rather a kingdom that can be found only inside. It is real and can even transform nature, as we see in miracles and in the resurrection; but it comes from the spirit, not from the natural world. This new beginning is suggested elsewhere in the New Testament by terms such as "the second Adam" and "New Jerusalem." The will of God works now inside the soul, through the moral will of man, spiritually renewing nature (resurrection of the body) and not simply keeping the old, natural order functioning.

What the comparison between Moses and Christ in John's prologue shows us is a shift in the way we experience the will of God. It is important that Christ did not cancel the law but brought it to fulfillment. ("I am not come to destroy [the law] but to fulfil.") This means that the will of God no longer confronts us from outside, but rather works from inside.

I would like to conclude with some quotations illustrating the two different tendencies we've been talking about. The first comes from the Russian poet, Ivan Bunin, who lived from 1870 to 1953:

Flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears [of corn],
and the blue sky, and the midday heat ...
The time will come — the Lord will ask the prodigal son:
"Were you happy in your life on earth?"
And I shall forget everything,
and remember only these paths across the fields
between the ears of corn and the grass — and,
pressed against [His] merciful knees,
I shall be unable to reply for the tears of joy in my eyes.
       (literal translation from the Russian by Dimitri Obolensky)

I loathe unnecessary side-stepping,
I loathe the words and lines of books,
when everywhere despair, anguish, and suicide
present their deathly countenance,

O, Lord, why are we so homeless?
Why are there so many beggars and orphans?
Why does your holy people
wander in the world's desert, vast and timeless?

I know only the joys of giving myself
to quench the world's grief,
in order that the flame and howl of bloody dawns
might be drowned in compassionate weeping.
       (literal translation from the Russian by Steve Talbott)

And again, we can compare passages from two priests. One is Alexander Schmemann, who was well known in America as the dean of a Russian Orthodox academy in New York:

My main and constant feeling is that of life. It is quite difficult to express it in words. Maybe the closest to that feeling is the word "wonder," the perception of each moment, each situation as a gift (rather than obvious, evident). Everything is always new, everything is not simply life, but encounter with life, and thus a revelation. I write this and realize that these are not the right words, but I can't find any others. I only know that this life as a gift demands attention, an answer from me; that life, in other words, is a continuous acceptance of a gift. Maybe everybody feels that way, but sometimes I don't think so. It seems that many people, maybe even the vast majority, live without noticing life. It is somehow for them a neutral, faceless frame, their substance, but not an encounter, not a gift. They don't see it, as we don't see a mirror when we look at ourselves in it. As in a mirror, we see ourselves, but not the mirror; so in life, one can quite easily not see life. Or, life is a transparent bag, full of me, my work, my concerns, my interests, etc. And this fulness gives a feeling of life — "life bubbles over, is in full swing." But suddenly, in a moment of clear vision, comes despair.
       (From The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, entry for March 11, 1980.)

Here, as in the first poem above, you see heightened feeling for one's surroundings — for an ensouled world. The complementary passage comes from another Russian orthodox priest, this one living in England at about the same time as Schmemann. His name is Antony Bloom:

There is a remarkable poem by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, called "Corals." There he says that corals are the most fragile creatures in the sea. In order to protect themselves from destruction, they surround themselves with this hard material — which we call coral — and they die within this protection. It is the same with a man who defends himself from pain, suffering, and terror, from dread of everything that alien grief, alien illness, alien death — the collective terrors of earthly life — can do to him. Such a man may be well-defended, but he dies within his defenses.

If I would nourish a living heart, I must pose from myself a very pointed question: Am I ready to allow into my heart all suffering? Am I ready to share every man's pain, every man's terror, every man's coldness and hunger, however he might have been wounded by life? Am I ready to be compassionate without trying to decide whether he is right or wrong, but only asking one question: is he suffering or not? Moreover, will we respond to his suffering with all the compassion we are capable of, which, if only we will give it free rein, will grow, spread, and embrace an ever greater portion of the world's pain, the world's tragedy?
       (translated by Steve Talbott)

The goal since the coming of Christ is to unite these two tendencies, to participate in both.