Talks on the Prologue to John's Gospel, by Vladislav Rozentuller
Part 8 (From session of February 27, 2008)

Today we will conclude our consideration of the prologue to John's gospel.

No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. (John 1:18)

Simply in its composition and sound, this sentence rings a magnificent concluding chord to the entire prologue. But, looking first at the statement from a more logical standpoint, we can say that, of all those who sought the spiritual world before Christ (and there were many), none succeeded in experiencing God from within. They may have found experience of the spiritual world, but there always remained a degree of disconnection between man and God. God the Father remained hidden. And the reason for this has great relevance for us today: apart from Christ, there is no pathway to God. Or, putting it positively: everyone who finds a connection to Christ can find the way to the Father. All this should be taken very literally; Christ emphasized in every possible way that the path to the Father was through him.

So we have the first part of the verse saying that no man hath seen the Father at any time, and the final part saying that Christ has revealed Him. And between we see Christ characterized as "the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father." Here in a wonderful way we have not only the link between the beginning and end of the verse, but also the link between the beginning and end of the entire earth evolution. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God — "in the bosom of the Father" — and precisely because of the Word's unity with the Father he can reveal the Father in our fallen, spiritually cut-off world.

By "end of earth evolution" I do not mean that evolution somehow stopped with Christ, but that he brought a decisive, qualitative change. Everything happening afterwards is necessarily merged and connected more and more with Christ, in whom all things are summed up. There will be nothing further in earth evolution of which we can say: "This stands outside Christ." As some Orthodox priests emphasize, the future for humanity is already present in Christ.

With that as a kind of introduction, I would like to consider an extremely difficult topic: how can we approach in our feeling and understanding the image of God the Father. Yes, we can say, "God is love," but it's also extremely difficult to speak about love! One thing that's clear about love is that it has no intrinsic limits. All other natural soul qualities or feelings — curiosity, fear, hatred, and so on — are limited. They can't last forever. Even if we imagine someone who nurtures and keeps warm a life-long desire for revenge, we can recognize that the desire is not so much alive as imprisoned within a certain frame of soul. It becomes a kind of dead, rock-like obstruction within the soul, lacking its own source of life. And this limitation owing to the lack of intrinsic life is true of all feelings except for love. Love can grow stronger and stronger with no inherent limitation.

Our task is to get from the love we see displayed in the life of the Son to the love of the Father. This is impossible to do through logic, and so I would like to try some other approaches, beginning with a story from the Sufi tradition.

There was a town where some righteous Sufis lived, and the townsfolk would get together and argue about which of these Sufis was most perfect. Finally they decided to put the matter to a practical test. And so, approaching the first of the righteous ones, they said, "There is someone in great need. What can you do for him?" The Sufi responded by collecting everything he had — money, treasures, possessions, clothes — and gave it all to the one in need. Delighted with this response, the people proceeded to the second Sufi and again pleaded for someone in need. This time the righteous one collected all his money, treasures, clothes, and so on, gave them to the one in need, and then sold his house and gave that money away also. The people thought that this was all that could possibly be done, but out of curiosity they nevertheless approached a third Sufi with the same plea. This one gave away his possessions, sold his house, and then said, "Wait a while" and disappeared. Subsequently a messenger appeared and gave an additional sum of money to the charitable cause. When the people asked where this money came from, the messenger said that the Sufi had sold himself as a slave, and this was the price of his slavery.

Love has no limit. There is always a further step of love we can take.

What happens when we perform a moral deed? On one side, we can experience that we grow and express ourselves inwardly, spiritually. We find spiritual life in ourselves. On the other side, taking a natural point of view, we diminish ourselves. Moral deeds generally bring us some kind of trouble, disquiet, distress, or whatever. Our natural comfort, our reassuring schedule, our plans — these all too easily suffer when we find ourselves called to a good deed. So moral activity brings an increase of spiritual life and a loss to our natural life.

Perhaps the most concise statement of this two-sided process was that of John the Baptist when he said of the Coming One: "he must increase and I must decrease." The natural "I" must always decrease so that the spiritual-moral "I" can increase. And perhaps the culminating expression of the process occurs when someone sacrifices his own life. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). That is, the culmination of love lies in the fact that the natural life disappears entirely, and one gains the fulness of spiritual life.

This fulness is what we call paradise, or the kingdom of heaven. We could also say: this is the being of the Logos, whose nature is to sacrifice itself and thereby to bring all things into existence. Things come to be, come into real existence or true being, through the power of sacrifice. Plato had hold of a similar thought when he said that the soul of the world is crucified — laid in the form of a cross — upon the body of the world. The soul and I AM of the world gave himself so that the world-body could have its own life. From the beginning the world has been under the sign of the cross. In sacrifice is the creation of the world. We can gain at least a slight experience of this truth when we recognize in ourselves how giving is the one real thing we can do. We can observe it in the creative process, when music or images or stage characters come to life through the giving activity of the artist. And we can experience this particular reality even more vividly in moral action. To put it in slightly different terms: Christ is the highest being, and the essential nature of his being is to give himself.

Now, the Father, who created everything through Christ, remained Himself unknown from the foundation of the world. "No man hath seen God at any time." This raises the question whether we can imagine something more than this sacrificial giving of Christ. Can love go beyond even this?

If we have imagined how, in giving up our natural or physical life, we gain spiritual life and power, then we can go on to ask ourselves what would happen if we entrusted to another person the entire fulness of our spiritual life? If the law is: the more we sacrifice here, the more we gain there, what happens if someone who is already there gives the full substance of his spiritual existence into the hands of another?

All the worlds may have come into being through Christ, but the Father was doing something also. He withdrew, and thereby gave Himself up to the freedom of other beings to use their own will however they might want. Perhaps they would learn to use this freedom in a right way. Remember that the Father did not create the natural universe. He created "the heaven and the earth," which we interpreted as a fulness of spirit on the one hand, and a place of unformed potential, of freedom, on the other. As the creation story plays out, we find human beings coming to the place where this realm of potential is a field upon which we exercise our freedom. We exercise it however we want until we come to the point where we can say, "Father, thy will be done."

The Father, then, carried all being within Himself before creation, and continues to carry all beings and all fallen nature within Himself after creation. He carries in absolute silence everything good and bad that we accomplish with our freedom. All evil and all consequences of evil He endures and carries. If we reflect upon what evil is in ourselves, we can well imagine that without this carrying of the Father the world would long ago have collapsed into hell or simply disappeared. But, no, the Father continues to carry and to wait, and He will continue to wait until the Last Judgment. Meanwhile, the sun shines upon the good and upon the wicked. This is not a matter of indifference, but rather of caring, of willingness to endure suffering.

In sum: we have in Christ the highest I AM of the world, the highest creative, spiritual-moral being of the world. Everything that could be created was created through him. In the Father we have the giving up of His own spiritual fulness so that humanity can employ it with the knowledge of good and evil in freedom. He withdrew His own will so that we could have our will. Our will does not come from nowhere; ultimately, we gain it from the Father.

I have offered all this as a first level of commentary on the line, "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." From the foundation of the world the Father was revealed through the son. He Himself was hidden, but revealed through His son. But there is another level we can consider.

The German theologian, Rudolf Frieling, considered the statement that the Father gave everything into the hands of the son, and also the statement that the son descended to the earth in human form, and concluded that they express the same reality. It is His own nature that the Father gives to the son, and the more the son receives this nature, the closer he comes to the point where he must perform a deed similar to that of the Father. In the descent of Christ toward the earth and into a human body we can already begin to recognize the similarity. He leaves heaven in order to live amidst suffering on the earth. So he comes ever closer to the "final" sacrifice--the final giving up and hiding of himself--which the Father alone had performed. Another German theologian, Friedrich Benesch, asks us to look at the sun (cautiously!) in all its radiant glory, and then to imagine it as the body of Christ. Then think what suffering would be involved for this Christ-being to be diminished or darkened to the point of being able to enter into a human body.

Or consider these lines from Boris Pasternak concerning the Garden of Gethsemane:

He had rejected without resistance
Dominion over all things and the power to work miracles,
As though these had been His only on loan
And now was as all mortals are, even as we.
       (translation by Bernard Guilbert Guerney)

Here Pasternak expresses in his own way the descent of Christ. One might have thought that Christ would naturally come as a glorious ruler for the uplifting of earth. But instead he came renouncing all his powers. He emptied himself. This is a fact of overwhelming importance. We can approach the same truth if we meditate on certain Christmas images. God appeared not as a strong ruler, guiding and guarding us from outside, but as a helpless child, requiring others to care for him. Here again is Pasternak's motif: a divine being wants to speak to us, not through power, but through a kind of weakness that contains the highest moral strength of trust and faith.

In the gospels Christ repeatedly says words to the effect, "I am not doing my own deeds, but the deeds that the Father performs through me." ("The word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father's which sent me" — John 14:24.) In the life of Christ, in each word and deed, we can sense and feel a revelation of the Father. The Father God is present in each moment of Jesus' life. Today, in different religions or spiritual traditions, we can find diverse images of God. It might be helpful in our search for God to know that the gospel gives us a very clear image of God — an example of what it is like to be in union with the Father — not as some kind of dogma, but as an opportunity whereby we ourselves can enter into inner communion with the will of the Father.

So this could be considered a second level of meaning in the statement that Christ revealed the Father. First he revealed Him in the beginning through creation, and then through his earthly life. And the closer he approached the moment of death, the closer he came to union with the Father. Christ repeatedly spoke, in connection with his death, of going to the Father.

Many have observed that the closer Christ approached to his death on the cross, the more his spiritual forces disappeared. Step by step he became ever poorer in spirit. Where once he had performed many miracles, now he had to ask for help. In this regard, we might change Pasternak's observation that Christ became mortal, even as we, to "he became even more mortal than we." Mortality is not just a matter of death's necessity; it means we need to encounter death face to face. This is a question of wakefulness. It takes a rare individual to face human suffering and evil without flinching and turning away. This suffering becomes a darkening presence that leads to loneliness and pain and can be very difficult to withstand without respite. Think only of Buddha, known as the Awakened One: it was enough for him to confront suffering three times — in connection with old age, with sickness, and with death — and he was ready to urge a radical withdrawal from life. This wakefulness is not a natural quality; it is a matter of spiritual strength. The higher the spiritual being, the more wakeful he is.

We can imagine, then, that through his descent from the heavens and his emptying of himself, Christ experienced a kind of inner vacuum of such huge intensity that he must have experienced everything humanity suffered on earth — and did so in the highest degree, without any protection. Remember the night in Gethsemane, when he became so weak that he asked his disciples for help. Remember also the weakness that made it so that he could not carry his cross. And again the thirst he experienced on the cross, and then the sense of abandonment by his Father: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

There are those who have suggested that Christ did not really suffer because his spirit must have abandoned his body, seeking release in higher realms. But the truth is more like the opposite of this: he suffered like no other human being, drinking the cup to the very last drop. It's as if he endured all the suffering of all humanity. And in this he lacked all protection because of the utter transparency, the perfect receptivity, of his body and soul to every blow dealt him by life.

When we are told that Christ took our sins upon himself, we should imagine it literally: the purest, softest being, inwardly warmed by a divine flame, endured on the cross the hardest consequence of the human fall. The intensity of his suffering had to become equal to the destructive power of human egotism in order to bring healing to the earth and humanity.

In War and Peace Tolstoy describes a moment when one of his heroes, Pierre, is being driven back toward France as a prisoner of the French army. Barefoot in winter and without food, this aristocrat suffered horribly. But at this moment he experienced as never before a sense of the fulness and reality of life. The less food he had, the more pain, the more he could sense what lay behind his existence. Similarly, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, amid the extreme suffering of the camps, said that the inmates ate their thin, watery soup with a feeling as if they were partaking of a Communion meal. Every little bit of substance in the soup spoke deeply of the true power and being of existence. It's hard to have such an appreciation when we are blessed with much!

We can imagine that Christ, suffering on the cross in the highest degree, experienced his sufferings as burning through his physical body and carrying him toward the reality of the spirit. His soul came to live, not from bread, not from the body, but only from the spirit — from the Father's words. And when he said, "It is finished," the fiery consuming of his natural body was completed. His spirit became absolutely independent of earthly matter. Rudolf Steiner remarks that when the soldiers pierced the lifeless body and drops of blood touched the earth, then the heavenly sun was born in the realm of the earth. The sun — the loving fire that sustains the world and is its soul, love itself — came to earth in Christ. Our normal blood, playing as it does such a vital role in the warming of our bodies, carries something of this divine, life-giving warmth, or fire. But the divine fire, frozen by egotism, becomes earthly substance. Christ's blood, on the other hand, was transformed through suffering back into pure fire. It returned to the form matter had in the beginning, when it was first created out of love. Spirit was unbound from the body, and death lost its power over him. The Logos was born in the very substance of earth.

And then he descended into hell. Hell is a place where separation from God rules. It is spiritual death and therefore belongs to the Prince of this world. So pure love descends into the place of ultimate egotism. The following considerations may help us to understand what happened in hell and in the miracle of the resurrection.

We not only have our blood, which might be considered the most spiritual part of our organism, but we also have our nervous systems and bones, which are the deadest parts of our bodies. We inherit these bodies from our parents, an inheritance we can trace all the way back to our father Adam and to the moment of temptation. Remember that the hard, contracted substance both of our bodies and of the natural world resulted from the grasping, egotistic gesture that was part of the temptation. But in all these substances there remained hidden the holy will of the Father, who gave this will into our use for the sake of our freedom. He gave this will of His spirit from the very beginning, when He created earth, with its darkness and emptiness and, ultimately, death. The Father is hidden in our bodily substance, and waits for the right use of our wills.

And now, when Christ descended into hell, connecting himself with all human beings and all fallen nature, he transformed the grasping, detaching, separating gesture of Adam (which receives its fullest expression in hell) into the opposite one of giving and connecting. The original separation of heaven and earth ("In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"), having gradually became death after the temptation, was now overcome. In Christ the great divorce of heaven and earth was healed, yielding the highest union. He became a revelation of the Father all the way down to the level of his bodily substance. The result is a resurrected body.

Surely the Father God can be imagined only as a union, as a whole without any disconnection. To the extent we understand the Father through Christ we would have to say: in Him darkness is transformed into the brightest light, evil into the highest good, and death into eternal life. But how can we avail ourselves of that transformative power? We cannot transform our fallen, dead parts through our own moral forces. Nothing less than than the spiritual fire that in the beginning gave rise to all the world's moral potentials could achieve such work. And in Christ's earthly life these potentials were realized to the highest degree. Moreover, in connecting himself with fallen humanity, he repeated the Father's deed of beginning. He gave us his power of love and put it freely at our disposal, bearing all the consequences of our misuse of it. In doing this he also lit up for us a path of redemption — a path we walk whenever we connect with one another in love and then find Christ in our midst as a revelation of the Father.

We have seen that Christ transformed his material body into spiritual substance, and we can naturally wonder how to imagine the resulting resurrection body. It's not merely spirit or soul; it's truly a body, but one that is moral and conscious in each cell. Imagine chemical reactions in which each substance enters into the reaction only because it loves the others. The union of substances and the participation of one with another gives outward expression to the principle of love. Such activity gives some idea of the resurrected body, which we could also say is a union of heaven and earth. It's a spiritual-physical body, just as we saw that God is a spiritual-physical being. The God who in the very beginning separated the creative powers of heaven from the receptive potentials of earth was a God who embraced both poles within himself before the act of creation. That's why the resurrected Christ could appear variously as a light (such as St. Paul encountered on the road to Damascus) or as a "normal" human being. He could physically eat a meal, and yet disappear entirely. He could be at many places in the world at the same time, and could participate with every gathering of two or three who were in communion with him. The resurrected body means final union with all being, but a union of individuals, where the individuality is not lost.

Another thing. At a higher level, being moral means that our interests extend beyond becoming perfect, beyond doing everything we can do in imitating Christ. We desire that all people and all creatures will become perfect and we won't give up until it happens. Then, in a sense, we live in all beings. And when we are truly capable of loving others as much as ourselves, our moral actions create spiritual substance. The New Jerusalem, various commentators have rightly pointed out, will be built, not out of stones, but out of moral deeds and deeds of beauty.

I want to mention two stories that give us examples of "extreme love." The first was told by an orthodox priest of the last century who was ministering in England, Antony Bloom. After the second world war he met an older friend who had been in a concentration camp. Noticing that his friend was depressed, he asked him why, and expected to hear some such answer as that, because of the the camp experience, he had lost his faith in God or humanity. But the friend answered, "When I was in the concentration camp and prayed for my torturers, I was confident that God was hearing my prayer. In that situation, you can only pray according to the truth in yourself; you can't pray insincerely. So I was inwardly sure of God's response. Now I live in freedom, I enjoy certain comforts, and I am not in danger. And I still pray for my torturers, but I am no longer sure that I am capable of offering prayers that God will hear."

This man's whole concern was for his torturers and for his ability to help them. Such was his love.

The second story comes from a short drama written by Kuzmina Karavaeva, whom I mentioned in the previous talk. It concerns a man who told a woman he met — perhaps she was a nun — that he had sold his soul to the devil. Today was the day his payment was due. Either he would be consigned to hell, or someone else would have to purchase his contract. The woman decided to take the man's burden upon herself, sacrificing her own spiritual future for his sake. Then the devil appeared in order to claim the woman, but alongside him an angel also appeared, saying, "No, the woman's soul has been redeemed by her love. No contract can withstand the power of such love."

Some people are capable of such love.

The overall composition of the prologue to John's gospel is a wonderful unity, like the music of Bach. It opens with "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God" — before all creation, when God was hidden — and this finds its complement at the end of the prologue in the final and ultimate revelation of God through Christ: "the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." Then we read that "in him was life," which becomes at the end: "grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." That is, heavenly life was created at the beginning out of love, and then, at the end, the humanly incarnated Word brought grace — a healing power of love toward the earth. And finally we have the stage of creation when light — cosmic consciousness — radiated forth, and this is balanced by the coming into the world of "the true Light which lighteth every man," who gives to those who receive him the "power to become the sons of God." Those who are born of the Light become again like children. Cosmic light, born in the human soul, radiates outward through the I Am.

You can see the beautiful, music-like symmetry. Everything created there in the heavenly cosmos, came to be mirrored here in human earthly existence in order to accomplish the whole cycle of creation. Between the beginning and end of the story we see darkness and separation from God. And standing in the midst of the darkness, we find the figure of St. John as representive of humanity, raising his hands toward the heavenly light, and calling for repentance, with his very name testifying to the fact that God will be merciful. "Make straight the way of the Lord" (John 1:23).

A last thought. When somebody helps us, we usually are grateful in a concrete and specific way to this specific person. I think it's important to realize as concretely as we can what Christ did for each one of us.