The good of Good Friday 4: doing and being

Continuing on from love, Thomas speaks of other ways in which the incarnation of God in Jesus enables our “furtherance in good”:

Fourthly, with regard to well-doing, in which He set us an example; hence Augustine says: “Man who might be seen was not to be followed; but God was to be followed, Who could not be seen. And therefore God was made man, that He Who might be seen by man, and Whom man might follow, might be shown to man.”

Fifthly, with regard to the full participation of [we would say ‘in’] the Divinity, which is the true bliss of man and end of human life; and this is bestowed upon us by Christ’s humanity; for Augustine says: “God was made man, that man might be made God.”

     We’ll be reminded of number four, “with regard to well-doing,” when we get to the tenth and last way in which the incarnation of God worked for our restoration, which follows a similar logic in saying that our Savior had to be both divine and human — divine for ability and authority, human for visibility and appropriateness. Here in number four, that logic of incarnation is connected to our being disciples of Jesus. Indeed, we can see that logic in Jesus’s words as he speaks of the exclusivity of our discipleship to him:

Don’t have people call you “rabbi,” since you have one teacher and are all brothers.
Don’t call anyone on earth “father,” since you have one father, the one in heaven.
Don’t have people call you “leaders,” since your one leader is the Messiah. (Matthew 23:8-10)

     A disciple is an example-follower, one who does what the teacher has done. Jesus carried out an amazing Savior-act of washing his disciple’s feet (John 13), thus leaping over every possible wall of metaphysics or cosmic status to bring rest and cleansing (of many different kinds) to his friends. Then he gave to them (and to us) the opportunity to bring the same holy act to each other:

You call me teacher and master, and you speak correctly because that’s what I am. So if I, your master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to do the same. I have set you an example so that you should do what I have done for you. (John 13:13-15)

     Moving on to number five, “participation in the divine” sounds odd to many of us who are vaguely or heartily Protestant (and I suppose to some Catholics as well). And “deification,” or more properly “theosis,” might sound worse. So we have to be clear about what Eastern Christians mean by such talk. Augustine said “God became human so that the human might become God,” reflecting what Athanasius wrote earlier. None of us can step into God’s place or displace him, but we can — indeed, are called to — imitate the perfection of God’s love (Mathew 5:43-48; see again the third post in this series). And this becoming like God, this participation in God’s nature, is, as Thomas says, “the true bliss of man and end of human life.” This is one of the wonders accomplished by the incarnation and the cross.

• The good of Good Friday
  1: introduction
  2: faith and hope
  3: and love
  4: doing and being
  5: bodies
  6: humility
  7: brought low and lifted up
• Matthew 20:25-26 is similar to 23:8-10 (which is quoted above): “You know that the Gentiles’ rulers rule over them and that their ‘great men’ exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you.” Consideration of James 3:1-2 — “Don’t let many of you become teachers, since you know that we teachers will be judged with greater strictness, and since all of us find many ways to fall on our faces” — should make us glad to recognize that ultimately we all have one teacher.
• Jesus’s Savior-act of washing his disciple’s feet: John 13 calls attention to the temporal placement of this event (verses 1 & 2) and to Jesus’s knowledge of his own mission (verses 1 & 3). Then it quotes Jesus as he refers to an understanding of the act the disciples would only gain later (verse 7), to the necessity of the cleansing for discipleship (verse 8), and then to an understanding they already have that is connected to their following Jesus in carrying out the same significant act (verses 12-15). In a sense, this speaks of baptism, but not even baptism can exhaust the meaning. Some of it is also captured in traditions that carry out literal foot-washing, whether mutual foot-washing among members or foot-washing carried out by leaders and teachers of the church, again connecting back to the nature of the teaching-leading role in churches.