Introduction to Orthodoxy

During the Orthodox liturgical cycle, we find a strange occurrence – on the Sunday between the Ascension and Pentecost, we commemorate the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council.  That’s not the strange occurrence – rather, the Gospel reading on that day, John 17:1-13, is, perhaps, not what would be expected.

The reading starts with Jesus praying to the Father at the end of the Last Supper. He prays for strength to carry out the will of the Father – that is, that the Son will be glorified by being crucified, so that the Father will be glorified. The resurrection of humanity, the defeat of death, depends on Jesus dying on the Cross.

Jesus prays especially for his disciples. He commends them to the Father as faithful, as knowing that all things are from the Father, and that Jesus was sent by the Father. Jesus explicitly doesn’t pray for the world, but He prays for the ones that have been given to Him by the Father. He prays for them especially because Christ, coming up to His voluntary death on the Cross, will resurrect and ascend to heaven – being bereft of their shepherd, they will need supernatural strength to keep from being destroyed by the evil one. Jesus asks that they be kept in His Name – that is, that they may be kept in the state where they can be representatives, or ambassadors, of God. The Father, being holy, can only delight in doing this.

“None of them was destroyed but the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled” may lead some to believe that Judas somehow had to betray Jesus and be lost, and it is an unfair deity to punish someone for what they were created to do. This is not the case – Judas chose to betray Christ, and the Psalms are quite clear that a traitor will have punishment – thus, fulfilling the Scriptures.

All well and good, of course, but we are in the period between the Resurrection of Christ and the great feast of Pentecost. Why, then, do we read a passage from just before Jesus is about to be crucified while we are still celebrating His Resurrection? This reading is read on the commemoration of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council. This is a great and auspicious event in the Church’s calendar, which is appropriate, because the First Ecumenical Council is a truly great moment in the life of the Church.

The early Church, from the first century onward, struggled with incorrect teachings. The Edict of Toleration, issued in Milan, did not serve to rid the Church of heresy, but it did mean that there was a new means of defining Church teachings. In response to the teachings of a priest by the name of Arius the emperor, St Constantine the Great, called a council of all the bishops of the Christian Church. 318 bishops attended the council in Nicaea in 325 – and perhaps we can imagine some of these bishops, who bore testament to their faith by their disfigurement, being almost bemused or waxing philosophical that the same Empire that tortured them was now paying for their transit to the Council and gave them lavish gifts for their diocese on their departure.

This council was opposed to Arius, who taught that Jesus was less than God, and to respond to this, the doctrine of the ‘of one essence’ group, championed by St Athanasios of Alexandria, was taken up, declaring that Jesus was “begotten not made, of one essence with the Father”. A baptismal creed was taken and expanded, and this is where most of our Nicene Creed is from.

The heresy lived on past the council, but compared to other heresies that required the entire Church to be brought together, it did not survive for very long. There are groups who still hold to Arian doctrines, with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, established in the nineteenth century, being the most well known group.

Now what exactly Christ is may seem to be mere pedantry. What does it matter, some might say, if Jesus was of one essence with the Father or if He was just a man adopted at His baptism or if He was just a top bloke? In more than one way, it makes all the difference in the world. If Jesus is not God, He cannot be our Saviour. Man had been trying for millennia to get back into God’s good graces through the Mosaic Law and it hadn’t worked, and the Son of God came to save us.

The First Ecumenical Council did not address whether Jesus was human, nor what relationship His divinity had with His humanity, because this had already been addressed by the Church in the second century, against the Docetists. The humanity or divinity of Christ has grave and direct effects on our theology of salvation, because: if Jesus was not divine, He could not be Saviour; if Jesus was not human, He could not save humanity. “God became man”, as St Athanasios of Alexandria so famously said, “so that man might become divine”, that we might become, by grace, the adopted sons of God.

The Gospel reading of Christ’s prayer at the Last Supper was not placed on this feastday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council arbitrarily. Rather, the two were placed together because one elucidated the other: the reading from John’s Gospel showed the relationship between Jesus and His Father. We see Jesus praying to the Father; equally, we see Jesus saying to the Father to glorify Jesus in the Father’s “own presence with the glory which [He] had with [the Father] before the world was made”, and that the disciples may be kept holy while Jesus goes to the Father. His humanity and His divinity are very ably demonstrated in this passage.

And it goes deeper. The reading is from the Last Supper, immediately before the Crucifixion, where Christ is glorified. His glory is in the Cross. And for us, who bear the name Christians, our glory must be in the Cross. We wear it around our necks, we make its sign upon ourselves; our glory is in our sufferings, for as St Paul says, it is in human weakness that God’s strength is made perfect. The Fathers had a power, not because of their own wonder, but because of their willingness to submit to God, to take up their Cross and follow Him, and God, being glorified, making their weakness into further occasion for God’s glory. And so, being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, urging us on to fight the good fight and to likewise witness to Christ, we both glorify God and honour their memory by taking up our own cross, with the assurance that we will have treasures in heaven, and hear our Saviour, saying: Come. Follow me.

This is based on a sermon delivered on the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, 2008.