Pascha: The Feast of the Resurrection of our Lord God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Acts 1:1-8; John 1:1-17.
Read John 1:1-17
Beginnings are important. Everything becomes what it is in its seed. That is why Jesus used organic metaphors in his parables – the vine and the branches, the sower and the soils, the mustard seed, the wheat and the tares, the growing seed. That is why acts like uprooting and replanting are essential to spiritual life – you can’t grow one thing from another. The gospel begins with Jesus Christ being the eternal Word of God, God the eternal Word, and becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Everything else grows out of that.
“What is not assumed is not healed,” is how St. Gregory of Nazianzus succinctly put it. For Christ to fully redeem humanity, he had to fully take on (“assume”) our humanity. Otherwise, the unassumed parts remain broken. We unite with his undiminished deity and full humanity in holy communion. Uprooting in ourselves everything which isn’t that, and replanting and nurturing everything that is, is what we do in confession beforehand and prayer afterward.
In first-century Greco-Roman culture, people could have difficulty believing Jesus is human. Now, people can have difficulty believing he is divine. The seed of connecting in faith with Jesus’s divinity may need to be planted through them first being touched by his humanity. As Jesus said to Phillip, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) But Jesus’s humanity would now have to be experienced by them through contact with us because “Now you (the church) are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27) “Lead a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. (Colossians 1:10) As the gospel comes to fruition in us, it sows the seeds of new life for others.