Secretly Surrounded in All Lowliness
“The truth of Jesus Christ is not one truth among others; it is the truth, the universal truth that creates all truth as surely as it is the truth of God. For in Jesus Christ God has created all things, He has created all of us. We exist not apart from Him, but in Him, whether we are aware of it or not; and the whole cosmos exists not apaprt from him, but in Him, borne by Him, the Almighty Word. To know Him is to know all. To be touched and gripped by the Spirit in his realm means being led into all truth.
If a man believes and knows God, he can no longer ask, What is the meaning of my life? But by believing he actually lives the meaning of his life, the meaning of his creatureliness, of his individuality, in the limits of his creatureliness and individuality and in the fallibility of his existence, in the sin in which he is involved and of which daily and hourly he is guilty; yet he also lives it with the aid which is daily and hourly imparted to him through God’s interceding for him, in spite of him and without his deserving it. He recognises the task assigned to him in this whole, and the hope vouchsafed to him in and with this task, because of the grace by which he may live and the praise of the glory promised him, by which he is even here and now secretly surrounded in all lowliness.
The believer confesses this meaning of his existence. The Christian Creed speaks of God as the ground and goal of all that exists. The ground and goal of the entire cosmos means Jesus Christ. And the unheard-of thing may and must be said, that where Christian faith exists, there also exists, through God’s being trusted, inmost familiarity with the ground and goal of all that happens, of all things; there man lives, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, in the peace that passeth all understanding, and which for that very reason is the light that lightens our understanding.”
[Crikey. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 26–27]
He Obtains a Double Blessing
“Such is the arrangement of the Institutes which may be thus summed up: Man being at first created upright, but afterwards being not partially but totally ruined, finds his entire salvation out of himself in Christ, to whom being united by the Holy Spirit freely given without any foresight of future works, he thereby obtains a double blessing, viz., full imputation of righteousness, which goes along with us even to the grave, and the commencement of sanctification, which daily advances till at length it is perfected in the day of regeneration or resurrection of the body, and this, in order that the great mercy of God may be celebrated in the heavenly mansions, throughout eternity.”
[John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Introduction]
Holy Wood, Intelligible Winepress
“Blessed are you, Holy Wood, intelligible
winepress!
In you was crushed the heavenly bunch
of grapes,
sufficient for gladdening the heavenly
and the earthly.”
[David the Invincible, “An Encomium on the Holy Cross of God,” in Vigen Guroian, Inheriting Paradise, 68]
Love Is That Liquor
“Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood, but I, as wine.”
[George Herbert]
Forever More a Living Tree
“The Word himself was the first Gardener. In the beginning he planted a tree in the garden of Eden that grew the fruit of immortal life. But the serpent came into the garden and claimed the tree as his own, until the Word took our flesh and reclaimed it. Nailed to that tree he made himself the antidote of sin and death. They who nailed our Lord to the Cross did not know that it was his from the beginning, that the selfsame dead instrument of execution was and is forever more a living tree, the Tree of Life that produces the food and drink of the Kingdom of Heaven.”
[Vigen Guroian, Inheriting Paradise, 73]
A Tree So Noble
“Faithful cross, a tree so noble
Never grew in grove or wood;
Never leaf or blossom flourished
Fair as on thy branches glowed;
Sweet the wood and sweet the iron
Bearing up so dear a load.
Ah! relax thy native rigor,
Bend they branches, lofty tree!
Melt, O wood, in tender mercy!
Christ, the King of Glory, see!
Veiled in human sin and sorrow,
Slain, from sin the world to free.”
[Fortunatus, “Pange Lingua,” in Vigen Guroian, Inheriting Paradise, 66]
