Galatians 6:11-18; John 3:13-1
7
In the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, our Lord gives us a wonderful comparison between a type and an antitype: the serpent lifted up in the wilderness and Christ lifted up on the Cross. Because of their hard-heartedness, the people of Israel had been bitten by poisonous serpents, and those who looked upon the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up were delivered from the poison. Our Lord tells us that this prefigures the Cross: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up.” Christ is lifted up, and when we turn to Him in faith—when we acknowledge Him, bow before Him, and give ourselves to Him—the poison of sin and death is overcome.
But there is a warning hidden in the story of that bronze serpent, and it is a warning that Orthodox Christians especially need to hear.
Orthodoxy is unapologetically maximally incarnational. The Word truly became flesh. God entered His creation, and because of the Incarnation, creation can be taken up, sanctified, and restored to its proper purpose. That is part of the reason we have beautiful temples, icons, relics, holy water, incense, candles, vestments, and all the other material things that surround our worship.
We have a lot of holy stuff.
But precisely because we have so much holy stuff, we need to make sure that our relationship with it is itself holy.
Think again about the bronze serpent. God commanded Moses to make it. God worked through it. People really were healed when they looked upon it. There was nothing wrong with the serpent. It was a God-given instrument of healing.
And yet, centuries later, we learn that the Israelites had turned it into an excuse for idolatry. The thing through which God had worked had become detached from the God who worked through it. And so the righteous King Hezekiah broke it in pieces and called it Nehushtan—a piece of bronze.
That distinction matters enormously for us. A holy thing is not a talisman.
We know that the Cross is powerful. Why? Not because two pieces of wood arranged in a particular shape contain some independent magical force. The Cross is powerful because of Christ. On the Cross, Christ defeated sin and death and opened the way to resurrection.
So yes, we venerate the wood of the Cross. Glory to God that we can do so. We have a relic of the True Cross at St. Sophia Seminary, and I can go there and kiss that wood. That physicality reminds us that Christianity is real. God really became flesh. Christ really suffered. His hands really touched wood. His blood really flowed. He really died, and He really rose again.
But we must guard against magical thinking. If an icon streams myrrh, is that because the icon has somehow acquired an independent sacred power? Heaven forbid. It is miraculous because God is working through His creation for the salvation of His people. The gift directs us toward the Giver. The image directs us toward its prototype. The holy thing draws us toward the Holy One.
The danger begins when the gift replaces the Giver, and the type replaces its prototype.
And now we can turn to the Epistle, because St. Paul is dealing with a surprisingly similar problem.
Today’s reading comes from the conclusion of Galatians. St. Paul writes, “See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.” Paul elsewhere used a scribe, but here he draws attention to these words being in his own hand. St. John Chrysostom sees even the large, perhaps awkward letters as evidence of Paul writing this himself.
And what is so important that Paul wants to put it in his own hand?
“It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would compel you to be circumcised.”
That has been the controversy running through the entire Epistle. Gentile Christians were being taught that faith in Christ was not enough—that in order to belong fully to the people of God, they also needed circumcision and the observance of the Jewish Law.
That was a problem. But the problem was not that circumcision was not evil.
After all, God had commanded it.
That is important. Paul is not contrasting something holy with something obviously wicked. Circumcision was the sign of the covenant. The Law was holy. It guarded Israel, it it helped formed Israel, and it helped prepare Israel for the coming of Christ.
But what the Law had been preparing Israel for had now come to fulfillment in Christ.
That is why St. Paul is so fierce about this. Something God had given for a particular purpose was now being treated as though Christ had not come and fulfilled that purpose.
Do you see the similarity?
The bronze serpent was given by God. It was good. God worked through it. But eventually the people confused the instrument with the One who worked through it.
Circumcision was given by God. It was good. It formed and identified His covenant people. But now some were insisting upon it as though union with Christ were insufficient.
The problem is not the thing itself. The problem comes when something meant to lead us toward God begins to take the place that belongs to God.
And so St. Paul forces upon us a very simple question, and it’s a question all of you have been asked:
Have you united yourself to Christ?
Have you united yourself to Christ?
Have you united yourself to Christ?
Our catechumens must be tempted to look at us during the reception service as though they were St. Peter after the Resurrection: “Yes, Father. I already told you!” But the Church asks several times because she wants that answer to go all the way down into the heart so and instinctively defines us and our relationship with the world.
Have you united yourself to Christ?
That really is central. Everything else has to be understood in relation to that.
And please don’t misunderstand me. This is not an attack on Holy Tradition. Quite the opposite. Holy Tradition does not take us backward into a world without Christ. Holy Tradition teaches us how to live in Christ. Its rituals, disciplines, images, prayers, and customs embody our faith in Him. They train us to perceive the world in Him and direct us toward Him.
But precisely because these things are powerful, we must never confuse the means with the end.
St. Paul then tells us something about the teachers who were troubling the Galatians. They wanted the Galatians circumcised, he says, “that they may glory in your flesh.” They were using religion to create a visible sign of belonging—a sign by which they could measure success and claim these people as their own.
In his homily on these verses, St. John Chrysostom notices that Paul directs much of his anger toward the teachers rather than toward those who have been misled.
There is a lesson there for us. Do you blame the neophyte who, in his zeal, follows the bad teaching of someone he trusts? Neophytes do knuckleheaded things. That is almost part of being a neophyte; it’s why neophytes are not given positions of responsibility. But the greater responsibility belongs to the teacher.
And that should make every priest and teacher tremble a little.
As your teacher and priest, what might I give you as part of “the package” of Orthodoxy that is actually just something I am accustomed to? What might I treat as essential because it is important to me because it was part of my formation? What might I teach you to identify with so strongly that, rather than helping you become a new creation in Christ, it becomes another identity in which you glory? What if my teaching leads you to become a child of hell rather than a child of God (Matthew 23:15)?
That question is especially important now because we have more Orthodox teachers available to us than perhaps any generation before us. Anyone can start talking online, and the teachers who attract attention are often those who speak most confidently, draw the hardest lines, identify the clearest enemies, and offer the strongest sense of belonging.
And belonging is both powerful and important.
That brings me to one contemporary example: nation and culture.
Human beings naturally live in peoples, nations, languages, and cultures. These things can be great goods. A culture can be sanctified by Christ. Its language, music, customs, family life, feasts, stories, and habits can preserve the faith and transmit it from one generation to the next.
Orthodox Christians in America know this especially well because we received the faith through cultures that had been shaped by Orthodoxy for centuries. Syrian, Lebanese, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian—all of these peoples have given us treasures, and we should receive those treasures gratefully. For them, their faith and culture are natural and largely invisible to them– like water to a fish. But it stands in contrast to our own culture, so we see it clearly.
Until we have a mature American Orthodox culture that naturally produces saints, we should be humble enough to learn from cultures that have been doing this much longer than we have.
But a culture can carry the faith without being the faith.
A nation can serve Christ without being Christ.
And when we forget that distinction, something good can become Nehushtan.
But this danger is much broader than nationalism. We can do it with almost anything that has helped us become Orthodox. We can do it with a jurisdiction. We can do it with a particular style of music. We can do it with the way we fast, the prayers we use, the books we read, the teachers we follow, even the particular customs of a parish.
And converts are especially susceptible to this because we are trying to learn what Orthodoxy looks like. That is a good desire. We come into the Church, and we want to learn how Orthodox Christians pray, how they fast, how they worship, how they raise their children, how they organize their lives and we want to do that ourselves. Glory to God.
But there is a temptation to take the particular form through which we learned Orthodoxy and identify it with Orthodoxy itself.
We say; “This is how Orthodox Christians do it; this IS Orthodoxy”
Well, maybe. Or maybe this is how the people who taught us do it.
That distinction requires humility.
The problem is not that these things are unimportant. They are important precisely because Christianity is incarnational. We need concrete practices. We need particular melodies. We need actual words and gestures and disciplines. We cannot live Christianity in the abstract.
But all of these things have a purpose. They are supposed to form us in Christ.
And that gives us a way to test them. Is this making me more faithful? Is it making me more humble? Is it teaching me to repent? Is it helping me love God and my neighbor? Is it drawing me more deeply into the life of the Church?
Or has it become another way for me to know that I am right and somebody else is wrong?
That is when we need to be careful.
And this is one of the great lessons of Pentecost. Pentecost does not abolish particularity. Notice what happens: the Apostles do not all begin speaking the same language. The Holy Spirit does something much more wonderful. Each nation hears the one Gospel in its own tongue.
Unity does not require sameness. The languages remain languages. The cultures remain cultures. The particular gifts remain particular gifts, and they are beautiful. But now they are capable of being taken up into something even greater than themselves.
They can glorify Christ together.
And that brings us back to St. Paul: “Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
He is not going to glory in circumcision.
And I am not going to glory because I can do services in Ukrainian. I am not going to glory because I am getting better at Byzantine music. Those things can be good. They can be beautiful. They can serve the Gospel.
But they are not the Gospel.
What do I glory in?
The Cross of Christ.
Because the Cross is where the old man dies. The old Anthony (I call him “Doug”) who wants praise, recognition, belonging, certainty, and the approval of his tribe—that man has to go onto the Cross.
And that gives us a useful test.
When someone teaches you that in order to be a faithful Orthodox Christian you have to adopt all the things that he has adopted—the same practices, the same cultural preferences, the same opinions, even the same enemies—take an emotional step back.
Some of those things may be good. Some may even have helped that person grow in holiness. But that does not make them the Gospel.
Ask instead: Is it true? Is it holy? Does it serve salvation? Does it help me repent? Does it help me love God and my neighbor? Does it build up the Body of Christ?
St. Paul gives us a different model. In 1 Corinthians 9 he says, “To the Jews I became as a Jew,” and “to those outside the law I became as one outside the law.” Why? “So that some might be saved” (1 Corinthians 9:20–22).
Notice what Paul does. He does not demand that other people become like him. He gives up his own preferences and prerogatives so that he can meet them where they are and lead them to Christ; this is the part of his ministry we are to imitate (1 Corinthians 4:16). The culture serves the Gospel; the Gospel does not serve the culture.
That is what culture is for. That is what ritual is for. That is what our customs and teaching are for: they are meant to lead us into the new creation.
So love your country. Love the good things in your culture. Seek what is just and good in politics and public policy. Receive with gratitude the cultures that preserved and handed Orthodoxy down to us.
But do not turn any of them into Nehushtan.
Do not take something through which God has worked and begin treating it as though it were God.
Do not let the gift replace the Giver.
Do not let the image replace its prototype.
Do not let the culture replace Christ.
And do not let any of them divide you from God or from one another.
“For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”
That is where all of this has been going: a new creation.
The bronze serpent served its purpose, but it was not God. Circumcision served its purpose, but it could not give the life that comes through union with Christ. Our rituals, cultures, customs, and identities can serve holy purposes, but none of them is the source of our life.
Christ is.
And so St. Paul gives us our final word:
“Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
That is our boast. That is our identity. That is our salvation.
Glory to God.