BILLTESKA

[click title above for Collect of the Day and scriptural references]


To be sanctified is to be made holy. That which is holy is “set apart”. It is not precisely the same as “the sacred”, although the sacred may also be holy. Anything that is specially revered is sacred. Things and places can be sacred without being holy, like the battlefield at Gettysburg or the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, or your own favorite beauty spot. But if it is also holy, it is connected with the highest kind of reverence. The Basilica of the Resurrection in Jerusalem is holy. The Body and Blood of Christ are holy.

But when human beings are called holy, it means something more. In English and German, the word is related to health in the sense of wholeness, completeness, human perfection. In Slavic languages, the word is related to the word meaning light. A sanctified person is someone who has been changed in an ineffable way: someone set apart from the world of ordinary people. At the same time as our Lord sends us into the world, He sanctifies Himself, so that we also may be sanctified – He sets Himself and us apart. This holiness is not the same as moral purity, although that may well result from holiness. Rather it is a new kind of consciousness, an unending process of opening and freedom.

To be apart from the world in this sense means not to be separate from material creation and human history, but to be free from “the world, the flesh, and the devil”: free from the powerful inclination to sink into sleep and death and nothingness; free from bondage to the flesh, which was Paul’s word for what we would call ego – the illusion of separation from the rest of reality; and freedom from the world in the sense of kosmos – the world of appearance, reality as it appears to unilluminated eyes, eyes that do not see the Divine Glory shining around us constantly, in and through creation.
“The tragedy of humanity is that a paradise of beauty blooms around us but we fail to see it.” Dostoyevsky probably had this insight because, as an Orthodox Christian, he would have been familiar with this notion: the change that happened on the Mount of the Transfiguration happened not to Jesus, but to the disciples. Jesus always radiated the Uncreated Light, but only on Tabor were the Apostles’ eyes opened so that they could see Him as He is. But as soon as they remembered themselves, and sank back into fleshly concerns about tabernacles and so on, they no longer saw reality as it is; a cloud obscured their vision. (Three separate tabernacles, you see: one for Jesus, one for Moses, one for Elijah. The flesh, the ego doesn’t get it!)

Human holiness is not a matter of separation from other humans and the rest of creation; in fact it is just the opposite. It is being set apart – set free – from the illusion of separateness. Jesus has sanctified Himself that we might be sanctified. He has ascended out of the world that He might fill all things.
In today’s Collect, we pray that the Holy Spirit may “exalt us to that place where our Savior has gone before.” That place is not a location above the sky. It is somewhere out of this world only in the sense of the unilluminated world of appearance, not in the sense of creation and history and human society. The “place where He has gone before” is where He got to when He had sanctified Himself. A place of purity, indeed. As we heard a couple of weeks ago, our hope purifies us even as He is pure, because the pure in heart shall see God. Purity of heart is the Holy Spirit testifying in our hearts and opening us to the vision of the Ascended One, in which we discover that we are “like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” This is eternal life. This is the place where our Savior Christ has gone before, not out of the world, but filling the world with glory – with holiness in the Slavonic sense, with Light.

According to St. John, this happens to Christians who believe in the Name of the Son of God, those to whom John writes in today’s epistle. But not to them only. It happens to all those who have the Son, and to no others, but there is a distinction between all who have the Son and those who trust in the Name of the Son. In other words, there are souls who have eternal life – and thus MUST have the Son – who do NOT necessarily know Him by Name! (Those other sheep… that are not of this fold, perhaps.)
But the fullness of joy, here and now, is given to us who not only have the Son, but who also know that we have the eternal life which is in Him, and that – despite all appearances – we already have whatever we ask of God, provided only that it is really good for us and is thus in accordance with God’s will.