(This post originally appeared in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald on May 7th, 2016. You may view the original post here.)
For Orthodox Christians around the world, today represents the last day of “Bright Week,” which is the week of Christian Passover (or “Pascha” in Greek, though we English speakers tend to use the pagan term, “Easter”).
Pascha, of course, is the greatest feast in the Christian calendar. It celebrates the resurrection of the Son of God, Jesus, from the dead.
The important thing to know about Pascha is that the Son of God became a human in order to die. In this sense, the old saying, “God is dead,” is true.
Well, I guess it really should be, “God was dead.” Because Jesus was divine, death could not hold him and he rose from the dead.
He “tramples down death by death” as we Orthodox Christians say in our Paschal hymn.
Now all this theology can get very complex, very quickly. But, as I said, the important thing to know is that the Son of God took on flesh. He became one of us – body and all.
There are many implications to this statement. After all, I’m saying the creator of the entire cosmos entered into creation. But the one implication that probably resonates with everyone – Christian or not – is the idea that this is an image of love for the stranger.
It’s like the story of the Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. The prince, in this case God, willingly becomes the pauper, a mere human. God not only walks among us, but he lives life as we do.
The theologians say that God willingly set aside his divinity – and everything that comes along with being God – and limits himself to the experience of a human.
In other words, he humbles himself so that he can be with us. He identifies with us.
If this is the example of himself that God gives to us; it becomes the image for us to imitate in our lives.
By imitating God, we seek ways to also humble ourselves in order to identify with those around us – even if they are different than we are.
One of the former deans of my seminary, Fr. Thomas Hopko, puts it very nicely in his book, The Lenten Spring.
He writes, “[Jesus] has come to identify Himself with everyone and everything, especially the sinful, the wayward and the lost. He, being our God and Creator, has become our brother and our slave. And so in Him we encounter everyone and everything. And in everyone and everything we encounter Him.”
When we identify with others, strange things start to happen. We have compassion for others. We empathize with others. In short, we learn to love others.
Imagine a world where, instead of seeing others through hate, anger, resentment, and fear, we see others as brothers and sisters.
We see them as brothers and sisters because we take a moment to pause, and try to put ourselves in their shoes. We ask them their life’s story. What joys have they experienced in life? What sort of pain and suffering has shaped them?
Stepping back and identifying someone who is different than us, as God did, transforms us. This is what Christians mean when we say that God became human so that we can become divine.
Learning to identify with others, and then love them, is what puts us on the path towards salvation, and shapes us to be more god-like.