Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:3-15
Hebrews 5:7-9
John 12:20-33
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I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. |
The Psalmist writes, "Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and my mind" (Ps 26:2). "Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!" (Ps 139:23). But what does God find when He searches our hearts and thoughts? In the case of most people, it is always something different every time He looks. For our minds are a vast, uncharted sea, and our thoughts are .... many different creatures surfacing for a moment and then diving back down into the deep again. We ourselves must meditate and search our spirits (Ps 77:6) in order to know what we think. And knowing who we are is so elusive as to become a multi-trillion-dollar industry of psychoanalysis, psychiatric treatment, psychological counseling, and self-help books. We may laugh confidently that we know our own minds well enough. But on reflection, we must confess that our minds are not so easy to know, for we revise ourselves constantly. And what we think we know, or are confident we believe, can turn out to be elusive and "unrealized" when we reflect more carefully.
During the twentieth century a theoretical physicist, Roger Penrose, set out to answer the riddle: How could our brains be so small yet be capable of such vast feats of computation, memory, and operational complexity? In his book, The Emperor's New Mind (1989), Penrose hypothesizes that only quantum physics can explain the evident properties of our brain. He goes on to say that we do not have settled thoughts or opinions or outcomes of reflection stored in vast warehouses that our memories then retrieve and report back to us. In fact, we actively think many, even opposing, thoughts on nearly every given topic all in the same moment. Our minds are not algorithmic as a digital computer is, Penrose says. They are not deterministic and find their norms in a state of constant contradiction, or in a state of potentially contradicting possibilities.
As a young college professor, especially teaching freshman who display these mental trait more openly and honestly, I constantly saw Penrose's thesis in action. As my students searched their minds for what they truly thought and believed, they contradicted themselves over and over, sometimes in a single paragraph. The language they used to explain this phenomenon during my office hours was telling: "No, that's not a contradiction! You see, I was like here when I wrote this sentence, and I was like there when I wrote that sentence." And that is exactly how the student experienced it. They sincerely believed both contradictory things at the same time. Here was simply an honest reporting of how things stood from one moment to the next.
Before the semester had ended, I endeavored to teach the students to write essays that were mostly free of contradictions. I taught them to develop deterministic systems of thought and then to report back from that system .... at least for the sake of their grades! But Penrose would say that what my students wrote was exactly what we should expect from the human brain. For the state of the electrons of the atoms in the brain can be in several states simultaneously. Several thoughts come to us at the same time. They all seem plausible and interesting. Which one do I want? Isn't that the way it really is with us? And then a collapse of quantum wave function (to borrow Pensore's language) occurs as we select one among the many. Our electrons enter finite states. We now know something. To say it plainly, we are always not of "two minds," but of countless minds ... on every subject or thought.
In one of the masterpieces of early Christian literature, On the Incarnation, a fourth-century Greek Father, St. Athanasius, wrote that at His birth our Lord Jesus Christ had already redeemed the world decades before His Crucifixion and Resurrection. The fact of God's Person touching the earth — now there is an awesome thought! — the fact of His Person touching the earth caused such a profound shock to the whole created lifeworld that the DNA of every living thing flipped from being ordered to death to being ordered to life. It was in the manger where human destiny was forever changed from hideous finitude and dust in a grave to everlasting life. And we should remember that the theological speculation concerning an Atonement in which Christ must die as a stand-in for sinful humanity would not be proposed until the twelfth century, and even then proposed by a monk of the Western Church, not a theological teaching of the whole Church. The Undivided Church, the Church of the first thousand years would have found this proposition to be foreign, unknown.
In His birth, the Early Church believed, God the Son, the Eternal Word, the Father's Instrument of Creation, fundamentally converted the world from death to life by virtue of His Creational Presence in intimate communion with every living thing ... which, after all, each contains His divine spark, the mysterious stirring we call animate life. We picture Jesus being born, and every living thing attentively turning toward Him. Our Creator! He is here among us!
Nonetheless, God does not coerce. In His profound respect for human freedom, each of us has the capacity to return to the culture of death. For, you see, true to God's design for our ever-active brains, we are always able to be double-minded, even many-minded on every subject. On the other hand, we are free to focus ourselves wholly upon God and His wonderful gift of life. The incarnation of evil, we call the Deuce, for he is double, even duplicitous. The Incarnation of God is One, and never-changing. We can choose the path to Heaven or the dark path to a dark kingdom. God always leaves the choice to us.
St. Athanasius poses the question to himself, If the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ has flipped all things from death to life, then how do we fasten ourselves upon this gift of life? How do we receive this gift? How do we fix our immortal souls on this blessed place? How do we avoid slipping back into darkness and death and chaos? For surely we must participate in this redemption. Else, we are little more than robots or puppets.
His answer to this riddle might seem odd at first. He says that we must meditate. We must fix our whole minds, our whole hearts, our whole spirits upon God, always on Him and Him alone. And, upon reflection, we see that this is not so odd. This is really a reformulation of the First Great Commandment. Remaining always in this posture, without contradiction — this is the path to life.
Whenever, I hear the sentence which serves as the name of this meditation, the hairs on my neck and arms stand on-end: "Sir, we would see Jesus." For this is the desire of the everlasting hills: "to see Jesus." And who, seeing Him, could ever see the world the same again? We long to see Jesus. Our minds and hearts and spirits were formed by God for this very longing. In his little book of meditations, called the Pensees, Blaise Pascal wrote on the subject of restless contradiction:
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"What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that
there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? "This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God Himself." |
Last week, we read that the people Israel were enjoined to gaze upon the bronze serpent in order to be healed of moral sickness. It was not enough to be in its vicinity. It was not enough to walk past it. But one must gaze upon it. Or as St. Athanasius would say, we must fix our hearts wholly upon it and then never turn away. Perhaps, in this we gain some insight into Jeremiah's words this morning:
What a beautiful gift!
—
for our hearts to be absolutely converted to God's mind,
to know His ways and have His instincts with our own hearts!
And as we were made in His image,
and
as we have the royal birth of his line,
and
as we are His bodily instruments on earth,
it is up to us to complete this work of fixing Him in our hearts forever.
For God expects of us not less than the obedience He asked of His Son, our brother.
For Jesus
"learned obedience through what He suffered; and being made perfect He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him ..."
Made perfect through obedience with the gaze of His heart .... unto everlasting life.
"Sir, we would see Jesus."
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.