“The works which the Father has granted me to accomplish”
While this is not a homily for the Third Sunday of Advent (year III), as it was my free Sunday, I have decided to write down some thoughts on the Gospel reading (which may inform my homily three years from now), as the message is so central to my theological approach. The readings are as follows: Malachi 4:4-6; 2 Peter 1:19-21; and John 5:31-36. When quoting Scripture, I will use the Revised Standard Version of Scripture (RSV), unless otherwise noted.
In the Gospel reading, we see that while Christ highly values the witness of St. John the Baptist, His witness is not his own: “But the testimony which I have is greater than that of John; for the works which the Father has granted me to accomplish, these very works which I am doing, bear me witness that the Father has sent me.”
The point here is that where we, including St. John, can talk about Christ, Christ puts His words into actual practice. The divine work, what God does through Christ, is the centre of the gospel and it should inform everything we do as a Church. In chapter 3 of his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, henceforth known as Dionysius,1 comments on the nature of the Eucharistic celebration, called the Synaxis.2 At the end of chapter 3, III:5, Dionysius states that “theurgy is the consummation of theology” (Gk. ésti tēs theologías hē theourgía sugkephalaíōsis).3 This means that theology, which is found in Scripture, but also in the practice of the Church, is consummated not in words but in perfect deeds. Where St. John could only make witness through his words and, occasionally, through his actions (which were imperfect), Christ regularly points to what He does. If in doubt, look not to His testimony but His actions.
And what are those actions? First, it is the act of incarnation itself. By becoming flesh, God works in creation, as a human, to achieve His ends. But the central act, which also marks the most important time of the Church Year, the Paschal Triduum, is what happened in the Upper Room, in the courts of king Herod and Pontius Pilate, on Calvary, and in the Grave, when Christ instituted His New Testament or New Covenant, when He suffered and died for our sake, and when He rose again to new life. Again, what we look to is the deeds themselves. The Holy Scriptures are of massive importance but they are not more important than the deeds they recount. As Thomas Plant puts it, commenting on Dionysius’s phrase: “The New Testament is completed on the Cross, not on paper.”4 For Dionysius, the focus is also squarely on Christ and particularly on His deeds. When he uses the phrase ‘theurgy,’ he does not first and foremost mean liturgical actions or Scriptural readings, where the Church enacts the divine work, where he prefers the phrase ‘hierurgy,’5 but the actual works of Christ, including the institution of these acts. When we preach Christ, we should not merely talk about Him but point to what He has done. But the important part is not that we say it, but that He does it. When St. Paul says that faith comes through hearing (Rom 10:14-17), what he means is that through the preaching of the word, the Holy Spirits enacts something in the hearer. He does something. This is, also, what we teach as Lutherans.
As we read in Confessio Augustana (hereafter: CA) V: “For through the Word and the sacraments as through instruments the Holy Spirit is given, who effects faith where and when it pleases God in those who hear the gospel.”6 The Holy Spirit does not just talk about Christ, He effects faith or trust. And what, according to the Lutheran tradition, is faith? In CA V, it says that when the Holy Spirit effects faith “in those who hear the gospel,” this means “in those who hear that God, not on account of our own merits but on account of Christ, justifies those who believe that they are received into grace on account of Christ.” Now, is this something we do? If we ask Christ Himself, the answer is no. When asked the question, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” (John 6:28), He did not actually say what we must do but what God does: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (John 6:29). When we believe, when we have faith that we “are received into grace on account of Christ” (cf. Romans 4), this is “the work of God.” The gospel is just that, the work of God. And in God, and in Christ, who is God in the flesh, there is no separation of person from work, as noted by Finnish Lutheran theologian Tuomo Mannermaa. He says: “Luther does not separate the person of Christ from his work. Rather, Christ himself, both his person and his work, is the ground of Christian righteousness. Christ is, in this unity of person and work, really present in the faith of the Christian (in ipsa fide Christus adest).”7
Mannermaa is citing Luther’s commentary on Galatians, where the reformer says, quite explicitly, that “in faith itself Christ is really present” (Lt. in ipsa fide Christus adest). This means that faith justifies because it is the very presence of Christ, and of His works. And again, we are left there: with the work of God. And that is the centre of the Gospel. Not our deeds and dealings but God’s. And it found its most central expression in the Paschal mystery, which started in the Upper Room and was completed in the Passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. None of those things are what we have done but what has been done for us. It is not a coincidence that the reading of the Paschal vigil always includes Exodus 14-15,8 which contains this line: “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still” (Exodus 14:14). But we cannot separate any of these out from each other. As the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later known as pope Benedict XVI), put it in 2003, Christ gave Himself already in the Upper Room, thus interpreting, in a way, His death on the Cross. Through His actions and prayers during His Last Supper, and particularly the institution of the Eucharist, Christ gave meaning to what appeared meaningless, His death. He writes (emphasis in original):
Jesus transforms death into the spiritual act of affirmation, into the act of self-sharing love; into the act of adoration, which is offered to God, then from God is made available to men. Both are essentially interdependent: the words at the Last Supper without the death would be, so to speak, an issue of unsecured currency; and again, the death without these words would be a mere execution without any discernable point to it. Yet the two together constitute this new event, in which the senselessness of death is given meaning; in which what is irrational is transformed and made rational and articulate; in which the destruction of love, which is what death means in itself, becomes in fact the means of verifying and establishing it, of its enduring constancy.9
What looks like the sin of sins, the murder of God Himself, became “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:2). But this was done not merely through words but through actions, through what Christ did (and does). And that is, again, the centre of the Gospel. So have faith in Christ, and look to what He has done. With that, I give Him the last words: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves” (John 14:11).
Notes:
Kjetil Kringlebotten, “Apofasis, teurgi og kristologi: Om delaktigheit i den ukjente Gud” (Teologisk tidsskrift 13:4, 2024): 213-226 (esp. 213-216), forthcoming very soon (unfortunately in Norwegian but fortunately open access).
The Greek word súnaxis means a gathering or an assembly, and refers to the whole celebration. In the Divine Liturgy or the Mass, however, this is centred on the Eucharist.
Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (De ecclesiastica hierarchia, hereafter: EH), III:3.5 (432B). There are two full translations into English: Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid with Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987) and The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, 2 vols., trans. John Parker (London: James Parker and Co., 1897, 1899). I usually recommend Parker’s translation but not always. See Kjetil Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation: On Theurgic Participation in God (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2023), xiii. For a discussion of the implications of this, see Thomas Richard Plant, Dualism and Nondualism in the Thought of Dionysius the Areopagite and Shinran Shōnin (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2013), 101-110.
Plant, Dualism and Nondualism, 104.
Sarah Klitenic Wear and John Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite and the Neoplatonist Tradition: Despoiling the Hellenes, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 99-115.
For the English translation of the confession, see The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2000), 27-105. If not otherwise noted, I follow the translation of the Latin text. For the Latin and German texts of the Lutheran confessions, see Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, vollständige neuedition, ed. Irene Dingel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).
Tuomo Mannermaa, “Justification and Theosis in Lutheran-Orthodox Perspective,” in Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, eds., Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 25-41 (here: 28). See my post on justification.
Exodus 14.10-31; 15.20,21. See Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England (London: Church House, 2000), 557.
Joseph Ratzinger, God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press 2003), 29-30.
Thank you for the honourable mention, Father!