Monday in Holy Week

I have never much liked the passage from the general confession in the Book of Common Prayer, "We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us."

The God I love is not a martinet filled with anger, insecurity and hubris; he is love, and his humility is so great that he took up our own frail flesh and died a most humiliating and agonising death that we might live. The Prayer Book itself in fact realises this, and addresses God as "the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy." God loves our love, which, in its purest form, is simply a reflection of his, as the moon's light is of sunlight. But we misdirect the clear mirror our hearts were made to be. We miss the mark (the literal meaning of the Greek word for sin, hamartia) and "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him [the suffering Servant] the iniquity of us all." (Isaiah 53.6)

Simon Barrington-Ward writes:

Pastor Daenstedt [Martin Niemöller's successor at the Dahlem Dorfkirkche in Berlin] expounded the real nature of the relationship with the eternal divine spirit into which, in the person of Jesus Christ, we had all been brought. We were studying 2 Corinthians 5, and the mysterious saying in verse 21, 'For our sake God made him [Christ] to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.' When we were all puzzled by this, Daenstedt exclaimed, with genuine surprise in his voice, 'But this is the heart of our whole life as Christians! It is saying that in the man Jesus Christ, God entered, as nowhere else, into the depths of our human tragedy, our utter frustration, and brokenness. In Jesus Christ also, we could enter into our true destiny, our freedom, our fulfilment, our ultimate joy, our final transformation, beyond death, to be made part of the new creation to come. This is "der süsse Austausch," the "sweet exchange."'

...I saw that our whole life could eventually come to be 'hidden with Christ in God' (Colossians 3.3) and that this was also our ultimate goal. I later learnt the Greeks were to call it theosis, or deification, that is to say, being united by the Spirit through the Son with the Father and so with the triune God, making us 'partakers of the divine nature' (2 Peter 1.4) so that in the transformed life to come the whole creation could be drawn on, by the Holy Spirit, through God's entering into our human life in the person of Christ - the Logos or 'Word' of God - into the very being of God.

"Hidden with Christ in God" - that's what lies at the core of my own experience of this. To be present, really present, to God's love is to be hidden (apparently absent, perhaps) from the world of getting and spending, pride and fear. We, and our little loves, disappear in that great love as the moon's mirror disappears in the blaze of the noonday sun.