Alex Swain

Salutations Beloved in Christ!

A motif I see in today’s readings is one of servitude and slavery, and subsequent transformation in and through Christ.

Where my mind travels, initially, from these themes is that humanity has two orientations of the soul: that we are, morally, a servant or slave of God; or we are bound to something else, something darker, and something worse. I then think on this, and surmise that all our action, our deeds, our thoughts, our entire orientation as an individual (and I might add, as a collective people) exist either turned toward God or turned away.

When one’s very being and soul is turned away from God, oriented toward something else, the outcome according to Saint Paul is that of perishing. The withering of the self. The loss of the soul to the point that one can no longer revel and experience the suffusing, resplendent, and transcendent wonder of God’s grace throughout all reality. The turning away from God is a perishing because these individuals, in turning away (or being turned away by metaphysical realities, the “god of the world” as Saint Paul puts it) blinds one and “keeps them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Bishop Colenso of Natal elucidates profoundly, I think, on what the qualitative experience of an individual turned away and engaged in active and unrepentant sin is like. He writes, “It is the Law of the Moral World, that known, indulged sin of any kind must be followed with this particular form of evil, the darkening of the mind, the hardening of the heart.”1 I see this as a perishing of the true self.

As a cosmic counter to this perishing, Saint Paul exults in our Resurrected Lord as a means by which we are lifted out of this mire by grace. Saint Paul writes, “For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake. For it is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:5-6).

Expounding on this theme, Alain Badiou writes regarding Saint Paul’s understanding of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, that this exultation in Christ is “not to be confused with slavery” as we traditionally see it. Why? Because in Christ, true slavery “is precisely that from which we are forever released insofar as we all become sons of what has happened to us… It is a community of destiny in that moment in which we have to become a new creature.”2

I see from today’s readings that it is Christ who shines in our hearts to “give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.” By Christ’s death and resurrection we become truly children of God and are raised up. We are born (and borne!) and raised from a slavery of self and sin to one of a community of destiny. And in this community, in and with and by God’s grace may we not serve two masters, but only one, who is Christ Jesus our God.

Amen.
Alex Swain

1Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans by John William Colenso
2Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism by Alain Badiou