‘Who do human beings say that I am?’

This Sunday we will read the Trinity prayer at the beginning and end of the Act of Consecration of Man for the first of ten weeks. In the second part of this prayer, we are drawn into the living reality that answers the question: Who do human beings say that I am? To live into the reality behind the words of the prayer, it can be a help to to attend to each part of prayer: 
We are called on to develop awareness of Christ as someone who is close to us in our humanity; through him, we can feel the Divine Son. Then our gaze turns to the Word who works creatively in the world. 
Living into these words actively, we can ask ourselves: are these three different names for one being, or are they three beings who interpenetrate each other?
There is a clue to this in the title 'Christ', which points to the fact that this is an anointed one. Oil has the effect of making surfaces translucent: when we are anointed, we are opened to the spiritual world in a particular way. The being called Christ is one who is ready to be permeated by a yet higher being: the Son of God. This being works in and through the creative Word. 
The question of the identity of the one whom we encounter in Jesus Christ has preoccupied Christians since the beginning. In the early centuries of the church, there were impassioned and sometimes bitter disputes which reflected the very different backgrounds that the early Christians came from. 
In the Fourth Century, these disputes took on a new importance when Constantine decided that the Church would be the ideal instrument for bringing harmony to the Roman Empire. Suddenly, a schism in the church became a matter of importance to the state. 
This is the backdrop to a tragic wound that was inflicted at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and which endures to this day. The debate was cast in such a way that a decision had to be made between two opposing views: 
Arius believed that Christ was an angelic being, the Logos or Word, created by God like us, but so far greater than us that he could be God's agent in creating the world. 
Athanasius believed that Christ belonged to an order of being that lies beyond and outside the created world, and gives it its source and purpose: the Holy Trinity. For him, the Logos was divine, the Son of God. Creation came about out of nothing by divine command; the divine was to sought in a world far away, to which only the church could grant us access.  Athanasius' view was declared to be Christian orthodoxy and after many further struggles, it triumphed. 
Working with the Trinity Epistle, we can do something to heal this wound. Living between Christ – Son of God – Creative Word and imagining how they open themselves for each other and work through each other, we arrive at intuitions of the answer to the question: Who is Christ? that are not cut and dried definitions, but living thoughts. We may gradually come to realise that both Arius and Athanasius grasped a part of the truth: in the being whom we call Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God is at work, as well as the totality of the beings we call the spiritual hierarchies, who belong like us to the order of creation, but are vastly greater than we, so that they can be called the Creative Word. 
~ Tom 

Some useful resources

• You can download a shortened, printable version of this email here.
• Reply to this email direct or by clicking this link. 
• Gospel readings for the Act of Consecration of Man are listed here. 
• Our Facebook page.
• Perspectives, quarterly journal of The Christian Community. 
• The website of The Christian Community in Great Britain and Ireland has a blog where we are posting some of the material that priests have been sending their congregations in the last weeks and months. There is a facility to subscribe to that directly. 
• Header picture by Deborah Ravetz