When God Rejoices Over Man

The Incarnation and the Terrible Beauty of the Human Person

“Man, completed and perfected, is wondrous, even as God is wondrous.”

— St. Sophrony of Essex, His Life Is Mine

“A man is born into the world.”

We hear these words and think of something ordinary. Another child. Another life beginning among billions of lives. Another small creature entering a world already immense before him and destined to continue long after he is gone.

But St. Sophrony hears something altogether different.

He hears wonder.

He hears the joy of God over the creature He has made.

The heavens are vast. The stars burn with a splendor before which our lives appear almost absurdly small. Galaxies stretch beyond anything the mind can comprehend. Yet St. Sophrony tells us that the Creator rejoices more over man than over the whole glorious choir of the heavenly bodies.

Why?

Not because man is powerful.

Not because he is morally impressive.

Not because humanity has distinguished itself by wisdom or goodness. Our history would quickly silence such claims.

Man is wondrous because of what God desired when He created him.

This is the mystery we so easily forget.

We have learned to speak of ourselves primarily through the language of our brokenness. We speak of passions, wounds, sins, compulsions, failures. The Fathers certainly do not minimize these things. No one is more unsparing than the ascetics about the darkness that enters the human heart.

But they never confuse the disease with the nature of the one who is diseased.

Sin is terrible precisely because man is magnificent.

The fall is tragic because something of unimaginable beauty has been wounded.

Repentance is possible because beneath everything we have done to ourselves, the intention of God for the human person remains.

And what is that intention?

God.

Not merely that we should become respectable creatures.

Not merely that we should obey commandments and avoid punishment.

Not merely that we should become slightly improved versions of ourselves.

God created man for Himself.

This is why St. Sophrony dares to use such staggering language. Man is not simply a microcosm, a little world containing within himself something of creation. He calls man a microtheos.

A little god.

Not God by nature. Never independent of the One who created him. Never another source of divinity alongside God.

But a creature fashioned with such an extraordinary capacity for God that the eternal Word Himself could assume our nature without destroying it.

Here the Incarnation becomes the great revelation of human dignity.

God became man.

We have heard it so often that the words scarcely wound us with wonder anymore.

The Uncreated entered the created.

The timeless entered time.

The One whom the heavens cannot contain was carried in the womb of the Virgin.

The hands that fashioned Adam became the tiny hands of an infant.

The One who breathed life into man breathed with human lungs.

God looked through human eyes.

God spoke with a human voice.

God loved with a human heart.

God suffered in human flesh.

God died a human death.

This is not merely something God did in order to repair a juridical problem created by sin.

It reveals something that was present in the divine intention from the beginning.

Man was made for communion with God so profound that human nature could become the nature of the Logos.

This is what St. Sophrony means when he speaks of a mysterious “commensurability” between God and man.

The distance remains infinite.

God is uncreated; we are created.

God is without beginning; we have received our existence.

God is Being itself; everything we possess is gift.

And yet within this immeasurable difference there is a mysterious likeness.

“Let us make man according to our image and likeness.”

Something in man answers to God.

Something in us can know Him.

Something can receive Him.

Something can love Him.

Something can become so transparent to grace that the life of God begins to shine through a human person.

The saints are the evidence.

Look at a human being purified by repentance.

Look at the tenderness of St. Silouan for the whole world.

Look at St. Isaac weeping for every creature.

Look at the old men and women of the desert whose hearts became so spacious that they could carry the suffering of strangers.

Look at the Mother of God standing silently before the mystery entrusted to her.

This is man.

Not the passions.

Not the ego.

Not the frightened little self endlessly defending its importance.

That is the distortion.

The saint reveals the icon beneath the grime.

And perhaps this is why genuine repentance never ends in contempt for ourselves.

Self-hatred is not humility.

The Fathers teach us to hate sin because sin prevents us from becoming what love created us to be.

Humility does not say, “I am worthless.”

Humility says, “Everything is gift.”

My existence is gift.

My capacity to know God is gift.

My ability to repent is gift.

My desire for Him is gift.

Even the possibility of becoming like Him is gift.

And this is where St. Sophrony’s vision becomes almost unbearable in its beauty.

God did not create us merely to give us something of Himself.

He did not portion out a small measure of divine happiness appropriate to creatures and then hold us at a safe distance.

Love does not behave this way.

Infinite Love desires to give infinitely.

God created reasonable beings because His goodness desired to communicate His own life.

The destiny of man is therefore not simply endless existence.

It is participation.

Communion.

Theosis.

To become by grace what God is by nature.

We should tremble before another human being if we truly believed this.

The person irritating us.

The person whose mind is failing.

The person lying helpless in a bed.

The addict.

The prisoner.

The stranger.

The unborn child.

The old man whose usefulness appears to have ended.

The person whose life seems completely disfigured by sin.

Before us stands someone created for divine life.

Someone for whom the Word became flesh.

Someone capable of becoming radiant with God.

We do not know what glory may be hidden beneath the ruin.

The Fathers learned to see this.

That is why their severity toward sin existed alongside an almost incomprehensible tenderness toward the sinner. They knew what sin destroys because they knew what man is.

And perhaps our age suffers not only because it has forgotten God.

It has forgotten man.

We alternate between worshipping ourselves and despising ourselves because we no longer know what a human being is.

Christianity offers something far more astonishing than either self-exaltation or self-contempt.

It gives us Christ.

And Christ shows us man.

“Behold the man.”

There He stands.

God and man.

Not confusion.

Not competition.

Communion.

In Him we discover that the greatness of man does not consist in becoming autonomous from God. It consists precisely in becoming so united to God that the divine life can fill the human person without destroying anything truly human.

Grace does not make us less human.

It makes us human at last.

This changes the spiritual life completely.

Prayer is no longer the anxious attempt of a worthless creature to attract the attention of a distant deity.

Repentance is no longer disgust with ourselves.

Asceticism is not punishment of the body.

Obedience is not annihilation of personality.

The commandments are not arbitrary tests imposed by God.

Everything becomes healing.

Everything becomes restoration.

Everything serves the recovery of the likeness.

The whole ascetical life becomes one long purification of the icon so that the Face after which we were fashioned might appear again.

And then the words with which St. Sophrony begins become almost impossible to hear casually:

“A man is born into the world.”

A mystery has appeared.

A being has entered creation who can know God.

Who can speak to God.

Who can receive God.

Who can love as God loves.

Who can become, by grace, like the One who called him from nothing.

And somewhere within the incomprehensible life of the Holy Trinity, this existence is not insignificant.

God desires him.

God calls him.

God rejoices over him.

The tragedy of our lives is that we settle for so little.

We spend ourselves constructing identities that death will erase while carrying within us a vocation that reaches beyond the cosmos.

We want to be admired.

God desires to make us radiant.

We want to be important.

God desires to give us Himself.

We want our small lives secured.

God calls us into His eternal life.

Perhaps the beginning of repentance is simply to recover our astonishment.

To look upon Christ and discover both mysteries at once:

how wondrous God is,

and

how wondrous man was created to become.