Our Personhood is Her Gift: Recovering the Holy Ruach through Traditional Trinitarian Theology
The Holy Spirit is our Mother
Yes, the Holy Spirit is our Mother.
For some people, this is an enormously encouraging, empowering and comforting statement. It speaks to and describes their experiences of God with a kind of stunning accuracy, and accords deeply with their knowledge about Scripture and the traditions of the church. For others, it is enormously disturbing, and may even seem heretical and evil. How does it impact you? Maybe you have one of these responses, or maybe you don’t have much of a response, or maybe you have a wildly ambivalent mix of conflicting feelings. Isn’t it interesting that a little sentence can have such enormously disparate effects on people, sometimes even on the same person?
Regardless of your response to the claim, I’d like to explain why the claim is not only orthodox for Christians, but is in fact a key that helps unlock Christian orthodoxy. Understanding this concept can bring peace and help resolve one of the greatest schisms in church history, although the real work of healing will require a very long and beautiful and painful process of repentance, transformation and reconciliation. All peacemaking involves working through conflicts and past evils rather than avoiding them. Still, by removing intellectual obstacles to reconciliation, I hope that this theology makes the way a bit more level for the work of tears and snot and clumsy bewildered hugging that I believe must come in time.
For all of its importance, it isn’t necessary to understand or refer to the Holy Spirit as “Mother” in my view. After all, there is definitely a long tradition of using neuter and masculine language for the Holy Spirit in Greek and Latin, for example, and I wouldn’t think to condemn anyone for that. Still, I do think it is necessary for anyone interested in Christian orthodoxy to understand how deep this concept is in our tradition and in Scripture, and that those who condemn it as heretical are caught up in serious deception and slander. They are welcome to their views and their comforts, as far as I’m concerned, but they are not welcome to slander others or misrepresent the Bible or our scarred and sacred tradition.
Of course, God is beyond both sex and gender, and that is always the starting point for these discussions. People tend to get confused about this in these discussions, so I’d like to say it again in bold: of course, in Christian theology God is beyond sex and gender. Nonetheless, God’s lifegiving work is described in ways that use linguistic gender, and that build deep analogies to sexual reproduction. Importantly, the logic here is embedded in the very start of the Bible, the very start of all the Gospels, and especially in the deep interplay between the two. As a result, it is enormously illuminating to unpack the ways in which the Bible uses gender and sex to express God’s inclusive transcendence of sex and gender. That is to say, God is beyond these categories, but that doesn’t mean God is less than these categories. Just the opposite. It means that God is more than enough to hold sex, gender, their inevitable limits, and whatever lies beyond.
Why bother with Christian orthodoxy and this sort of thing at all? I always like to make my own motives clear from the start. I practice loving enemies instead of doing violence to them, and I practice the work of reconciliation, and I practice living in joyful solidarity with the poor, every day. That means I do some of this, and it means that I’m still just practicing. It’s not always easy, but it is genuinely wonderful. I write this because I want to encourage other people to practice this stuff too. I think it is really important, because Jesus claims that people who build on these practices will build on rock, and so what they build will endure. When we don’t build on these teachings, I think we’re just wasting our time, because the rest won’t last. I agree with Jesus, and I’d like to help us all waste less time. We can stop killing time, and each other, and start living anytime. We can bring the time to life. The door is open to us in every moment if we just start to walk into this other way of being.
Understanding the Trinity helps underscore the meaning and the importance of those fundamental teachings of Jesus, and is also important for reconciling the globally divided church. So the work of theology is, importantly, part of the work of correcting ourselves and encouraging reconciliation, first among ourselves as Christians. Restoring the original Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit as a Mother and as the Breath of God helps illuminate a topic that has caused a lot of heartache and division: the doctrine of the Trinity. My writing here is based on the Catholic Church’s guidance for ecumenical dialogue on the topic. (I rely on the Catholic Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity’s official article on the topic, The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit.)
What’s more, reconnecting and bonding with the Holy Spirit can help us heal and reattach ourselves to God more deeply and in neurologically important ways. So while it isn’t necessary for any individual to recover the understanding of the Holy Spirit as Mother, I think it is important for the church throughout the world to do this as a whole, as a fundamental and therefore acceptable element of our tradition. Without this work, I don’t think we can fully remember and reconnect our divided selves and the detached church we have become. I mean this, first, in a basic literal and historical sense. The loss of the understanding of the Holy Spirit as Mother corresponds to a denial of our roots in the Aramaic thought world of Jesus. Historically, it has led us to damage and scar the Syriac liturgy and tradition that whispers to us clearly and urgently about our own roots and our own history. It has also led us to ignore the extensive maternal imagery and language that surrounds the Holy Spirit’s self-revelations in Scripture. I explore these connections systematically here. If we are to exclude the Motherhood of the Holy Spirit from our faith, we must excise the deepest root of our tradition and our nearest linguistic connection to Jesus.
But more of that to come. The rest of this article will be an explanation of this infographic. I’d like to invite you to really take some time with it and notice any questions that might bubble up for you. Hopefully, I’ll answer them, and hopefully I’ll answer many questions you didn’t think to ask. If questions remain or new questions arise, and I hope they do, please feel free to reach out to me. You can use the internet for that.
The Trinity as Speaker-Word-Breath and as Father-Son-Mother
There are two takes on the Holy Trinity in this chart, but this definitely does not mean there are two Trinities. There’s only the one Trinity, described in two different ways. A deepening understanding arises in the play between these two deep analogies for the activity of God: speaking and forming life. Speaking implies a Speaker, who logically requires a Word and a Breath. Forming life implies a Father, who logically requires a Son and Mother. Sometimes the two analogical frames are conflated, for example in this beautifully compact but analogically confusing statement: “The Father begets the Son and spirates the Spirit.” This formula mixes the two metaphors in a way that perfectly illuminates our present cloud of unknowing. On its face it does this by reflecting our obfuscations back at us clearly. Underneath this, though, on the other side of clear speech, the formula can give us still more: it nicely draws us back up to the primary analogy of the Trinity (speaking) from the second analogy (family). To start, let’s untangle the analogies so that they can more clearly and intuitively play off of each other, so we can carry simpler intuitions into a process of ever-deepening knowledge.
The straightforward analogical sets have been buried for a variety of reasons, although the most basic one is that the Holy Spirit is feminine in Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, but neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin. The Syriac tradition is closest in its thought world to the language of Jesus and the background of Scripture, and so it should be given priority in clarifying the basic structure of the thought here. It bears witness to the explicit use of Mother to refer to the Holy Spirit, and elements of this deepest layer of the tradition can also be found in Latin and Greek in spite of grammatical obstacles. Additionally, the other primary images for the Holy Spirit in the New Testament (fire and dove) also help us here. Like Ruach, fire and dove are both feminine in Hebrew. In Greek, dove remains feminine while fire becomes neuter. With the Aramaic background in view, we find a distinct pattern: Spirit, Fire and Dove are all fundamentally feminine words in the mother tongue of Jesus, and they are the core images by which the Holy Spirit is revealed in Scripture. And in Greek, the written language, the only gendered term is also feminine. You can find a more detailed treatment of these topics in the link that follows, but I consider it to be well-established on linguistic and metaphorical evidence that the femininity of the Holy Spirit was clear in Aramaic, remains the best understanding of the written witness, and has been neglected and then eventually effaced, leaving our tradition scarred. But beyond the Hebrew Bible, if we pause even briefly and listen to the still small voice that whispers to us through the Syriac liturgy and tradition, we can very quickly find ourselves invited to walk through a great deal of smoke that has surrounded this question.
Once we have the untangled linguistic frames in view, our understanding of the Trinity can develop more simply and deeply. Unmixing the two analogies from each other and then setting them side by side, we are invited to coherently, intuitively and rationally compare and contrast them. Deep insight, both explicit and intuitive, then arises as the pair of conceptual systems dance and play off of each other. This is the general form by which Scripture teaches us, by the way: its dyadic invitation to wisdom is present at every scale in the Bible, from the couplets of poetry on up to the account of the two temples. In this pair of takes on the Trinity, we come to understand God as the One who orders reality with lifegiving words, and whose life is an act of truthful disclosure. And so we find ourselves at dawn: the dawn of all, the dawn of all life. Let’s walk toward this horizon and see what comes into view.
If you’re still here, we will look more closely at the three crucial distinctions involved in speaking, as well as in life-giving. For speaking, we have the logically necessary relationship between Speaker, Word and Breath. For bringing life, we have the logically necessary relationship (granted human biology, the image of God) of a Father, Son and Mother. The Speaker-based analogy of the Trinity is at the forefront in Genesis 1, although the life-giving analogy is powerfully there in the background. Meanwhile, God as life-giver is fleshed out at the start of each of the four Gospels even as the Speaker-based perspective persists beautifully. So the Trinity comes to us primarily from Genesis 1, Matthew 1, Mark 1, Luke 1 and John 1. This pattern isn’t a coincidence. Just as loving enemies instead of doing violence is fundamental to Christian discipleship, the Trinity is fundamental to understanding why the words of Jesus properly order our souls, if we hear and heed them. Understanding the Trinity helps us understand how, at least in a Christian context, we see that the commands of Jesus carry just and non-coercive authority, bringing us Life in the fullest sense that is possible for beings like us: aionic life.
So let’s start with Genesis 1. The first word that names God is the masculine plural “Elohim”, although the corresponding verb is singular here at the start. The first naming of Elohim, then, barely hints at plurality but emphasizes God’s unity. This plural doesn’t indicate plurality so much as majesty: the royal we. So we begin with the Unity of God at the center of our language, plurality at the edge. Fascinatingly, Elohim breaks out into a plural form at a significant moment in Genesis 1:26. There, Elohim say (yes, Elohim say), “Let us make adam in our image…So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Here the language crosses back and forth from plural to singular to plural. Recall as well that in Hebrew, a group of a thousand women with one man in it is referred to with the masculine “they” rather than the feminine “they”. If “Elohim say” this can mean that the Father, Son and Mother say, “Let us make adam in our image.” Here we find a profound playfulness around the precise nature of Elohim. The word’s submerged power to indicate plurality is evoked (and then withdrawn) precisely in the verbally ordered generation of humanity in God’s image. The combination of language and biology also plays out in the way Genesis designates the universally shared human vocation, male and female alike, of governing the Earth. That is what it means to bear the image of God: to be the living idols of the living God, beings that must not surrender our agency to dead things like stone statues or flags.
The second word that names God in the Bible is the feminine word “Ruach”. Now grammatical gender doesn’t have sexual implications when naming non-persons, but if the Holy Spirit is a person (as in Christian thought) then the femininity of this noun is significant. To deny the significance of the feminine noun by which Scripture reveals God to us would be to deny the personhood of the Holy Spirit. And just as the first people to declare the resurrection of Jesus were women, the first revelation of a single person of the Trinity is the feminine Ruach. Ruach carries the meaning of both “Breath” and “Spirit” and is importantly associated with “fluttering” here. This fluttering is an intense quavering, like that of a passionate voice or the groans of childbirth, the dramatic swing of vulture’s wings or the knocking of Jeremiah’s knees as the power of the Word of God fills him. In a clear reference back to Genesis 1, the Holy Spirit is also routinely represented as this fluttering, quaking, groaning dove in the Gospels. She is peaceful where a vulture scavenges, but do not think She is a tame vulture. She is the power that transforms death into life. Even as the Speaker analogy is at the forefront here, it is significant that the Spirit is the principle of life itself, and that the plurality of Elohim is evoked precisely as God says, “let us make humanity (male and female) in our image.”
Now let’s take some time to really think about what’s always already assumed if we say that someone is speaking. There is a Speaker, but they aren’t a Speaker at all unless there is also a Word spoken. (Word can also stand in for any amount of language.) But there’s no such thing as a Speaker who only has a Word in their mind: they must also have Breath so that they can breathe out the word. If Breath is absent then the Speaker is also absent, but if a Speaker is present then there logically has to be Breath and Word as well. Without a Word, the Breath is the groans, birthpanglike, of the Spirit interceding for us, or of tongues beyond words expressing the ineffable. Both have profound value. But it is truly in their unity that Word and Spirit, proceeding from the Speaker, create.
All of this sounds like it is unfolding in time when I describe it, so an important clarification is necessary. If we just imagine a person who is about to speak, we might say, “They can still be a speaker and just not be speaking at the moment.” That’s true, but it’s not how we’re thinking when we’re talking about truly timeless (aidios) realities. (A basic level of familiarity with the relationship between the Greek words aidios, aion and aionios can help you in this discussion. If this isn’t clear to you, you can read this for a fuller exploration of the topic.) When considering what is aidios, there is no before and after, and so there are no moments. However, the discussion proceeds in a certain logical order, which reflects one of the two distinct senses of procession that deeply shapes the traditions around the Trinity. This procession can be called a “logical procession” because we have to talk about the relationships between the concepts in some particular order. We have to work through them in time because we’re time-bound beings, but that’s our limitation and not something inherent in the concept. This sounds a bit strange, but we’re actually all familiar with it. We think this way all the time. For example, math also gets laid out in order, but the intent is similarly timeless. We can say that 3 + 4 = 7, but in a basic mathematical sense this is the same as saying 4 + 3 = 7 or 7= 3 + 4. There’s an order to the numbers, and the order can matter in some ways, but it isn’t a fundamentally temporal ordering. Rather, the ‘temporality’ is an incidental result of our own limits. This is also how we talk about the Trinity in an aidios sense: time is irrelevant, and the order of presentation isn’t about an ordering in time. It’s just a necessary inconvenience involved in being time-bound creatures, like us, talking about timeless truths.
Nonetheless, there is a real flow to the logic: we start with a Speaker, and from that Speaker we deduce that they must Say something. And Saying involves both the intelligible clarity of a Word and the power of speech in the Breath. In a similar but only analogical way, we might also suggest that the Speaker is like the 7 that sums up the 3 and the 4. Or we might suggest that God is like the whole statement (3+4=7) and that each term is like one of the persons of the Trinity. These get at the timeless and logical nature of the distinction and the deeper unity. But like all analogies, this also breaks down. No, a Speaker is not simply the sum of the Word and the Breath, any more than Breath and Word are reducible to a Speaker. And no, the truth of the statement doesn’t simply rest in the entirety of the statement: it is also there in each element. Or more precisely, in the relationships between the parts, and only by that relationship, can we apprehend the whole. The system of definitions involved in Speaker-Word-Breath forms a timeless logical whole that can only be articulated through their combined distinctness and unity. That’s the indissolvable, timeless, equally mutually interdependent, logical unity that is assumed in the simple words “God said,” there in Genesis. So there is a fundamental equality here, even as Word and Breath proceed logically and necessarily from the single origin of “Speaker”. So now we understand something of this triune Speaker. And?
And God said, “let there be light” and the universe was born. Note that the word “and” can be used to indicate a temporal process, but it doesn’t have to. It can simply add more to our understanding.
Which brings us very close to our Greek scriptures as well. In all of this processional logic, we are trying to get nearer to the relationships that make up a whole. That includes looking closely (with our minds’ eye) to see what transpires ‘between’ one concept and another with the greatest resolution possible. I would suggest that there is always more between, more intermediation to be explored. At least that’s how it is for beautiful glimmering shards like us: finite beings invited to run and play in the endless halls of God’s home. The quest for broader scope and the quest for narrower precision are an endless fractalloid adventure, at least for those of us who have found our secure base for exploration in God. Now I will gesture toward the ever-deepening exploration of intermediation (of narrowing precision) by drawing together the Speaker and Father analogies more tightly, showing how the two overlap and mutually clarify each other. In this way, they express a core reality that isn’t reducible to either analogy. In this way, the pair of analogies reveals the underlying concept more clearly, even as it helps us avoid being captured by either map as if it were the territory itself.
We can describe the activity of a Speaker like this: they hold and are held in life by their Breath already, and they have an invisible and unheard Word in their mind already. Then they take that Word and somehow they place it within their Breath. Friction is involved. And so, the Word proceeds from the Speaker into the Breath and then the Breath carries the Word out as a sound wave that others can encounter and experience publicly. The Word from the Speaker moves from imperceptible to perceptible by the power of the Breath that carries it. Now in ancient terms, we can describe a Father, Son and Mother in precisely the same way. The Father, the Son (who is his seed) and the Mother are there. And then the Father’s seed proceeds out from him and goes into the Mother. Only after the Father and seed (the Son) have proceeded into the Mother does the Son go out from the Mother in a different, non-formational sense. Notice that contrary to a lot of contemporary peoples’ intuitions, this relationship does not mean that the Son proceeds (in the biological and generative sense) from the Mother when he is born. Rather, the Father’s seed is already understood to be the Son, in a timeless teleological sense. Paul, for example, must be using seed in this sense in Galatians 3:29: “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” The Mother is not intermediate between the Son who is the seed in this biological metaphor; rather, the Father and Son both proceed into the Mother who completes the procession within herself. In this way, the idea of an analogical Eternal Mother and Eternal Breath both fit the Latin filioque with perfect precision. And here we’re reminded of how constantly Jesus referred to himself as a seed that would need to die so that it would not remain a single grain. Or to put it another way: the Eternal (aidios and aion) Word is the seed of an idea that is carried in the Eternal (aidios and aion) Breath , and only in this can there be an Eternal (aidios and aion) Speaker at all.
Now the analogy between Speaker-Word-Breath and Father-Son-Mother is very straightforward, although something different has started to happen as we’ve moved from pure logic into this second, more detailed version of the analogy. The analogy has moved from being purely timeless (aidios) and constituted through pure logical relations and has become ‘eternal’ in a more timeish sense. We’re no longer talking about true timelessness, which God must also hold, but of time itself taken as a whole.
The word “aion” describes this more timelike eternity. It comes from Greek and it simply means lifetime. It’s usage here is rooted in Plato’s use. The word “lifetime” gains more meaning because of how much it can hold conceptually. To speak of a lifetime is to speak of a life from the perspective of its completion: you don’t know the whole story of a life until you get to the end. Call no one happy until they’re dead. In this very specific sense, aion is beyond time: it looks at time from a non-sequential perspective, as a frozen and completed whole. In describing the entire lifetime of the cosmos (precisely what is in view in a Creation narrative!) we are also talking about the Big Aion: all of the time of this order (cosmos) taken together, from the standpoint of its completion and end.
This might seem a bit strange, but we actually use this ‘aion’ mode of thinking and talking all the time. For example, consider how obnoxious it would be for me to insist on talking this way: the not-yet-father sent his not-yet-seed into the not-yet-mother and then they became a father, son and mother. When we talk about life we naturally talk about a process from the standpoint of its end (telos). This means that we routinely speak as if we are looking backwards from the perspective of a completed process, and it would seem strangely pedantic to insist on doing otherwise in normal speech. When doing technical sequencing work in biology, we need to move away from this normal mode of speech and be annoyingly pedantic to gain more insight. Still, when summarizing what we’ve learned by looking more closely at the mediations, we naturally and appropriately revert to teleological language. Teleological language is how we intuitively integrate and synthesize an understanding of processes, their tendencies, and their outcomes (unless the process is interrupted). This is why a teleological shorthand is constantly used by biologists, even as it also holds the moment-to-moment mapping of processes that make the ‘not yet’ explicit alongside the ‘already’ of the goal.
Now to be clear, the eternal Father-Son-Mother relationship in the Trinity is decidedly not temporal either, and this is true in both the sense that it speaks of an aion (lifetime and teleology) and in the sense that we are talking about a truly aidios (time-independent, utterly timeless) relationship. The purely aidios and logical expression of this relationship retains a kind of deep priority even as we slowly begin to contemplate what it means for God to draw near to living, time-experiencing beings like us, generating and revealing and then speaking into our lives like a good Father. Nonetheless, precisely because the Trinity reveals God as the One who draws close and condescends to beings like us, we can also describe this nearing with teleological analogies to “lifetime”. Our understanding of the lifetime of the cosmos in relationship to the lifetime of Jesus the eternal word does not subtract away the aidios, but is instead held within the aidios, in love.
It is important to appreciate how the idea of a complete lifetime mediates between the truly timeless and time as a sequence. A lifetime is “outside of time” or “eternal” in the sense that it is beyond sequence, like a container is beyond its contents. Your lifetime holds all of the moments of your life, as they go from one to the next to the next to the next. But the lifetime of the cosmos doesn’t arise from putting one cosmic life after another; instead, it is made up of moments and hours and days and years. (Yes, I’m aware that after Einstein this is a naive view of time.) Still, the concept of a lifetime/aion brings us closer to sequence than aidios did. Aidios doesn’t have sequences of time in view at all, but aion is beyond sequence just enough to hold and structure the whole sequence of a lifetime. Importantly, the more ‘biological’ kind of procession comes into view when we try to look closer and get more resolution on what is happening within the process of an aion’s formation. It is also important that this notion of “biological” procession retains the logical relations as well: Speaker-Word-Breath and Father-Son-Spirit are both, first and foremost, aidios relations. The “biological” understanding of the Trinity just helps add the concept of “lifetime” to our aidios understanding of God. When we think in purely aidios terms, we understand how the other two persons proceed by mutual logical necessity from the first person. When we consider the lifetime of the cosmos, we further illuminate the process that moves from the Speaker to the Word and then from the Speaker and the Word to the Breath. This second mode of description, the aion one, corresponds best to the Latin Church’s filioque, which holds that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Misunderstandings around the filioque are often cited as the theological rationale for the Great Schism between East and West. Ultimately, though, I don’t think the issue is about whether these understandings can be reconciled well. That isn’t so hard. The harder questions all involve our hearts. Does the church want to be reconciled, or do we all want to hold to illusions of righteousness, even though this false righteousness is nothing but the rotting rags of wars long past?
Which brings us to the birth narratives of Jesus, the point of unity who continues to beckon us into the process of dying to ourselves at all scales: personal, national, denominational, and more.
What Happens in the Trinity Doesn’t Stay in the Trinity
Life has a way of breaking the boundaries we sometimes try to put on it, and this includes everyone from babies conceived in Vegas to the Son who was born to Mary. All four of the Gospel accounts draw on the language of Genesis 1 in illuminating ways that carry our account of Creation and New Creation forward. With the births of Jesus (both of Mary and his baptismal rebirth) we are once again at dawn, a new dawn. Let’s walk toward this horizon as well and see what comes into view. First, let’s consider a scene that is presented in each of the four Gospels: the baptism of Jesus. With what has preceded here, you’ll be equipped to pick out how extensively these passages draw on, synthesize and carry forward the interplay between the Speaker-Word-Breath analogy and the Father-Son-Mother analogy. Many fine differences can be noted between the accounts, but the similarity that unites all four presentations is the deep interplay between these two beautiful, coherent, and powerful analogies for God.
Mark, in its compactness, provides us with the most succinct summary of the narrative, here in Mark 1:1–13 (NASB):
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“Behold, I send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make his paths straight.’”
John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And all the country of Judea was going out to him, and all the people of Jerusalem; and they were being baptized by him in the Jordan River, confessing their sins. John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist, and his diet was locusts and wild honey. And he was preaching, and saying, “After me One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to stoop down and untie the thong of His sandals. “I baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Immediately coming up out of the water, He saw the heavens opening, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon Him; and a voice came out of the heavens: “You are My beloved Son, in You I am well-pleased.”
Immediately the Spirit impelled Him to go out into the wilderness. And He was in the wilderness forty days being tempted by Satan; and He was with the wild beasts, and the angels were ministering to Him.
And here is Matthew 3:1 to 4:11 (NASB), contracting the narrative at points and expanding at others:
Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said,
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make his paths straight!’”
Now John himself had a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist; and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then Jerusalem was going out to him, and all Judea and all the district around the Jordan; and they were being baptized by him in the Jordan River, as they confessed their sins.
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? “Therefore bear fruit in keeping with repentance; and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father’; for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham. “The axe is already laid at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
“As for me, I baptize you with water for repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. “His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
Then Jesus arrived from Galilee at the Jordan, coming to John to be baptized by him. But John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I have need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?” But Jesus answering said to him, “Permit it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he permitted Him. After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.”
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He then became hungry. And the tempter came and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took Him into the holy city and had Him stand on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down; for it is written:
‘He will command his angels concerning you’;
and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”
Jesus said to him, “On the other hand, it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”
Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory; and he said to Him, “All these things I will give You, if You fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.” Then the devil left Him; and behold, angels came and began to minister to Him.
And here is Luke 3:1–22, which does more to situate the baptism explicitly in its broader sociopolitical context:
Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness. And he came into all the district around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins; as it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet,
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make his paths straight.
Every ravine will be filled,
and every mountain and hill will be brought low,
The crooked will become straight,
and the rough roads smooth;
and all flesh will see the salvation of God.’”
So he began saying to the crowds who were going out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? “Therefore bear fruits in keeping with repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham. “Indeed the axe is already laid at the root of the trees; so every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
And the crowds were questioning him, saying, “Then what shall we do?” And he would answer and say to them, “The man who has two tunics is to share with him who has none; and he who has food is to do likewise.” And some tax collectors also came to be baptized, and they said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.” Some soldiers were questioning him, saying, “And what about us, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Do not take money from anyone by force, or accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages.”
Now while the people were in a state of expectation and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he was the Christ, John answered and said to them all, “As for me, I baptize you with water; but One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. “His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into His barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
So with many other exhortations he preached the gospel to the people. But when Herod the tetrarch was reprimanded by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the wicked things which Herod had done, Herod also added this to them all: he locked John up in prison.
Now when all the people were baptized, Jesus was also baptized, and while He was praying, heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came out of heaven, “You are My beloved Son, in You I am well-pleased.”
Finally there is John 1:1–34, which resembles Mark in how closely the language calls back to Genesis 1, even as it diverges profoundly from the other three in other ways. Here, notice that the implicit Word in the Speaker-Word-Breath Trinity is made explicit, bringing to fruition something buried but always present there in the “God Said” of Genesis 1. Also notice that while there is no birth narrative here in John, the Gospel refers to it by talking about the Word made flesh.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
There came a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to testify about the Light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the Light, but he came to testify about the Light.
There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. John testified about Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.’” For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.
This is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent to him priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” And he confessed and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” They asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” And he said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you, so that we may give an answer to those who sent us? What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am a voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as Isaiah the prophet said.
Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him, and said to him, “Why then are you baptizing, if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” John answered them saying, “I baptize in water, but among you stands One whom you do not know. “It is He who comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” These things took place in Bethany beyond the Jordan, where John was baptizing.
The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! “This is He on behalf of whom I said, ‘After me comes a Man who has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.’ “I did not recognize Him, but so that He might be manifested to Israel, I came baptizing in water.” John testified saying, “I have seen the Spirit descending as a dove out of heaven, and He remained upon Him. “I did not recognize Him, but He who sent me to baptize in water said to me, ‘He upon whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining upon Him, this is the One who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.’ “I myself have seen, and have testified that this is the Son of God.”
It would take a much longer piece to draw out the many, many ways in which these narratives build on the account of the Trinity provided already. For our purposes, I’ll assume that for the attentive reader the power of the double-analogy Trinitarian framework has already delighted and encouraged you. For others, I appreciate your perspective, and I hope that at least I have given you something to gently roll over in your mind.
With that deep pattern firmly in view, we can also more fully appreciate what is really happening between the Holy Spirit and Mary in the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. An important background consideration here is that the Hebrew Bible contains an important anti-type against which the Marian birth narratives shine brightly: the account of the Watchers and the Nephilim provides a deep and shadowy background against which the arrival of Jesus contrasts so sharply. Here, I’ll draw on Amy Richter’s scholarship in “Enoch and the Gospel of Matthew”. While a great deal more can be said, the basic idea is that fallen angels impregnate human women, and their gigantic and monstrous children bring war, death, make-up, the use of women as prostitutes, hackish astrologers and curses into the world. These monstrous giant children, the Nephilim, echo the Big Men of Babylon, men claiming to be demi-gods like Gilgamesh and his many imitators.
In stark contrast, Jesus is not the half-breed result of some angel’s transgression. He is, rather, the fully human and fully divine Eternal Word and Eternal Son. The Holy Spirit is not an angelic man who comes and impregnates Mary, like the Watchers. Instead, the Holy Spirit is involved in an eternal process of prior generation that is complete within herself, bearing a boundless and ultimately triune creative power that spills over into all of Creation, through the Word, by the power of the Spirit, all from the Speaker. Unlike the Nephilim who are born of transgression, the Word eternally pre-exists His enfleshed birth through Mary, just as he pre-exists John. In other words, the Son has an Aidios Mother as well, the Mother of Him even as She is the Mother of the whole universe: the Holy Spirit. Through Jesus Christ, Mary is truly the mother of God, just as we are truly the siblings of God through Jesus. Still, just as the rest of us are adopted into the family of God through faithfulness to Christ’s ordering of our souls, Mary is the surrogate mother whose voluntary and uncoerced faithfulness brought him to birth. Mary is not the third person of the Trinity, but the Holy Spirit is. Adoption and surrogacy analogously map the familial relationship that we have with the Trinity, through Jesus: we are contingent time-beings, forever adopted into family by the utterly boundless God who is analogous to Speaker-Word-Breath and Father-Son-Mother.
Importantly, notice that the Father explicitly does not enter into Mary in the way the Watchers entered into the women of Genesis 6. Rather, the Holy Spirit fills her in much the same way that the presence of God fills the Temple. In an intimately connected way, Christ is born in us as we are built up through Christian discipleship. In this way we become a living Temple in which God’s Word is truly spoken by the power of God’s Breath. In other words, God’s Son is born in us by the power of the Mother of the Son.
And so we have Matthew 1:18 (NASB):
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah was as follows: when His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be pregnant by (ἐκ, out of) the Holy Spirit.
And Luke 1:35 (NASB):
The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon (επί, on or to) you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow (επισκιάσει) you; for that reason also the holy Child will be called the Son of God.
Notice that the word “overshadow” here is also present in Matthew’s transfiguration narrative in a way that also calls back to his baptism. In this way it connects the rebirth of baptism with the importance of the non-violently ordering Word, Jesus. We can’t help but connect this overshadowing cloud with the presence of God, descending on the Temple. This is not to say that the overshadowing by the Most High describes the Spirit rather than the Father at work, any more than the spoken words of affirmation for Jesus represent the Spirit and not the Father. Rather, wherever the Word is spoken and wherever the Son is present or is presented, it is the Father working in the Mother through the Son who we perceive. And so of course this overshadowing also calls to mind the Spirit hovering over the waters of Creation, the power by which illumination bursts forth.
Matthew 17:1–8:
There, it says: After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.
Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters — one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”
While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them (επεεσκίασεν), and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”
When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.
In this section, we have carried our basic Trinitarian analogies into our reading of the beginnings of the Gospels. I’d like to close by offering another gift that you might also enjoy reflecting on here. Traditional icons portraying the baptism of Jesus by John have a lot of wonderful details in them. If you’re attentive, you may have wondered who those strange people swimming at the feet of Jesus might be. They are personifications of the sea and of the Jordan river, where Jesus was baptized. They represent a Christ-centered reading of this line from Psalm 114: “The sea looked and fled, the Jordan turned back.” Read in the traditionally Christian Christocentric way, the meaning comes to involve God’s non-violent order overcoming chaos, traditionally represented by the sea. He doesn’t overcome this chaos by remaining aloof, but instead by moving through it: it is through his passage through death and rebirth that the seed who dies is reborn, giving rise to countless others who imitate his model of death and rebirth. In light of the virgin birth it is also worth contemplating the fact that Jesus was what he described as a “eunuch for the Kingdom of God”. He was not fundamentally born of Mary’s biological fertility, but of the Holy Spirit’s limitless generative power, the same power of the inspired Word that gives Him countless adoptive siblings. That is to say, countless other daughters and sons of the Father, by the power of the Spirit. The non-biological and adoptive reproduction strategy of the church in history therefore snaps into view: we become children of the Father by hearing and heeding His Word, carried by His Breath.
I’d invite you to meditate on Psalm 113 and 114 then, as a preparation for the movement from aion, the cosmic lifetime that we are slowly moving on from now, and into the endlessly productive aionic imitation of the lifetime of Jesus.
Praise the LORD!
Praise, O servants of the LORD,
Praise the name of the LORD.Blessed be the name of the LORD
From this time forth and forever.From the rising of the sun to its setting
The name of the LORD is to be praised.The LORD is high above all nations;
His glory is above the heavens.Who is like the LORD our God,
Who is enthroned on high,Who humbles Himself to behold
The things that are in heaven and in the earth?He raises the poor from the dust
And lifts the needy from the ash heap,To make them sit with princes,
With the princes of His people.He makes the barren woman abide in the house
As a joyful mother of children.Praise the LORD!
When Israel came out of Egypt,
Jacob from a people of foreign tongue,
Judah became God’s sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.
The sea looked and fled,
the Jordan turned back;
the mountains leaped like rams,
the hills like lambs.
Why was it, sea, that you fled?
Why, Jordan, did you turn back?
Why, mountains, did you leap like rams,
you hills, like lambs?
Tremble, earth, at the presence of the Lord,
at the presence of the God of Jacob,
who turned the rock into a pool,
the hard rock into springs of water.
As the Word of love that turns our rock-hard hearts to water, Jesus raises children of Abraham from lifeless stones when others imitate his own baptism: a rebirth and death rooted in the cruciform renunciation of violence and taking up of enemy love.
This last bit of reading brings us to the end of baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit, a formula which precisely collapses our two analogical frameworks just as this formula collapses it: “The Father begets the Son and spirates the Spirit.” The collapse is deeply appropriate, and in many ways is more appropriate than the disambiguation I’ve engaged in here. Still, its profound propriety is only fully understood when paired with another appropriate mixing: “The Speaker speaks the Word by the Mother.” The first mixing is one of ascent. Beginning with our lifetime as a basis, it carries us up from hearing about the aion of Jesus, through the aion of Creation (which occurs through the Son) and on to the aidios Father. Correspondingly, it most intuitively begins with the Greek Christan Scriptures and leads us back to Genesis 1. The second mixing is one of descent: it carries our understanding down from Genesis 1, beginning with the aidios Speaker placing the aidios Word into the Mother, groaning with the birthpangs of creation until the Word emerges. And so we descend in our analogy from the Speaker, following the Word through every being and to His birth, through Mary and through it all by the truth-bearing power of the Mother. This leads to a methodological point that needs to be clarified before we move into our final act.
A common complaint against the notion that the Holy Spirit is our proper analogical Mother is that this formula is not found explicitly in Scripture. My methodological response is this: Trinitarian theology is always apocalyptic. This means that it is always revelatory and that it always proceeds on an assumption that both of the books (Scripture and Nature, that is) are written for the sake of bridelike unveiling. That is to say, all is written so that we can be seen and come to understand ourselves as we truly are: utterly beloved by God from before the foundation of all. The complaint against the Motherhood of the Holy Spirit is, simply, a complaint that this truth is veiled (however thinly). Of course it is veiled a bit, but only a bit, and this is appropriate for all of the obvious reasons. These are Hebrew texts and Aramaic traditions at their core, after all, and sexual modesty has a high and proper place. In a modest context one thing (that holds two things) happens: sexual generation is spoken of indirectly, by implication, and therefore it can be spoken of constantly. As with the central images of bridegroom and bride, by which the church understands ourself properly, the generative and procreative analogy is appropriate. The apocalyptic mode of reading that Christian Scripture and tradition demand, on their own terms, is well-described by Father Behr in the following terms: it has a cryptic aspect that requires of us a mode of reading that is inspired, uniform and contemporary. The doctrine of the Trinity, in any form whatsoever, has always required a kind of disciplined, apocalyptic, abductive reading of an entire Christian canon, whichever canon it may be. So yes, the tradition has long affirmed that the Trinity is to be found in Scripture, and that is precisely where it has always been found historically. But only through a process of careful unveiling. What this unveils, methodologically, is that the complaint against the Motherhood of the Holy Spirit on the grounds that this is veiled is, precisely, a complaint against all Christian Scripture and our tradition, especially the Trinity itself. What those advancing this argument truly hate isn’t just this, but the fact that the Trinity is revealed though unveiling and that our Scripture is ancient scripture. For my part, I stand on the other side of that: I adore Scripture and tradition and love that this is how God have (yes, have) revealed Himself to us in our generation.
So look again, with fresh eyes, toward God, and at Creation and at yourself. And then, if you’d like, look again at our diagram with fresh eyes as we spiral to our end.
Aionic Imitation
A core Christian belief that is confusing to many might be expressed like this: we hold that time itself is shattered when it rushes against Jesus. It isn’t that Jesus threw himself against the wheel of history and failed, as Rome and its cross would always have the story go. Rather, Christ has retaken time itself in a new way, at least among us who have heard and heeded and seen.
Our way of speaking about time and marking time is fundamentally anchored around Him, which is why it is the year 2022 as I write this. Other Year 0s have been tried and have even been established here and there, in an effort to imitate his calendrical accomplishment. Nonetheless, we continue to mark our rotations around the sun based on our slow spiraling toward the Son. The ancient calendar could get as far as the year on the basis of astronomy, but it grasped for some greater principle than the life and death of an Emperor that could hold the years. This container, too, we found in Jesus. And this bit of Christian triumphalism, ironic and strange as cruciform triumph always has to be, brings us nicely to the relationship between aion, a lifetime, and our own aionic imitation and reflection of the aion.
Recall that for Plato, the aidios is truly beyond time, while aion is ‘eternal’ in the sense that it encompasses the whole of time. In this sense, it is beyond sequence. We count time by lining up apparent rotations of the sun, the regular veilings and unveilings of the moon, the processions of the stars, and our own journey around the sun. But as Plato knew, we have to contain this counting in something larger and uncounted, the whole of time, the Big Aion of the cosmos. (That which is One is not yet counted.) And so we are carried from the aidios (the zero) to the Big Aion, and from there to the Big Aion lived out as a single aion on Earth: the life of the enemy loving Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. You don’t get a container for all the years unless the container is singular, and so it is his life alone that comes to hold the years. His day is the Day of Days, his year is the Year of Years, and so on.
But since that life, a lot of people have been confused by a question that seems to indicate failure on the part of Jesus: “Then what?” Because the claims that surrounded Jesus and which enabled Him to establish the world’s most enduring and widespread Year 0 were enormous. He was the Son of David who would rule until he had brought the gifts of all nations into the halls of Judah’s Temple, the Son of Abraham who would fulfill the promise to bless all the nations and give Abraham children as numerous as the stars, and the One who would bring peace and unity to all. Yet as I write this, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church are in a schism that draws to mind Samaria and Judah by way of comparison. I would mark the beginning of the invasion on Tuesday, 2/22/22, the day that our forerunners named for the god of single combat, Tyr. Putin seems to have gotten what he wanted from his timing: this is single combat, at least so far. Tyr was assimilated to Mars as the one who rules over all war, but there is a real sense in which that monster is with us still. You don’t need to be superstitious to understand what I am saying here, analogically, or how I am using ancient frameworks to talk about today. Where is our Messiah now, and where has He been over the millennia? I believe the best answer is that he is aionically present, and this needs to be unpacked to understand how significant it is.
In the close of Matthew, Jesus gives us order. That is not to say that he orders us like a military commander would, but instead that he gently and powerfully orders our souls, precisely as the Word in Genesis gently orders Creation. He gives us order through the new birth of baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but that’s not where it stops. He gives us words of truth in his own foundational covenantal teaching, there in the neglected corners of Matthew 5–7 and Luke 6, the Sermons on the Mount and Plain. The same Gospels that provide us with the narratives of explicit birth by the Holy Spirit also provide us with the most explicit covenantal ordering by the Word, Breathed out. For Plato and for philosophically literate people after him, aionic (aionios in Greek) was an intermediate term between The Big Aion and the emergence of sequential time. From Philo of Alexandria to Paul and the author of Matthew, there were many Jewish authors from the period who demonstrated their profound capacity to synthesize both Hebrew and Greek wisdom. For example, I believe we find skillful use of the aion-aionic procession from Plato’s Timaeus in Matthew 24–25’s own aion-aionic procession as well.
With all of this together, we can soulfully read and so hold together the narrative arc of Matthew in a Trinitarian way. In this way we can understand the Gospel as a revelation of the divine procession in and into history: the arrival of the Messiah who is the Son of God. The Eternal Word from before Creation is borne by the Holy Spirit to Mary and born of her. He models the lifetime of the entire created universe in his own lifetime, in his watery baptism with its bursting light above, in his healings that teach and his teachings that heal, in his enemy-loving death on a cross and in his resurrection victory. In his resurrection he steps out of the watery chaos and rises to the right hand of God. There, in his position of absolute authority, the Word and Son invites us to aionically imitate his aion. This is not only a compelling invitation into a beautiful (if hard) life, but into the very life of all.
This properly Trinitarian reading of Matthew’s Gospel also invites us to embrace the modestly, but not subtly, veiled Motherhood of the Holy Spirit. It also profoundly resolves our basic conundrums around the timing of God. The word “aionic” enters the philosophical and literary scene with the landscape of the cosmos in view, as it zooms in to the simplicity of our lifetimes. Having stretched “lifetime” to describe the lifetime of the entire cosmos, Plato needed to bring this grandeur back down. Aionic was the right word for the job, but its specialized use meant that it always had a vastness to its scope even as it was a novel and unvastening word. New words have a way of inviting you to think and synthesize in new ways. Aionic, as the adjective of aion, is perfect for the job of bridging from the general form or model of a single lifetime to its many imitations and copies, giving rise to something more like sequence (because it is multiple) but still not yet sequential (because it is not yet locked in the same rigidly legionnaire order as the days). Aionic, then, speaks to an imitation of the lifetime that constitutes and carries forward time, but only insofar as lifetime refers to The Big Aion, the lifetime of the cosmic order marked out by the vastness of space.
So who can establish an enduring Year 0? It must be someone whose lifetime is understood to hold the lifetime of the cosmos itself, someone bigger than the stars. It must be someone who is not only another god like Tyr, who still gets his Tuesdays, but someone who can hold all of the Tuesdays that will ever be. And here we should pause and consider the uncompromising vastness of the basic Christian claim. We proclaim that Jesus, who died interceding for the forgiveness of his killers, is also the ordering principle of the entire cosmos, and is the source of all life. However many eons of eons it may have taken for life to burst forth from the womb of the cosmos, He is the organizing principle behind the life-bearing universe we inhabit. Among other things, this necessarily implies that his principle of overcoming deadness and violence through love is an ultimate principle of our cosmos. The only kind of life that could ever manifest this Life must be something very like the sad but triumphant life of Jesus. Through his birth, life, teaching in word and deed, death and resurrection, he invites us into the family of God and calls all of us his siblings.
And this provides us with a fascinating way of re-reading this bit of Enoch 107, to pick just one redolent example of a relevant text from the period. People would have read this and drawn from it expectations about the Messiah in his final generation:
And I saw written on them that generation upon generation shall transgress, till a generation of righteousness arises, and transgression is destroyed and sin passes away from the earth, and all manner of good comes upon it.
The expectation was that the rectification of the sins of many generations, the not-quite-sequential sequence of lifetimes, would be completed by a single generation. The book of Enoch also expected this generation to enact its orders with violence, or at least it used superficially violent language to describe the final generation’s work. Followers of Jesus follow Paul’s example and take up this violent imagery like a sword, but only to subvert it: our words are our only swords.
But what if the life of the only Son of God is imitated aionically, so that siblings are always being adopted into the family of God? Such a relationship is equalizing in the most radical sense possible: not that it makes those siblings equal to God by their imitation, but it draws them into an ever-equalizing relationship with God. This also involves an equality of time across merely biological generations. Through this kind of adoption, we all become part of the same, single, generation. After all, aren’t you a member of the generation of your siblings? In this way, the faithful imitation of Jesus also introduces an equalization of time into the tradition of Christian faith as well, at the most basic level. Our tradition must therefore also be ever-new, precisely because our forerunners in the faith are not our fathers. We only have one Father, and the siblings of Jesus are those who are faithful to his covenant as the years turn to millenia. In this, even the apostles are our siblings, and their familial quarreling is ours. Over this aionic family, this final singular generation, the Father is always speaking into us and through us by (beside) the Holy Spirit:
This is my Son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!
Listen closely to the voice of Jesus, the Word, whispering behind this text. Listen to the Aramaic background, as attested by the development of Syriac, which unavoidably carries the implication that we will listen and so become non-coercively ordered by Him. The opportunity is always there. Any person can enter into this aionic life easily through baptism, an extremely brief rebirth. His baptism becomes ours, as He initiates all the lifetimes of our transformation from violence to enemy love, from hoarding wealth to solidarity with the poor, and from slander and abuse into the work of reconciliation. In hearing this, we hear the Speaker’s perfect silence carried in power by the Mother.
So what is stopping us? That is the question after all. I think it is one to be asked seriously, in the hope that each of us will work to answer it in order to understand our next step.
Yes, precisely. What, if anything, is stopping us from stepping into the Life? Are there ways God might be inviting you to pass through those obstacles?