Participatory Eschatology
We are the people God is waiting for
“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” - Matthew 11:29 (NRSV)
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” - Philippians 2:5 (NRSV)
“Whereby he [Jesus] has given us his precious and majestic promises, so that through these you may become communicants in the divine nature, having escaped the decay that is in the cosmos on account of desire.” - 2 Peter 1:4 (The New Testament: A Translation)
“The coheir of Christ is the one who comes to be in unity and delights in contemplation together with Christ.” - Evagrius of Pontus, Kephalaia Gnostika 4.8.
“Salvation means full realization or, in traditional terms, divinization, and divinization occurs only in union with the divine – whose symbol in Christian language is Christ. – Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man, p. 147
Like a good rabbi, Jesus offers the image of a yoke to describe our relationship with him. The metaphor of a farmer yoking a new ox to an experienced ox, so that the new ox will learn how to move consistent with the farmer’s direction, is commonly found in the rabbinic tradition. It is a way to describe how the disciple learns from the teacher: not simply by intellectual comprehension of the teaching or trusting the teacher, but by embodied participation in the way of life of the teacher. Jesus invites us to take up his yoke so that we might find sabbath rest, peaceful abiding in the divine life; he invites us to wake-up on the inside of the life of God.
St. Paul will employ various figures of speech to describe this yoking: having the mind of Christ, being clothed with Christ, becoming part of the Body of Christ. These all share the theme of participation or communion with/in Jesus. St. Paul goes so far as to say that, in this way, we complete what is lacking in Jesus’ afflictions for the sake of his body, the church, and bring to fulfillment the mystery of God, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.[1]
St. Paul articulates a participatory eschatology: the salvation of the world for which we hope is realized through our participation in the mystery of Christ’s self-giving love. St. John’s Gospel describes this participatory eschatology as a sharing in Christ’s mission – doing the works that Jesus does – as we come to “abide in Christ.” We are sent into the world just as Jesus was sent into the world, for its enlightenment and sanctification.[2]
What this means is that we have a role to play in the drama of salvation. It isn’t all up to Jesus. Those of us who grew up in Protestant traditions that embraced a radically one-sided sola fide understanding of salvation may find this a bit unsettling. But it is time for us to move beyond the faith vs. works polarity and embrace a unitive understanding that is accord with the witness of scripture and the early Church Mothers and Fathers.
This unitive understanding, culminating in the Chalcedonian Christology of the 5th Century, embraced salvation as divinization, the participation of the human being in the divine energies, reconciling all things with God. Salvation is cosmic in scope. It involves nothing less than the sanctification of the universe. Matter is divinized, brought to its fulfillment. Creation and redemption are one movement in the dynamic process of apokatastasis – the reconstitution of all things.
We have bought into an “evacuation model” of salvation, as Brian McClaren describes it: salvation as escape from the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this evacuation model, Christ is separate from us and is the only real agent in history. We are simply the objects of his divine action (if we are lucky winners in the predestination lottery) allowing us to escape this world for some other. This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer complained of as “cheap grace.”
But grace and works, like creation and redemption, are all part of one divine-cosmic-human movement. There is only one reality, and we are all part of it. We are not the director of the play, but we all have our part to perform. And we can go off script. That is why our being yoked to Jesus is so important. So that we can learn and enact our part. We have work to do.
It is difficult for us to walk the middle way, integrating this grace vs. works dualism into a unified way of life. There is a kind of Christianity that sees humans as so irredeemably sinful that we have no positive role to play in salvation. Since everything depends on Jesus, we are, oddly, relieved of any responsibility for the state of the world. The result is Christians chanting, “Drill, baby, drill” because Jesus is coming soon, and the world is going to end anyway.
There is also a kind of Christianity that interprets God’s love and mercy as a kind of indifference to what we do or don’t do, since we will all be saved in the end. There is a strange kind of passivity at work here, in which we feel absolved from actively seeking the personal and communal transformation that comes through being yoked with Jesus. What we do matters. It makes a difference whether or not we mitigate suffering and resist evil. Our capacity to be of service and the consequences of our actions extend far beyond our lifetime in this dimension of reality, as part of the communion of saints.
Will all be saved in the end? That is the hope in which we live. But we share responsibility for what happens between now and then. We are co-creators of the future that God intends. We are the people that God has been waiting for.
[1] Philippians 2:5 quoted above. Cf. Galatians 3:27, I Corinthians 12:27, Colossians 1:24-29.
[2] John 14:12-14; 15:9-11; 17:18-19.