Hello Me, Docetist!

Photo by Josh Marshall on Unsplash

At the behest of a priest, I have taken up the regular practice of spending at least 10 minutes a day doing the Lectio Divina, or Holy Reading. This is the practice of meditating on scripture that dates back to monastic period and takes a number of different forms. The form I am using comes from the Universalis App, and makes use of the Gospel readings for the Mass of that day. The idea is that we not allow the Gospel to zoom past us as we move to other parts of the liturgy, but to take the time to reflect on whether we not just understand the Gospel, but also on whether we understand how the Gospel is resonating or diverging with our own experience.

One particular reading that confronted me was the Gospel reading at the beginning of this month (Matt 9:1-8), when Jesus cures a paralytic with the words “Courage…your sins are forgiven”. This statement attracts the charge of blasphemy by the Scribes and Pharisees, who ask rhetorically “who but God can forgive sins?”

The crucial line for me came when Jesus responds (Matt 9:5-7):

Now which of these is easier to say, “Your Sins are forgiven” or to say “Get up and walk”? But to prove to you that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins - He said to the paralytic - get up, and pick up your bed and go off home. And the man got up and went home.

It was reflecting on this that I realised that I have been living my life according to one of the oldest heresies, and operating as a de facto Docetist.

In the history of the ancient Church, Docetism is the heresy which arose in the first century and denied that God truly took human form, which was the precondition of a root and stem redemption of the material order.

The Gospel reminded me that, as a composite of body and soul, I lived in two orders - the material and the spiritual - both of which are addressed by Jesus’ statements “Get up and walk” and “Your sins are forgiven”. Jesus’ own rhetorical question to the rhetorical question of the Scribes and Pharisees - which is easier to say - reminded me that there is a hierarchy to these orders. The material is always subordinate to the spiritual. This is made apparent when Jesus demonstrates his power over sin precisely because he has power over the material order.

The only problem is, in my sin, I very often live my life that is based upon an inverting of that hierarchy, such that things of the temporal order come to the forefront of my mind before those of the spiritual. My reason for this is that, in my own mind, I had made a sharp division between the material and the spiritual, such that the Lord’s sole concern was his Lordship over the spiritual, leaving the material order untouched by his presence and transformative reasoning.

So of course, in my mind it would be easier for Jesus to say it would be easier to say “your sins are forgiven”, but much harder to exercise his lordship over the material order, bounded as they are by the unchangeability of fact. I realised that within myself, to ask for intervention in my history and circumstances seemed like too much to ask for, because I have lived as though God does not incarnate himself in history, and thus not exercise his mastery over our circumstances.

To this mentality, the Gospel message provided this response: it is precisely because God has lordship over the spiritual realm that gives him sovereignty over the temporal.

This Gospel passage reminded me of the need to ask God to break down that cognitive wall that separates God’s work in the spiritual sphere and his transformative work in the material. If I accept that God is Lord of all things, both visible and invisible, then I need to constantly remember both his heavenly throne, but also his incarnation in a real and physical presence, a presence that overcame the closed facts of illness, loss, paralysis, and death. The real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist is a constant reminder of this crucial coupling.

To borrow from Julian Carron in The Radiance in Your Eyes, this Eucharistic coupling brings before me a presence that not only breaks this dualism, but does so for me. To quote Carron:

[S]ince Jesus burst into history, the horizon of the lives of women and men has a presence it can cry out to, someone who responds to our cry and asks, “What do you want Me to do for you?” There is one who embraces our cry, a presence that no one can erase, a fact that happened and happens, contemporary, remaining and continuing in history.

Crucially, I am asked at the time of the consecration of the Eucharistic elements, to acknowledge this real presence in my circumstances, and also remember it. For it is this kind of remembrance that, in the words of the marxist philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was”, that is, overcomes the toxic lordship of facts over my life.

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