What Have You to Do with Us, O Son of God?
by Fr Paul O'Callaghan
Feast of SS Proclus & Hilary the Martyrs of Ancyra
Anno Domini 2020, July 12
At that time, when Jesus came to the country of the Gergesenes, two demoniacs met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way. And behold, they cried out, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God?” ~Matt. 8:28-29
Last week in my homily, I asserted the following: "For most of our history, Christ stood at the center of our (American) culture. Despite the varying interpretations and denominations surrounding Him, there was no question that He was the pre-eminent figure in our national cultural life."
America has never been an officially Christian country; from the beginning it gave full rights to Jews and others, but there’s no doubt that the ethos of the culture was Protestant Christian.
If one observes classic movies from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, it’s amazing to note how often clergymen were prominent characters—particularly in the ‘40s you find a fascination with Catholic priest characters—all portrayed in a positive light; Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift and others had leading roles as priests. And this is at a time when almost all—if not all—the studio heads were Jewish. They may not have been Christians themselves, but they recognized the culture around them, respected it, and played to it.
I remember saying after watching one such film recently, “That movie could never be made today.” Not just because people’s tastes in entertainment have changed, not just because of the clergy scandals of recent times, but because the culture as a whole has distanced itself from Christ and the churches.
At some point in time the objection of the demons in our Gospel reading today was raised in our culture: “What have we to do with you, O Son of God?”
Not only influential Jews, who naturally did not believe in Him, but progressive sons of Protestant Christianity—like John Dewey for example—raised the same question: “What have we to do with you, O Son of God?” We will form a culture that excludes you.
We see the fruits of their success in the schools and on the streets of our country today. Christ having been excluded, many young people today have turned once again to Marxism as their great moral cause and potential savior of our society.
“What have we to do with you, O Son of God?” We don’t need God. We have Marx. His way will bring us social justice.
And yet, when one surveys the living hells of Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the purgatories of Cuba and Venezuela, with the millions upon millions of human lives sacrificed for the cause of Communism, and the incalculable human suffering, one is prompted to ask: “Why would you want to relive those experiments? You have seen how they turned out.”
And the answer is: “They didn’t get it right. We will.”
The naïveté would be laughable were not the potential outcomes so terrifying.
Yet the attempt to dissociate from Christ is hardly limited to revolutionaries active here in the States. It is an international phenomenon.
Many of us were perturbed by the news the other day that the Islamist President of Turkey signed a decree changing the status of Agia Sophia from a museum back to a functioning mosque.
His logic is simple: We Muslims took it from you Christians, therefore it is ours—and in no sense yours. Therefore Agia Sophia must be entirely Islamic. It’s 900 years of Christian history must be plastered over and forgotten.
President Erdogan has added his voice to the chorus: “What have we to do with thee, O (supposed) Son of God?”
“For you, being but a prophet, have been surpassed by our prophet. We have remade you into the Issa of the Quar’an, and we have remade your cathedral into our mosque of the believers in the final messenger of God, our Muhammad.”
You must be erased, for “What do we Islamists have to do with you, O (supposed) Son of God?”
Yet he is hardly alone. His program to exclude and exterminate the heritage and community of Christ and Christianity in Turkey are hardly unusual on the world scene today.
Other examples are the efforts of Islamists in Nigeria to eradicate Christianity there by wholesale slaughter, the repeated attacks on Christians carried out by Hindu nationalists in India, the active persecution being carried out by the Chinese Communists today—not to mention what we saw with ISIS in the last decade.
It is as if Christ and Christianity are currently besieged nearly worldwide—as never before, as the chorus grows louder: “What have we do to with you, O Son of God?”
In our epistle today, the Apostle Paul speaks to the Jews of his day who refused Christ:
Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that it may be saved. I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law, that everyone who has faith may be justified. (Rom. 10:1-4)
In other words, God’s way is Christ. But they, he says, wanted to do it their own way—as do so many in our times.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, for us Christ is everything.
“What have we to do with you, O Son of God?” Our answer is “everything.” Christ is everything. Everything that we are, everything that we do, has to do with everything He is.
He is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the origin, source, sustenance, and purpose of all the works of God.
I close with some words from the first epistle to the Corinthians:
For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God … But of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God—and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. (1 Cor. 1: 22-24, 30)
“What do we have to do with you, O Son of God?” Everything.
Fr. Paul O'Callaghan
is the Dean of St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral in Wichita, KS. He is one of the founding members of Eighth Day Institute’s Board of Directors and is responsible for starting the Eighth Day Symposium.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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