By Father Peter Farrington
The Christian message of Good News is one of men and women becoming truly human, fully those persons each one was created to be and become. To Be Truly Human | Fr. Peter Farrington
The Christian Gospel is the proclamation of the union between God and man, and the renewal of the divine-humanity which Adam abandoned. It is not possible to become that man or woman whom God has uniquely created us to be unless we seek and experience union with God who is true being and the fulness of life. He teaches us himself that he is Life, and that he has come into the world for the sake of Life. I am come that they might have life, and have it abundantly.
To Be Truly Human | The Abundant Life
What is this abundant life, this life of eternity, if it is not life lived in union with God, and experienced as the beginning of such a life here and now. We do not avoid sin to please God and gain some future reward. Rather, sin is always a choice for non-being, for death and for a loss of our true humanity in the grace of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Our participation in the divine life of the Holy Spirit by grace is already the experience of the life of eternity. It is already a foretaste and a guarantee of salvation.
We must resist sin, as a corrupt choice in a fallen and failing society, because it leads to death, and to a loss of true humanity. To Be Truly Human | Fr. Peter Farrington
If we must speak and act against sin in the world, it is not out of a judgmental condemnation of others. We share this same sickness of heart and soul. We know as we consider our own weakness that we bear the same scars and fall in the same battles. But we speak and act because all sin is dehumanizing, and is truly inhuman. We must resist sin, as a corrupt choice in a fallen and failing society, because it leads to death, and to a loss of true humanity. It is never simply neutral and relative. It is always destructive and absolute.
To be silent in the face of sin is to be complicit in evil, especially when those who are harmed and corrupted are the weak, the vulnerable, those without the ability to resist themselves.
To Be Truly Human | The Good News
Our own participation in the life of the Holy Spirit by grace clearly reveals to us our own weakness and failure. The growth of the humility teaches us to be slow to judge others since we become more aware that we are most worthy of judgement. But while we must be slow in judging others we must be resolute in resisting sin and describing sin as the subversion of humanity which it is. To resist sin in the world is also an aspect of the Good News, since it is to be Good News for all living in this world, especially those in a state of oppression and those faced with bearing the sin of others.
No more should we be silent as the world around us drinks itself into a stupor with all manner of harmful intoxicants of the flesh, mind and spirit. To Be Truly Human | Fr. Peter Farrington
The Christian message of Good News is one of men and women becoming truly human, fully those persons each one was created to be and become. Sin is the denial of life, of being and of humanity and is to be opposed on that basis, as a sickness from which we all need divine healing and for which there is a divine medicine. Our service in the world must surely be a ministry of bringing such healing, not only to individuals but to society and to the relations between nations and peoples.
To Be Truly Human | The True Humanity
When we see one falling into sin we do not judge their heart as if we were better than them, but we identify the sin as a poison that will lead to death, in our experience and theirs. Who would be silent if they saw a friend, or even a stranger, taking a draught of some deadly poison? No more should we be silent as the world around us drinks itself into a stupor with all manner of harmful intoxicants of the flesh, mind and spirit.
Yet our ambition is always to be those who preach Good News for mankind, a saving and transforming anthropology. Our is not a legalistic system that denies the enjoyment of humanity, but a liberating union of man with God by grace that allows participation in the experience of true humanity, real and abundant life, the life of eternity.
By: Father Peter Farrington | A priest of St Mary and Saint Cyril Coptic Orthodox Church in Liverpool. United Kingdom ~ Diocese of the Midlands.
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