The Fathers of the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon
Scripture: Matthew 5:14-19
Oops!
In college I was fascinated by history. It’s part of the reason I majored in Classical and Near-Eastern Archaeology. Something about learning the history of the Bible drew me in. It made scripture come alive, and the people in the stories became real people, not just characters in a story.
So when I was registering for my first semester, one of the first classes I signed up for was “The Historical Jesus.” It looked at Jesus in his historical context — the geography, the politics, the religion, and the culture of his time.
Because the class was taught by a member of the Jesus Seminar, one question hung over the whole semester: Who was this Jesus?
Some scholars, like John Dominic Crossan, see Jesus as an itinerant cynic. Others, like E.P. Sanders and Bart Ehrman, see him as an apocalyptic prophet. Still others, like Robert Funk and Stephen Patterson, think he was a kind of prophetic sage. And some, like Bruce Chilton, see him as a charismatic holy man.
These are scholars who can get lost in the minute details. As a priest, I get asked simpler questions: Why trust in Jesus? Why not see him as a moral teacher among others? Isn’t Jesus, isn’t Christianity, just one path among many to “get to heaven”?
Ugh!
These are fair questions — especially if, as a priest, I expect people to trust and be loyal to Christ and his gospel.
The answers make a huge difference.
If Jesus is simply a moral teacher, then Orthodox Christianity isn’t what it claims to be. It’s a self-help improvement plan dressed up in religious language.
In fact, I had a man come up to me at our Taste of Greece festival and claim exactly that. He went further, trying to convince me that Jesus the Son of God, as the Savior of the world, was invented after his death by his followers, following the pattern of other ancient gods.
Aha!
I think people do this to make themselves feel comfortable. If Jesus is just a moral teacher, and we disagree with him, it’s no big deal — it’s one person’s opinion against another’s. But if Jesus is the Son of God, his teaching carries just a little more weight.
That’s not how Jesus describes himself, though. He does things only God can do: forgive sins, drive out demons, calm storms, walk on water, turn water into wine, and raise the dead.
He also speaks about himself differently. Listen to today’s gospel:
“I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”
John records Jesus calling himself “I am” — the great “I am” God uses to tell Moses his name.
It is this the Jesus, fully God and fully man, that the Fathers of the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon articulated so carefully in the year 451.
They weren’t inventing something new. They were defending something under threat from two directions. On one side, Nestorius wanted to split Christ into two separate persons, one divine and one human, loosely attached to each other — as if God were standing near a man named Jesus rather than being that man. On the other side, Eutyches collapsed Christ’s humanity into his divinity, as if a drop of water dissolved into the ocean, until his humanity barely counted as human at all.
The Fathers said no to both. Christ, they wrote, is one person known in two natures, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” Fully God. Fully human. Not half of each. Not one disguised as the other. One person, two natures, united without either one being erased.
Whee!
Here’s why that fifth-century argument still matters on a Sunday morning in Duluth.
If Christ’s divinity and humanity are united in one person, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” then something extraordinary is true: God himself has fully entered our condition — not visiting it from the outside, not merely observing it, but taking it up as his own. Everything it means to be human — our weakness, our limitation, our mortality — the Son of God has united to himself.
The Fathers understood something the philosophers before them hadn’t dared to say: what God does not take up, God does not heal. If Christ’s humanity were only apparent, or only partial, then only part of us would be touched by his life, death, and resurrection. But because he took up the whole of our humanity, joined to the whole of his divinity, in one undivided person, the whole of us is met by God and healed from within.
That’s the good news hiding inside a fifth-century council: healing didn’t wait for us to climb high enough, purify ourselves enough, or figure out the right philosophy about God. God came down. God moved toward us, all the way into our own flesh, so that our flesh could be joined to his life. It’s heaven bending down to where we already are.
That’s what Jesus meant when he said he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. He wasn’t handing us a longer to-do list. He was telling us that everything the law and the prophets pointed toward — a God who draws near, who heals, who restores — was standing in front of them, in one person, fully God and fully human.
Yeah.
So what do we do with that on a Monday, once the festival booths are packed away and the man with his questions has gone home?
We stop treating our faith, and our own healing, as something we have to earn our way toward. So often we approach God the way I approached that college classroom — trying to reason our way up to him, gather enough evidence, get our doubts resolved, get our lives cleaned up first. Chalcedon says the direction of travel is the other way. God has already moved toward us. He has already joined himself to our humanity — to your humanity, with whatever you’re carrying into church this morning.
That changes how we come to confession, not as an audition for God’s approval, but as showing up to receive what he has already accomplished for us. It changes how we come to the chalice, receiving Christ’s own humanity and divinity, joined together, so that ours might be joined to his. It changes how we sit with our doubts, and even with people like the man at the festival — not defensively, but with the confidence that comes from knowing our faith rests on Someone, not just on an argument.
And it changes how we treat our own weakness. You don’t have to perfect yourself before God will come near you. In Christ, God has already united himself to human weakness, human limitation, even human death — so that none of it is beyond his reach.
The Fathers at Chalcedon weren’t settling an abstract dispute for its own sake. They were guarding the good news that God moved toward us first, fully and completely, so that everything in us that needs healing has already been met by the God who came looking for it.
That’s not just fifth-century theology. That’s this morning’s gospel, this morning’s Eucharist, and — if we let it be — this morning’s healing.
Amen!