Dear Friends in Christ,
It is March, our Lenten journey is continuing, we’re all getting tired of winter and await springtime and Easter with some ardency. I hope we are also yearning for an interior springtime, new spiritual lives.
St. Augustine wrote: “The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.”
Well, that is pretty typical Augustine, who could be a little dour in his thinking, but I think it may help us to figure out what we’re trying to accomplish in our long Lenten journeys. I suspect that Augustine’s use of the word “form” may involve Platonic associations that no longer convince us, but if we read it metaphorically, we may still find useful insights here.
Plato thought that everything was based on an ideal form or essence that was its truest self. But the world has drifted from this purely spiritual essence or form and become deformed by matter. St. Augustine’s Christian version of this is that humans have been specifically deformed by what Augustine calls sin. We were made in the image of the God of Love, but we no longer “image” or reflect this pure love; we have become “turned in upon the self” (this is Luther’s version of Augustine) and thus have forgotten who we really are, what our true “form” is. The world suffers from a vast spiritual amnesia that leads ineluctably to moral deformity.
But then something amazing happens. This God of love in whose image we were created comes down from his pure essentiality and recreates God’s self in our image: he takes on our deformity. It is an act of purest love. This love is made perfect, i.e. God completely identifies with our deformity, on the cross. And the miracle is that this utter solidarity with us in our brokenness heals that brokenness. By becoming de-formed for us, God in Christ re-forms us. He recreates us again as God’s children and image. So, says Augustine, “let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.”
St. Francis famously said that it is better to love than to be loved, but Augustine digs deeper. He sees that no one can love unless that person has been loved deeply and profoundly. And we all have been so loved. The deformed man on the cross is God’s love for us. Let us hold it fast.
Yours in Christ,
–Pastor Bastien
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