Our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light-years away. She dwarfs our galaxy and contains a trillion stars.
The energy that fuels all of those stars and has kept them in a spiral for 13 billion years is measurable, but who has the instruments or the time? The best we can do is make estimates.
Our witness and wisdom says that a first-century baby born to a peasant Jewish teenager, a baby whose stepfather was a carpenter, is the One who spoke this galaxy into fiery substance and perpetual motion from nothing.
And our tradition claims that this human is the One who spoke another hundred billion galaxies into existence from no substance that existed before...*ex nihilo* in the ancient tongue.
One of the stories about this human tells us that on the night before he suffered for the cosmos he created, that he loves from eternity before his own life, he took a towel and a basin of water and washed the feet of his friends.
You cannot wash someone’s feet without getting low to the ground, on your knees.
In the world of his time, the host of a meal would not be the one to wash the feet of his guests. This was the task of a servant.
What does it mean that the One who creates all stars and fuels their fires, is on his knees, serving humans?
Let me suggest that it means that most human projection of what it means to be a god or the God in the history of humans—and most human imagination of what it means to be powerful—is deeply mistaken.
One makes oneself vulnerable to wash feet in a world without proper sanitation and waste removal but this detail about humbly kneeling and scrubbing who knows what from smelly feet is not nearly the lowest place this human goes or will go to love the cosmos.
This human who is God descends further still, down into death, entering by his own terrible death into the death of every human, for every time the one human nature we all share dies we die again, and he dies again with us, and further still: he descends into all our hells.
Athanasius says that he keeps falling further than our hells and his descent is not slowed until he is beneath the deepest falling human, down to the edges of non-existence, to rescue us from the non-being from which we came and to give the one human nature we all share permanence.
He is not stingy with his kind of existence. He wants his fellow humans to participate in his never-ending divine life.
He gives humans not the permanence of Andromeda but his own permanence, and with all humans somehow gives the cosmos the gift of his eternity.
The name of this human who is God is Jesus Christ.
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