“Re-Creation Begins”

Fr. John Riccardo

July 28, 2021

“Behold, I make all things new!” Jesus speaks these words to us in the Book of Revelation (cf. 21:5). All things were made through Him, John’s Gospel tells us, and all things were made for Him. Everything that is came into existence through the Word of God (cf. John 1:1-3). Most especially you and me. 

But, as we saw, something horrific—much, much worse than we understand—happened at the dawn of our race, when our first parents fell under the spell of our enemy and sold our race into slavery to powers we cannot compete against: Sin and Death.

So the Word, the Author of all creation, out of His inestimable love, came to earth as a man to save, to restore, to heal and to liberate and rescue His creation from its slavery of the enemy. Let us pick up the story in The Christian Cosmic Narrative, then, as Jesus emerges from His hidden life in Nazareth and breaks on the scene.

The Baptism of Jesus

“When the time came for Jesus to begin his assault on the Devil’s stronghold, his first act was to go to John in the desert and to be baptized by him. John represented all that was best and truest in the Jewish tradition. By receiving baptism from John, Jesus embraced the whole of that long history, placing himself squarely within it and pointing it to its fulfillment. As Jesus was baptized, John was given to see the Holy Spirit descend upon him and to hear the voice of the Father from heaven declare: ‘This is my beloved Son’ (Matt. 3:17). God in his fullness was present, now united to humanity in a new way, and John knew that his task had been completed: the ‘bridegroom’ had come, and the friend of the bridegroom needed to diminish and depart. John spoke reverently of Jesus to his disciples, pointing him out as the lamb of God, the sacrificial offering that would fulfill the sacrifices of Abraham, the Passover lamb, and the offering of Moses at the sealing of the Covenant on Sinai. Some of John’s disciples attached themselves to Jesus and became his close followers and friends.

“Soon after he had been baptized, an act that signaled the beginning of his messianic mission, Jesus was led by God’s Spirit into the wilderness for the first round of his hand-to-hand combat with Satan, the one whose rule he had come to contest. For forty days, mirroring the Israelites’ forty years of purification in their wilderness wanderings, Jesus was assailed by the Devil’s most potent attack against humanity: namely his lies and seductions. The first Adam had succumbed to that seductive voice and had believed the lies of the Devil; but now the new Adam, the founder of a renewed humanity, responded to Satan’s subtle attack with defiance toward him and faith in God. As Mary by her faithfulness had begun to undo the sin of Eve, so Jesus by his loyalty to the Father yet more decisively undid the sin of Adam. Satan was baffled and humiliated. He was confused by this Israelite, this son of Abraham and David. He saw Jesus to be a mortal man, descended from Adam and a member of a fallen race. He was confident in his power over all the members of that race; yet this man strangely eluded his influence and threw back his assaults. So, the enemy of mankind drew off, biding his time, waiting for a more propitious moment…

“Authority is a word close in meaning to the word ‘author.’ It was fitting that the one who had authored the story of the human race, and who had now entered that story as the world’s savior and king, should be seen to possess authority. But Jesus was not content merely to speak with authority. His deeds corresponded to his words. He quickly gained the reputation of being a wonder-worker, a man around whom miracles sprouted on all sides. Yet there was a special quality to the miracles and acts of spiritual power performed by Jesus. There was nothing of the atmosphere of the magician or the wizard about him. He did not fly through the air, or cast spells, or make things appear and disappear, or change himself and others into strange shapes. There were no dazzling displays of fire and light spinning from his fingers, no arbitrary manipulations of matter to amaze and impress crowds. All his miracles possessed a quality fitting for the author of creation. They were deeds of love, compassion, healing, judgment, and governance, in keeping with the rhythms of the created order, setting right what had been corrupted or destroyed.

“Wherever Jesus went, he physically healed many who came to him. The blind were able to see again; the deaf could hear; the lame walked; the crippled could again use their limbs. He who had created the world was restoring heavenly order to a region that had fallen into chaos. Wherever Jesus went, he cast out demons with a word. He had come to end the usurping rule of the fallen angels, and he showed his authority over them by sending them fleeing. Wherever Jesus went, he healed leprosy, a symbol of the guilt of sin, of humanity’s impurity in the presence of God. Lepers were held by Jewish law to be unclean, and those who touched them caught their uncleanness by a kind of contagion. Yet when Jesus touched lepers, the contagion worked in the opposite direction: instead of him becoming soiled, they caught his purity and were cleansed. It can be imagined what kind of effect this had on the people of the villages and towns Jesus visited. They flocked to him by the thousands, bringing their sick, their leprous, all those possessed by demons, hoping for a cure. The numbers grew so great that in a short time Jesus could no longer walk about openly lest he be mobbed by crowds.

“Of particular amazement to the Jews, and of great perplexity to the demons, was Jesus’ occasional act of bringing a dead person back to life. Death had been the most grievous consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin, the strongest hold of Satan upon humanity. It was the deepest humiliation of the race, the blot that darkened all of human life, the destination that withered all hope, the sure sign of slavery to the devil. Yet here was a man, a mortal son of Adam, who seemed to possess authority even over death. People marveled that God had given such authority to a man. And again, the question was forced upon the onlookers, both human and demonic: Just who was this person? How did he come by such authority that even the demons were forced to obey him and the dead came back to life at his word?

“As striking and provocative as were his miraculous works, Jesus always made clear that they pointed to deeper, hidden realities. The divine Logos did not enter humanity only in order to eradicate the immediate effects of physical disease for a few people during a brief span of time. He was pursuing the ultimate spiritual cause of all physical frailty. His acts of physical healing were signs of a more profound healing of the soul. He needed to teach his hearers the realities of the invisible world, to help them understand the real nature of their slavery and their poverty. So he performed visible signs that would catch their attention, but he would then direct their gaze to the invisible truths to which they pointed and upon which everything hung. 

“A telling example of these priorities can be found in the account of Jesus healing a paralyzed man. Jesus had been preaching to a packed house when a paralytic was brought along by friends, hoping for healing. Finding no way to enter the house due to the crowd, they opened a hole in the roof and lowered the man down on his pallet. Jesus, whose sight encompassed the whole of reality, saw into the man’s soul and recognized in him a person who wanted to return to faithfulness. In his compassion, he immediately reached out and touched the man at the point of his cruelest suffering and deepest need, saying to him, ‘Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven’ (Matt. 9:2). The divine doctor perceived and healed the real condition that was weighing upon his patient, his burden of guilt. When some of those present began to grumble, thinking that this showed blasphemous presumption on Jesus’ part, he said to them: ‘For which is easier, to say, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Rise and walk”? But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins—he then said to the paralytic—“Rise, take up your bed and go home.”’ And he rose and went home (Matt. 9:5–7). Jesus performed the relatively easy act—for him—of visibly healing the man’s body so that his hearers would know that he had the power to perform the far more momentous and hidden operation of healing the mortal wound in his soul.”