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Freedom, Kenosis, And Love

Freedom, Kenosis, And Love

Last updated on: October 11, 2024 at 2:31 am by Henry Karlson

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Freedom, Kenosis, And Love 2024-10-11T02:31:11-05:00 Henry Karlson

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Michelangelo: God’s Act of Creation (An Act Of Kenosis) / Wikimedia Commons

When we pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, we pray for the temporal creation to be united with and penetrated by the kingdom of God so that God will be all in all. It is the goal that God has for creation. As God created the world out of an act of pure love, God has given creation its own freedom, a freedom, to be sure, which is not absolute (as only God’s freedom can be absolute), but yet is certainly real. Creation can determine for itself what it wants to do and what it will achieve with its existence (within the framework or stage God gave to it for it to act). God does not engage the absolute power and authority the divine will can impose upon creation, forcing creation to be what God wants it to be; rather, due to God’s love, God willingly forgoes such absolute power, which is why the act of creation can be seen as a representation of God’s kenosis, that is, God’s self-emptying love.

As love is greater than unlove, God is greater than sin. But the way of love, and the way it achieves its victory is different from the way of unlove and the way it tries to conquer and take over all that is seen as other. The way of love requires self-giving, giving oneself to the other to lift up that other, while the way of unlove is the opposite, taking over and destroying that which is other. In the incarnation, in the life and death of Jesus Christ, we are shown that at the heart of the Godhead is God’s self-giving, sacrificial love, and that divine love willingly becomes vulnerable to creation in order to let creation fulfill its own will and find the end result of that will. God’s self-giving love, God’s vulnerability to creation, is what allows God, in the end, to have the divine will fulfilled, and it will be fulfilled despite the way creation used its own will to disengage itself from God and try to live and exist as if it were independent from God. In doing so, the constituents of creation, the created subjects which arise throughout time, follow the example given to them by creation itself as they try to make themselves independent from everyone else. Thus, the result of the fall of creation is that creation ends up breaking apart and divided into parts, which then fight against each other instead of seeking to come back together and find their true happiness, the happiness which can only exist when creation willingly embraces God and finds all its parts once again engaging each other as one interdependent harmonious whole.

Allowing creation, and all the subjects found within it, to follow its own path to where it shall lead, to allow all created subjects find out what they can and will do for themselves, is an act of divine love. It is, of course, a paradox, because divine love wants what is best for us, and yet, by allowing us to make of ourselves as we will, we find ourselves in a state of pain and sorrow, one of a continuous dissolution which would lead to our own annihilation if God does not intervene. The further we go on our own, the more pain and sorrow we will experience, until at last, we will find ourselves ready to receive God’s love and all the healing and blessings it offers us. We will do so willingly, as free subjects, obtaining, in the end, something greater and better than if God used the absolute power of the divine will to force us to conform to what God knows is best for us. Divine kenosis, the willingness to allow creation to try to become its own absolute subject independent from God, is what allows creation to truly welcome and relate to God in a way it would not have been able to do without first having its own freedom and the ability to make of itself as it willed (and experience, in and through it, its own limitations).

Through the incarnation, we are shown the God who is love opens up that love to all. No matter what we have done, God continues to show us love and is willing to share with us the bounty of that love, starting with forgiveness and spiritual healing, if we but show we are willing to accept it and love God back. That is God’s love, revealed in and through the incarnation, is so great, sin is unable to thwart it; and it will be able to take in all that sin has tried to destroy and heal it, bringing everything and everyone back together into the integral unity God intended for creation, using each and every positive act of love to form the bonds which bring creation together as one. Thus, as Pope St. Leo the Great explained, despite God’s kenosis, and indeed, through it, what God wills, what God desires, will be done: sin will not destroy creation, but rather, God, in the incarnation, has found a way to make sure that the divine plan for creation, its deification, will be fulfilled, and that no one in it will perish for eternity:

As a result, dearly beloved, it was necessary (by the designs of a secret plan) for the immutable God (whose will cannot be severed from his goodness) to complete by a deeper mystery the first intentions of his love. It was necessary that human beings, tricked into sin by the devil’s wickedness, should not perish in opposition to God’s plan. [1]

How all of this can and will come about is a great mystery, one which we can only get a glimpse of this side of eternity. How can God, in an act of self-denying love, give creatures their freedom, and yet obtain what God wishes, without having creation lose its own freedom but instead find it enhanced? What is important is for us to understand that no one will be annihilated or destroyed forever. We have been given the sign of Jonah, showing us that we can hope for the salvation of all, that even those who appear to be doomed can be saved. We are told this can happen in and through the work of Christ in his death and resurrection. Christ took on creation in its fallen state of being and reconfigured it from within – using what creation has established for itself as a means by which God will re-encounter creation, showing it and all in it the abundance of divine love. God, in self-giving love, in the willingness to be taken by humanity and killed, to take on the sins of the world, shows that God accepts the world and its actions, but also, that sin, that hate, is limited, and will come to an end. Then, God can and will heal what hate has undermined, bringing creation back to its integral unity:

“The union of Christ in the divinity has indicated to us the mystery of the unity of Christ.” This is the mystery: that all creation by means of one, has been brought near to God in a mystery. Then it is transmitted to all. Thus all is united in Him as the members in a body; He however is the head of all. This action was performed for all of creation. There will, indeed, be a time when no part will fall short of the whole. For it is not just a matter of this great spiritual intelligence being transmitted only partially, but He will do something greater, once He has made <this> manifest and has indicated it here below. [2]

In the eschaton, creation will have its integral unity, and all the parts, all the relative distinctions find in creation, will find that they are interdependent with every other part. They will find creation reflects the unity which is found in God (that is in the Trinity) and they will find it is all connected to and bound with the bonds of love established by God’s self-kenosis, a love which will be reflected as they will embrace their own self-kenosis, sharing themselves with others and with God.

[1] St Leo the Great, Sermons. Trans. Jane Patricia Freeland CSJB and Agnes Josephine Conway SSJ (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1996), 81 [Sermon 22].

[2] St. Isaac the Syrian, “The Third Part.” Trans. Mary T. Hansbury in An Anthology of Syriac Writers From Qatar in the Seventh Century. Ed. Mario Kozah, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Saif Shaeen Al-Murikhi and Haya Al Thani (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2015), 322-3 [V.10].

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