“…I am the door of the sheep” (RSV, John 10:7)
Only when we actually see God shall we understand what he is really like. And that experience will be completely shattering. All our present ideas of God are hopelessly small because they are limited by our human minds which form them.
We cannot even comprehend the Universe which he has made and in which we find ourselves. Our solar system, including the Sun and Earth, orbits around the centre of our galaxy (the Milky Way) at a speed of around 514,000 mph. Yet the Milky Way is so vast that even at that speed it still takes about 230 million years to make just one complete orbit around the Milky Way. (1,2) And of course ours is not the only galaxy: there are billions of other galaxies in the Universe. (3)
Such vastness is altogether beyond human understanding, and yet God himself is infinitely greater than his Universe – the Eternal God who was, and is, and is to come, the Almighty.
There can indeed be no comparison at all between him and us. A few short years ago you and I were as non-existent as those children who will be sitting at their tables at school in 20 years’ time. True it is that the difference between God and ourselves is infinitely greater than that between us and a swarm of midges fluttering on a summer’s evening.
But the difference does not end there, for God’s infinite greatness is equalled by his infinite holiness, a holiness such as we are wholly unable to imagine. Indeed, it would be utterly absurd to think that God had made us to share his visible presence in perfect union, if we did not also know that his generosity and his love are infinite too, infinite in depth and infinite in extent.
One thing alone prevents that union between ourselves and him, and that is our sinfulness. If we could see God now, face to face, and experience the blinding light of his sanctity streaming into our souls, we should be so excruciatingly aware of our utter unfitness in his sight that we would shrink away and flee from before his face.
That sight of him is mercifully hidden from us now, for by our sins – by all the un-Christlike things we have thought and said and done – we have turned against him and have knowingly embraced evil. We have no merit of our own which could ever entitle us to approach him whose sanctity is a flame of fire. With our will at all times ready to rebel, it is impossible for us to claim as by right a place before him as his true sons and daughters.
And yet in that life of fellowship with him lies the only happiness that the Universe in the end has to offer.
Our plight would therefore indeed be desperate could we not turn in penitence and faith to his sinless and crucified Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. He is our hope and our only hope, because in his infinite love and compassion he willingly came down from Heaven and gave his life upon the Cross so that he might save you and me and in his own Person bring us to his Father.
Unfit as we are to appear before God in our own right, all we can do is to appeal to the Crucified, invoking on our own behalf all Our Lord has done and suffered for us; and claiming a place within the shelter of his outstretched arms. So he alone is our justification for approaching our holy and eternal Maker. The very prayers we say are not offered in our own right but reach God’s throne “through Jesus Christ Our Lord”.
And that is uniquely true of our worship, for it is at the Eucharist that Our Lord, as the Door to God, gives us free and unhindered access to the throne of God.
We acknowledge at the beginning of the Eucharist, however, how totally unworthy we are in God’s sight, and that if it were not for Our Lord and for his Crucifixion we should not be in this church at all. So we do not come breezily in, thinking what splendid people we are. No, we humbly plead, “Lord have mercy”.
At the Offertory, when we are still standing, as it were at a distance from the throne of God, we offer the bread and wine and with them we offer what they represent: ourselves and our lives, what we are and what we do – poor offerings indeed, but soon to be taken possession of by Our Lord and made one with his offering of himself and transformed by his Divine power.
Then at the Sanctus we come nearer to God’s throne, near enough to join in the angels’ song of “Holy, holy, holy”, until at the Consecration we offer to our Heavenly Father his Son, Our Saviour Jesus Christ himself, and the outward forms of bread and wine enshrine his own risen and glorified Body and Blood, and he is in our midst in the Blessed Sacrament. And still showing those victorious scars in his feet and hands and side he presents us to his Father as his own people, his own flock, whom he died to save. And God welcomes and receives us with his Son.
So through the centuries Our Lord in the Eucharist has been bringing generation after generation to his Father. Men and women and children of every race and every land have, at countless Consecrations, been brought by him week by week to God. And now we, in our turn, come Sunday by Sunday and are brought by Our Lord into the immediate Presence of God, and thus enter into that heavenly supernatural life that surrounds us on every side.
And at the end of each Eucharist we go forth from his throne in peace to serve him in the world outside; until at the next Sunday Eucharist we reassemble, as God’s people do the world over, and with them are brought once again by Our Lord into the holy of holies, before the very throne of God himself.
Thus is fulfilled for us, as it is for the rest of Christ’s Church the world over, his own promise: “…I am the door of the sheep…if any one enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture” (RSV, John 10:7,9).
References
1. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Astrophysics Science Division) StarChild question of the month (2000). Available from: http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question18.html (Accessed 26 February 2014) (Internet).
2. Wikipedia (2014) Galactic year. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_year (Accessed 26 February 2014) (Internet).
3. Potter, C. (2009) You are here. A portable history of the Universe, London: Hutchinson.