Purify the image of God.

“For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than whole burnt offerings.” (Hos 6:6). How often do we evaluate God and look at God through the glasses of our worldliness? We think that God likes and demands worship and adoration because we want others to honor, glorify, and praise us so we in the world can affirm our greatness. We think that God is at these things and is offended, and if we are not humbled enough and if we happen to touch Him with anything, He is immediately angry. And it doesn’t even occur to us that God, infinitely great in Himself, could need nothing of the kind, considered as something completely alien and useless, and such a thing does not even cross His mind. Why, then, you will say, does He allow Himself to be worshipped and receive obeisances? As
says one of the prefaces of the liturgy, “Our praises add nothing to thy
greatness, but they contribute to our salvation” – because God initially lets us approach himself in our way, humanly and worldly, enculturating himself into our forms. But the goal is that we might discover God’s ways and get used to them. And these are in the brotherhood and unity of love, where greatness and smallness, the giver and the given, the first or the last, lose their meaning in the all-embracing unity of the fellowship of God and man, where everything is of all and everyone, and love blurs every distinction and creates equality out of grace.
And so it is with gifts, sacrifices, titles. In the beginning, the Lord accepts them because it is a language that we, men of the world and sons of sin, understand. But then He leads us from this into His world, as He did the disciples. Just let us listen here, “When he had washed their feet and put on his garments, he sat down again at the table and said to them: “Do you understand what I have done to you? You are addressing me: “Teacher” and: “Lord,” and you speak well, for that is what I am. When therefore I, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (Jn 13:12-14). It begins at the address, distinguishing between greater and lesser, between master and servants. But simultaneously, he brings them into a world where servants are suddenly like masters, and the Lord acts as a servant. All this is wiped away, and an unprecedented, alien-to-the-world equality sets in when he says: “I no longer call you servants… I have called you friends” (Jn 15:15) and thus becomes “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom 8:29). Not sacrifice, but love. Not obeisance, but brotherhood and friendship. Not gifts, but devotion and fidelity, which He first shows to us humans, even already “when we were enemies” (Rom 5:10)! This is genuine respect – when we give it and honor God and give Him thanks, not according to ourselves, but according to Him, not as we imagine, but as it pleases Him. And it pleases Him when we become like Him, equal to God by grace when we become gods like Him. He is God so we can form a real companionship with Him, a genuine fellowship, true friendship of the Round Table of the Trinity. That is why He came to bring us through Christ to worship us.

This is what the liturgy, which contains for everyone what he understands, leads us to do. It proclaims the Gospel by intercession. It offers adoration to the beginners and worships in the manner of the language and ways of the world. To the advanced unity with the Lord
and each other in the fellowship of the Lord’s Table and the Lord’s Supper. The Gospel is about invitation into this communion. Conversion is about stepping into this communion and deciding to accept and enter this invitation. Christianity is about living this communion and learning to trust, faithfulness, love, and unity with each other and God as friends, comrades, brothers, and indeed among equals by the grace and love of God. Heaven is when to this is added the glory of God. We live in this communion as people with God, who became human like us. Heaven is when we live it already as gods, with God is holy and full of His Glory.

Being like God… To a beginner, this sounds like blasphemy. And when it reluctantly accepts it, he begins to imagine what knowledge, power, and all these things of God he should one day have and possess if Heaven is indeed about deification. Only gradually, as he grows in communion with God, does he know that this is far from the main thing! The primary and miraculous thing about deification is that by grace, raised to the level of God, we are finally not only allowed, but actually, we can form with God a communion, a unity, a community that can exist only and only among equals! There is no greater or lesser, the first or the last; everything is overcome, consolidated, balanced by love into true equality, where everything of all is everyone’s, as he figuratively suggests in Scripture, “In his light shall the nations walk, and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory” (Rev 21:24).
Therefore, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the heavenly kingdom” (Mt 18:3). Children have no greatness of their own – and others bow down in awe before the greatness of the King; they leap upon me without embarrassment on their knees, embrace him, kiss him, and lead him away to show him their toys and share them and play with the king as with a friend… And He, the King, accepts and enjoys it, so he takes them by the hand and sits them down, his comrades, beside him on his throne – while the adults scandalized and guiltily stand still in the back, below. And that is the overwhelming message of the Gospel!