quote:

---

(from Ware, p. 38)

There is a Trinitarian dimension also to the most dearly loved of the single-phrase Orthodox prayers, the Jesus Prayer, an "arrow prayer" used both at work and during times of quiet. In its most common form this runs:

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner."

This is, in outward form, a prayer to the second person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ. But the other two persons are also present, although they are not names. For, by speaking of Jesus as "Son of God", we point towards the Father; and the Spirit is also embraced in our prayer, since "no one can say 'Lord Jesus', except in the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor. 12:3). The Jesus Prayer is not only Christ-centered by Trinitarian.

==============

(from Ware, p. 68-70)

Lord Jesus, have mercy

In an earlier section (p. 38), we explored the Trinitarian meaning of the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner". Let us now consider what it has to tell us about the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and about our healing by and in him.

There are in the Jesus Prayer two "poles" or extreme points. "Lord...Son of God": the Prayer speaks first about God's glory, acclaiming Jesus as the Lord of all creation and the eternal Son. Then at its conclusion the Prayer turns to our condition as sinners -- sinful by virtue of the fall, sinful through our personal acts of wrongdoing: "...on me a sinner". (In its literal meaning the Greek text is yet more emphatic, saying "on me the sinner", as if I were the only one.)

So the Prayer begins with adoration and ends with penitence. Who or what is to reconcile these two extremes of divine glory and human sinfulness? There are thee words in the Prayer which give the answer. The first is "Jesus", the personal name conferred on Christ after his human birth from the Virgin Mary. This has the sense of Savior; as the angel said to Christ's foster-father St. Joseph: "You shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins" (Matt. 1:21).

The second word is the title "Christ", the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew "Messiah", meaning the Anointed one -- anointed, that is, by the Holy Spirit of God. For the Jewish people of the Old Covenant, the Messiah was the coming deliverer, the future king, who in the power of the Spirit would set them free from their enemies.

The third word is "mercy", a term that signifies love in action, love working to bring about forgiveness, liberation and wholeness. To have mercy is to acquit the other of the guilt which by his own efforts he cannot wipe away, to release him from the debts he himself cannot pay, to make him whole from the sickness for which he cannot unaided find any cure. The term "mercy" means furthermore that all this is conferred as a free gift: the one who asks for mercy has no claims upon the other, no rights to which he can appeal.

The Jesus Prayer, then, indicates both man's problem and God's solution. Jesus is the Savior, the anointed king, the one who has mercy. But the Prayer also tells us something more about the person of Jesus himself. He is addressed as "Lord" and "Son of God": here the Prayer speaks of his Godhead, of his transcendence and eternity. but he is addressed equally as "Jesus", that is, by the personal name which his mother and foster-father gave him after his human birth in Bethlehem. So the Prayer speaks also of his manhood, of the genuine reality of his birth as a human being.

The Jesus Prayer is thus an affirmation of faith in Jesus Christ as alike truly divine and fully human. He is the Theanthropos of "God-man", who saves us from our sins precisely because he is God and man at once. Man could not come to God, so God has come to man -- by making himself human. In his outgoing or "ecstatic" love, God unites himself to his creation in the closest of all possible unions, by himself becoming that which he has created, God, as man, fulfills the mediatorial task which man rejected at the fall. Jesus our Savior bridges the abyss between God and man because he is both at once. As we say in one of the Orthodox hymns for Christmas Eve, "Heaven and earth are united today, for Christ is born. Today has God come down to earth and man gone up to heaven".

The Incarnation, then, is God's supreme act of deliverance, restoring us to communion with himself. But what would have happened if there had never been a fall? Would God have chosen to become man, even if man had never sinned? Should the Incarnation be regarded simply as God's response to the predicament of fallen man, or is it in some way part of the eternal purpose of God? Should we look behind the fall, and see God's act of becoming man as the fulfillment of man's true destiny?

To this hypothetical question it is not possible for us, in our present situation, to give any final answer. Living as we do under the conditions of the fall, se cannot clearly imagine what God's relation to mankind would have been, had the fall never occurred. Christian writers have therefore in most cases limited their discussion of the Incarnation to the content of man's fallen state. But there are a few who have ventured to take a wider view, most notably St. Isaac the Syrian and St. Maximus the Confessor in the East, and Duns Scotus in the West. The Incarnation, says, St. Isaac, is the most blessed and joyful thing that could possibly have happened to the human race. Can it be right, then, to assign as cause for this joyful happening something which might never have occurred, and indeed ought never to have done so? Surely, St. Isaac urges, God's taking of our humanity is to be understood not only as an act of restoration, not only as a response to man's sine, but also and more fundamentally as an act of love, an expression of God's own nature. Even had there been no fall, God in his own limitless, outgoing love would still have chosen to identify himself with his creation by becoming man.

The Incarnation of Christ, looked at in this way, effects more than a reversal of the fall, more than a restoration of man to his original state in Paradise. When God becomes man, this marks the beginning of an essentially new state in the history of man, and not just a return to the past. The Incarnation raised man to a new level; the last state is higher than the first. Only in Jesus Christ do we see revealed the full possibilities of our human nature; until he is born, the true implications of our personhood are still hidden from us. Christ's birth, as St. Basil puts it, is "the birthday of the whole human race"; Christ is the first perfect man -- perfect, that is to say, not just in a potential sense, as Adam was in his innocence before the fall, but in the sense of the completely realized "likeness". The Incarnation, then, is not simply a way of undoing the effects of original sin, but it is an essential state upon man's journey from the divine image to the divine likeness. The true image and likeness of God is Christ himself, and so, from the very first moment of man's creation in the image, the Incarnation of Christ was in some way already implied. The true reason for the Incarnation, then, lies not in man's sinfulness but in his unfallen nature as being made in the divine image and capable of union with God.

---