The End Is Ever-Beginning: The Coalescence of Alpha and Omega in the Eternal Day of the Son

Beginning with Abraham and his household, God instituted circumcision on the eighth day for all his male progeny, as a sign of entrance into the covenant He cut with Abraham, from whom He purposed to call forth a people of His own, and through whom He would bless all nations. God's central purpose for this covenant was to preserve a lineage—from Abraham to Isaac, Jacob, Judah, David, and from him a particular line of sons—until the birth and incarnation of the Son of God, the eternal and uncreated Person of the Word, who would be King of that city whose builder and maker is God, for which Abraham looked¹ and which has now come concretely in the Church, but which will come in its fullness as the Heavenly Jerusalem at the end of time. Implicit in circumcision, then, was Abraham’s hope (and, in Abraham, truly the hope of all mankind) in this promise of God.

On the eighth day of Jesus Christ’s incarnate human life, He too was circumcised. But, being Himself the very One promised by God and foreshadowed in this covenantal rite, the Lord’s circumcision is the fulfillment of circumcision as such, and itself signifies the reality of God’s promises coming to fruition in Christ’s salvation of mankind and all of creation thereby. But why did God choose the eighth day of a male child’s life specifically for this rite to be performed? The Synaxarion of the Orthodox Church, which commemorates the circumcision of the Lord on January 1², offers the following as an answer to this question:

In the circumcision of the flesh that God required of Abraham there was likewise a prophetic element, for He commanded it to be done when the child had completed his first seven days of life; and this stands for the whole course of time (as we are to understand the week of the creation in Genesis). The eighth day therefore symbolized the passage, beyond the time of this world of death, to the everlasting life opened to us by the Resurrection of the Lord on the ‘eighth’ day of the week, which is also the first and unique day of endless and changeless life. Therefore, in being circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, Christ announces His Resurrection and our Redemption.³

After Christ’s circumcision on the eighth day, He grew to the ripe age of thirty, which is the minimum age requirement set by God for the sons of Kohath to perform service related to the most holy things in the tabernacle⁴, which are shadows of their archetypes in the worship of the Heavenly Temple, at whose altar Christ would perform the final offering of Himself on behalf of all. Thus the time came for the inauguration of His public ministry, at which point He received baptism by John in the Jordan; in solidarity with sinful man, though Himself without sin, His baptism prefigured His priestly death on the cross—as both offerer and offering—and his resurrection, both of which were to come three years later, as well as His sending the Holy Spirit after His ascension (for the Spirit came and lighted upon Him after he came up out of the waters of the Jordan). Upon the completion of this holy mission of mercy and righteousness, for which purpose the Father sent the Son— the fulfillment of the Old Covenant in the New—the foundation for Christ’s salvific work was laid and made available to all who have ears to hear and eyes to see. The birth of the Church at Pentecost commenced the actualization of what He had accomplished, that it might begin to unfold among those humans who, starting from that point and throughout the rest of human history, would become His Body on earth through death and resurrection with Him, and who look forward in hope to their eventual eschatological ascension with Him into the heavenly life of the age to come, after the likeness of His own ascension from atop the Mount of Olives. Once the Kingdom of God had thus been inaugurated in the Church, and a New Covenant cut, circumcision gave way to baptism, the latter being not a sign only, but an ontologically efficacious means of entrance into the New Covenant and the Church, translating the person who has so died and risen with Christ into His Kingdom and giving him a foretaste in this age of the eternal “eighth day” to come, which will be manifested in full at Christ’s parousia at the end of time. Following St. Dumitru Stăniloae’s patristic assessment of the matter, I will consider some aspects of what this eschatological eighth day means for those who are Christ’s. Of this day, St. Dumitru says with concision:

The life to come will be an endless Sunday, or paradise found and eschatology inaugurated, the moment of the dawn with its wonderful "suddenly" and the unfading light of the eighth day in which God will be all in all.⁵

As Sunday in this age functions as both the end of a prior week and the beginning of the next, on an eschatological level, Sunday represents the eternal Day of the age to come, whose realization is precisely the telos of history and time itself—the eschatological culmination of temporal creation that humans were from the beginning meant by God to inhabit. This is so because the purpose of all temporal movement in this age is to deepen the communion of love between all things among themselves and with God; and thus, in this sense, history itself is a preface to true and abundant life, which for man and all of creation in him is nothing other than the fullness of this divine communion. Because the endless Sunday to come is an eternal beginning to the infinite life in God, its character is such that all points within it are perpetual beginnings of yet more glorious beginnings without limit and ad infinitum, for the vector of this ever-moving rest is Spiritual movement toward and deeper into God in Christ His Word. St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his Seventh Homily on the Song of Songs, describes this dynamic as follows:

Thus in the eternity of the age without end, he who runs towards Thee is always becoming greater and higher, always adding to himself by the multiplication of graces… but as that which is sought is in itself boundless, the end and fulfillment of that which is found becomes, for those who ascend, the starting point of the discovery of more exalted blessings. And he who ascends never ceases to go from beginning to beginning by beginnings which have no end.⁶

St. Dumitru too describes this dynamic, emphasizing that we cannot view this movement in temporal terms—neither as a simple cycle nor as an endless linear progression:

[T]he end or eternal life is not a simple return to the beginning, a return to a point from which the temporal cycle can begin again, but rather an advancement in the same infinity. It does not mean an advancement in an endless linear time, for it happens at the end of time, but into an infinity that is continually tasted but that never satiates. If the life to come is movement, it is not a movement that transforms beings, St. Maximus the Confessor says, but a static movement or a mobile stability, a movement that eternally maintains the beings in that which they are and in Him who is, strengthening them and making them grow at the same time. For it is a direct movement around their unmoved first cause, of which they increasingly partake, and thus they cannot be corrupted.⁷

Necessary for this form of eternal, ever-moving rest—this movement of ever-beginning and insatiable desire described in different yet complementary terms by both St. Gregory and St. Dumitru above—is the freedom given by God to man, as His image. Such freedom is absolutely essential for man in his realization of his own meaning as the capstone of God’s creation, as St. Dumitru, who locates the crux of human significance in man’s ability to move freely, relates:

Human nature must realize itself through its free movement, following its authentic direction. This free movement toward its source, sought after as its final goal, gives it its true significance. In this movement creation continually overcomes its finitude, that is, the limit it has already reached.⁸

The mystery of this divine eschatological freedom, the likeness of which man can to some extent actualize within himself by grace in this age, involves his surpassing perpetually the finitude of his existence, represented as any given definite stage of his spiritual development or level of communion with God. Each step of progress further into the bosom of God is a new beginning, with an even vaster horizon of infinitude opening up before man’s spiritual vision, a deeper revelation of Christ which stokes the flame of his desire and expands his capacity both to be loved and to love. As St. Dumitru says, the direction of this movement is at once both back toward man’s origin, God, and so in this sense the Beginning, but also toward the ultimate purpose of his existence, whose shape is an eternal trajectory into ever-deeper states of communion with the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, and so in this sense, the End. It is in this convergence of Beginning and End—Alpha and Omega—in Christ that the paradox of man’s simultaneous finitude and infinitude (“the finite opened to the infinite”) is resolved; his ever-moving rest in and around God can only be actualized beyond the bounds of natural law and time, and through such movement man is capable of experiencing God with both an increasingly intimate familiarity and as an inexhaustibly deepening Mystery with a concomitant sense of His absolute otherness—as both ineffably immanent (as One closer to man than his very self) and utterly transcendent ( as a Spiritual destination that gets further away the closer he gets to Him). Accordingly, St. Dumitru identifies the fulfillment and actualization of human nature as nothing other than man’s becoming himself, the likeness of God, with “an endless dynamic capacity”. In the words of this modern father of the Church:

The unification of the entirety of human dynamism in ever-increasing love reveals to us that the spirit's most profound aspect is freedom. For freedom is the pure spirit's infinite ability, always renewed, to continually overcome its finitude. Freedom is the continual ascent toward God, the human spirit's infinite and unconditioned origin. Freedom is, on one hand, our nature's mode of realization; on the other hand it is, in its essence, an experience of the infinite. This is because "human nature is at once finite and infinite." It is the finite opened to the infinite. It is finite when it remains unmoved in itself, and it is infinite when it moves toward God through its freedom. "The nature of angels and of souls knows no limit and nothing stops it from progressing to the infinite." It follows from this that nature is not something completed, but, due to freedom, something in the course of becoming, with an endless dynamic capacity. "Creation is not in the good except through a participation in the better; it did not only begin to exist once, but in every moment one sees it in its beginning, because of its perpetual growth in the good." Consequently, human nature and its likeness with God are one, because both represent the élan toward the infinite. "The one limit of virtue is the absence of a limit. How then would one arrive at the sought-for boundary when he can find no boundary?"⁹

Thus the final rest for man, and for all of creation in him, is found in a stable movement around God on Sunday, the eschatological and eternal Day of the Son. This Eighth Day, with its myriad layers of theological significance, is symbolized prophetically in, among other things, circumcision, baptism, Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection—and, truly, by the entirety of the Church’s pilgrimage through history from Pentecost to the end of time and great eternal beginning. Temporal movement is inherently limited, for such movement is circumscribed by a boundary and has both a definite beginning and end; therefore, time cannot be the domain in which man finds his ultimate fulfillment and actualization as the manifest likeness of God. Rather, he must find rest in an eternal movement around and within God Himself, who transcends time and is uncircumscribed, without boundary, making Him the only domain within which man is able to realize the meaning underlying the inexhaustible desire of his heart planted within him by God. As lofty as the themes of this article may at first appear, they have all found concrete realization in our Lord Jesus Christ, who, in history, has brought definitively and forevermore the divine and human natures into perfect union within His Person, “inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably”.¹⁰

1. Hebrews 11:10

2. January 1 is the New Calendar date. For those using the Julian calendar, the date is January 14.

3. Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra, The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church, Volume 3, January, February, p. 3.

4. Numbers 4:1-15

5. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 6, p. 200.

6. St. Gregory of Nyssa, Seventh Homily on the Song of Songs, as quoted in The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church, Volume 3, January, February, p. 105.

7. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 6, pp. 200-201.

8. Ibid, p. 199.

9. Ibid, pp. 198-199.

10. Symbol of Chalcedon: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds2.iv.i.iii.html