Greatness

"You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world." (1 John 4:4)

Most people do not believe in God today, because they do not believe in or understand greatness. Greatness has many meanings, but first and foremost, it refers to magnitude. To imagine something larger than the entire universe seems to stretch the mind to its very limits and beyond. There are other kinds of greatness. There is nobility, purity, power, intelligence, love--all of these have a share in greatness, and help to define it. And yet, since most of what we see in the world is dark or evil, it seems at first glance unreasonable to believe that there is truly someone so great as to have the intelligence to plan everything, the power to create everything, the nobility to allow everything to be independent of it and yet not abandoned, the purity to remain perfect despite the imperfections of what has been created, and the love to redeem everything created through self-sacrifice. And yet this is the kind of greatness that is God.

There is another kind of greatness. This refers to the best quality of the human character. It calls to mind fictional characters like Jean Valjean of Les Miserables and Gilliat of Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo orPrince Myshkin in The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. These characters have a great capacity for love and for seeing the world from a completely higher and transcendent plane without using that understanding to wield power over others or chain them in darkness, but rather to help people and bring them into light. In history, we might recall men and women who epitomize the best of human nature--people like Raoul Wallenberg, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mother Theresa, and Thomas Merton, to name a few. It has become unfashionable to think of "great" men and women, because the aspiration for greatness is sadly lacking today. As soon as one commentator hailed Michael Phelps as the greatest Olympic athlete of all time, there were editorials in the newspapers criticizing and trying to deny his tremendous accomplishments. Why? Humanity has reached a critical, perhaps fatal, stage in its development where it has come to loathe greatness as much as it has loathed light. All that remains for it is a great darkness. Instead, we glorify smallness, the natural, the easy, the comfortable. All of our aesthetics, ethics and metaphysics seeks the simplest answer, the one that troubles us least, the one that requires no effort from us, the answer that will make us less than what we are and more chained than ever before.

"No! No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved. For he who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all. They shall all be remembered, but everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. One became great through expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greater than all. They shall all be remembered, but everyone was great in proportion to the magnitude of what he strove with. For he who strove with the world became great by conquering the world, and he who strove with himself became great by conquering himself; but he who strove with God became greater than all. Thus there was strife in the world, man against man, one against thousands, but he who strove with God was greater than all. Thus there was strife upon earth: there was he who conquered everything by his own strength, and he who conquered God by his powerlessness. There was one who relied upon himself and gained everything, and one who, secure in his own strength, sacrificed everything; but greater than all was the one who believed God." Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. Trans. Alistair Hannay. (London: Penguin Great Ideas, 2005). 15-16.

Only when people start seeking what is greatest will greatness return to our hearts, expand them with love and that great space that is God, and fill them with the living water of His Spirit. Only when people start seeing the greatness in the pure and untainted Scripture will mankind see himself as he is, and see beyond his limitations by finding his home in eternity, in the cross-bearing life of grace that comes through Jesus Christ.