Romans 10:1-10; Matthew 8:28-9:1
We live in a time in which many people feel
lonely and isolated, even if they are around others on a regular basis at home,
work, and other settings. Sometimes that
is because we hold ourselves back emotionally from the possibility of being
rejected or harmed. Such separation is a
symptom of the estrangement from God and one another which Jesus Christ came to
heal.
The
demon-possessed men in today’s gospel reading represent Gentiles who were
enslaved to the worship of idols and false gods. Their deliverance shows
that Christ’s salvation is for all people, including those separated from
others by the power of evil in their lives.
When He set them free from their miserable isolation, the Lord required
nothing of them in advance; instead, He graciously liberated them from the degrading
forces of evil and restored them to a truly human existence. Here we see an
implication of St. Paul’s instruction to the Romans: “Christ is the end of
the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” At the very heart of
our faith is not a requirement for meeting an objective standard; instead, the
unlimited mercy of God is the very foundation of our life and extends even to demon-possessed
Gentiles, as well as to you and me.
The Orthodox Church has many rules, many canons, traditions, and
practices. But at the heart of our faith and common life is not the
obedience of law, for we are not called to be like the Pharisees of old.
Instead, we are called, as St. Paul teaches, to confess with our mouths the
Lord Jesus and to believe in our hearts that God has raised him from the dead;
if we do so, we will be saved. “For with the heart one believes unto
righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”
Of course, there are no magic words that can heal our souls. Instead of
creating a new law, St. Paul points to the deep truth of what it means to commend
all our life to Christ our God. It means that we trust in Him as whole
persons. As we offer our lives to Him, our words, deeds, and thoughts will come
to embody the new life that He has brought to the world. That is how we
open ourselves to receiving His transforming grace. That is how, like the demon-possessed men in
today’s reading, we too may become living icons of the mercy of Jesus Christ.
Remember that He
did not require the Gergesene demoniacs to earn their deliverance; neither does
He require that of us. Instead, the Savior has graciously taken upon Himself
the consequences of all human corruption and sin to the point of death, burial
and descent to Hades so that He could conquer them all in His glorious
third-day resurrection. He has ascended into heaven with full, complete
glorified humanity and sent the Holy Spirit to empower His Body, the Church, of
which we are members. He lives within our hearts by the Holy Spirit,
casting out our demons, forgiving our sins, and enabling us to share in His
eternal life even now as healed and transformed persons in relationship with
Him and one another. By His grace, Christ
restores us to the dignity and freedom of those who bear the divine image and
likeness.
Those particular men were set free from the control of demons, but that was
surely only the beginning of their lives in Christ. Even though their
deliverance was quite dramatic, it was only a start and they surely had to
press on from there to resist temptation, to grow in holiness, and to learn to
love and serve Him in their neighbors. They certainly had old fears
and habits to overcome. And the same is
true of us. Our salvation is a process, an ongoing journey of sharing
more fully in the new life that our Savior has brought to the world. We must
confess Christ more fully each day as we find greater healing, as we more fully
manifest His victory over sin and death in our own lives.
If our religion were about meeting the requirements of a law, we could meet the
standard and not think about it anymore. We could check off a box and
move on to something else; perhaps then it would make sense to condemn others
who did not measure up. But Orthodox Christianity is not about rules and
regulations, but instead about growing in relationship with a Person, our Lord God
and Savior Jesus Christ. It is about sharing in His blessedness, about
partaking in His divine nature by grace. And because God is eternal and
infinite and beyond even our best attempts to define and control Him, there is
no upward limit on what it means to unite ourselves to Him.
So we are constantly as much in need of Christ’s mercy as were those
demon-possessed fellows. We say the Jesus Prayer precisely because we are
sinners in need of Him. The more we are healed by His grace, the more
aware we will be of our brokenness and weakness. The
more we open our lives to Christ, the more clearly we will see how far we have
yet to go, how undeserving we are, how grateful we must be before an infinitely
holy God Who will stop at nothing—not even the cross—in order to bring us into
His blessed kingdom.
The formerly demon-possessed men could claim no credit for their
deliverance. They could only marvel at their great blessing and do their
best to live lives worthy of what Christ had done for them. We all face
the same challenge: to live in ways that reflect what our Lord has done
for us, to bear witness to the healing and fulfillment that He has brought to
our lives, and to continue to open ourselves more fully to His salvation.
That means that
we must all continue to struggle against whatever evil thoughts, habits, words,
and deeds threaten to separate us from the Lord and one another. We will not do
that perfectly, for we get side-tracked and distracted from fulfilling our
vocation each day. That is precisely why we need to build holy habits—like
attending services, praying daily, fasting regularly, and giving generously to
the needy-- into our lives. We need to
wake up and stay alert, for the ultimate choice of our lives is an ongoing
challenge. At stake is whether we will
grow in relationship with Christ by faith, repentance, and humility: by a life that confesses what He has done and
is doing for us. The other alternative is to return to the graveyard, to the isolation
and slavery of worshiping the false gods of our own will. Our choice is
not whether to obey a law, but whether we will embrace deliverance and healing. If we turn away from Christ, we do so as
isolated individuals who prefer our own will to His, who would rather decay in
the loneliness of a cemetery—of a dark tomb-- than share in the blessed banquet
of the Kingdom. But if we offer ourselves to the Lord, we enter
into eternal joy through His Body, the Church; we become members of Him through
our life together. The standards and
practices of the Church help us to grow in relationship with Him and with one
another. They sustain our faith, and help us grow in freedom from our slavery
to the power of sin in our lives. They
enable us to do what we cannot do alone as isolated individuals who hide in
fear from God and one another.
So like those Gergesene demoniacs, it is time for us to leave behind the
graveyard of evil and instead become who we are called to be in Jesus
Christ. It is time to embrace our true identity as those created in God’s
image and likeness and called to become partakers of the divine nature. By
sincere faith, honest confession, and genuine repentance, let us accept the infinite
mercy of the One who loves us so much that He conquered sin and death in order
to bring us from the despair of the tomb into the joy of the Kingdom. Now
is the time to turn our backs on the degrading delusions of idolatry and to
enter into the unspeakable blessedness to which He calls us. Now is the time to confess and believe in
Christ as we offer every dimension of our lives to Him for deliverance and
transformation that know no bounds. Now
is the time to turn from the isolated misery of sin for the joyful communion of
those who have been set free through the mercy of Jesus Christ.
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