It Is Only Because of the Light that We Can See the Darkness: Homily for the Thirty-first Sunday After Pentecost & Fourteenth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

1 Timothy 1:15-17; Luke 18:35-43

 

We remain in a period of preparation to behold Christ at His appearing.  The One born at Christmas and baptized at Theophany is brought by the Theotokos and St. Joseph the Betrothed to the Temple in Jerusalem as a 40-day old Infant in fulfillment of the Old Testament law, which we will celebrate later this week at the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the old man St. Simeon proclaims that this Child is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.”  The aged prophetess St. Anna also speaks openly of Him as the Savior.   At the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple, we celebrate the appearance of the Lord Who fulfills the ancient promises to Abraham and extends them to all with faith in Him.  By His appearance, He has enlightened the whole creation. Christ is “the true light which gives light to everyone coming into the world.” (Jn. 1:9) 

 If we have any level of spiritual integrity and insight, however, we will recognize how far we are from having the clarified spiritual vision necessary to behold the glory of the Lord at His appearance.  Despite our celebration of these great feasts, we remain very much like the blind beggar in need of the Lord’s healing mercy for the restoration of our sight.  That may seem odd, for we are illumined in baptism, filled with the Holy Spirit at Chrismation, and nourished by Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist.  As we sing after receiving Communion, “We have seen the true Light.  We have received the Heavenly Spirit.  We have found the true Faith, worshiping the Undivided Trinity Who hath saved us.”   Yes, the eyes of our souls have been cleansed, but not to the point that we are fully transparent to the brilliant light of Christ.

 St. Paul wrote, “For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor. 4: 6) The Apostle gained the spiritual vision to see himself, as he wrote in today’s epistle reading, as “the foremost of sinners.”  We quote him in confessing that we are each “the chief” of sinners in our pre-Communion prayers.  To pray those words with integrity is a clear sign that Christ is enlightening our hearts, for otherwise we would remain in the utter blindness of thinking that we are justified in self-righteously exalting ourselves before God and over other people.  St. Paul had the vision to do precisely the opposite when he wrote that “I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience for an example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life.”  In other words, Paul knew that if the divine mercy could extend even to a miserable sinner like him, then there is hope for everyone in Christ Jesus.  That is precisely the kind of humility that even the smallest ray of spiritual light should inspire in our souls.

 If we have truly embraced the Lord’s mercy with the humility of the chief of sinners, then He has already corrected our spiritual vision to the point that we can catch at least a glimpse of how infinitely beyond us the fullness of His eternal glory remains.  That is why we are able to see, at least partially, how much darkness remains within us and how far we are from fulfilling the Lord’s command: “You shall be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48) He also taught: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matt. 5:8) If we are not completely blind spiritually, hearing these words will inspire us to call out with the humble persistence of the blind beggar for mercy that will further restore and perfect our sight.   

 The blind beggar is a model for us in many ways in how to gain spiritual clarity.  First, he neither denied nor embraced his inability to see.  He did not accept some kind of fantasy that distracted him from facing the truth about his situation.  He did not somehow convince himself that the best he could do was to make the most of being a blind beggar.  He knew that he could not see and desperately wanted healing.  Is the same true of us?  Have we become so comfortable with our darkened spiritual sight that we do not long to become radiant with the brilliant light of our Lord, sharing as fully as possible in His blessed eternal life?  Have we become content with a faith that is little more than an assortment of religious ideas and practices that we use to distract ourselves from confronting where we truly stand before God and in relation to our neighbors?  If we are honest, we will answer those questions not according to our passions but in light of our Lord’s infinite holiness, for we must all engage in the perpetual spiritual struggle of opening our darkened souls more fully to the light of Christ.  We have all become too comfortable with the darkness with us; to the extent that we recognize that, it is because we have opened the eyes of our souls to receive at least a small measure of the light of our Lord. 

 The blind beggar is also a model for us because he called out to Christ when he did not fully understand who He was.  The beggar used a very Jewish term for the Messiah, “Son of David,” when he asked for mercy.  Like everyone else who was waiting for the Messiah or “anointed one” at that time, the beggar surely thought of Christ as merely an especially righteous human being who would bless the Jews by healing the sick, casting out demons, teaching strict obedience to the Old Testament law, and delivering Israel from occupation by the Roman Empire.  They wanted a new King David, not One Who appeared truly as the Son of God Who would conquer death through His cross and empty tomb.  The Savior did not, however, reject the blind man’s request due to this lack of full understanding.  Instead, the Lord graciously restored the man’s sight because he had faith that He could heal him.  Likewise, we must not be discouraged from persistently calling out to Christ due to our imperfect faith or knowledge. Uniting ourselves fully to Him is an infinite vocation that none of us has completed.  We may face deep struggles in entrusting our most painful wounds and weaknesses to the Savior for healing.  We may wrestle with doubt almost to the point of despair.  God may seem distant from the challenges that break our hearts.  Like that blind beggar, however, we must refuse to be denied, cultivating the trust to call for the Lord’s mercy from the depths of our hearts in some form of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  If we can pray that prayer with any measure of spiritual integrity, even with faith the size of a mustard seed, that is because His light is already shining in our hearts.  The way to grow in faith is to cultivate and magnify that light, which we do by offering even our deepest pains and darkest fears to Christ through prayer from the depths of our hearts, especially when we are sorely tempted not to. Let us do so with simple trust that, as St. Paul wrote, “’whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’” (Rom. 10:13)   

 There is simply no way for us to gain the spiritual vision to behold and know Christ more fully than to embrace the daily spiritual struggle to share personally in His healing and fulfillment of the human person in the image and likeness of God.  When we stumble in doing so, let us use our fall to grow in humility and sense of dependence upon His grace.  There is no way to open the eyes of our souls to His brilliant light without calling persistently from the depths of our hearts for His mercy.  That is precisely the humility that attracts the grace without which we would be completely blind.  That is precisely the humility that we see in St. Paul, who knew himself to be the chief of sinners.  That is precisely the humility that we see in the blind beggar, who refused to stop calling out for the Lord’s healing mercy.  And it must be the humility that becomes characteristic of us as those who recognize the 40-day old Christ at His Presentation in the Temple as the Savior “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.”   He alone can overcome the darkness that remains within us.

 

 

 

Obedience and Gratitude: Homily for the Twenty-ninth Sunday after Pentecost & Twelfth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Colossians 3:4-11; Luke 17:12-19

 

            During the season of Christmas, we celebrated the Nativity in the flesh of the Savior.  Born as truly one of us, He is the New Adam Who restores and fulfills us as living icons of God.  During the season of Theophany, we celebrated the revelation of His divinity as a Person of the Holy Trinity at His baptism, where the voice of the Father identified Him as the Son and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in the form of a dove.  Christ has appeared in the waters of the Jordan, blessing the entire creation, enabling all things to become radiant with the divine glory.  When we put Him on like a garment in baptism, we participate in the sanctification that He has brought to the world as we regain the “robe of light” repudiated by our first parents. 

             We must never think of our Lord’s birth or baptism, or of our own baptism, as somehow the end of the story.  Saint Paul wrote that, “when Christ, Who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”  As we confess in the Nicene Creed, there is a future dimension of Christ’s appearance, for He “will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, Whose kingdom will have no end.”  We “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”  When Christ returns in brilliant glory, the true state of our souls will be revealed.  The Last Judgment will be the ultimate epiphany or manifestation of whether we have embraced His healing and become radiant with His gracious divine energies.  It will be impossible to hide or obscure on that day who we have become.

             To shine eternally with the light of Christ requires that we undertake the daily struggle to purify and reorient the desires of our hearts toward fulfillment in God and away from slavery to our passions.  The Colossians to whom Paul wrote were mostly Gentile converts who needed to be reminded that they had repudiated corrupt pagan practices and put on Christ in baptism.  That is why Paul told them to “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”  It is contradictory to unite oneself to Christ and then to refuse to conform our character to His.  In order to have spiritual integrity, we must continue to repudiate all that keeps us from becoming living epiphanies of our Lord’s salvation. As Paul notes, “anger, wrath, malice, slander…foul talk” and lying should have no place in our lives, for in baptism we have “put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.”

            As those who live in hope for the coming of the Kingdom, we must struggle every day of our lives to enter more fully into Christ’s restoration and fulfillment of the human person in the image and likeness of God.  There is no other way to appear with Him in glory, whether today or when His Kingdom comes in its fullness.  And the merely human distinctions that we so often celebrate due to our passions and insecurities have nothing to do with sharing in the life of our Lord, for as Paul wrote, “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.” 

        Today’s gospel reading provides a shocking example of this truth, for the Lord’s healing mercy extended even to a Samaritan with leprosy.  Among the ten lepers the Lord healed, the only one who returned to thank Him was a hated Samaritan, someone considered a foreigner and a heretic by the Jews.  After the man fell down before Him in gratitude, the Lord said, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”  Our Lord’s gracious interaction with this man shows that His therapeutic ministry extended even to those conventionally understood to be outsiders, sinners, and enemies.  The Lord’s love for humanity transcends all political and personal boundaries, and we must not pretend that His benevolence somehow does not extend to those we consider our enemies for whatever reason.  Doing so will reveal only how very far we are from becoming living epiphanies of His salvation.    

         Remember that our Savior praised the faith of a Roman centurion, who was an officer of the Roman army that occupied Israel.  By any conventional standard, that man was His enemy.  (Lk 7:9) The people of Nazareth tried to throw Christ off a cliff when He reminded them that God had at times blessed Gentiles through the ministry of great Hebrew prophets and had not helped Jews.  (Lk 4:29) He shocked everyone by talking with St. Photini, the Samaritan woman at the well, and then spending a few days in her village.  (Jn 4:40) The list could go on, but the point is obvious that our Lord’s love for broken, suffering humanity extends literally to all who bear the divine image and likeness.  He was born and baptized in order to bring all people into the Holy Trinity’s eternal communion of love.  It is only “the old nature” of corruption that would keep us so enslaved to hatred, division, and vengeance that we would imagine that those we consider our enemies are any less called to become brilliant epiphanies of salvation than we are.   

Perhaps the Samaritan returned to give thanks because he had never expected to find healing from the Jewish Messiah.  He knew that, in the eyes of the Jews, he was considered sinful and an outcast.  Nonetheless, he obeyed the Lord’s command to head toward the temple in Jerusalem to show himself to the priests.  That must have been a very difficult instruction for a Samaritan to obey, for the Samaritan temple was not in Jerusalem, but on Mount Gerizim.  The Jewish temple was no place for a Samaritan; he surely would not have been welcome there.  Nonetheless, he set out toward Jerusalem with the other lepers.  When he realized that he had been healed, he was the only one to return to thank the Savior for this life-changing miracle.

             This man did not have the pride of someone who expected everything to go his way because of his heritage or personal accomplishments. He could take nothing for granted and was profoundly thankful for a blessing he had never expected.  He was truly humble and thus had the spiritual clarity to see that the only appropriate response to his healing was to fall down before Christ in gratitude.  That is how he showed the faith that made him well.

             We can all follow his example by both obeying the Lord’s commandments and cultivating a deep sense of gratitude.  The Samaritan did what Christ told him to do and, when he saw that he was healed, remembered to thank Him.  We must struggle to repudiate the ways in which we fall short of our high calling to manifest His glory.  When we find the strength to do so, even in small and imperfect ways, we must not thank ourselves but the One Who heals us by His grace.  We must not pretend that we have accomplished something by our own power, but must cultivate gratitude as we continue the journey to share more fully in His life.   The more that we enter into the brilliant light of Christ, the more the darkness within us will become apparent.  Instead of despairing or distracting ourselves by judging others, let us embrace the struggle each day of our lives to find healing from our passions as we embrace more fully our true identity in Christ, becoming evermore brilliant epiphanies of His salvation.  Let us prepare to “appear with him in glory” through obedience and gratitude, for that is the only way to follow the example of the Samaritan, whose faith made him well.

Christ's Baptism Renews the Whole Creation: Homily for the Synaxis of the Holy Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John in the Orthodox Church

 

Acts 19:1-8; John 1:29-34

In this season we celebrate the great feast of Theophany, of Christ’s baptism by St. John the Forerunner when the voice of the Father identified Him as the Son of God and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in the form of a dove. Epiphany reveals that the Savior Who appears from the waters of the Jordan to illumine our world of darkness is truly the God-Man, a Person of the Holy Trinity.  He is baptized to restore us, and the creation itself, to the ancient glory for which we were created.

By entering into the water, the Lord made it holy, which means that He restored and fulfilled its very nature.  We need water in order to live.  The earth needs water in order to become fertile, bearing fruit and giving life to animals of all kinds.  We wash with water and use it to maintain cleanliness and health.  Without water, we become weak and die, as do other creatures.  And in the world as we know it, water can kill us through floods and storms. Since the creation has been subjected to futility through the sin of human beings, the very water through which God gives us life may become the means of our death. But when water is blessed, God restores it to its natural state, to its place in fulfilling God’s purposes for the flourishing of the creation in holiness.  And since our homes are where we and our families live each day, how could we not want His blessing on our marriages, our children, and the physical space where we offer our lives to the Lord?  When we bless our homes, we join what is most important to us to Christ’s healing and restoration of the entire universe. We find strength to make our daily lives a liturgy, an entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the natural state of those who bear the image and likeness of God.

Tragically, our first parents turned away from their high calling and ushered in the unnatural realm of corruption that we know all too well, both in the brokenness of our hearts and in our relationships with one another.  God gave Adam and Eve garments of skin when they left paradise after disregarding Him.  Through their disobedience, they had become aware that they were naked and were cast into the world as we know it.  Their nakedness showed that they had repudiated their vocation to become like God in holiness.  Having stripped themselves of their original glory, they were reduced to mortal flesh and destined for slavery to their passions and to the grave.   Because of them, the creation itself was “subjected to futility…” (Rom. 8:20)

As we prepared for Theophany, we heard this hymn: “Make ready, O Zebulon, and prepare, O Nephtali, and you, River Jordan, cease your flow and receive with joy the Master coming to be baptized. And you, Adam, rejoice with the first mother, and hide not yourselves as you did of old in paradise; for having seen you naked, He appeared to clothe you with the first robe. Yea, Christ has appeared desiring to renew the whole creation.”   If it seems strange to think of Christ being baptized in order to clothe Adam and Eve, remember St. Paul’s teaching that “as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”  (Gal. 3:27)   In baptism, Jesus Christ clothes us with a garment of light, restoring us to our original vocation to become like Him in holiness.  He delivers us from the nakedness and vulnerability of slavery to our own passions and to the fear of the grave.  Through His and our baptism, He makes us participants in His restoration and fulfillment of the human person. He is baptized in order to save Adam and Eve, all their descendants, and the entire creation, fulfilling the glorious purposes for which He brought us all into existence.    

Life after baptism is not, however, without pain, disease, death, and other sorrows.  In contrast with the divine glory of the appearance of our Lord, the darkness of sin within us and our world of corruption becomes all the more apparent.  In the aftermath of Christ’s birth, Herod the Great had all the young boys in the region of Bethlehem murdered. St. John the Forerunner, who prepared the way for “the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world,” was arrested by Herod Antipas for prophetically denouncing the king’s immorality.  After the one who baptized Him was arrested, the Lord went to “Galilee of the Gentiles” to begin His public ministry in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that “’the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.’” (Matt. 4:15-16) 

We are baptized into Christ’s death in order to rise up with Him into a life of holiness in which we regain the robe of light rejected by our first parents. In every aspect of our darkened lives, He calls us to become radiant with the divine glory He shares with us as the New Adam.  In order to do so, we must find healing for the passions that have taken root in our hearts and have distorted our relationships even with those we love most.  In how we treat everyone from those closest to us to complete strangers, we must find healing from the corruptions of pride, hatred, anger, resentment, and the desire to dominate others.  It does not matter whether we are at home, work, school, or other settings, or whether we think we are in private or in public. If we have put on Christ in baptism, we must become living icons of Christ’s salvation and mercy to all we encounter.

We must also be on guard for all the ways in which we remain inhabitants of “the region and shadow of death.”  Because the Savior has hallowed the water and the entire creation through His baptism, absolutely nothing is intrinsically evil or profane.  No dimension of God’s good creation requires us to return to the nakedness of passion in any way.  We are without excuse for doing so, for Theophany reveals that we are always on holy ground and must speak, act, and think as those who wear a garment of light.  Though we fall short of meeting the goal each day, we must always strive to manifest our Lord’s healing of the human person in every thought, word, and deed.  We must become like holy water restored to its natural place and blessing the world as a sign of its salvation.

            If we are to discern how to fulfill our vocation to bear witness to our Lord in the midst of a world still enslaved to the fear of death, we must embrace the full meaning of our baptism.  That requires constant vigilance against allowing self-centered desire to creep unnoticed into our hearts and distort our vision of ourselves, our neighbors, and our world.  That requires turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, and treating others as we would have them treat us, especially when we think we are justified in responding in kind to those who have wronged us.  That requires turning away from whatever fuels our passions so that the desires of our hearts are purified and directed toward their true fulfillment in God.  As we celebrate Theophany in “the region and shadow of death,” let us focus mindfully on living each day as those who have died to sin and risen up into a life holiness.  That is how we may become brilliant living epiphanies of the salvation of the world as we wear the robe of light that Christ has restored to Adam and Eve, for He is baptized to do nothing less than “to renew the whole creation.”