Romans 10:1-10; Matthew 8:28-9:1
Today
is “Saint Timon Sunday” in our Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America, when we make
an offering in support of our brothers and sisters in the Archdiocese of
Bosra-Hauran in Syria. That Archdiocese does all that it can to show the
love of Christ to those who suffer from years of violent conflict and social disruption.
Millions of people remain displaced or in severe need in Syria, where 90% of
the population now lives below the poverty line. The support provided by our Diocese over the
years has helped to fund a medical clinic, a pharmacy, and other desperately
needed forms of humanitarian aid.
We commemorate St. Timon today as one
of the seventy apostles sent out by the Lord and one of the original deacons
mentioned in Acts (Acts 6:5). He was the first bishop of what is now the
city of Bosra, and he died as a martyr for Christ. He played a key role
in evangelizing a region where our Lord Himself often ministered (Matt.4:25)
and where St. Paul took refuge after he escaped from Damascus following his
conversion. (Gal. 1:15-18) Especially as Antiochian Orthodox Christians,
we must give thanks for how St. Timon’s ministry enabled the Church to flourish
in ways from which we benefit to this very day.
We read in Acts that it was in Antioch that “the disciples were first
called Christians” and where the first Gentile church was established. (Acts 11:
20-26) Across the centuries, the Church of Antioch has embodied St. Paul’s
teaching that “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor
uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but
Christ is all and in all.” (Col. 3:11) Antioch is not a
nation or ethnic group, but a Church which manifests the unity in Christ of people
of many different cultures and languages. Antioch’s witness in doing so is all
the more powerful due to its many centuries of suffering, beginning with the
persecution of the pagan Roman Empire. Since
the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christians in the region have
carried a heavy cross as a “tolerated” minority community typically enduring persistent
discrimination mixed with periods of brutal oppression. Throughout history and
in our own time, many Middle Eastern martyrs and confessors have refused to
deny Christ, regardless of the cost.
The
ministries of the Archdiocese of Bosra-Hauran extend benevolence to anyone in
need, as is typical of philanthropic efforts of the Orthodox Church, such as
International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC). True Christians are not tribalistic and
concerned only with the needs of people like them, either religiously or in
other ways. Even as God’s love extends
to all, those who are truly in Christ share His love with everyone, especially
those they are inclined for whatever reason to view as enemies and
strangers. That is one of the major
reasons that our Lord’s ministry was so shocking, as today’s gospel reading
describes. The two demon-possessed men were Gentiles who had no ancestral
claim on the ministry of the Jewish Messiah.
They had lived a miserable life in the tombs and no one, not even their
pagan relatives and neighbors, would come near them out of fear. Nonetheless, the Savior had mercy on the men,
casting out their demons and restoring them to a recognizably human
existence. By the conventional standards
of that time and place, they were strangers and enemies of the sort to be
destroyed by the expected nationalistic Jewish Messiah.
Christ, of course, was a very
different kind of Savior Who delivered even demon-possessed Gentiles from their
sufferings as a sign of His love for all who bear the divine image and
likeness. His doing so was so shocking
that the people of the area actually asked Christ to leave as a result. Surely that had something to do with the
drowning of the herd of pigs into which He cast the demons and the astounding
transformation of the two men. Christ’s
crossing of the division between Jew and Gentile must have also been unsettling
to them. They only asked him to leave, however,
unlike the people of Nazareth, who tried to throw the Savior off a cliff after
He reminded them that God had at times blessed Gentiles through the prophets Elijah
and Elisha while disregarding Jews. (Lk. 4:25-30)
Unfortunately, the temptation
remains to use religion to make ultimate distinctions between groups of
people. Even as St. Paul criticized his
fellow Jews for “seeking to establish their own” righteousness by outward
obedience to the Old Testament law, it is possible to imagine that we are uniquely
pleasing to God simply because we do this or that or have some standing or
characteristic that we take to be a sign that God loves us more than people who
are different in that regard. The more
that we build ourselves up in our own eyes for whatever reason, the easier it becomes
to condemn our neighbors as being worthy only of contempt. If we persist in thinking that we stand
before God on the basis of the good deeds that we have done, the opinions we
hold, or our affiliation with any group or society, we will make ourselves
unreceptive to the healing mercy of the Lord Who delivered the demon-possessed
Gentiles. They were well beyond the
possibility of establishing their own righteousness by any standard;
nonetheless, the Savior delivered them. We
must learn to see ourselves in them.
St. Paul knew that “Christ
is the end of the law, that everyone who has faith may be justified.” He teaches that “the law was our tutor to
bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after
faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.” (Gal. 3:24-25) More fundamental
than the law of Moses was the promise to Abraham, who “’believed God, and it
was accounted to him for righteousness.’…And the Scripture, foreseeing
that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel to Abraham
beforehand, saying, ‘In you all the nations shall be blessed.’ So
then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham.”
(Gal. 3: 6-9) These passages show that we
will not find the healing of our souls by mere legal observance or morality,
and certainly not by any cultural or ethnic identity. Those who have faith in and confess Christ pursue
an eternal journey of union with Him as “partakers of the divine nature” which
requires turning away from all forms of self-justification in order to become
radiant with His gracious divine energies.
Christ
taught that the great test of whether we are uniting ourselves to Him is how we
treat the most miserable and inconvenient people who need our care, especially when
they are our enemies. He practiced what He preached by delivering the
demon-possessed Gentile men who lived in the tombs. St. Timon and the ongoing witness of the
Church of Antioch demonstrate what it means to be faithful to a Lord Whose love
for suffering humanity transcends the petty divisions that we use to justify condemning,
or at least ignoring, those who are not like us according to some earthly
standard or who have wronged us in some way.
We simply cannot pursue the life in Christ if we insist on grounding our
identity in our accomplishments or characteristics in comparison with those of
others. Instead, we must embrace the
true unity of the Body of Christ, in which all such worldly distinctions are
irrelevant, and together convey His love to our suffering neighbors, no matter
who they are. Let us do that, not only
by making generous offerings today for our brothers and sisters in Bosra-Hauran,
but also by refusing to allow self-justification of any kind to compromise our
faith in and faithfulness to Jesus Christ.
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