Homily for "Saint Timon Sunday," the Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, & the Fifth Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

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 7^th 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.