Transfigured in Holiness Like the Theotokos: Homily for the Sixth Sunday After Pentecost & Sixth Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

Romans 12: 6-14; Matthew 9: 1-8

We are certainly in a spiritually rich time of year in the life of the Church.  Having begun the fast in preparation for the Dormition of the Theotokos, we are now also anticipating the Transfiguration of the Lord, when Peter, James, and John beheld His divine glory on Mount Tabor.  As with all the feasts of the Church, the point is not simply to remember what happened long ago, but instead to participate personally in the eternal truth made manifest in these celebrations.  And that means nothing less than being transfigured ourselves by our Lord’s gracious divine energies as we come to share more fully in His restoration and fulfillment of the human person as a living icon of God.  

In order for that to happen, we must become like the Theotokos in saying, “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord.  Let it be to me according to your word.”  In other words, we must follow her example of holy receptivity and obedience to Christ, for she said “Yes” to God with every once of her being as the first and model Christian who also became the first to follow Him as a whole embodied person into the Kingdom of Heaven.  Looking to her uniquely blessed example, we pray, fast, and give alms in order to open our souls in humility to receive the divine grace necessary to gain the strength to rise up from our comfortable beds of self-centeredness and move forward into a life of holiness.  She shows us how a human being—living in a fallen world, subject to temptation, and facing the reality of the grave –may become transfigured in holiness through union with her Son.

Today’s gospel reading provides another example of what such personal transformation looks like.  When the paralyzed man was brought to Christ, He refused to be constrained as a mere faith healer or miracle worker, for He actually forgave the sins of the paralyzed man.  In doing so, He showed His divinity in a way that scandalized the religious leaders, for only God could do that and they did not believe that He was divine. The man’s paralysis is a vivid icon of the state of humanity cast out of Paradise, corrupted and decayed by our refusal to pursue the fulfillment of our calling to become like God in holiness.  By rejecting our true vocation and looking for fulfillment in gratifying our self-centered desires, we have diminished ourselves to the point of becoming as weak as the man unable to get up off the ground.  Christ responded to him with healing mercy, granting the poor man strength and restoration beyond what he could ever have given himself, no matter how hard he tried.  In response to the Savior’s gracious therapy, the man obeyed the command to stand up, pick up his bed, and walk home.  Apart from this personal encounter with the Lord, the man would have remained enslaved to debilitating weakness and despair, but the Savior’s healing restored his ability to move forward in the life of one who bears the image and likeness of God.

When we open our souls to receive the Lord’s mercy through prayer, fasting, and generosity to our neighbors, we receive the same therapy that He extended to the paralyzed man.  We ask Him to heal our wounds, restore our strength, and help us become participants in the eternal joy for which He created us.  We ask Him to deliver us from the wretched, corrupt state of being so weak before our passions that we feel helpless before our familiar temptations, no matter how much we despise them. We ask Him to help us gain the wherewithal to put behind us the ingrained habits of thought, word, and deed that serve only to make us and our neighbors miserable.  We even dare to ask Him to make us “partakers of the divine nature” who share by grace in His victory over death, which is the wages of sin.  

To rise up, take up our beds, and walk home is to freely obey Christ, even as the Theotokos accepted her extraordinary calling to become the virgin mother of the Son of God.  Since one dimension of being in the divine image is to have freedom, God never forces us to fulfill our vocation to become more like Him in holiness.  As we affirm in so many of our prayers, we are responsible for how we use our freedom as those who will stand before the dread judgement seat of Christ.  God wants all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4), but we must not blithely assume that our beliefs or membership in the Church somehow guarantee us the blessedness of the Kingdom.  Christ said that to whom much is given, much will be required.  (Lk. 12:48)   As He taught, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.”  (Matt. 7:21) True transfiguration in Christ is not merely a matter of having certain ideas or emotions about God, for as St. James wrote, “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” (Jas. 2:17) The standard of eternal judgment in the Lord’s parable in Matthew 25 is how people treated Christ in their most miserable neighbors.  That is not a matter of legalistic self-justification, but of becoming so transfigured in holiness that we spontaneously convey His gracious mercy to those in whom we encounter Him every day.       

Christ alone is the Savior Who has united divinity and humanity in His own Person, conquered death through His glorious resurrection, and ascended in glory to heaven.  He alone will come to judge the living and the dead, Whose kingdom will have no end. As the God-Man, He is our restoration and fulfillment as living icons of God.  His commandments are not arbitrary or superficial, but go to the heart and require our transformation as whole persons.  St. Paul described the chief characteristics of such a life in today’s epistle reading: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Never flag in zeal, be aglow with the Spirit, and serve the Lord. Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints, practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.”

Such a life requires the purity of heart necessary to see God, which we will never acquire by lying comfortably in our beds of self-centered desire.  True transfiguration in holiness has nothing to do with judging ourselves and others according to superficial checklists of piety or morality, for it is entirely possible to congratulate ourselves for going through the motions of religious or legal observance while remaining enslaved to pride, anger, lust, greed, vengeance, and other passions that will keep us spiritually paralyzed.  In the Sermon on the Mount, the Savior taught that Old Testament laws on murder and adultery go to the heart in ways that call us to become holy as God is holy, not merely to refrain from grossly immoral behaviors. True transfiguration in holiness is an infinite goal and we will not progress toward it by viewing the Christian life as an exercise in justifying ourselves in our own minds by our good behavior.  Instead, we must obey the Lord in humility according to the level of spiritual clarity and strength that we currently possess, even as we use our ongoing struggle to do so as a reminder of our constant need for the healing mercy of the Lord for overcoming the paralysis that remains with us.    

In this spiritually rich time of year, let us unite ourselves in faith and faithfulness to the Lord Who was transfigured in glory on Mt. Tabor, for He alone makes it possible for us to be transfigured in holiness as “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.  Let us look to the Theotokos as the great example of a merely human person who did precisely that and has now followed her Son into the life of heaven.  She used her freedom to say “Yes” to God with every once of her being.  Let us follow her blessed example, for that is the only way to receive His gracious healing of the ongoing paralysis of sin in our lives.