1 Corinthians 4:9-16; Matthew 17:14-23
We do not have to look hard today to find distortions of the way of Christ that have nothing to do with humbling ourselves before the Lord as we take up our crosses to follow Him. It is very dangerous to accept such corruptions of discipleship, for there is simply no way to unite ourselves to Him in faith and faithfulness without allowing our hearts to be broken. We continue today to celebrate the Dormition or “falling asleep” of the Theotokos, who after her death was the first to follow Him as a whole, embodied person into the Kingdom of Heaven. St. Symeon said to the Theotokos at the presentation of the 40-day old Savior in the Temple, “a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” (Lk. 2:35) We cannot begin to imagine the pain that she experienced as she saw her Son and God rejected and crucified before her own eyes. She never abandoned Him and surely no one rejoiced at His resurrection as did His virgin mother.
Regardless of how young or old our children are, the hearts of parents will be broken for them time and time again. The same is true of our relationships with our spouses and others with whom we are deeply united in love, for their sorrows become our own. Most of us have to learn the hard way that those we love are free persons whom we must not attempt to control or make in our own image. No one involved in such relationships is perfect and we must learn to bear the burdens that we present to one another patiently.
The father of the epileptic boy in today’s gospel reading stands out as a shining example of how we may lift up our broken hearts for our loved ones to Christ in true humility. This poor man sorrowed over the sufferings of his son, whose seizures put his life at risk by causing him to fall into both fire and water. He had asked the disciples to heal him, but they lacked the strength to do so. The Lord spoke truthfully about the spiritual weakness of those who followed Him most closely: “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.” Then He healed the young man. The disciples, being unaware of why they were unable to be of help in this situation, asked the Lord about it. His response must have been hard to hear: “Because you have no faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. This kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.”
As hard as it is for us understand, the
attachment the disciples had to Christ at this point was not true faith in Him. Since the Savior said that “This kind
never comes out except by prayer and fasting,” they must have lacked even the
most basic spiritual disciplines. The
passage ends with Christ foretelling His Passion: “The Son of man is to be
delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him, and He will rise on
the third day.” All the gospels indicate
that the disciples did not expect the Messiah to die and rise from the grave.
They shared the dominant hope for a military champion to defeat the Roman
forces of occupation and set up an earthly kingdom, in which they expected to
have places of prominence. Remember that
the Lord said, “Get behind me, Satan!” to Peter, the head disciple, when he
rejected the prediction of His cross and empty tomb. (Mk. 8:33) The hearts of
the disciples would have to be broken through their denial and abandonment of
the Savior Who went to the Cross for them finally to become receptive to a
Messiah very different from what they had expected.
St. Paul dealt with such distortions of the way of Christ in the church at Corinth where some built themselves up in their own minds in contrast to the humble obedience characteristic of true apostles. In contrast to the pretensions of his opponents, Paul wrote that true apostles are fools for Christ, weak, held in disrepute, hungry, thirsty, homeless, and persecuted. They were obviously not out for praise, glory, or self-satisfaction, but manifested in their sufferings the true way of the Lord as they blessed and forgave their tormentors. That is why Paul could say with integrity, “be imitators of me.” By enduring the pain and struggle of a heart broken for love of God and neighbor, he was healed of his passions and became a living icon of Christ.
The heart of the father in today’s gospel lesson had already been broken by his recognition that he could not heal or protect his son from seizures that could cause his death. Years of caring for the boy had revealed his own weaknesses and limitations. The common hopes of parents to see their family lines flourish in future generations rang hollow for him now. He struggled to think that he could keep his son from dying an untimely death and he was disappointed yet again when the disciples could not heal him. In Mark’s account of this encounter, we learn that the “father cried out and said with tears, ‘Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!’ in response to the Savior’s words ‘If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.’ (Mk. 9:23-24) In the midst of this man’s brokenness and pain, he knew that his faith was far from perfect. He had acquired the humility to see the weakness of his faith. His heart would not be healed by pretending he was something he was not. He cried honestly to the Lord from the depths of his soul and the Lord heard his plea.
As King David wrote in Psalm 50, “a contrite and humble heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.” Our hearts will become contrite and humble when we confront how we have marred the beauty of our souls and refused to fulfill our calling to become like God in holiness. St. Mark the Ascetic wrote that “Remembrance of God is pain of the heart endured in the spirit of devotion.” We will experience pain in our hearts when we persistently open even our deepest struggles and the darkest crevices of our souls to the healing of Christ. We will then know the infinite distance between the brilliant holiness to which we are called and the dark corruption that festers within us. Doing so requires mindfully dying daily to the slavery of our passions and reorienting the desires of our hearts for fulfillment in God. We must pray, fast, serve our neighbors sacrificially, and otherwise do all that we have the strength to do in taking up our crosses if we are to follow the Theotokos in the eternal joy of the Kingdom.
Remember,
however, that even the most conscientious performance of spiritual disciplines lacks
the power, in and of itself, to bring healing to our hearts, to our loved ones,
or our world. Even as the Lord chided
the disciples for their lack of faith, prayer, and fasting, He foretold His
great Self-offering on the Cross and victory over death through His glorious
resurrection on the third day. He alone
is the Savior, but we open ourselves to receive His healing by calling to Him in
humility from the depths of our broken hearts.
They will be broken when we honestly engage the struggle to turn away
from addiction to the self-centered desire that corrupts our relationships even
with those we love most in this life. It
is only then that we will be able to say with the brokenhearted father, “Lord,
I believe; help my unbelief!” It is only
then that we will be able to entrust our hearts to Christ with integrity. Otherwise, we will remain spiritual weaklings
who are captive to our illusions of self-righteousness and our desires that our
children, spouses, family members, and friends play the roles that we have
assigned them. If our hearts are not
broken by the weight of our own sins and purified by suffering love for our
neighbors, we will never gain the spiritual integrity of the father in today’s
gospel reading. But, thanks be to God,
that is possible for us all, if we will only take up our crosses as best we can
each day. Doing so will break our hearts
in many ways, but that is necessary if—like the Theotokos—we are to learn to entrust
ourselves and all our relationships and attachments to Christ, Who taught that
we must “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” (Matt. 6:33) By
enduring the struggle to focus on “the one thing needful” of hearing and
obeying the Word of God, we will open our hearts to receive the grace necessary
to follow her into the blessedness of the eternal joy for which He created us.
No comments:
Post a Comment