Homily for Saints Athanasius and Cyril, Patriarchs of Alexandria & Twelfth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Hebrews 13:7-16; 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 brought to the world as we regain the “robe of light” repudiated by our first parents.  Baptism demonstrates that the God-Man did not come to make only one group of people participants in eternal life.  As St. Paul wrote, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”  (Gal. 3: 27-29)            

 

The Messiah fulfilled the ancient promise to Abraham and extended it to the Gentiles, which was contradictory to all the religious and social assumptions of first-century Palestine.  The same is true of our Lord’s healing of the Samaritan leper in today’s gospel reading.  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 interaction with this man shows that His gracious blessing extended even to those understood to be obvious foreigners, sinners, and enemies.  That is good news for us who have no ancestral claim to the spiritual heritage of Israel.  As recipients of divine love that transcends all human boundaries, we must never accept that nationality, race, or any such distinctions somehow exclude anyone from the same mercy that we ourselves have received.  Having received the high calling to become living epiphanies of His salvation through baptism, we must never fall into the spiritual blindness of viewing and treating anyone as less than a living icon of the One Who has born and baptized for the salvation of the entire world.   

 

Remember that the Savior praised the faith of a Roman centurion, an officer of the pagan Roman army that occupied Israel.  That surely scandalized religious nationalists who wanted a Messiah to bring political power to their people over against others.  (Lk 7:9) The people of Nazareth even 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 compassion 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 foreigners and enemies are any less called to become brilliant epiphanies of salvation than we are.   

 

Another shocking detail of our gospel reading is that the Samaritan alone returned to give thanks for receiving healing from the Messiah of Israel.  He knew that, in the eyes of the Jews, he was considered a complete 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 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. He reminds us in this regard of the “Good Samaritan” who, unlike the Jewish religious leaders who continued on their way, stopped to show overwhelming concern for the healing and wellbeing of a Jewish man who had been beaten by robbers and left for dead by the side of the road.  And even as the Samaritan cleansed from leprosy surpassed his Jewish companions in gratitude, the Samaritan Photini had understood Christ far better than had Nicodemus the Pharisee.

 

It remains tempting today to distort the way of Christ into agendas that are contradictory to His teaching and ministry, especially when we convince ourselves that we may define people according to the categories of our fallen world instead of seeing ourselves and our neighbors in light of the glory of His Kingdom.  Those who have put on Christ like a garment in baptism must not prefer the nakedness of slavery to passions that lead to hatred, fear, and abuse of anyone who bears the image and likeness of God, regardless of their nationality, political opinions, religious beliefs, or other characteristics.  If we corrupt the way of the Lord into a project that inflames our passions against any neighbor or group of people for any reason, we will most definitely not fulfill our calling to become living epiphanies of His salvation.  Instead, we will become like the self-righteous hypocrites who rejected Christ because He challenged their dreams of earthly power.   

 

Today we commemorate Sts. Athanasius and Cyril, Patriarchs of Alexandria who played crucial roles in resisting heresies that gravely obscured the good news of Jesus Christ. Athanasius combatted Arianism, which denied the full divinity of the Savior.  Cyril repudiated Nestorianism, which denied the unity of divinity and humanity in the Person of Christ.  They both focused on matters that strike at the very heart of the Faith, for only One Who is truly the God-Man can make us “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.  Their focus was not on superficial differences between people but on the most basic questions of how Christ brings salvation to the world.  They did not worship earthly power for they knew that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city, which is to come.”  They clarified that our calling is to “continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge His Name.”  They warned us “not [to] be led away by diverse and strange teachings; for it is well that the heart be strengthened by grace,” not by attachment to anything that hinders the healing of our souls.  They reminded us to live as Christ taught and “not [to] neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

 

That they were Egyptians who lived in a time and place very different from our own is irrelevant, for we are members together with them of the one Body of Christ.  We celebrate their memories and ask for their prayers not out of earthly kinship but with the same spiritual gratitude that we have for the Samaritan leper, St. Photini, and all the other “strangers and foreigners” with whom we have become “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” by the grace of the One born in Bethlehem and baptized in the Jordan for our salvation. Let us follow their teaching and example to the life of a kingdom that remains not of this world and in which all who respond to Christ “with the fear of God and faith and love” are welcome.