Homily for the Tenth Sunday After Pentecost, the Tenth Sunday of Matthew, and the After-feast of the Transfiguration of Christ in the Orthodox Church

 

1 Corinthians 4:9-16; Matthew 17:14-23

 

            We are presently in an especially rich period of the life of the Church, as we continue to celebrate our Lord’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor and prepare for the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos.  The spiritual eyes of Peter, James, and John were opened to behold the brilliant divine glory of the Lord as they saw Him speaking with Moses and Elijah.  Then from a bright cloud the voice of the Father proclaimed, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!” (Matt. 17:5). This miraculous vision occurred to enable the disciples, at Christ’s crucifixion, to remember that His “suffering was voluntary” so that they “could declare to all the world that Thou art truly the effulgent Splendor of the Father.”

 

            In His Transfiguration, it is revealed that the Savior is the God-Man, fully divine even as He is fully human.  He enables us to become transfigured in holiness by sharing personally in His gracious divine energies.  That is possible because of His incarnation, which required the free response of the woman called to become His virgin mother.  During the Dormition Fast, we humble ourselves as we celebrate how Mary was transfigured in holiness as the Theotokos, the Living Temple of the Lord, who at her “falling asleep” became the first to follow Him as a whole, embodied person into the Kingdom of Heaven.  She points us to her Son as the greatest example of receptivity and devotion to the Savior.

 

            Even as the Transfiguration was to prepare the disciples for the Lord’s crucifixion, the life of the Theotokos has a deep connection to the Cross.   As St. Symeon said to her at the presentation of the 40-day old Christ 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.  Nonetheless, she never abandoned Him and surely no one rejoiced at His resurrection as did His virgin mother. 

 

            The hard truth is that being transfigured in holiness requires taking up our crosses and enduring the struggle and pain that are necessary for the healing of our souls.  Since we are not isolated individuals but members together of Christ’s Body, the Church, it is not surprising that our spiritual health requires offering ourselves for the wellbeing of our neighbors.   That is especially the case for parents who have both a uniquely deep bond with their children and a unique responsibility to put their interests before their own.    

 

The father of the epileptic boy in today’s gospel reading stands out as a shining example of what it means to lift up our broken hearts for our loved ones in humility. The 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.  This encounter is reported by St. Matthew immediately after Peter, James, and John had beheld the divine glory of the Lord at His Transfiguration.  The man had asked the disciples to heal him, but they lacked the strength to do so.  The Lord spoke sternly 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 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 to understand, the attachment the disciples—including those who had beheld His Transfiguration-- 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 similar misunderstandings in the church at Corinth where some had built themselves up in their own minds in stark contrast to the humble obedience characteristic of true apostles.  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 Christ and His Body, the Church, he had been transfigured in holiness.

 

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 thrive 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 St. 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 his weakness clearly. His heart would never 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 and healed his son.

 

            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 struggle to open our deepest struggles and the darkest crevices of our souls to the healing light 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 true fulfillment in God.  Especially in this season, 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 become transfigured in holiness like the Theotokos and follow her into the eternal joy of the Kingdom of Heaven. She did not shy away from taking up her uniquely heavy cross.  Let us follow her blessed example in gaining the strength to become totally receptive and obedient to the Lord, despite the cost, for that is how we may all come to shine resplendently with the divine glory.  That is how we may share even now in the eternal life of the God-Man Whose “face shone like the sun” and Whose “clothes became as white as the light” on Mount Tabor as the voice of the Father proclaimed, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!”

 

             

 

Homily for the 7th Sunday After Pentecost and the 7th Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

Romans 15:1-7; Matthew 9:27-35

Today we continue to celebrate the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mt. Tabor, when the spiritual eyes of Peter, James, and John were opened to behold His divine glory.  They saw Him shining brilliantly and heard the voice of the Father proclaiming “This is my beloved Son with Whom I am well pleased; listen to Him.”  We also continue to prepare to celebrate the Dormition (or “falling asleep”) of the Theotokos, when she became the first to follow her Son as a whole embodied person into the eternal life of the heavenly kingdom.  This spiritually rich season calls us to become transfigured in holiness like the virgin mother of the Savior, who received Christ into her life without reservation and lived faithfully as His holy temple all her days.  Regardless of our sex, marital status, or personal history, she remains the model for us all of obedient receptivity to Christ.  Our hope to follow her into heavenly glory is in the healing mercy of her Son, Who shares His victory over death with all who unite themselves to Him in humble faith and obedience.    

That is precisely what the blind men did in today’s gospel lesson.  They sat by the road and begged, for that was all that they could do in that time and place in order to survive.  We do not know the mental state of the man who was possessed by a demon and unable to speak, for others had to bring Him to the Lord for deliverance. The blind beggars were Jews who asked for mercy from the Son of David, a Jewish term for the Messiah.  Even though their faith was far from perfect, as symbolized by their blindness, the Lord had mercy on them and restored their sight.

The man who was unable to speak was a Gentile, which is why the people responded, “’Never was anything like this seen in Israel,’” while “the Pharisees said, ‘He casts out demons by the prince of demons.’”  Due to their idolatry, the mouths of the Gentiles had been shut to the glory of God, and the Jews at that time expected a Messiah who would bless them, not the other peoples of the world.  But Christ’s mercy restored the man’s speech, cast out the demon, and provided a sign of how He came to bring salvation to the entire world.  In today’s epistle reading, St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, both Jews and Gentiles, that “together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  We Gentiles may now know and glorify Him every bit as much as the descendants of Abraham, for the ancient promises extend to all who have faith in the Messiah.  The Holy Spirit has united the divided tongues of the tower of Babel such that people of all cultures, ethnicities, and nationalities may join together in the praise of God as full members of the household of Christ in faith.

It should be no surprise that the Lord restored the abilities of sight and speech to these suffering men.  To see is to know and experience in ways that transcend rational description.  The spiritual eyes of Peter, James, and John were opened to behold the divine glory of the Lord, to the extent that they were able, at His Transfiguration, when they saw Him radiant with brilliant light.  We know God through the eye of the soul, the nous, not as a symbol or idea, but by true participation through His grace or divine energies.  Christ’s restoration of the sight of the blind men provides an icon of what He has done for fallen humanity blinded by sin, wandering in the darkness of those enslaved to the fear of death, and unable to share in the eternal life of God.  In Him, the eyes of our souls are restored, cleansed, and healed so that we may know the Lord not in images and ideas, but as a Person in Whose life we truly participate as His living icons.

Likewise, our ability to speak has profound spiritual significance, for the Lord taught that “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”  (Luke 6:45) The Scriptures contain many warnings about the dangers associated with mindlessly running our mouths.  We read in the Psalms, “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.” (Ps. 141:3)   Christ taught that we will have to give an account for every idle word that we speak, “For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”  (Matt. 12:36) It is not what goes into our mouths, but what comes out of them that defiles us. (Matt. 15:11) As St. James wrote, the tongue is small, powerful, and very difficult to control: “It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” (Jas. 3:6) The uncomfortable truth is that how and what we speak reveals the true state of our souls, for which we must give an account to the Lord at the last day.  Whether we are currently embracing Christ’s healing is not an inscrutable secret, but is plain for all to hear in the words we speak and in the actions we perform every day.  We must remember what the Lord said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.  For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” (Matt. 7:1-2)

Like the men in today’s gospel reading, we all need the gracious healing of the Lord for our eyes, our mouths, and every aspect of who we are.  Though physical and spiritual sight are different, what we fill our eyes with certainly impacts our hearts and how we think, speak, and act.  There is great danger to our souls in pornography, in any type of entertainment that glorifies sex, violence, and the love of money and power, and also in the many images of superficial happiness found on social media. Much of what passes for news or entertainment today is designed to inflame our passions in order to bring power and money to the sponsors, whoever they may be.   We may want only to be entertained or informed, but what we see and hear can easily keep us so wedded to spiritual darkness that we will become blind to the brilliant light of Christ.  The less that we fill our physical eyes and ears with what inflames our passions, keeps us from seeing ourselves and our neighbors as living icons of God, and otherwise weakens us spiritually, the more we will be able to open the eyes of our souls to experience and know the Lord from the depths of our hearts.  Keeping a close watch on our eyes, ears, and mouths is not a calling only for other people, for none of us is so advanced spiritually that we can safely let our own guard down before such powerful temptations. 

Especially in today’s culture, we must be careful not to fall prey to self-centeredness in our words and deeds.  As St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, concern for the wellbeing of our neighbors must take precedence over our own desires: “Brethren, we who are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good for his edification.”  We must not speak and act as though our will must always be done or think that we have some personal characteristic that makes it necessary for us to always have the last word.  In the family, the life of the Church, and in any other setting, we must embrace the humility of blind beggars who know that they must cry out, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.”  Such humble trust is necessary for us to learn to see our neighbors as living icons of Christ whom we must serve with selfless love.  To see and speak about others in the light of our passions is a terrible form of blindness that will make it impossible for us to behold the glory of the Lord.

During the Dormition Fast, we all have the opportunity to reorient the desires of our hearts toward their true fulfillment in the love of God and neighbor.  Our transfiguration in holiness is a matter of following the example of the Theotokos in doing precisely that.  Like her, let us gain the spiritual clarity to lift up our hearts in humble obedience and receptivity to her Son, Who has conquered death and opened the gates of Paradise.  It is only through Him that our spiritual eyes will be opened and our tongues will be loosed to offer praise and glory to God.