Galatians 6:11-18; John 3:13-17
The temptation to make faithfulness to Jesus Christ merely
a matter of outward obedience to a set of laws goes back to the first century
and is still with us today. The problem
with legalism is that, as admirable as a life lived according to even the best
code of conduct may be, it cannot heal our souls by making us “a new creation”
as participants in the eternal life of the God-Man. Today’s celebration of the
Nativity of the Theotokos and the upcoming feast of the Elevation of the
Holy Cross both remind us that only the Savior Who vanquished Hades is able to
make us “partakers of the divine nature” as heirs by faith to His fulfillment of
the promises to Abraham.
The Savior’s grandparents Saints Joachim and Anna had
despaired of fulfilling their role in the ongoing life of the Hebrew people due
to their childlessness well into old age.
God heard their prayers, however, and miraculously blessed them to
conceive a daughter, whom they offered to the Lord by taking her to live in the
Temple as a three-year old. That is where she grew up in purity and prayer as
she prepared to become the Living Temple of the Lord, the Theotokos who would
contain the Son of God in her womb as His Virgin Mother. Her parents had
learned through decades of bitter disappointment not to rely on what they could
accomplish merely by their own abilities, but instead to trust in the Lord’s
mercy to bless them as He had blessed Abraham and Sarah. He did so with a
daughter who would give birth to the Messiah.
By His grace, they fulfilled their role in the life of Israel in ways
well beyond all expectations.
In today’s epistle reading, St. Paul argues against
fellow Christians of Jewish heritage who thought that Gentile converts had to
be circumcised in obedience to the Old Testament law before becoming
Christians. He rejected that practice, “For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision counts for anything, nor
uncircumcision, but a new creation.” As St. Paul taught, “you are all sons of God through faith
in Christ Jesus.
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: 26-29) By conquering death through His Cross and resurrection,
the Savior has opened the gates of Paradise to all who respond to Him with
faith. As He said to Nicodemus in
today’s gospel reading, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son,
that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For
God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world
might be saved through Him.”
Our Lord was lifted up upon the Cross because even the
strictest obedience to the Old Testament law could never have made us “a new
creation.” The cycle of birth and the grave had reigned ever since the
corruption of our first parents both for those who had the law and for those
who did not. The path out of slavery to corruption was not through our ability
to obey rules, but in being healed by the gracious mercy of God, Who blessed an
elderly, righteous Jewish couple with a long-awaited daughter named Mary.
She, in turn, received the unique blessing of becoming the Virgin
Mother of the New Adam, Who would set right all that the first Adam had gotten
wrong. The Theotokos is the New Eve through whom Life came into the
world. Her birth foreshadows the coming of the Savior in whom we are born
again for the life the Kingdom.
In Christ’s conversation with Nicodemus, a legalistic
Pharisee, He spoke not of law, but of the life into which we enter by faith,
saying that “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son
of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have
eternal life.” He refers here to an event described in Numbers 21:8-9,
when the Hebrews were saved from deadly snake bites when they looked at the
bronze snake held up by Moses in the desert. Christ does not describe Moses
here in connection with the Ten Commandments, but instead as foretelling His
victory over death through the Cross. Against those who trusted in their
ability to obey laws, St. Paul wrote, “far be it from me to glory except in the
cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and
I to the world.” Through His Cross, Christ has liberated us from obsession
with self-justification so that we may become “a new creation,” being born
again into the eternal life that He has brought to the world.
In order to find the healing of our souls in Him, we must
take up our crosses. Joachim and Anna
bore the heavy cross of childlessness for decades. When God miraculously
blessed them with the conception and birth of Mary, they offered her to grow up
in the Temple. After decades of disappointment, they knew that God’s
blessing was not their private possession, but a calling for them to offer even
the greatest desire of their hearts to Him.
Their daughter bore the unbelievably heavy cross of seeing her Son lifted
up for the salvation of the world. As
St. Symeon prophetically told her, “a sword will pierce your own soul
also.” (Luke 2:35)
As members of Christ’s Body, the Church, we reap the
blessings of the faithful obedience of Joachim and Anna and of their daughter the
Theotokos. We must now take up our own crosses
as we unite ourselves more fully to Christ in His great Self-Offering for the
salvation of the world. It is only by
dying to the old ways of death that remain with us that we will be able to live
as His “new creation,” free from obsession with self-justification as a
way of coping with slavery to the fear of death. We will condemn only ourselves if we celebrate
the faithfulness of the Theotokos and her parents while not following their holy
examples. They were not self-righteous
legalists, but humbly entrusted themselves to God in ways that required deep
faith and personal sacrifice. We must do
the same as we refuse to view the Cross as merely an artifact of ancient religious
history or an empty symbol that we distort into a means of gaining power of any
kind in this world.
We will remain enslaved to the corruption of the first
Adam and Eve if we refuse to endure the daily struggle of crucifying the
disordered desires and unholy habits that keep us wedded to the misery and
despair from which Christ came to set us free.
The birth of the New Eve foreshadows our salvation in the New Adam
through His Cross. “For God sent His Son
into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved
through Him.” Let us celebrate the Nativity of the Theotokos, then, by freely
taking up our crosses as we turn away from all that distracts us from entering into
the great joy of the fulfillment of the ancient promises to Abraham to which we
are heirs by faith. “For
in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision,
but a new creation.” That is precisely who
our Lord, the New Adam, calls us to become as those transfigured by His
grace.
