Homily for the Sunday Before the Elevation of the Holy Cross and for the Nativity of the Theotokos in the Orthodox Church

 

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.  

Homily for the Sunday of All Saints and the Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles in the Orthodox Church

 

Hebrews 11:33-12:2; Matthew 9:36-10:8

 

            Today we commemorate our Lord’s Twelve Apostles and all the Saints, looking to them as brilliant examples of faithfulness to the Savior.  We may, however, be tempted to think that such glorious persons have little to do with the humble and broken circumstances of our lives.  After all, the Apostles were our Lord’s closest followers during His earthly ministry. Though they did not fully understand Who He was until after His resurrection, He sent the Holy Spirit to empower them to shepherd the Church as they fulfilled His command to “preach…‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.”  They all struggled and suffered greatly in faithfulness to the Lord in their ministries, with St. John the Theologian being the only one not dying as a martyr. 

 

            If we are ever tempted to think that we have achieved something great in the Christian life, we should look to their example of abandoning all the comfort and security of a conventional life to experience the uncertainty of following a Messiah Who Himself was rejected and condemned by respectable religious and political leaders.  The Savior’s message was such a threat to their power that they crucified Him as a public example of what happened to those who got in their way and threatened the interests of the powerful.  As Christ foretold, “the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God.” (Jn 16: 2) It is not surprising that the Apostles who continued our Lord’s ministry met deaths like His.  They obeyed literally the Savior’s teaching to deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow Him.

 

The way of Christ was certainly not popular or celebrated during their lifetimes.  To the contrary, it was a path to persecution, imprisonment, torture, and death.  In contrast to false teachers who tried to use their position for self-glorification, true Apostles followed in the way of those in the Old Testament who looked forward in faith to the coming of the Messiah. As we read today from Hebrews: “Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”

 

Christ fulfilled their hope not by setting up an earthly kingdom with geographical borders in which they or their descendants would rule, even though that is what the Apostles themselves had originally anticipated.  Instead, He offered Himself freely to the point of death on the Cross for the salvation of all in a Kingdom not of this world.  He then rose in glorious victory over the worst that the most powerful empire of the world could do.  Empowered by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Apostles were completely transformed and manifested the ways of heaven amidst the realities of a broken world.  They healed the sick, cast out demons, and raised the dead.  They did not respond in kind to their enemies, but embodied the merciful love of the Savior.  Even as He prayed for the forgiveness of those who killed Him, St. Paul wrote of the Apostles, “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate.”  The Apostles are members of Christ’s Body, the Church, and chief shepherds of His flock. Their work is not their own, but Christ’s.  That is why St. Paul could say with integrity “I urge you, then, be imitators of me.” (1 Cor. 4:12-16) His life had become an enacted icon of the Savior.  As he wrote elsewhere, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me.”  (Gal. 2:20)

 

No matter what our particular calling in  life may be, we all have the same fundamental vocation to become radiant with the holiness of God.  People should be able to look at any one of us and see a vibrant image of the healing of the human person in God’s image and likeness that our Savior has worked for the salvation of the world.  The Apostles are examples for us all in this regard, as are all the Saints.   We do not know the names of all the Saints, but God certainly knows all who have entered into the blessedness of the heavenly kingdom, regardless of whether they have been formally recognized by the Church.  We have the benefit of the teachings, ministries, and prayers of countless people who have manifested the holiness of God, and we must not excuse ourselves from faithfully following their examples.  As today’s epistle reading exhorts us: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfection of our faith.”

 

Christ said to the Apostles, “You received without paying, give without pay.”  All the more does His admonition apply to us, who have benefited from the witness of countless generations of holy people in the Church, not as a reward for good behavior, but due to the mercy of our Lord Who was and is at work through them by the power of the Holy Spirit.  We must resist the strong temptation to make the pursuit of the Christian life all about ourselves, or about people who are superficially like us, as though God’s salvation were our personal possession to be used for our own comfort and satisfaction.  The Apostles and the Saints have rejected the temptation to distort the way of Christ into an exercise in serving themselves or seeking earthly glory. Had their religion been something they had invented, they could have done with it as they pleased.  Our Lord’s salvation, however, is not a product of this world or a commodity to be divided up or bought and sold according to conventional human designs.  He has conquered death, the wages of sin, by His own death and resurrection.  We share in His life by grace, which means that we are always in the position of those who have “received without paying.”  Consequently, we must “give without pay” as we offer our resources, time, and attention in support of the ministries of our parish and to bless the suffering, outcast, and needy neighbors with whom our Lord identified Himself.  If we are truly in Christ, then His life will become our own; our character will conform to His.  He is the vine and we are the branches.  (Jn. 15:5) Since He offered up Himself freely for our sake, we must offer ourselves to become channels of His blessing and healing for the world, as all His faithful servants have done. 

 

Across the centuries and to this very day in some parts of the world, countless Christians have followed the Apostles in literally dying as martyrs.  Such martyrdom is a particular calling that requires a God-given strength to make the ultimate witness for Christ.  By the power of the Holy Spirit, the Lord calls and enables us all to bear witness to Him as we take up the crosses we bear in our particular circumstances. In order to gain the spiritual strength to bear faithful witness to Him, we must make the most basic spiritual disciplines part of our daily lives as we pray, fast, share our resources, read the Scriptures, forgive our enemies, and keep a close watch on the thoughts and desires that we welcome into our hearts.  These practices are essential for gaining the spiritual clarity to discern how the Lord is calling us to serve Him in the Church and in the world.  Embracing them is an essential step in following in the way of all the Saints.   

 

By the power of the Holy Spirit, an unlikely group of Palestinian Jews became our Lord’s Apostles.  To this very day, people who face all the problems of life in our fallen world become radiant with the holiness of God as His Saints.  Let us take the small, faltering steps that we are capable of taking today as we follow in their path to the Kingdom.  We have no lack of opportunities to do so in our parish, our families, our workplaces, and our neighborhoods.  By responding to those opportunities as best we presently can, we will learn to take up our crosses and take our place among those who bear faithful witness to the saving mercy of our Lord.  We have received from Him without paying.  Let us give ourselves to Him and our neighbors in the same way. That is how, by His grace, we may all become Saints.

 

 

 

 

Homily for the Sunday of St. Thomas the Apostle in the Orthodox Church

 

Acts 5:12-20; John 20:19-31

 Christ is Risen!  Indeed, He is Risen!

             Today we continue to celebrate the most fundamental and joyful proclamation of our faith:  Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!  He is our Pascha, our Passover, from death to life, for Hades and the grave could not contain the God-Man Who shares with us His victory over corruption and decay in all their forms.  In a world enslaved to the fear of the grave, He has illumined even the dark night of the tomb with the brilliant light of heavenly glory.  As Christ said to Martha before He raised Lazarus, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” (John 11:25) Because death did not have the last word on our Lord, it will not, by His grace, have the last word on us or on any who call upon His Name.

             When the Savior rose from the dead, He did so as a whole Person Whose glorified body still bore the physical wounds of His crucifixion.  He was born, lived, and died with flesh and blood every bit as much as we do.  Thomas doubted the news of the resurrection because he was not present when the Risen Lord first appeared to the disciples.  He said that he would not believe unless he saw and touched the marks of His torture and death.  When Christ appeared again eight days later, He told Thomas to do precisely that.  Thomas responded by recognizing Him as “My Lord and my God!”

             This encounter demonstrates how essential Christ’s bodily resurrection is for our faith.  Simply put, there would be no Christianity and no Church without it.  The Savior died through a public form of capital punishment on the Cross at the hands of Roman soldiers who knew their grim trade all too well.  It was literally just another day’s work for them when they broke the legs of the two thieves in order to get them to die more quickly. They did not break the Lord’s legs, however, for those seasoned professional killers knew that He was already dead.  The Roman Cross had apparently made its point yet again about what happened to anyone perceived as a threat to the Empire.  It is hardly surprising that the disciples had fled in fear at the Lord’s arrest with Peter denying Him three times, for they had no expectation of His resurrection.  They had wanted a military Messiah to crush the Romans and establish an earthly kingdom, not a Savior Whose great victory would come through public torture and execution by a Gentile army of occupation. Of course, it would be absurd to think that those who had denied and abandoned their Crucified Lord would have later made up a story about His resurrection and then died as martyrs for Him.  The women disciples, who showed greater love and courage by going to the tomb in order to anoint Christ’s dead body when all seemed lost, obviously had not anticipated His resurrection either. 

      St. Paul taught, “[I]f Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith.” (1 Cor. 15:14)  The Savior proclaimed His divinity by forgiving sins and saying that He and the Father are one (John 10:30) and that “before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:58)  The high priest asked Him at His arrest, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Christ responded, “I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” (Mark 14: 61-62)   If One Who had claimed to be God was wrong in predicting His resurrection and had simply decayed in the tomb like anyone else, there would be no reason for anyone to remember Jesus Christ today as anything but a failed Messiah with grandiose delusions.    

            Orthodox Christian faith is not grounded in sentimental memories or warm feelings about an inspiring personality who lived a long time ago, but in the joyful proclamation that “Christ is Risen!” in victory over death as a whole Person.  His bodily resurrection is our hope for “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,” as we confess in the Nicene Creed.  To quote Saint Paul again, “[I]if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor. 15: 17-19) If Christ did not rise from the dead as an embodied Person, then St. Paul and all the martyrs wasted their lives for nothing.  Remember that he became a Christian only after the Risen Lord miraculously appeared to Him in blinding light on the road to Damascus   Apart from the reality of the Savior’s resurrection, the conversion of St. Paul from a persecuting Pharisee to the apostle to the Gentiles makes no sense at all. 

            St. Thomas believed only when he touched the wounds of the Risen Savior’s glorified body.  In our reading from Acts, the apostles healed the suffering bodies of many sick people.  The Lord’s resurrection reveals the great dignity of the human body, which is destined for heavenly glory. Salvation is not an escape from the physical dimensions of our lives, but requires our purification and fulfillment as whole persons united to Christ. True faith in the Savior demands that we offer every aspect of our existence to Him for healing and transformation, holding nothing back.  Even as He healed the sick and fed the hungry, the most obvious practices of faithfulness involve caring for people in their bodily weaknesses and infirmities.  By showing tangible signs of mercy for our neighbors, we also touch the wounds of Christ, for He is present to us in everyone in need. In light of His resurrection, the bodily sufferings and struggles of others appear not as irrelevant distractions, but as invitations to manifest a foretaste of “the life of the world to come.” Regardless of any context or circumstance, to refuse to abandon our neighbors in their bodily sufferings and to provide whatever care we can provides a sign of God’s gracious purposes for all who bear His image and likeness.  If we refuse to do so, then we live as though He had not conquered the tomb.  Because “Christ is Risen!,” we must show our neighbors the care due those who are called to heavenly glory.

            In order to follow our Risen Lord into the joy of the resurrection, we must also open our deepest personal struggles and wounds to Him for healing.  The problem is not that we have bodies, but that we have allowed the fear of death to fuel our passions in ways that corrupt every dimension of who we are in this world.  Because God creates and saves us as whole persons, we must embrace the Savior’s victory over death by living as those who are in a “one flesh” communion with Him in every dimension of our existence.   We are living members of His Body, the Church, and nourished by His Body and Blood in the Eucharist.  We must live accordingly with our bodies every day of our lives, for Christ’s resurrection has glorified the human body and calls us to holiness.  All our relationships, actions, and desires must be healed and reoriented to the Kingdom in order for us to enter into the joy of our Lord’s resurrection as whole persons.  That is not a disembodied or abstract vocation, but a tangible and practical calling.   

            Because “Christ is Risen!,” we must not use the fact that we have bodies as an excuse to remain enslaved to corruption in any form.  We fall into hatred, greed, sloth, gluttony, drunkenness, lust, vanity, and other sins not because we are flesh and blood, but because we have refused to enter fully into the joy of the resurrection of Christ.  The season of Pascha calls us all to embrace our Risen Lord as the restoration and fulfillment of every dimension of our personhood.  We cannot become truly human apart from Him, for only He has conquered the fear of death that is at the root of our corruption.  We must unite ourselves to Christ in joyful obedience, even as we remain flesh and blood in this world. Then we may say with St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20) The struggle to do so is ultimately one of joy as we enter more fully into the gloriously good news of this radiant season of Pascha.  It is a struggle that we must all undertake if we are to respond like St. Thomas to the God-Man Whom death could not destroy, for “Christ is Risen!”

 

 

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church

 

Hebrews 6:13-20; Mark 9:17-31

             If we have embraced the spiritual practices of Lent with any level of integrity for the last few weeks, the weakness of our faith has surely become apparent to us.  Our minds wander when we pray and so much else seems more important than being fully present before the Lord, both in the services of the Church and in our daily prayers at home.   We often make excuses not to fast to the best of our ability and, regardless of what we eat and drink, routinely indulge our self-centered desires for pleasure.  We justify being stingy in sharing our resources and attention with our neighbors, especially when we fear that doing so will compromise our illusions of self-sufficiency and comfort.  By this point in Lent, we have all gained insight into how we have failed to entrust ourselves fully to Christ for healing to the point that we can say with the brokenhearted father in today’s gospel reading, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

In kneeling before the Lord and struggling to believe that Christ could deliver his son from a life-threatening condition, the father revealed the true condition of his soul.  He was bitterly disappointed that the disciples had not been able to help and did not fully trust that the Savior could do anything more.   Nonetheless, he could muster enough faith to offer the young man to Christ for healing, even as he pleaded for Him to “help my unbelief!”  That humble, heartfelt plea was sufficient for his son to receive the Lord’s merciful healing. Despite his doubts, that blessed man still had enough faith to receive healing for his son.  He entrusted himself and his beloved child to Christ as best he could, despite his imperfect faith.

The word given by God to St. Silouan the Athonite applies to him as much as it does to us: “Keep your mind in hell and do not despair.”   On the one hand, we must not fool ourselves with an illusory, superficial spirituality that distracts us from experiencing the true state of our souls before God.  Instead, we must know from our hearts how far we are from fully embracing our Lord’s gracious healing and entrusting ourselves and all our earthly cares to Him.  On the other hand, even as we confront the grave tension between the infinite holiness of God and our corruption, we must refuse to despair by accepting the lie that there is no hope for us, our loved ones, and our world in the mercy of the Lord.  Far better is the way of the father in today’s gospel lesson, for he confessed the weakness of his faith even as he paradoxically showed great faith in asking for Christ to save his son.  

He provides us a much better example of honest faith than did the disciples, for they lacked the spiritual strength to deliver the young man from the demon.  The Savior told them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.”  He said that because they were spiritual weaklings who had neglected the most basic spiritual practices for opening themselves to receive Christ’s healing strength. Not one of them got the point when the Lord said, “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him; and after He is killed, He will rise on the third day.”  At this point, they had a superficial faith focused on acquiring earthly power for themselves, not on commending themselves to the God-Man Whose Kingdom remains not of this world.  It was only after the horror of the Cross, the complete shock of the empty tomb, and the appearance and teaching of the Risen Lord that they acquired the faith necessary for them truly to believe.

The deliverance of the young man certainly did not come easily, for the demon convulsed him and most of the bystanders thought that he was dead.  That is an interesting detail, for we often naively assume that Christ’s healing comes with only sweetness and light when, in reality, embracing His healing can seem impossibly difficult.  That is especially the case for finding the strength to resist the temptation to gratify passions that have taken deep root in our souls.  Wrestling seriously with our besetting sins is a battle that causes us to die to so many illusions about ourselves. 

 As we continue the Lenten journey this year, let us persist in the inner struggle necessary to intensify our prayers, to deny ourselves, and to give generously to our neighbors as we take the small steps that we presently have the strength to take in reorienting our lives to toward the Lord.   When the battle even to take those small steps reveals our weaknesses and seems like a lost cause, that is not the time to give up, but instead to obey the command: “Keep your mind in hell and do not despair.”  It is only by doing so that we may gain the spiritual clarity necessary to cry out from the depths of our hearts, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”  Indeed, it is really the only time in which we can begin to see the state of our souls clearly, which is necessary in order for us to follow our Lord to His Cross and empty tomb through humble confession and repentance of our sins. In the remaining weeks of the Fast, let us refuse to be distracted by anything that would keep us from entering as fully as possible into the holy mystery of our salvation, for “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him; and after He is killed, He will rise on the third day.” 

 

 

 

 

We Must Learn to Mourn and Rejoice with the Widow of Nain: Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost & Third Sunday of Luke with Commemoration of Our Righteous Mother Pelagia the Penitent of Antioch in the Orthodox Church

 

2 Corinthians 9:6-11; Luke 7:11-16

            I am sure that many people today reject or have no interest in the Christian faith because they have not seen in others the healing of the human person brought by Jesus Christ.  Perhaps they have heard Christians speaking primarily about morality, politics, emotion, or a view of salvation that has nothing to do with the realities of life in the world as we know it.  Or they may have seen many examples of hypocrisy on the part of those who identify themselves with the Lord, but who live their lives in opposition to His teachings even as they look for opportunities to condemn their neighbors.  Regardless, many today have concluded that there is nothing in the Christian life worthy of their devotion.

            Today’s gospel reading provides a different and powerful image of Christ’s salvation in the midst of the tragic realities of life and death.  The widow of Nain was having the worst day of her life and had no reason to hope for a blessed or even tolerable future, for in that time and place a widow who had lost her only son was in a very precarious state.  Poverty, neglect, and abuse would threaten her daily; she would have been vulnerable and alone.  When contrary to all expectations the Lord raised her son, He transformed her deep mourning into great joy. He restored life both to the young man and to his mother.

The Lord’s great act of compassion for this woman manifests our salvation and provides a sign of hope in even the darkest moments of our lives.  We weep and mourn not only for loved ones whom we see no more, but also for the brokenness and disintegration that we know all too well in our own souls, the lives of our loved ones, and the world around us.   Death, destruction, and decay in all their forms are the consequences of our personal and collective refusal to fulfill our vocation to live as those created in the image of God by becoming like Him in holiness.  We weep with the widow of Nain not only for losing loved ones, but also for losing what it means to be a human person as a living icon of God. 

           The good news of the Gospel is that the compassion of the Lord extends even to those who endure the most tragic and miserable circumstances and the most profound sorrows.  Purely out of love for His suffering children, the Father sent the Son to heal and liberate us from slavery to the fear of death through His Cross and glorious resurrection. The Savior touched the funeral bier and the dead man arose.  Christ’s compassion for us is so profound that He not only touched death, but entered fully into it, into a tomb, and into Hades, because He refused to leave us to self-destruction.   He went into the abyss and experienced the terror of the black night of the pit.  The Theotokos wept bitterly at His public torture and execution.  When He rose victorious over death in all its forms, He provided the only true basis of hope that the despair of the grave will not have the last word on the living icons of God.  His Mother and the other Myrrh-Bearing Women were the very first to receive this unbelievably good news.    

            Death is not only a physical reality, but also a spiritual one.  It is possible to have physical health, material possessions, high social standing, and innumerable other blessings while being enslaved to self-centered desire to the point of spiritual death.  Thankfully, Christ said that He “came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”  (Luke 5:32) Today we commemorate our Righteous Mother Pelagia the Penitent of Antioch.  She was a beautiful woman from a pagan family who became quite wealthy as a prostitute. Having heard part of a sermon on divine judgment as she passed by a church, she was overcome by remorse for her way of life, repented, and was baptized.  She then gave away all her wealth to the poor, went to Jerusalem, and undertook the great ascetical labor of living alone in a cave as the Monk Pelagius, devoting herself to fasting, prayer, and all-night vigils.  That she was a woman was discovered only when her body was prepared for burial. 

             Saint Pelagia is not alone as a woman whose ascetical repentance led her to become a monk.  For example, Saint Theodora of Alexandria pursued a similar path after falling into adultery.  She did not want to be found by her husband in a community of nuns and, as the Monk Theodore, was known in the monastery for her strict spiritual discipline and piety.  After being accused of fathering a child, she was cast out of her community for seven years as she cared for him and then was allowed to return.  Upon her death, her fellow monks who learned the truth about her mourned for how they had falsely judged her.     

            The paths that these great saints trod were unusual and surely hard for people of our time and place to understand.  They took the identity of male monastics not out of a rejection or denigration of how God had created them as persons of female biological sex, but in order to embrace in their particular circumstances the type of asceticism that they needed for the healing of their souls in light of the spiritual maladies that they had suffered as unique persons due to their sins.  The Church certainly does not impose their vocations on anyone, for as free persons we must all discern the path to the Kingdom that is best for us with the guidance, but never the compulsion, of our spiritual father or mother.  For example, we also commemorate today St. Thais of Egypt, who repented of her debauchery by burning all of her riches in the city square and then spending three years in seclusion as she prayed for the Lord’s mercy.  She did not take on the identity of a male monastic.  “From the moment I entered into the cell,” said St. Thais to St. Paphnutius before her death, “all my sins constantly were before my eyes, and I wept when I remembered them.” St. Paphnutius replied, “It is for your tears, and not for the austerity of your seclusion, that the Lord has granted you mercy.”[1] 

            The widow of Nain wept bitterly out of grief for the loss of her son.  Christ wept at the tomb of his friend St. Lazarus, not only for him, but for us all who are wedded to death as the children of Adam and Eve who were cast out of Paradise into this world of corruption.  We weep with broken hearts out of love for those whose suffering is beyond our ability to ease, those who are no longer with us in this life, and those from whom we have become otherwise estranged. The corruption that separates us from God and from one another takes many forms and the same is true of our healing and restoration.  The particular paths that we must follow in order to embrace Christ’s victory over death as distinctive persons will certainly vary.  But they must all be routes for gaining the spiritual clarity to learn to mourn our sins and take the steps that are best for our healing and restoration.  We must learn to weep for ourselves as those who have caught a glimpse of the eternal blessedness for which we came into being and who know how far we are from entering fully into the joy of the Lord. 

            St. Paul wrote that “he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”  That is true not only in terms of almsgiving, but also in terms of how deeply we invest ourselves in what is necessary for the healing of our souls.  Many people today surely do not take the Christian faith seriously because they have not encountered people who do precisely that.  In ways appropriate to our own circumstances, let us take Saints Pelagia, Theodora, and Thais as examples of those who fulfilled in their own lives the teaching of our Lord: “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”  (Matt. 5:4) The widow of Nain provides us all a sign of the hope that is ours in Christ.  Through our humble repentance, may we open ourselves to receive the joy that overcomes both the dark night of our spiritual blindness and even of the grave.        

               

 

   

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[1] http://ww1.antiochian.org/node/16761