Colossians 3:4-11; 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 has brought to
the world as we regain the “robe of light” lost by our first parents.
We must never think of our Lord’s birth or baptism, or of our own baptism, as
somehow the end of the story. Saint Paul wrote that, “when Christ, Who is
our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” As we
confess in the Nicene Creed, there is a future dimension of Christ’s
appearance, for He “will come again with glory to judge the living and the
dead, Whose kingdom will have no end.” We “look for the resurrection of
the dead and the life of the world to come.” When Christ returns in
brilliant glory, the true state of our souls will be revealed. The Last
Judgment will be the ultimate epiphany or manifestation of whether we have
embraced His healing and become radiant with His gracious divine
energies. It will be impossible to hide or obscure on that day whether we
are full of darkness or light.
To shine eternally with the light of Christ requires that we undertake the
daily struggle to purify and reorient the desires of our hearts toward
fulfillment in God and away from slavery to our passions. The Colossians
to whom Paul wrote were mostly Gentile converts who needed to be reminded that
they had repudiated corrupt pagan practices and put on Christ in baptism.
That is why Paul told them to “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you:
fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is
idolatry.” It is contradictory to unite ourselves to Christ and then to
refuse to conform our character to His. In order to gain spiritual health,
we must mindfully reject all that keeps us from becoming living epiphanies of
our Lord’s salvation. As Paul notes, “anger, wrath, malice, slander…foul talk”
and lying should have no place in our lives, for in baptism we have “put off
the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is
being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.” We must vigilantly turn away from the
darkness and remain focused on receiving the light.
As those who live in hope for the coming of the Kingdom, we must struggle every
day of our lives to enter more fully into Christ’s restoration and fulfillment
of the human person in the image and likeness of God. There is no other
way to appear with Him in glory, whether today or when His Kingdom comes in its
fullness. And the merely human distinctions that we so often celebrate
due to our passions and insecurities have nothing at all to do with sharing in
the life of our Lord, for as Paul wrote, “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew,
circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ
is all, and in all.”
Today’s gospel reading provides a shocking example of this truth, for the
Lord’s healing mercy extended even to a Samaritan with leprosy. Among the
ten lepers the Lord healed, the only one who returned to thank Him was a hated
Samaritan, someone considered a despised 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 gracious interaction with this
man shows that His healing mercy extended even to those conventionally
understood to be sinners and enemies. The Lord’s love for humanity
transcends all the petty divisions of the fallen world, and we must not pretend
that His benevolence somehow does not extend even to those we consider our worst
enemies. There is simply no way to become a living epiphany of His
salvation if we persist in remaining more attached to our own grievances and
prejudices than to the boundless love of our Lord, before Whom we are all “the
chief of sinners.”
The Savior praised the faith of a Roman centurion, who was an officer of the
Roman army that occupied Israel. By any conventional standard, that man
was His enemy. (Lk 7:9) The people of Nazareth 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 love 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 our enemies are any less called to
become brilliant epiphanies of His salvation than we are.
One
of the great virtues of the Samaritan leper is that he did not allow fear about
the hatred of others toward him to keep him from remaining focused on finding
healing and expressing gratitude. Together
with a group of Jewish lepers, he called out “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”
He obeyed the Lord’s command to head toward the temple in Jerusalem to show
himself to the priests. No one at the time would have expected a
Samaritan leper to receive anything but rejection and condemnation from the
Messiah and other Jewish religious authorities.
When he realized that he had been healed, he did not immediately head back
to Samaria to his own people, for “he [alone] turned back, praising God with a
loud voice; and…fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks.” He did not allow fear of rejection to keep
him from showing gratitude for this life-changing miracle. Christ, of course, did not condemn him in any
way, but said “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.” The Samaritan shows us the importance of finding
healing from our fear of criticism and our love of praise from other people. He did not allow concern for what others
thought or said about him to keep him from calling for the Lord’s mercy,
obeying His command, or giving thanks.
A fellow monk once asked St. Makarios the
Great of Egypt, one of the great Desert Fathers from the fourth century, how he
could be saved. Abba Makarios told him
to go the cemetery and abuse the dead. So he insulted them and threw stones at
their graves. When the monk returned,
Makarios asked what the dead said in response.
He reported that they said nothing.
Then he told the monk to go to the cemetery and praise the dead, which
he did. When asked by Makarios what they
said in response, the monk reported that they said nothing. “Then Abba Makarios said to him, ‘You know
how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they
did not speak; so you too if you wish to be saved must do the same and become a
dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their
praises, and you can be saved.’”[1]
If
we want to open our darkened souls to the healing light of Christ, we must gain
the spiritual clarity of the Samaritan leper.
He was so focused on receiving the healing mercy of the Lord that he died
to concern about what others thought or said about him. In order to become
living epiphanies of His salvation, we must find healing from the obsessive desire
to ground the meaning and purpose of our lives in the attitudes, words, and actions
of other people, which can be a very subtle temptation. Like the Samaritan, we must refuse to allow worry
about the opinions of others to keep us from focusing our energies on calling
for the Lord’s mercy, obeying His command, and giving thanks for His blessings. Doing so is necessary to “Put to death…what
is earthly in you” and to live as those who “have put off the old nature with
its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in
knowledge after the image of its Creator.”
In order to “appear with [Christ] in glory,” we must not allow anything
to keep us from uniting ourselves to Him with the humble faith of the Samaritan.
[1] As
cited in “Orthodox Road: Rediscovering
the Beauty of Ancient Christianity.” https://www.orthodoxroad.com/a-lesson-from-the-dead
