Becoming Living Temples of Christ, Who Is Our Peace: Homily for the Twenty-fourth Sunday After Pentecost & Ninth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Ephesians 2:14-22; Luke 12:16-21

 Having begun the Nativity Fast on November 15 in preparation to welcome the Savior at Christmas, today we anticipate the Feast of the Entrance into the Temple of the Most Holy Theotokos. Her elderly parents Joachim and Anna offered Mary to God by taking her to live in the Temple in Jerusalem as a young girl, where she grew up in prayer and purity as she prepared to become the Living Temple of the Lord in a unique and extraordinary way as His Virgin Mother.  This feast directs us to the good news of Christmas, as it is the first step in Mary’s life in becoming the Theotokos who gave birth to the Son of God for our salvation. 

Joachim and Anna had a long and difficult period of preparation to become parents, as they had been unable to have children for decades until God miraculously blessed them in old age to conceive.  They knew that their daughter was a blessing not simply for the happiness of their family, but for playing her part in fulfilling God’s purposes for the salvation of the world   Their patient faithfulness throughout their years of barrenness helped them gain the spiritual clarity to offer her to the Lord.  They knew that their marriage and family life were not simply about fulfilling their desires, but were blessings to be given back to God for the fulfillment of much higher purposes. 

Joachim, Anna, and the Theotokos are the complete opposites of the rich man in today’s gospel reading.  His only concern was to eat, drink, and enjoy himself because he had become so wealthy.  He was addicted to earthly pleasure, power, and success, and saw the meaning and purpose of his life only in those terms.  When God required his soul, however, the man’s true poverty was revealed, for the possessions and accomplishments of this life inevitably pass away and cannot save us.  This man’s horizons extended no further than his dreams of the large barns he planned to build in order to hold his crops.  Before the ultimate judgment of God, he was revealed to be a fool who had wasted his life on what could never truly heal or fulfill one who bore the divine image and likeness.  He had laid up treasure for himself, but was not rich toward God in any way. The problem was not simply that the man had possessions, but that he had made them his god, which is another way of saying that he worshipped only himself and surely was not concerned about the needs of his neighbors.  His barns were a temple of the greed to which he had offered his entire existence in a vain effort to satisfy his self-centered desires.   

In stark contrast, the Theotokos followed the righteous example of her parents.  She was prepared by a life of holiness to agree freely to become our Lord’s mother, even though she was an unmarried virgin who did not understand how such a thing could happen.  When she said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” this young Palestinian Jewish girl bravely made a whole, complete offering of her life to God.  She did not ask what was in it for her in terms of money, power, or any kind of earthly success.  Unlike the rich fool in the parable, she was not blinded by passion and had the purity of soul to put receptivity to the Lord before all else.

The world is full of tragic circumstances today that are caused by people who are so enslaved to their self-centered desires that they think nothing is more important than doing whatever it takes to gratify their lust for possessions, power, and pleasure.   But even if they succeed in gaining the whole world, they will lose their souls because they have offered themselves to false gods which lack the power to heal people from the ravages of sin, let alone to raise anyone up from the tomb.   Those who serve such idols inevitably lack peace within their souls and act in ways that make peace with their neighbors, especially those they consider their enemies, impossible.   

In today’s epistle reading, St. Paul taught the Ephesians that “Christ is our peace, Who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in His flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the Cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end.”  That is why Gentile Christians are now also part of the holy temple “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone…”  Though we had been “strangers” to the blessed heritage of the Hebrews, we are now built into the living temple of Christ’s Body, the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Too many people today insist on preserving whatever “dividing wall of hostility” they can use to promote their vain desires for power, wealth, and other signs of worldly success.  Doing so  enables them to justify in their own minds how they refuse to pursue reconciliation with those who pose real or imagined threats to their dreams of earthly glory.  There are ways to “eat, drink, and be merry” that have nothing to do with food and beverage, but everything to do with impoverishing our souls by indulging in self-centeredness to the point that we cannot even imagine living according to the good news that Christ “has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” and brought peace to those “who were far off, and peace to those who were near.”

The Jewish Messiah Whose ministry extended to Samaritans, Roman centurions, Gentiles, the poor, the sick, the demon-possessed, and those viewed as hopeless cases of depravity has brought all with faith in Him into His Body, the Church, the living temple of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.  He worked that reconciliation through His great Self-offering on the Cross by which He has released us from bondage to the fear of death through His glorious resurrection on the third day.  If we want to pursue reconciliation with those we consider our enemies concerning any matter in this world, we must embrace our true identity as “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone.”  We must find healing for our souls as we embrace our identity as a holy temple of the Lord.  We must reorient the desires of our hearts toward His Kingdom and away from any version of worldly glory.  In other words, we must become like the Theotokos who offered herself fully and without reservation to receive the Savior.  We enter into His peace not by gaining wealth, power, or victory over enemies, but by offering ourselves to Him with complete receptivity, as she did.  

We are now in the Nativity Fast, the 40-day period during which we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Savior at Christmas.   The weeks of Advent call us to wrestle with the passions that threaten to make us so much like the rich fool that we become blind to the healing and peace brought by our Lord.  Far from obsessing about earthly cares and indulging in the richest and most satisfying foods, this is a season for fasting, confessing and repenting of our sins, giving generously to the needy, and intensifying our prayers.  It is a time for preparing to open our hearts to receive Christ more fully into our lives at His Nativity.  

 The Theotokos entered the Temple, living there for years in preparation to become the Son of God’s Living Temple through whom He took on flesh. The Nativity Fast provides us blessed opportunities to become more like that obscure Palestinian Jewish girl who said “Yes!” to God with every ounce of her being.  It calls us to become more like Joachim and Anna in the patient trust in God that enabled them to offer their long-awaited daughter to Him.  They show us how to enter the Temple by embracing the difficult struggle of learning to offer ourselves and all our blessings fully to the Lord. It is only by following their righteous example that we will gain the spiritual clarity to provide the world a much-needed sign that the Savior born at Christmas truly “has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” that we know all to well.   Let us use these weeks to find healing for our passions as we embrace our true identity as “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in Whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in Whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

 

    

Those Who Have Received Christ's Merciful Generosity Must "Go and Do Likewise": Homily for St. John the Almsgiver, Patriarch of Alexandria & the Eighth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

2 Cor. 9:6-11; Luke 10:25-37

             It is terribly tragic when people fall into the delusion of thinking that they love God and neighbor, when in reality they are using religion to serve only themselves and the false gods of this world.  One symptom of doing so is to narrow down the list of people who count as our neighbors to the point that we excuse ourselves from serving Christ in all who bear His image and likeness.  When we do so, we disregard not only them, but our Lord Himself, the God-Man born for the salvation of all.  Our actions then reveal that we are not truly united with Him because we seek to justify ourselves by serving nothing but our own vain imaginations.

            That is precisely the attitude that the Savior warns against in today’s gospel reading. After describing how the Old Testament law required loving God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself,” the lawyer wanted to justify himself by limiting the people he had to love.  That is why he asked, “And who is my neighbor?”  He wanted to limit what God required of him in a way that served his convenience and prejudices.  That way, he could assume that he was a righteous man as he went through life serving only himself and the few he deemed worthy of his concern.   

            The Lord’s parable does not allow us, however, to place any limits on what it means to love our neighbors.  He tells us about a man who was robbed, severely beaten, and then left on the side of the road to die. Surely, anyone who saw him in that condition would have an obligation to help him.  All the more is that the case for the religious leaders who were going down that same road.  They knew that the Old Testament law required them to care for a fellow Jew in a life-threatening situation.  Like the lawyer, however, they must have come up with some excuse not to treat him with even an ounce of compassion.  We do not know exactly what they were thinking, but they somehow rationalized passing by on the other side without helping him at all. 

            Ironically, a Samaritan—a hated foreigner, a despised heretic-- is the one who treated the unfortunate man as a neighbor.  The Samaritan did not limit his concern to his own people.  He did not restrict the demands of love in any way.  Even though he knew that the Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans, he responded with boundless compassion and generosity to this fellow’s plight.  He did not figure out how little he could do and still think of himself as a decent person.  Instead, he spontaneously offered his time, energy, and resources to bring a stranger back to health. Even the lawyer got the point of the story, for he saw that the one who treated the man as a neighbor was “The one who showed mercy to him.”  

            The Lord used the story of the Good Samaritan to show us who we must become if we are truly united to Him in faith.  Purely out of compassionate, boundless love, Christ came to heal us all from the self-imposed pain and misery that our sins have worked on our souls.  He came to liberate everyone, Jews and Gentiles alike, from slavery to the fear of death, which is the wages of sin.  Like the Samaritan, He was despised and rejected as a blasphemer.  In the parable, the religious leaders were of no help to the man who was robbed, beaten, and left to die.  They passed by and left him to suffer in the state in which they had found him.  Likewise, the legalistic, hypocritical religious leaders who rejected the Messiah were of no benefit to those who needed healing from the ravages of sin.   They interpreted and applied the law in order to gain power in this world and were powerless to heal anyone. We must be on guard against the temptation to become like them by distorting our faith in ways that would excuse us from seeing and serving Christ in every suffering neighbor.    

Christ has brought salvation to the world, not by giving us merely a religious or moral code of conduct, but by making us participants in His divine life by grace.  By becoming fully human even as He remains fully divine, He has restored and fulfilled the basic human vocation to become like God in holiness.  Only the God-Man could do that.  If we are truly united with Him, then His boundless love must become characteristic of our lives.  Among other things, that means gaining the spiritual health to show our neighbors the same mercy we ask for from the Savior.  Doing that even for those we love is difficult because our self-centeredness makes it hard to give anyone the same consideration we want for ourselves. 

The challenge of conveying Christ’s love to people we do not like for whatever reason may seem impossibly hard. Remember, however, what the Samaritan in the parable did for the robbed and beaten man.  He administered first aid, took him to an inn, paid the innkeeper to care for him, and promised to pay for any additional expenses when he returned.  Christ does the same for us in baptism, the Eucharist, and the full sacramental life of the Church, which is a hospital for our recovery from the ravages of sin. He also calls us to spiritual disciplines—such as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—through which we will prepare to welcome Him during the Nativity Fast as we open ourselves to receive the healing necessary to convey His mercy to our neighbors.  He enables us to pursue a life of faith and faithfulness through the ministries of His Body, the Church, as a sign of the salvation of the world.    

The generosity of our Lord is truly infinite.  The more that we share in His life, the more His generosity will become characteristic of us.  As St. Paul wrote, “he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”  This entails that those who offer themselves to serve Christ in their neighbors “will be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God.”  Today we remember two saints known especially for how they manifested the generous mercy of the Lord.  Saint John the Almsgiver, Patriarch of Alexandria, directed the church’s resources to help thousands of needy people, including paying ransom for the release of captives. He distributed alms on Wednesdays and Fridays, visited the sick three days a week, and brought those who had done wrong to repentance through his personal example of great humility and mercy.[1]  Saint Martin of Tours was a Roman soldier and a catechumen when he cut his cloak in two and gave half to a shivering beggar on a freezing night.  Then “Christ appeared to the saint wearing Martin’s cloak. He heard the Savior say to the angels surrounding Him, ‘Martin is only a catechumen, but he has clothed Me with this garment.’”  After his baptism and departure from the army, he became a monk and then a bishop.  “He is called the Merciful because of his generosity and care for the poor, and he received the grace to work miracles.”[2]  

Their blessed examples show that it is possible to be so fully united to Christ that His generous mercy becomes characteristic of us in relation to those who are robbed, beaten, and left for dead by the side of the road, whether literally or figuratively.  In the Good Samaritan, we see the boundless mercy of our Lord for all His suffering children. Today and throughout the coming weeks, we are receiving an offering for the suffering people of the Holy Land.  Let us not miss this opportunity to unite ourselves more fully to Christ as we invest ourselves in His compassion and generosity, for by doing so we “will be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God.”  As those who have received such infinite mercy from the Savior, how can we not obey His command to the lawyer, “Go and do likewise”?   

 

 

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[1] Saint John the Merciful, Patriarch of Alexandria - Orthodox Church in America (oca.org)

[2] Saint Martin the Merciful, Bishop of Tours - Orthodox Church in America (oca.org)

Loving Our Neighbors More than Our Money is Part of Being "A New Creation": Homily for the Twenty-second Sunday After Pentecost & Fifth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

Galatians 6:11-18; Luke 16:19-31

            There is perhaps no more powerful example of our need for Christ’s healing of our souls than that contained in today’s gospel reading.  A rich man with the benefit of the great spiritual heritage of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets had become such a slave to gratifying his desires for indulgence in pleasure that he had become completely blind to his responsibility to show mercy to Lazarus, a miserable beggar who wanted only crumbs and whose only comfort was when dogs licked his open sores.  The rich man’s life revolved around wearing the most expensive clothes and enjoying the finest food and drink, even as he surely stepped over or around Lazarus at the entrance to his home on a regular basis and never did anything at all to relieve his suffering.   

            After their deaths, the two men’s situations were reversed.  The rich man had spent his life rejecting the teachings of Moses and the prophets about the necessity of showing mercy to the poor.   He had diminished himself spiritually to the point that he became unable to recognize Lazarus as a neighbor who bore the image of God.  Consequently, after his death he was blind to the love of God and perceived the divine majesty as only a burning flame of torment.  When the rich man asked Father Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers to warn them of the consequences of living such a depraved life, the great patriarch responded, “‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’” 

That statement applies to the corrupt nationalistic religious leaders who called for Christ’s crucifixion and denied His resurrection because they wanted only a warrior king who would slaughter their enemies and give them earthly power.  We must not rest content, however, with seeing how the Lord’s statement applies to others, for it should challenge us even more as those who have received the fullness of the mystery of God’s salvation.  Our responsibility is far greater than that of the Jews of old, for as members of Christ’s Body, the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have every spiritual benefit to strengthen us in serving our Lord in our neighbors.    Since every neighbor is an icon of God, how we treat them reveals our relationship to Him.  Christ taught that what we do “to the least of these,” to the most wretched people, we do to Him.  If we become so obsessed with gratifying ourselves or serving worldly agendas that we refuse to convey His mercy to our neighbors, then we will reject our Messiah and deny the truth of His resurrection, for we will not live in a way that reflects His victory over the corrupting power of sin and death.  Regardless of what we say we believe, we will bear witness through our actions that we have become blind to the good news of our salvation.  And like the rich man, we will exclude ourselves from the joy of the Kingdom.  Remember the words of the Lord: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.”  (Matt. 7:21)   

Lazarus, like everyone else, bore the image and likeness of God.  There is simply no way around the basic truth that how we relate to our neighbors reveals how we relate to our Lord.  What we do for even the most miserable and inconvenient people we encounter in life, we do for Christ.  And what we refuse to do for them, we refuse to do for our Savior.  Our salvation is in becoming more like Him as we find the healing of our souls by cooperating with His grace.  While we cannot save ourselves any more than we can rise up by our own power from the grave, we must obey His commandments in order to open our souls to receive His healing mercy as we become more like Him as “partakers of the divine nature.” If we do not do that, we will suffer the spiritual blindness of the rich man in today’s gospel lesson, regardless of how much or how little of the world’s treasures we have.  

Our calling is not to any form of religious legalism, but to embrace the healing and restoration that the God-Man shares with us.  In our epistle reading, St. Paul strongly opposes fellow Jewish Christians who required Gentile converts to be circumcised in obedience to the Old Testament law.  In contrast to those who would insist that Gentiles become Jews before becoming Christians, Paul writes that, “neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”   We enter into the life of the New Adam by being reborn in baptism as we put on Christ like a garment.  Being united to Him from the depths of our souls by the power of the Holy Spirit, we may become radiant with the gracious divine energies, manifesting the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness.” (Gal. 5:22) The contrast between the plight of the first Adam, miserably enslaved to the fear of death in our world of corruption, and the holy glory that Christ shares with us is so great that Paul describes our salvation as nothing less than “a new creation.”  Our risen Lord raises us from death to life, making it possible for us to participate in the new day of His Kingdom even now, which is something that even the most exacting obedience to the best set of religious laws could never achieve.      

In the midst of our materialistic and consumeristic culture, it is easy to overlook St. Paul’s warning that “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”  (1 Tim. 6: 9-10)   It was surely the love of money that led the rich man in today’s parable to become so enslaved to gratifying self-centered desire that he closed his heart completely to concern for his neighbors, even those so obviously suffering right before his eyes. Because he would not show love for poor Lazarus, he degraded himself to the point that he could not love God.   St. John wrote, “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (1 Jn. 4:20) The Lord Himself taught that love of God and neighbor are the greatest of the commandments. (Matt. 22: 37-40).   It is no surprise, then, that the rich man experienced the torment of bitter regret after his death, for he was in the eternal presence of the Lord Whom he had rejected throughout his life.  He had turned away decisively from God’s love and was capable of perceiving the divine glory as only a burning flame.  

If we have become “a new creation” in Christ, then we must live as members of His Body, manifesting His love and mercy for our suffering neighbors each day of our lives.  We must do so in relation to people in our own city, as well as to those who suffer around the world, including the living icons of God who are currently undergoing such horribly tragic circumstances in the Holy Land.    His Eminence, Metropolitan SABA, has directed all the parishes of our Archdiocese “to collect aid for our brethren at the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and to partake in the relief of their suffering while demonstrating the Christian communion of humanity in times of affliction…”[1] Beginning today and throughout this month, please put offerings marked “Holy Land” in the collection plate, which we will then send to the Archdiocese.  We must remember to place our almsgiving in the context of intensified prayer, especially for peace and blessing for those now suffering so terribly, and in renewed spiritual struggle to purify the desires of our hearts from self-centeredness in all its forms.  That is the only way that we will learn to respond to the “poor Lazaruses” of our day in light of the “new creation” of the God-Man, in whom “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.” (Gal. 3:28)       

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] https://www.antiochian.org/regulararticle/1812

Entrusting Ourselves to Christ with Truly Humble Faith: Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost and Seventh Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Galatians 2:16-20; Luke 8:41-56

            It is worth asking what we want to achieve by practicing our faith.  Why do we come to church, pray, fast, give to the needy, forgive our enemies, confess our sins, and otherwise struggle to reorient our lives toward God?  Perhaps we do these things because we want to put God in our debt so that He will do our will.  Maybe we want to become socially respectable, making ourselves look virtuous in our own eyes and in those of our neighbors.  It could also be the case that we want to distinguish ourselves from our neighbors, especially those we do not like, presenting ourselves as more pious and moral than we think they are.  Of course, these are all distortions of true Christian faith, but the real test of our faith is not simply in what we generally want from religion, but especially in how we relate to the Lord when we face deep challenges that break our hearts and threaten to lead us into despair.   

             In today’s gospel reading, Jairus and his wife were put to the ultimate test when the Lord said of their daughter, “Do not fear; only believe, and she shall be well…[and] “Do not weep; for she is not dead but sleeping.”  Jairus was an upstanding Jewish man who was responsible for the good order of a synagogue.  He was surely respected by his neighbors and thought to be righteous, but we have no idea what Jairus had thought about Christ other than that he knelt before Him and asked Him to come to his house, where his daughter was dying.  After she had died, whatever faith he had was surely stretched to the breaking point.   

             We also do not really know how Jairus and his wife responded to the Lord’s challenge to believe that their daughter would return to life and health.  Nonetheless, they had enough faith to go into their house with the Messiah Who had promised to save their daughter if they believed and did not fear.  Mourning and weeping had already begun, and others laughed at the Savior for saying, “Do not weep; for she is not dead but sleeping.”   In the midst of their despair, Jairus and his wife somehow found the strength to trust in Christ’s promise, which enabled them to receive a miracle well beyond all expectations.

             Something similar occurred with the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years.  She had impoverished herself by spending all her money on physicians who could not heal her. There was no medical cure for her condition, which also made her ritually unclean.  She was isolated, poor, and miserable.  Her religious and social standing were completely different from that of Jairus, who was at the center of the Jewish community, for she was very much on the margins.  All that we know about her attitude toward Christ is that she reached out and touched the hem of His garment in the midst of a large crowd.  She probably did not want to draw attention to herself by asking for healing and or to risk rejection from Him, for anyone who touched her would have been considered unclean also.     

             When the woman reached out for the Lord’s garment, she was healed immediately, but Christ knew that someone had touched Him; her secret was out.  Instead of running away in fear or becoming defensive or angry, the woman then “came trembling, and falling down before Him declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched Him, and how she had been immediately healed.”  Then the Lord said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”      

             As different as Jairus and this woman are, they have in common that they were both at the end of their rope and tempted to fall into despair.  It did not matter that one was an admired example of religious piety and that the other was an outcast.  Questions of how observant they were of the Jewish law or of what people thought about them had become irrelevant, for they knew no way out of the tragic circumstances they faced.  To their credit, they did not look for scapegoats to blame for their grave problems; neither did they do anything self-destructive.  Instead, they humbly offered the deepest pains of their lives to Christ for healing beyond what they could expect or even understand.  They entrusted their brokenness to the Lord without reservation and, thus, opened themselves to the healing of the human person that He has brought to the world. 

            The woman did not say anything at all until after her healing, which came through the only gesture of faith that she had the strength to make:  reaching out to touch the hem of the Savior’s garment in the middle of a crowd.  She was healed instantly, but spoke only after she had been found out.  She did so with fear and trembling, falling down before the Lord and stating publicly why she had reached out for healing.  That was likely the most difficult and embarrassing moment of her life.  In response, the Lord said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”  The Savior did not relate to her as a bundle of impurity, but simply as a beloved child of God who had opened her heart to Him as best she could.   

            The pain felt by Jairus and his wife was in no way lessened by their respectable position among the Jews.    Jairus had asked Christ to come to his house where his daughter was dying, but he and his wife surely struggled to believe that the Lord could actually raise her from the dead.  After He did so, “her parents were amazed; but He charged them to tell no one what had happened.” Their faith, however weak and imperfect, was all that the Savior needed to work an extraordinary miracle.  

 The Lord showed mercy throughout His earthly ministry to suffering people who offered their personal brokenness to Him for healing, regardless of where they stood in the religious and social pecking orders of the day.  He praised the spiritual understanding of a Gentile woman and cast a demon out of her daughter. (Mk 7:24-30) He said that no one in Israel had greater faith than the Roman centurion whose servant He healed. (Lk 7: 1-10) He restored the broken life of St. Photini, the Samaritan woman, by disregarding the prejudices of the time through His shocking conversation with her.  (Jn 4:1-42) The Savior did not treat them according to their social standing or level of religious observance, but according to His love for all the living icons of God.    

           Contrary to those who thought that obeying the Old Testament law would heal their souls, St. Paul taught that we are “not justified by works of the Law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” (Gal. 2:16) Only our risen Lord has delivered us from the corrosive fear of death through His glorious resurrection on the third day.  Even the strictest obedience to religious law could not resurrect Jairus’ daughter or anyone else; neither could it stop the chronic bleeding of the woman or deliver us from slavery to our self-centered desires.  It is only by opening our souls to Christ in brutally honest faith, no matter how weak or imperfect, that we may become participants in his restoration and fulfillment of the human person as a living icon of God.

 We must learn to see that we stand before Him just as did Jairus and the woman with grave, ongoing challenges that no level of religious observance, in and of itself, has the power of heal.  We must die to the pride that would make us think that we will become worthy of God’s favor if we will only accomplish this or that. The point of all our spiritual disciplines is not to attempt to put God in our debt, to achieve any earthly goal, or to distinguish ourselves from our neighbors in any way.    It is, instead, to help us gain the humility to have the faith necessary to entrust our deepest pains and fears to the One Who has conquered even death and Hades.  Acquiring that kind of faith is not easy and surely not a matter of simply going through the motions of religious practice.  It is, instead, a matter of allowing our illusions of self-sufficiency and self-righteousness to be destroyed as we come to see clearly where we stand before the Lord as those with broken hearts who often totter on the brink of despair.  He graciously accepts faith even the size of a mustard seed, such as that of an outcast woman who secretly touches the hem of His garment or of parents who can barely believe that death will not have the last word on their daughter.  If we can acquire the humility to entrust ourselves so fully to Christ, then His words will apply to us also: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”