The Faithful City of Isaiah's Vision

This is a homily I preached at our school chapel last Advent. The text is one I chose, though I don't really remember what led me to it.

‘Afterward thou shalt be called “the city of righteousness, the faithful city”. Zion shall be redeemed by justice, and her converts with righteousness.’

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It is fitting as we begin the period of Advent, patiently, or sometimes impatiently, expecting the adventus or coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, that we look back to the prophecies of the Old Testament that foretell the mighty works He came and will come again to perform. Today’s reading from the prophet may seem to strike a dark note at first, for it concerns the unfaithfulness of the holy city of Zion--Jerusalem. The Prophet Isaiah says the city has become a harlot or adulteress, that she is greedy and without charity or justice. It’s easy to read this and think smugly to ourselves, ‘Wow, those people were bad.’ But we miss the point entirely if we read this prophecy merely as a history of some place in the Middle East thousands of years ago.

For ‘the city’ is us, human beings. This is the Lord’s way of giving us a picture, because we all have some idea of what a city is like, though most of our modern cities are rather poor things. But it is a deeply significant picture. It means human beings are not just individual people, totally separate from each other, but people made for each other. St Chrysostom says, ‘Do you see how many bonds of love God has created? He’s done so as forces of nature lodged in us to be pledges of our peace with one another. We are of the same substance….God made us to need one another...’ [1] Even the great hermit, St Anthony, who spent 30 years in prayer with God alone, says ironically, ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour’, [2] and because of this teaching, as St Athanasius writes, even ‘the desert was made a city’. [3] We must begin by realising that human beings are all neighbours, we are a family. In a famous book based on this image of ‘the city’, St Augustine writes:

‘And human nature has nothing more appropriate, either for the prevention of discord, or for the healing of it, where it exists, than the remembrance of that first parent of us all, whom God was pleased to create alone, that all men might be derived from one, and that they might thus be admonished to preserve unity among their whole multitude.’ [4]

Thus our first mother Eve was taken out of the side of our father Adam, and the two were given to each other to help one another. But the sin of the Fall has split this familial unity that St Augustine speaks of, and we have become the broken family that St Augustine calls ‘the city of man’. For ‘the founder of the earthly city was a fratricide’--Cain, the murderer of ‘his own brother, a citizen of the eternal city, and a sojourner on earth’. [5]

And thus, as the Prophet says, the city of man has become full of murderers now (1:21)--for Christ says we are all guilty of murder whenever we become angry with our brother or insult him.

The Prophet says the city’s ‘silver is become dross’ (1:22)--which as Matthew Henry says means that moral corruption and injustice in the powerful among society is worse than economic decline. [6]

The Prophet says the city’s ‘wine is mixed with water’ (1:22)--meaning the sweetness and fellowship of human life has become flavourless due to our sin.

The Prophet says that the princes--our leaders--have become rebellious against God--the companions of thieves--defrauding the poor--greedy for profits and bribes--allowing the oppression and exploitation of the powerless--calling the orphans and the widows and the homeless lazy, dishonest, thieves, and drunkards, when it is really the powerful who are all these things. (1:23)

It is this city of which Socrates prophetically warned his pupil Alicibiades, ‘I know the city, and I fear that it shall get the better of both of us’ [7]--of the pupil, because it would seduce him to a life of sin, and of the teacher, because it would put him to death unjustly.

So God says He will ‘avenge’ Him ‘of His enemies’ (1:24). He will say: ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.’ (Matt. 25:41-3)

This is the fate of what St Augustine calls ‘the city of man’, and it is depicted well in Dante’s Inferno, where Dante beholds ‘the city they call Dis, / with its great hosts, with its grave citizens’. [8]

But thanks be to God, there is another City, which St Augustine calls ‘the City of God’--because as St John says, when he sees it ‘coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’ (‘in the purity and virtue of the saints’), it ‘has the glory of God in it’ lightening it more brilliantly than even the sun could do (Rev. 21:2, 11, 23). It is a city of the converts, of the repentant, restored to beauty and order--and love--by the Lord, and thus as St Andrew of Crete writes, ‘This city, which has Christ as its cornerstone, is composed of the saints concerning whom it is written: They shall be as the stones of a crown, lifted up as an ensign upon His land (Zech. 9:16)’ [9].

It is a city marked by justice and charity between all, where ‘the love that moves the sun and the stars’ binds everyone together forever. In an essay called ‘The Redeemed City’, the eccentric Anglican man of letters, Charles Williams writes:

In the last paragraph of the Apostles’ Creed the City is defined. ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost’ is its first clause and primal condition….Simultaneously all its citizens derive from all. ‘The Holy Catholic Church’ is its name here, allowing for all proper implications of whatever kind....But the other four clauses are, as it were, the four walls of the description [of St John] in the Apocalypse; or, if the metaphor divides them too much, say they are the four qualities of that life: ‘the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body, and the Life everlasting’. They are the qualities of the renewed perfection of union--interchange, interchange redeeming even the denial of itself...The almost incredible nature of things is that there is no fact which is not His glory. This is the great inclusion which makes the City. If, to use terms of space, we ascend towards it, it is still that which descends out of heaven, and is the cause and course of our ascent. The language of it is in the great interchange of fiery tongues by which the Spirit manifested at the beginning. [10]

But we mustn’t forget that all of this does not simply happen magically. As the Lord says through His prophet, ‘I will turn my hand against you and will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy’ (Is 1:25). We must be purged of our sins and passions, and begin to practice the commandments of Christ if we are to become the City of God. So as we embark upon this journey that will lead us to the little city of Bethlehem, and to worship the great King whose birth is proclaimed with the words ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace towards men of good will’, let us remember to do our part in symphony with His grace to live with justice, to show love towards all in our earthly city here and now, and to comfort the outcasts and afflicted in the streets, so that we may one day behold the heavenly City, where ‘God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away’ (Rev 21:4).

For the city of the great King is well planted on the mountains of Sion, with the joy of the whole earth, on the sides of the north. God is known in her palaces, when he undertakes to help her. (Ps 47:2-3 LXX)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[1] Homily 34.6; St John Chrysostom, The Love Chapter: The Meaning of First Corinthians 13 (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2010), pp. 78-9.

[2] Apopophegmata Patrum, Anthony 9; Benedicta Ward, SLG, tr., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1984), p. 3.

[3] Vita Antonii 14; St Athanasius, The Life of Antony & the Letter to Marcellinus, tr. Robert C. Gregg (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1980), pp. 42-3.

[4] De Civitate Dei 12.27; St Augustine, The City of God, tr. Marcus Dods (NY: Modern Library, 1950), p. 410.

[5] De Civitate Dei  15.5; St Augustine, p. 482.

[6] Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible: New One Volume Edition, ed. Leslie F. Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1966), p. 828.

[7] Alcibiades 135e; Plato, ‘Alcibiades’, tr. D.S. Hutchinson, The Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper & D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p.

[8] Inferno 8.68-9; Dante Alighieri, Inferno, tr. Anthony Esolen (NY: Modern Library, 2003), p. 81.

[9] In Archbishop Averky, The Apocalypse in the Teachings of Ancient Christianity, tr. & ed. Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose) (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1998), p. 268.

[10] Charles Williams, The Image of the City & Other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford U, 1970), p. 110.

'He softly springs the locks of death'—A Homily

This is the text of a homily I read in the school chapel today, the readings having been taken from the lectionary of the Book of Common Prayer for the Sunday after Easter. As can be seen, I took the lazy approach with this one, pretty much just using the relevant volumes of IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture for all of my patristic commentary, and supplementing it with the lines from Merton and Donne, followed by the full text of the Merton poem (a favourite of mine) at the end. I do not apologise for this, however, since when I do these homilies in the way that comes most naturally to me, the process can take hours. Pulling all of the quotes from essentially one book probably cut the time in half. 

The readings are I John 5:4-12 and John 20:19-23. 

‘And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord.’ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

The Fathers of the Church have noted that when today’s Gospel begins, it is evening, and therefore, dark like the darkened mood of the disciples. St Peter Chrysologus, the 5th-c. bishop of Ravenna, writes: ‘It was evening more by grief than by time. It was evening for minds darkened by the somber cloud of grief and sadness because although the report of the resurrection had given the slight glimmer of twilight, nevertheless the Lord had not yet shone through with His light in all its brilliance.’ [1] Furthermore, the doors of the house were shut—for fear of the Jews, yes, but according to St Peter: ‘The extent of their terror and the disquiet caused by such an atrocity [as the Crucifixion] had simultaneously locked the house and the hearts of the disciples...’ [2] 

But thank God, there is no darkness, there is no door or barrier that Christ cannot pierce, for indeed, in the words of the Trappist monk and writer, Thomas Merton, He is the ‘intrepid visitor’ who ‘springs the locks of death’. [3] He penetrated the gates of Hell itself and emerged from the sealed tomb, defying the heavy stone put in place to keep out the living, but which could not contain the Risen One. 

So Christ enters and stands in the midst of them, having passed through the locked doors. This might be surprising to us, because it seems that in several of the Resurrection accounts He is first of all concerned to show that He is not a disembodied ghost. Thus, we find our Lord walking and eating and drinking, demonstrating that it is indeed His physical form that has risen. But clearly His physical form has changed. St Augustine takes the Lord’s resurrected body as an example of what we can expect of our own future resurrection bodies, which St Paul calls ‘spiritual bodies’ (I Cor. 15:44). [4] But of course, this is only a preview of the true heavenly body, for in the words of St Cyril of Alexandria, ‘Our eyes could not have endured the glory of His holy body, if He had chosen to reveal it to His disciples before He ascended to the Father.’

So, St Cyril writes, ‘By his unexpected entry through closed doors Christ proved once more that by nature He was God and also that He was none other than the one who had lived among them.’ [5] Furthermore, He demonstrates that He is certainly not an incorporeal spirit by showing them His hands and side, which St Augustine takes to be scars rather than fresh wounds, and which he says the disciples see ‘as the result of His power, not of some necessity’. [6] 

But there is a more profound, more positive reason that He shows His wounds, beyond merely proving that He is still Jesus in the flesh. St Gregory the Great has written some moving words on this question: 

But because the faith of those who beheld [His entrance into the room] wavered concerning the body they could see, He showed them at once His hands and His side, offering them the body that He brought in through the closed doors to touch. By this action He revealed two wonderful, and according to human reason quite contradictory things. He showed them that after His resurrection His body was both incorruptible and yet could be touched....By showing us that it is incorruptible, He would urge us on toward our reward, and by offering it as touchable He would dispose us toward faith. He manifested Himself as both incorruptible and touchable to show us that His body after His resurrection was of the same nature as ours but of a different sort of glory. [7] 

But there is more to this still, of which I am reminded by St Gregory’s choice of words when he says that Christ was ‘offering them’ His body. For He had already offered them His body at the Mystical Supper on the night He was betrayed, hadn’t He? And He had offered it supremely at the moment when He was lifted up on the precious & life-giving Cross. And He offers it continually when He calls us to partake of Holy Communion. Recall the words of today’s Epistle: 

This is He who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree. (I John 5:4-12) 

The Fathers point out that the water and the blood—both of which pour out of His side when He is pierced by the spear—signify Christ’s Baptism and Crucifixion, and by extension our Baptism and partaking of His shed blood in Communion. In the words of the Venerable Bede: 

The Son of God came not by water only, in order to cleanse us from our sins, but also with the blood of His passion, by which He consecrates the sacrament of our baptism, giving His blood for us, redeeming us by His suffering and nourishing us with His sacraments so that we might be made fit for salvation. [8] 

In the breaking of bread, in the partaking of the sacrament, our eyes are opened and we recognise our Lord and are made glad when we see Him. In the words of St Leo the Great, ‘the traces of the nails and spear had been retained to heal the wounds of unbelieving hearts, so that not with wavering faith but with the most certain conviction they might comprehend that the nature that had been lain in the sepulcher was to sit on God the Father’s throne.’ [9] 

And what does our Lord do then? He says ‘Peace be unto you’ once more. As St Chrysostom says, ‘having put away all painful things, He tells of the victory of the cross, and this was the “peace”’. [10] Then, having blessed them in word, He blesses them in deed by breathing upon them. According to St Cyril of Jerusalem’s lectures to Catechumens: ‘This was the second time He breathed on human beings—His first breath having been stifled through willful sins.’ [11] He that is who breathed the Spirit of life into the face of Adam at his creation, making him a living soul, breathes the same Spirit into the faces of the disciples in that dark room, giving them a pledge of the Comforter whom He will send in awesome power on the day of Pentecost. He thaws out their frozen souls with the warmth of His breath, like Aslan breathing upon the statues in the courtyard of the White Witch, revivifying those who have been turned to stone. 

St Athanasius and St Cyril of Alexandria say too, that this testifies to Christ’s divinity, since in the latter’s words, ‘as the breath proceeds physically from the human mouth, so too does Christ, in a manner befitting God, pour forth the [Spirit] from the divine essence’. [12] And here we recall again today’s Epistle, when St John says that not only the water and the blood, but the Spirit testifies, ‘because the Spirit is truth’. Just as the two elements flow from His side on the Cross, so too does the Spirit ‘pour forth’ from Him when He voluntarily ‘gives it up’ on the Cross, quoting Psalm 31 when He says, ‘Into Thy hands I commend My Spirit’ (Luke 23:46). 

Thus, the events of today’s Gospel are all just watery ripples flowing out from the stone of Christ dropped into the pond of Death on that night in the Holy Sepulchre, when the uncreated light of the Holy Trinity dawned forth in the darkness of the cold grave, and Death lost its sting forever. For now, in John Donne’s words, ‘life, by this death abled, shall controule / Death, whom thy death slue’. [13] 

To wrap up this homily, I would like to look back once again to that Holy Night that saw a Dawn unlooked-for, by reading a poem by Thomas Merton, whom I’ve already quoted. This is called ‘The Dark Encounter’: 

O night of admiration, full of choirs,
O night of deepest praise,
And darkness full of triumph:
What secret and intrepid Visitor
Has come to crack our sepulcher?
He softly springs the locks of death
In the foretold encounter! 

O silence with no syllable for weapon,
Drunk with valor,
Whose speechless wonder solves the knots of flesh our captor:
Dower desires with your eloquence! 

O darkness full of warning and abandon,
(Disarming every enemy,
Slaying the meaning of the mind’s alarms)
Why do our steps still hesitate
Upon the threshold of incredible possession,
The sill of the tremendous rest,
Reading the riddle of His unexpected question? 

O silence full of exclamation!
It is the time of the attack.
Our eyes are wider than the word: “Aware.”
O darkness full of vision, vivid night,
Defying the frontier. 

O silence full of execution,
All intuition and desire lie destroyed
When Substance is our Conqueror.
O midnight full of victory,
And silence of the wonderful acclaim,
And darkness full of sweet delight. 

O night of admiration, full of choirs,
O night of deepest praise,
And darkness full of sweet delight!
What secret and intrepid Visitor
Has come to raise us from the dead?
He softly springs the locks of time, our sepulcher,
In the foretold encounter. 

[1] Joel C. Elowsky, ed., John 11-21, NT Vol. IVb of Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2007), p. 355. 

[2] Ibid., p. 356. 

[3] Thomas Merton, ‘The Dark Encounter’ (here). 

[4] Elowsky, p. 356. 

[5] Ibid., p. 357. 

[6] Ibid., p. 356. 

[7] Ibid., p. 356. 

[8] Gerald Bray, ed., James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, NT Vol. XI in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2000), p. 223. 

[9] Elowsky, p. 358. 

[10] Ibid., p. 359. 

[11] Ibid., p. 361. 

[12] Ibid., p. 362. 

[13] John Donne, ‘Resurrection’, The Poems of John Donne, Vol. 1: The Text of the Poems with Appendixes, ed. Herbert J.C. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford U, 1966), p. 321. 

[14] See the link above, n. 3.

'Saddened Eyes Beheld a Vision of Joy' - A Homily

The following is a homily that I prepared for Monday, 9 April--Holy Monday on the Orthodox calendar, Bright Monday on the Western, but due to a mix-up had to revise for delivery on 16 April--Orthodox Bright Monday. I was feeling a bit lazy and pressed for time when I started working on it, so unlike most of my homilies it was actually written out from the beginning rather than being composed in notes and then expanded into readable prose later for blogging purposes. I find it much easier to work that way.

I Corinthians 15:1-8

St Luke 24: 13-32​

'O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?'

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The poet T.S. Eliot begins his famous poem 'The Waste Land' with the words, 'April is the cruellest month', [1] and the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, seems to be telling us why when he writes, in his own poem:

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,

And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring;... [2]

While almost all of you out there this morning celebrated Easter at your churches yesterday, my family and I still have a week to go. In the Orthodox Church, yesterday was only Palm Sunday, when we celebrate the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem before His Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. In other words, we're still thinking of the cruelty this month, of Christ lying slain. This left me momentarily in a bit of a conundrum about what to speak about today. I didn't feel I could just plunge comfortably into a homily about the Resurrection, but on the other hand, I didn't think I could speak as though the Resurrection was still to come when almost the whole school had already celebrated it.

But a bit of reflection reminded me that this was not as big a problem as it seemed. For one thing, Christ's entry into Jerusalem, and our Palm Sunday celebration, are already looking ahead towards the Cross and the Resurrection. The Lord's Entry is a triumphal procession, such as that a Roman emperor might have made after defeating a terrible enemy, and Christ is openly proclaimed as King. For Christ is the King of Glory, and the enemies He has defeated are Death, Sin, and the Devil. The poets Eliot and Merton know this as well as you and I, but an ancient Byzantine hymn says it better than they could:

O immortal Lord, Thou hast bound hell, slain death, and raised the world: therefore the children, carrying palms, sing praise to Thee as Victor, O Christ, and they cry aloud to Thee this day: 'Hosanna to the Son of David! For no more', say they, 'shall the little children be slain because of Mary's Child; but Thou alone art crucified for all, both young and old. No more shall the sword be drawn against us, for Thy side is pierced by a spear. With great rejoicing, then, we cry: Blessed art Thou that comest to call back Adam.' [3]

According to the Synoptic Gospels, the people laid their clothes on the ground before the Lord as He rode forth on the donkey. The clothes being trampled could be read as the mortality of the Old Man, which we are to take off to be clothed with Christ the New Man (Rom 6:6), and the poor, humble beast on which the Lord is mounted might be the ignominious but Precious Cross, 'unto the Jews a stumblingblock and unto the Greeks foolishness' (I Cor 1:23). Furthermore, we recall that the very same crowd that welcomed Christ as their Saviour, shouting 'Hosanna!', would shortly be shouting 'Crucify Him!'

​So already, those of us who celebrated Palm Sunday were shown an image of the Crucifixion. But as I have suggested, even this image of the Crucifixion is not one of defeat, and the element of triumph, of victory, glory, and honour, is present already in the entry into Jerusalem as well as in the Crucifixion itself. For it is by His own death that the Lord has trampled upon Death, for He was not taken and put to this death against His will. He willingly underwent Crucifixion when He said, 'Not My will, but Thine be done' (Lk 22:42). The old Anglo-Saxon poem, 'The Dream of the Rood', speaks of Christ stripping like a warrior before battle, and mounting the Cross like a war-horse, and while we know that this is not 'historically' accurate, it is most definitely 'theologically' true. In other words, the Crucifixion is also an image of the coming Resurrection. [4]

But both the Entry into Jerusalem and the Crucifixion itself left the Disciples confused, didn't they? In St John's Gospel, having quoted the prophecy in Zachariah 9:9 about Israel's King coming to her 'meek, and seated upon a donkey', the account of the triumphal entry tells us, 'These things understood not his disciples at the first: but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of Him, and that they had done these things unto Him' (Jn 12:16). In other words, they did not recognise the significance of what was taking place before their very eyes. Much less did they recognise it at the Crucifixion itself, nor even when they first heard the news of the empty tomb from the Myrrh-bearing women. 'But when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of Him'. When did this happen?

In today's Gospel, we discover the nature of the disciples' misunderstanding as well as the means of their understanding. Two disciples, one named Cleopas and the other traditionally identified as St Luke himself, are walking to Emmaus, when they meet Jesus on the road. It is a meeting that inspired part of Eliot's 'Waste Land', where he writes, 'Who is the third who walks always beside you?' (360) For so complete is the Disciples' misunderstanding, their inability to recognise what is before their eyes, that they do not even recognise the risen Lord Himself--'But their eyes were holden that they should not know Him' (Lk 24:16). In response to His question about why they are sad, the disciples tell Him about 'Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to be condemned to death, and have crucified Him. But we trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel' (Lk 24:19-21).

In other words, the disciples believed that because Christ had been crucified, it could not be He that was to deliver Israel. As Bl Theophylact writes, 'the people expected, incorrectly, that Christ would be their savior and redeemer from the temporal afflictions that beset them, and from the yoke of slavery to the Romans. And they hoped that He would rule as king over an earthly kingdom'. [5] They thought that the Crucifixion meant that He could not redeem them, not realising that it was precisely BY the Crucifixion that He DID redeem them. Bl Theophylact exhorts us, 'You, O reader, consider how entering into glory comes by means of suffering.' [6]

So what did Christ do? He responded, 'O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself' (Lk 24:25-26). In other words, He told them that it was by His suffering that He was glorified, and began to expound the Scriptures to them. He proclaimed the Word to them, and having proclaimed the Word, 'He took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew Him; and He vanished out of their sight' (Lk 24:30-31). Notice that the first verse I just quoted consists of precisely the same words that were used when Christ instituted the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper.

Do you see what happened? He gave them the Liturgy of the Word or of the 'Catechumens', who are instructed in the Scriptures, and then He gave them the Liturgy of the Sacrament or of the 'Faithful', who partake of the Eucharist, and it is through this two-fold celebration of the divine mysteries that ​their eyes were opened and 'they said to one another, "Did not our heart burn within us, while He talked with us by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?"' At last, 'Jesus was glorified, and they remembered'. Of course, it was in His suffering, death, and Resurrection that He was glorified, but the Disciples were not able to see this until He reminded them of the Scriptures that had foretold all of this, and then served them Holy Communion. In the words of St Augustine:

It was for our sake that He didn't want to be recognised anywhere but there, because weren't going to see Him in the flesh, and yet we were going to eat His flesh. So if you're a believer, any of you, if you're not called a Christian for nothing, if you don't come to church pointlessly, if you listen to the Word of God in fear and hope, you may take comfort in the breaking of bread. The Lord's absence is not an absence. Have faith, and the one you cannot see is with you. [7]

It is only the Church that gathers together to hear the Word and celebrate the Sacrament that truly knows WHO Christ is, that is able to see in the midst of a savage beating and a shameful death, in the midst of an extreme condescension, the Maker of all the universe lifted up, glorified, and defeating the evils that have plagued us since the Fall of our Forefather in Paradise. According to one of the hymns of St Ephrem the Syrian:

When the disciples' eyes

were held closed,

bread too was the key

whereby their eyes were opened

to recognise the omniscient:

saddened eyes beheld

a vision of joy

and were instantly filled with happiness. [8]

In the light of the Resurrection, and only in this light, we are able at last to see the true meaning of all of the events of Christ's life, of all of the words that He spoke, of all the Old Testament Scriptures, and of all of human history for that matter, and it is ultimately as St Ephrem says, 'a vision of joy'. We couldn't celebrate the Entry into Jerusalem, or the Crucifixion, if it we didn't already know the Resurrection followed them, and if our eyes had not been opened by the grace of God of which we partake in Word and Sacrament. But in the wake of this experience, we see that He has made all things new (Rev 21:5), and we are 'instantly filled with happiness'. As G.K. Chesterton has written:

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn. [9]

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

​

[1] T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays 1909-1950 (NY: Harcourt, 1971), p. 37.

[2] Thomas Merton, Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, enlarged ed. (NY: New Directions, 1967), p. 13.

[3] Ikos of the Canon at Matins for Palm Sunday; Mother Mary & Archimandrite Kallistos [Ware], tr., The Lenten Triodion (South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon's Seminary, 1994), p. 499.

[4] I'll add a reference and perhaps quote a line or two soon just to improve the post a bit.

​[5] Bl Theophylact, The Explanation by Bl Theophylact of the Holy Gospel According to St Luke, tr. Fr Christopher Stade (House Springs, MO: Chrysostom, 1997), p. 320.

[6] Ibid., p. 322.

[7] From Sermon 235; qtd. from Arthur A. Just, Jr., ed., Luke, Vol. III of Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2003), p. 378.

[8] St Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, tr. Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 1990), p. 183.

[9] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (SF: Ignatius, 2008), p. 213.

‘Even So Send I You’—A Homily for the 1st Sunday after Pascha

This was my last homily of the school year, preached on the Monday after the first Sunday after Pascha, using the BCP readings for that Sunday. Orthodox readers will note a larger number of quotations from non-Patristic sources, including Jim Elliot, Corrie ten Boom, and John Keble. I don’t apologise for this, since these are sources that I thought my audience might be able easily to relate to and which expressed ideas that I do not find at all opposed to the Patristic tradition. I do ask that sensitive readers please excuse my paraphrase of the first quote from St Isaac the Syrian. I was afraid a great deal of my audience might find it difficult to follow Dana Miller’s rendering of the passage, and so attempted to simplify without—I hope—distorting the meaning.

I John 5:4-12
St John 20:19-23

‘As My Father sent me, even so send I you.’

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Christ is risen!

When preaching on a text from Scripture, I’m nearly always tempted to explain the passage as whole—looking for a structure, drawing out a dense complex of ideas. But today I want to focus closely, and draw out my homily from one fairly simple idea.

In today’s Gospel, Christ shows His disciples the wounds in His hands and side—glorious scars of His suffering and death. It is then that He speaks the words I have quoted: ‘As My Father sent me, even so send I you.’ What I want to point out today is that these two things—the action and the words—are not unrelated.

Commenting on this passage, St Gregory the Great writes:

As the Son is loved by the Father and yet is sent forth to suffer, so also the disciples are loved by the Lord, Who nevertheless sends them into the world to suffer; that is, ‘I am loving you with the love with which the Father loved Me, Whom He sent into the world to undergo sufferings.’ [1]

Today’s message is that just as Christ was sent to suffer, so He sends His disciples to suffer too.

The showing of His wounds confirms the Resurrection, it builds that faith by which the world is overcome, according to the first verse of today’s Epistle reading. But this overcoming of world, though it is by faith, is nevertheless a struggle which requires suffering. In other words, God’s grace enables us to overcome world, but only through much suffering: physical, emotional, and spiritual. And what I am struck most by is the implication that this is the normal life for Christ’s disciples. Thus a line has long stuck with me from the journal of the famous Protestant missionary, Jim Elliot:

‘We are the sheep of His pasture. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise.’ And what are sheep doing going into a gate? What is their purpose inside those courts? To bleat melodies and enjoy the company of the flock? No. Those sheep were destined for the altar. [2]

In other words, they are destined to be slaughtered as a sacrifice.

Similarly, the great spiritual teacher of 20th-c. Serbia, Elder Thaddeus, says ‘there is no life other than that of serving others and patiently bearing sorrow and pain’. [3]

I’m afraid that more than at any other time or place, we Americans in the 21st c. fall into the trap of thinking that a life of ease and comfort, material prosperity and the respect of society, doing fun and pleasing ourselves, is somehow compatible with Christianity.

Make no mistake: Christian life is a cross!
Christian life is sacrifice!
Christian life is difficult!

St Paul writes, ‘That no man should be moved by these afflictions: for yourselves know that we are appointed thereunto’ (I Thess. 3:3).

The great contemplative of the eastern desert, St Isaac of Nineveh, writes:

The person that wants to fulfill the Lord’s word is like someone prepared to be crucified who can think of nothing but dying, and no longer cares at all about the life of this present age. That’s what it means to ‘take up one’s cross and follow Him’ (Matt 16:24). The cross is a choice to be ready to suffer all the time. . . . Therefore by yourself prepare your soul to forget completely about this life. . . . When you struggle for Christ with this preparation, then everything that seems painful and bad will seem like no big deal at all. When your mind is prepared like this, it has no struggle or affliction when it faces death. If you don’t forget about life in this world because you want the blessed life to come, you’ll never be able to get through all the tribulations and pains that are gonna happen to you. [4]

The memory of the Church records that Christ’s words were certainly fulfilled by His immediate hearers—of the twelve Apostles, St Peter was crucified upside-down; St James, son of Zebedee, was beheaded; St John, son of Zebedee, died in exile; St Andrew was crucified on an x-shaped cross; St Philip was crucified; St Bartholomew was flayed (skinned) alive and beheaded; St Matthew was killed by an axe; St Thomas was killed by a spear; St James, son of Alphaeus, was crucified, stoned, and beaten to death by a club; St Jude was crucified; St Simon the Zealot was crucified; and St Matthias was stoned and beheaded.

Now, in context Christ’s words, ‘even so send I you’, obviously apply first of all to ‘clergy’. Our Lord is speaking to the Apostles—to whom He gives the power to ‘bind and loose’ (cf. St John 20:23). According to the English Puritan, Matthew Henry: this power ‘puts immense honour upon the ministry, and should put immense courage into ministers’. [5] Unfortunately, even the clergy often forget that it is their calling precisely to suffer.

But our Lord’s words also apply to all believers. All Christians are ‘sent out’ into the world. It is true that the laity don’t have the special task of ‘binding and loosing’—but we too can spread Christ’s forgiveness, if not sacramentally. The 6th-grade class just finished reading The Hiding Place, about a woman named Corrie Ten Boom who was imprisoned by the Nazis for helping Jews. After her release from the Ravensbruck prison camp, Corrie meets one of her former guards—who does not recognise her—when speaking at a German church. We read:

His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.

Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help to forgive him.

I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.

As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.

And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself. [6]

As I mentioned early on, by faith through grace we ‘overcome the world’. But what do we mean by ‘the world’? Is this the same as that world into which we’re sent?

In a homily on today’s Epistle delivered over 150 years ago, the great Anglican preacher, John Keble, said: ‘The world is the visible and outward course of things, amidst which we live and move. It is something different to each one of us but each one finds it the same in this respect, that by things in sight it tempts and draws him away from things out of sight.’ [7]

Thus the ‘world’ is not just outside, but, sadly, within us in the form of the passions which St Paul says ‘they that are Christ’s have crucified’ (Gal 5:24). Indeed, as St Isaac has famously written:

World is a collective noun which is applied to the so-called passions. . . . When we wish to give a collect name to the passions, we call them world. And when we wish to designate them specifically according to their names, we call them passions. . . . These are the passions: love of wealth; gathering objects of any kind; bodily pleasure . . . ; love of esteem, from which springs envy; the wielding of power; pride in the trappings of authority; stateliness and pomposity; human glory, which is the cause of resentment; fear for the body. [8]

All of this can be overcome by faith in Christ, through which His grace transforms us. The mediaeval English monk, the Venerable Bede, says that:

The commandments of God are not burdensome. If we keep them with true devotion, even though the world is difficult, we’ll pass by its temptations without being troubled, and we’ll even look forward to death, because it’s the gateway to the heavenly country. Of course we can’t achieve all this by our own efforts, so St John adds that our victory is a result of our faith, not our works. [9]

Finally, as Keble observes:

To overcome this world is really to turn away from the things which seem desirable in it and to give them up for the sake of better things out of sight, and when our faith has this effect on us—when it actually causes us to forego earthly things in order to secure the things eternal to please God and show duty to Jesus Christ—then it is a faith which overcomes the world. [10]

May we all learn to acquire and practice this kind of faith so that we can repeat in our own lives the great sacrifice that Jesus Christ made for us.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.


[1] The Orthodox New Testament, Vol. 1: The Holy Gospels, tr. & ed. Holy Apostles Convent (Buena Vista, CO: HAC, 1999), p. 552, n. 365.

[2] Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty: The Life & Testament of Jim Elliot (NY: Harper, 1958), p. 89.

[3] Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives: The Life & Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, compiled by the St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, tr. Ana Smiljanic (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2009), p. 15.

[4] Paraphrased from Homily 37, in The Ascetical Homilies of St Isaac the Syrian, tr. Dana Miller (Boston: HTM, 1984), p. 168.

[5] Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible: New One Volume Edition, ed. Leslie F. Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1966), p. 1628.

[6] Corrie ten Boom, with John & Elizabeth Sherrill, The Hiding Place (Washington Depot, CT: Chosen, 1971), p. 215.

[7] John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, ed. Maria Poggi Johnson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 127.

[8] Ascetical Homilies, pp. 14-5.

[9] Gerald Bray, ed., James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, Vol. XI in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2000), p. 222.

[10] Keble, p. 127.

'He That Is of God Heareth God's Words'--A Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent

I really didn’t mean to let two full months go by without posting a thing. To make up for it, here, much belatedly, is one of two homilies that I plan to post this week. This is my homily for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, preached, as usual, at chapel on the Monday morning following. I had received an indirect request through my principal to make it easier for the other teachers to take something away to discuss with their students—hence the repetitions of certain carefully enumerated points. The age and generally Protestant orientation of most of the audience accounts for the tone and some details of my retelling of the Life of St Mary of Egypt. I apologise that it is hardly a model of hagiographical narration.

Hebrews 9:11-15
St John 8:46-59

‘He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.’

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

In the second verse of today’s Gospel, these words that I have just quoted are spoken by Christ to the Jews. By ‘God’s words’, we can be sure that Our Lord means the Scriptures, of course, but the Scriptures are not only words already written but the words He is speaking at that moment.

From this ‘living Scripture’ we learn, first, that it is important that we ‘hear’ His words, not only read them silently. In the ancient world reading was always done out loud, and as often as we can we too must read the Scriptures aloud, listen to others read them, recite them, etc.

Second, we learn that merely hearing His words physically with our ears is not enough, since the Lord says to his physical audience ‘ye therefore hear them not’. It is also necessary to pay careful attention to what He says. Commenting on this text, the English Puritan, Matthew Henry, writes:

He that is of God . . . is willing and ready to hear His words, is sincerely desirous to know what the mind of God is, and cheerfully embraces whatever he knows to be so. He apprehends and discerns them, he so hears them as to perceive the voice of God in them, as they of the family know the master’s tread, and the master’s knock, as the sheep know the voice of their shepherd from that of a stranger.’

Third, and finally, we learn from these words of Christ that even paying attention is not enough—in v. 51, the Lord says that those who would never see death must ‘keep my saying’. In other words, truly hearing entails also doing.

In his commentary on this Gospel passage, St Gregory the Great emphasises all three of these points:

Let each one of you then consider within himself if this voice of God prevails in the ears of his heart. Then he will recognize whether he is now of God. There are some who do not choose to hear God’s commands even with their bodily ears. There are others who do this but do not embrace them with their heart’s desire. There are still others who receive God’s words readily, yes, and are touched, even to tears. But afterwards they go back to their sins again and therefore cannot be said to hear the word of God, because they neglect to practice it. [2]

Hearing the Word means listening, paying attention, but most importantly, doing the Word.

In the Anonymous Collection of Desert Fathers sayings, we read that:

A woman came to [St] Antony [the Great] and declared that she had endured great fasting and had learned the entire Bible by heart. [Amazing, huh?] She wanted to know from Antony what more she should do. Antony was less sanguine about her accomplishments than she was and put a series of questions to her. He asked her, ‘Is contempt the same as honor to you?’ She answered, ‘No.’ He then asked her, ‘Is loss gain, strangers as your parents, poverty as abundance?’ Again she answered ‘No.’ Antony said to her, ‘Thus you have neither fasted nor learned the Old and New Testament, but you have deceived yourself.’ [3]

By contrast, consider the story of the monk who—

came to St Basil [the Great] and said, ‘Speak a word, Father’; and Basil replied, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart’; and the monk went away at once. Twenty years later he came back, and said, ‘Father, I have struggled to keep your word; now speak another word to me’; and he said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’; and the monk returned in obedience to his cell to keep that also. [4]

Hearing God’s Word means listening, paying attention, but most importantly, doing God’s Word.

Indeed, I have already mentioned that in v. 51 Christ says, ‘If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.’ Does He mean we won’t die, but be taken to heaven like Enoch and Elijah? Clearly not. According to St Augustine: ‘It means nothing less than He saw another death from which He came to free us—the second death, eternal death, the death of hell, the death of the damned, which is shared with the devil and his angels! This is real death; the other kind of death is only a passage.’ [5] So Christ promises that if we keep His saying, we shall be delivered from this eternal death. But there is a more subtle, positive promise as well: If we hear (that is, do) the Word, its mysteries will be revealed to us.

Recall that the Jews respond to Christ’s promise: ‘Abraham is dead, and did he not keep God’s Word?’ What the Lord says in reply is rather strange. In v. 56, He tells them, ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.’ Happily, the author of Hebrews, traditionally believed to be St Paul, helps us to understand this.

First, in a passage not found in today’s Epistle, but in chapter 11, v. 13, St Paul, having spoken of Abraham, writes: ‘These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them.’ In other words, yes, Abraham died the lesser death, and he died before Christ brought deliverence from eternal death, but he foresaw the deliverance, and he obtained this through faith—through hearing (that is, doing) the Word of God. St Irenaeus of Lyons says, ‘Righteously therefore, having left his earthly family, Abraham followed the Word of God walking as a pilgrim with the Word so that he might afterwards make his home with the Word.’ [6]

Now, the Fathers say many things about what Abraham saw—the mysteries revealed to him for his faith, like the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation. But most Fathers specifically connect what Christ calls ‘my day’ with His crucifixion and death. St Irenaeus writes, ‘Abraham was a prophet and saw in the Spirit the day of the Lord’s coming and the dispensation of His suffering’; [7] St Chrysostom says Abraham ‘was gladdened at the cross’; [8] and St Gregory Palamas says the ‘mystery of the Cross was working in Abraham’. [9]

How was this so? The Fathers say it is especially true in the story of the Sacrifice of Isaac (found in Gen. 22:1-14). St Cyril says Abraham ‘saw the day of the Lord’s slaughter . . . when, as a type of Christ, he was enjoined to offer up for a sacrifice his only begotten and firstborn, Isaac . . . making clear the exact force of the Mystery in a type in what happened.’ [10] St Ephraim the Syrian writes, ‘“He saw and rejoiced,” for he recognized the redemption of all the nations through the symbol of the lamb. “He said, ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’” For He existed, but in hidden fashion, when Isaac was being redeemed and revealed His sign through a lamb.’ [11]

Christ is of course the true Agnus Dei, the true Lamb of God—that is the Word of God that Abraham saw, and it is this ‘Word of God’ which we ‘hear’ in today’s Epistle: Hebrews 9:11-15. In verses 13-14, St Paul writes:

For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

This is the Mystery revealed to Abraham. Christ is the perfect sacrifice, who delivers us from death and frees us from the dead works of the Law—sacrificing animals, etc.—so we can follow ‘the Word of God’. To paraphrase St John Cassian (Conference 21.4.3), we no longer offer sacrifices of animals or mere ‘tithes of our possessions’, but ‘disdaining property, we offer ourselves and our own souls to God’. [12] We hear and do God’s Word by imitating Christ’s sacrifice. We participate in the Mystery of the Cross by denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Jesus. For as we listen to today’s Gospel, we ourselves must be hearing the Word of God, and if we do this, we like Abraham will learn its Mystery. The Jews to whom Our Lord spoke heard but did not hear—we have the opportunity to hear what they did not.

In St John 8:58, Christ says: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.’ Commenting on this passage, St Gregory the Great writes:

Our Redeemer graciously turns their gaze away from His body and draws it to contemplation of His divinity. . . . ‘Before’ indicates past time, ‘I am’ present time. Because divinity does not have past and future time but always is, He did not say, ‘I was before Abraham’ but ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ And so it was said to Moses [at the burning bush], ‘I am who I am’, and ‘You will say to the children of Israel, “He who is has sent me to you”’ (Ex 3:14). [13]

In other words, Christ existed both before and after Abraham. It was Christ Who appeared to Abraham by the Oaks of Mamre, and the sign of the Precious Cross was stamped on his life. But this should not surprise us. As one modern theologian puts it:

Theologically speaking, creation and its history begins with the Passion of Christ [His suffering on the Cross] and from this ‘once for all’ work looks backwards and forwards to see everything in this light, making everything new. Christian cosmology, elaborated as it must be from the persective of the Cross, sees the Cross as impregnated in the very structure of creation: stat crux dum volvitur orbis—the Cross stands, while the earth revolves. The power of God revealed in and through the Cross brought creation into being and sustains it in existence. [14]

He then quotes St Isaac of Syria:

We do not speak of a power in the Cross that is any different from that through which the worlds came into being, [a power] which is eternal and without beginning and which guides creation all the time without any break, in a divine way and beyond the understanding of all, in accordance with the will of His divinity. [15]

If all this theology is a bit too much for you though, I’ll tell a little story that might make it easier.

Starting about 600 years ago, the Church that I belong to began a tradition of reading the Life of a Saint named St Mary of Egypt every year on the 5th Sunday of Lent. In the West, not many know about St Mary, so I’ll tell her story briefly.

The Life as we have it was written down in the 7th c. by St Sophronius of Jerusalem. It tells of a St Zosimas who lived in the Holy Land and was a good monk who ‘never ceased to study the Divine Scriptures. Whether resting, standing, working or eating food (if the scraps he nibbled could be called food), he incessantly and constantly had a single aim: always to sing of God, and to practice the teaching of the Divine Scriptures.’ According to the custom of his monastery, St Zosimas set off to the desert across the River Jordan to spend Lent alone with Christ (so, following the Word of God).

After 20 days, St Zosimas saw a human being whose body was ‘blackened, burnt by the heat of the sun’ [16]—an image of self-denial, of suffering, of the Mystery of the Cross—and discovers that it is a woman who already knows his name through Spirit. She is too humble to speak of herself, but St Zosimas begs her to tell him her story and finally cajoles her into it.

She says her name is ‘Mary’ and that she is from Alexandria, Egypt. Before she came to the desert, she was a very sinful woman—she liked to party, she wore lots of makeup and fancy clothes, and committed adultery many times. One day she went to Jerusalem and heard it was Feast of Precious Cross (at that time the Jerusalem Church still had all of the actual Cross that Christ was crucified on). Mary tried to go into the church with the crowd, but a mysterious force held her back. She realised that God was preventing her to enter because of her sins, and she promised to go to the desert and live in repentance. At that moment, she was able to enter the church and kiss Christ’s Precious Cross, upon which she immediately left and crossed the Jordan. At the time that she meets St Zosimas, St Mary believes that it has been 47 years since she left the Holy City to follow the Word of God.

When St Mary quotes Scripture to St Zosimas, he asks if she has read the Bible. Interestingly, she says: ‘I never learned from books. I have never even heard anyone who sang and read from them. But the word of God which is alive and active, by itself teaches a man knowledge.’ So Christ revealed to her His mysteries—she has heard His living voice, of which Scripture is only a record, and has been freed by grace to ‘serve the living God’. St Zosimas says, ‘Blessed is God Who has shown me how He rewards those who fear Him. Truly, O Lord, Thou dost not forsake those who seek Thee!’

The end of the story is that St Mary tells St Zosimas (who is a priest) to bring her Holy Communion. When he goes back to the Jordan he sees her on the other side, but she crosses by walking across the water to receive the Mysteries and says, ‘Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, O Lord, according to Thy word; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.’ When St Zosimas goes back at her request after a year, St Mary has fallen asleep in the Lord.

Because St Mary has heard (and done) the Word of God, He has made known the Mystery of His Cross to her.

Because St Zosimas has heard (and done) the Word of God, He has made known mystery of St Mary’s cross to him.

Obviously, not all are called to live in the desert of the Holy Land, but as we get ready to celebrate His death and resurrection in a couple of weeks let’s try to remember that—

Whenever we are asked to do something we don’t like, we have an opportunity to share in Christ’s Cross just a little bit.

Whenever someone insults us or hurts us, and we are tempted to get angry and get back at them, we can share in Christ’s Cross.

Whenever we feel like fidgeting during Matins, or ignoring our teacher, we can share in Christ’s Cross.

Whenever we have to wait for something we want, we can share in Christ’s Cross.

Whenever our tie is too tight, the day is too hot, our chair is too hard, our class is too long, or the book we have to read is too boring, we share in Christ’s Cross.

If we do this, if we take advantage of these opportunities and even seek new ones, we will truly hear God’s Word.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.


[1] Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible: New One Volume Edition, ed. Leslie F. Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1966), p. 1555.

[2] Joel C. Elowsky, ed., John 1-10, NT Vol. IVa of Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006), p. 309.

[3] Douglas Burton-Christ, The Word in the Desert: Scripture & the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (NY: Oxford, 1993), p. 161.

[4] Benedicta Ward, Foreword, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1984), p. xxii.

[5] Elowsky, p. 313.

[6] Ibid., p. 316.

[7] Ibid., p. 316.

[8] Ibid., p. 316.

[9] St Gregory Palamas, The Homilies, ed. & tr. Christopher Veniamin with the Monastery of St John the Baptist (Waymart, PA: Mount Thabor, 2009), p. 79.

[10] Elowsky, p. 316.

[11] Ibid., p. 317.

[12] St John Cassian, The Conferences, tr. Boniface Ramsey (NY: Newman, 1997), p. 721.

[13] Elowsky, p. 317.

[14] Fr John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2006), p. 90.

[15] Qtd. in ibid., p. 90.

[16] All quotations from the Life of St Mary of Egypt are taken from here.

'Let Us Cry Out to Christ Like the Canaanite Woman' - A Homily

At last, I have a new homily to post. This was based on the BCP readings for the second Sunday in Lent: I Thessalonians 4:1-8 and St Matthew 15:21-28. I was a little worried about frightening some of the kids with the talk about child sacrifice, but I think it was the best received so far.

‘Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.’

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s Epistle, St Paul writes, ‘[E]very one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour’ (I Thess. 4:4). This is something that the people of Tyre and Sidon, the country of the ‘Canaanite woman’ in today’s Gospel historically failed to do. Indeed, the pagan worship of the Phoenician cities is still well known for its ‘licentiousness’. [1]

But it is worse than that. Actually, it surprises me little that the ‘woman of Canaan’ would complain of a daughter ‘grievously vexed with a devil’ (St Matt. 15:23). Ps. 96:5 says ‘all the gods of the nations’—or Gentiles, like the Phoenicians—‘are mere idols’: but according to both the Greek and Latin translations of the Old Testament, ‘all the gods of the nations are demons’ (Ps. 96:5 LXX). Next week’s Gospel mentions ‘Beelzebub’, or ‘Lord of Flies’, the demonic god of the Philistine city of Ekron, who is referred to there as ‘the chief of devils’ (St Luke 11:14-28).

The latter passage reminds us that Ps. 96:5 is true par excellence of the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, whose deities are variously known as Baal or Moloch, and who were known to sacrifice their children in the fiery mouths of their great bronze idols. Such sacrifices are mentioned in Lev. 18:21, and there are terrifying, vivid descriptions of them in a scholium to Plato’s Republic as well as in Plutarch.

Thus, it seems a fitting punishment for people known in the Mediterranean world for sacrificing children to demons for their children to be ‘badly demonized’, according to a literal translation of the woman’s words. Surely the burners of human beings to demonic gods fall under St Paul’s condemnation when he writes in today’s Epistle, ‘He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God’ (I Thess. 4:8). Confronted with the same Moloch-worshipping Phoenicians in their colony of Carthage, G.K. Chesterton tells us the Romans saw ‘faces of sneering men; and hated the hateful soul of Carthage’. [2]

But, as St Augustine happily observes in The City of God, ‘[M]en, though erring, incredulous, and averse from the worship and service of the gods, are nevertheless beyond doubt better than the demons whom they themselves have evoked’ (De civ. Dei 8.24). [3] This is wonderfully demonstrated by the woman in today’s Gospel. She recognised her error, repented, and came to Christ in humble supplication, and this humility is the dominant note of today’s lesson. It begins with a simple plea for mercy, like the prayer of the Publican, ‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner’ (Lk 18:13). Then, we see the recognition that the Messiah of the Hebrews is the true ‘Baal’, or ‘Lord’, when the woman says ‘O Lord’.

St Gregory Palamas, the Archbishop of Thessalonica in the 14th c., preached a beautiful homily on today’s Gospel in the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Thessalonica (not the big famous Hagia Sophia, but a smaller one). [4] I will be quoting frequently from St Gregory through the rest of this homily. Commenting on the Canaanite woman’s address to Christ, St Gregory points out that ‘no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost’ (I Cor. 12:3). Thus, in his words, ‘In fact the Canaanite woman did not merely come out from those heathen coasts, but sprang up from the valleys like a sacred lily, exhaling with her words the fragrance of the divine Spirit from her mouth.’ [5]

So, we have already a model of enormous self-abasement, but our Lord ‘wanted her faith and virtue to be demonstrated even more clearly’. First, He ‘answered her not a word’ (15:23), then, when the disciples pleaded with Him to send her away, He said, ‘I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (15:24).

Now, we might think that the humble response to such a rebuff would be to accept it and withdraw—but this would be pride, not humility. When she needs help, the humble woman begs for it. Thus, woman of Canaan worships Christ, that is, she falls down before Him in prostration, and supplicates Him in even simpler words: ‘Lord, help me’ (15:25).

How does Christ respond to this self-abasement? We are astonished to find that He responds with an insult: ‘It is not meet to take the children’s bread [that is, the salvation belonging to Israel], and to cast it to dogs [the Phoenician Baal-worshippers]’ (15:26). But while we may be shocked by Christ calling a woman a ‘dog’, however fitting a moral description of her people it may be, He who knows all things knew her heart, saw her humility, and wanted to test her to reveal her amazing virtue before all for centuries to come.

For how does she respond? She is not insulted. According to St Gregory, ‘[W]hen she was treated with contempt and heard herself called not just an irrational animal, but a dirty and fierce one, whose voice was a dog’s bark rather than human speech worth listening to, she agreed and joined in ridiculing herself, but did not cease to entreat Christ.’ [6]

The Fathers teach us that when we are insulted, we absolutely must NOT respond with insults, but, they say, it is even better not to become angry, and best of all to admit the truth in the insult. One Father of the Egyptian desert, Abba Isaiah, says insults are good for us because they teach us humility, and that one who ‘bears insults is like a tree that is watered every day’ (Isaiah 1). [7] Another Desert Father, Abba Xanthius, points out a dog is better than we, ‘for he has love & he does not judge’ (Xanthius 3). [8]

So the Canaanite woman follows this highest path: ‘Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table’ (15:27). St Gregory writes:

Let us learn from this teacher with how much patience, humility and contrition we must persevere in our prayers. Even if we are unworthy, and even if we are sent away because we are soiled with sins, let us learn not to turn back, but to keep humbly asking from our soul. We shall receive our requests from God. [9]

The exhortation ‘not to turn back, but to keep humbly asking from our soul’ reminds us of the Parable of the Unjust Judge in Luke 18:1-8, which, incidentally, is the proper Second Lesson for Evening Prayer to follow this morning’s readings. In this parable, a widow comes to a judge ‘which feared not God, neither regarded man’ (18:2), pleading for justice against her adversary (and in interpreting this it is helpful to recall that in I Peter 5:8 the ‘adversary’ is the devil). The judge complains to himself, ‘Because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me’ (18:5), to which the Lord says, ‘Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily?’ (18:6-8)

(By the way, in this parable, Christ is drawing from an old Hebrew schoolbook called ‘The Book of Ben Sirach’, where we find the lovely line: ‘The prayer of the humble pierceth the clouds: and till it come nigh, he will not be comforted; and will not depart, till the most High shall behold to judge righteously, and execute judgment’ (Ecclesiasticus 35:17).)

Like the widow, the Canaanite woman pleads to be avenged against her adversary—who in this case is quite clearly the devil—and is rewarded for her perseverance in prayer. So we too must persevere in prayer, but while St Gregory says that in this way ‘We will receive our requests from God’, I’m afraid we often spend too much time requesting frivolities, things that we want to get from God, rather than requesting deliverance from the devil who keeps us captive through our sinful thoughts and habits.

As we see, the Canaanite woman’s words are, as St Gregory says, ‘truly wise’, but they are also beautiful imagery, they are eloquent, poetic. Indeed, St Ephraim the Syrian (4th c.), whom one scholar calls ‘the greatest poet of the patristic age and perhaps the only theologian-poet to rank beside Dante’, [10] loves the Canaanite woman’s image of dogs eating crumbs from the master’s table. In his humility, St Ephraim often speaks of himself eating ‘crumbs’ from heaven:

And if none who is defiled can enter that place, then allow me to live by its enclosure, residing in its shade. Since Paradise resembles that table, let me, through Your grace, eat of the ‘crumbs’ of its fruit which fall outside, so that I too may join those dogs who had their fill from the crumbs of their masters’ tables. (Hymns on Paradise 7.26) [11]

Humility, however, is not merely nice but absolutely necessary for our salvation. Christ says that unless we humble ourselves we ‘shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 18:3). Another Desert Father, Abba Longinus, said:

I reckon that just as pride is the greatest of the passions, since it was able to cast various beings down from Heaven, so also is humility the greatest of all the virtues. For it has the power to raise a man up from those dark abysses, even if he is a sinner like the Devil. This is why the Lord called the poor in spirit, that is, the humble, blessed above all others (Matt. 5:3). [12]

This is wonderfully illustrated in a beautiful passage of Crime & Punishment, by the great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov is a despicable man, an alcoholic who lets his family starve while he spends their money on booze, but he weeps over his own sins even while committing them. In one of my favourite passages of one of my favourite books, when the protagonist, Rodion Raskolnikov, goes to find him in a St Petersburg bar, Marmeladov describes the Last Judgement:

And when He has finished with everyone, then He will say unto us, too, ‘You, too, come forth!’ He will say. ‘Come forth, my drunk ones, my weak ones, my shameless ones!’ And we will all come forth, without being ashamed, and stand there. And He will say, ‘Swine you are! Of the image of the beast and of his seal’ but come, you, too!’ And the wise and the reasonable will say unto Him, ‘Lord, why do you receive such as these?’ And He will say, ‘I receive them, my wise and reasonable ones, forasmuch as not one of them considered himself worthy of this thing . . .’ And He will stretch out His arms to us, and we will fall at His feet . . . and weep . . . and understand everything! Then we will understand everything! . . . and everyone will understand . . . […] Lord, Thy kingdom come! [13]

I shall conclude with St Gregory Palamas’s words:

Let us humble ourselves of our own free will, brethren, that we may demonstrate our faith in Christ and also be exalted by Him. Or rather, may we acknowledge our innate lowliness, and the fact that the misleading thoughts which sometimes arise within us are from the demons. Then let us cry out to Christ like the Canaanite woman, fall down before Him and persevere in humble prayer, and we shall obtain the grace which is given to the humbleminded, and speedily ascend to divine heights. [14]

[1] See ‘Baal’, Peloubet’s Bible Dictionary, ed. F.N. Peloubet, asstd. by Alice D. Adams (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1974), p. 64.

[2] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (SF: Ignatius, 2008), p. 150.

[3] St Augustine, The City of God, tr. Marcus Dods (NY: Modern Library, 1950), p. 275.

[4] Homily 43; in St Gregory Palamas, The Homilies, ed. & tr. Christopher Veniamin with the Monastery of St John the Baptist (Waymart, PA: Mount Thabor, 2009), pp. 339-45.

[5] St Gregory, p. 340.

[6] Ibid., p. 341.

[7] Benedicta Ward, tr., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1984), p. 69.

[8] Ibid., p. 159.

[9] St Gregory, p. 341.

[10] Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1987), p. 30, citing Robert Murray, Catholic Dictionary of Theology, Vol. 2, ed. J.H. Crehan (London, 1967), p. 222.

[11] St Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns On Paradise, tr. Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 1990), p. 128.

[12] Archbishop Chrysostomos & Hieromonk Patapios, ed. & tr., The Evergetinos: A Complete Text—Book I (Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2008), p. 384.

[13] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (NY: Everyman, ), p. 23.

[14] St Gregory, p. 342.