5 September 2010

“What do you think of the Christ?” (Matthew 22.42)

Look straight into the sun, without blinking, without looking away for a second. Look into the sun, with naked eyes. Do you know what will happen? The sunlight starts to inflame your cornea, until it feels like grit lodged under the lid. It burns the nerves of your retina. A foreign growth invades the corners of each eye. A yellowish lesion may appear on the surface of the white tissues. You are lucky if you get away with cataracts. You are likely to go blind, slowly and painfully; and the pain is excruciating. But the sun itself has not ‘decided’ to blind you. The sun that gives life to the grass; the sun that bathes all the flowers in light. The sun that warms your skin or heals your body did not choose to blind you. You blinded yourself. Did you not choose to look straight into that ball of light in the sky, strong enough to sustain life on earth – or kill it? Did you not presume to look at the sun with weak, unguarded eyes? Yet millions of Christians casually presume to look into a fire that is infinitely brighter than the sun. They stare at the Son of the Living God; they presume to reduce his glory to a rigid code of laws. Is it any wonder that half of these ‘Christians’ go blind, while the other half never sees him at all? And, not seeing him as he is, they make him into an image of themselves.

Who is he? You hear as many answers today as yesterday, when he walked on earth. A prophet, some call him. A miracle-worker. The ‘best man who ever lived’. So on, and so forth. But my all-time favourite is the ‘teacher of morals’. ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. At least, he looks mild, from his rosy cheeks to his blond hair and blue eyes. You would say that he came from Tunbridge Wells. A teacher of morals: a Sunday School teacher. Not very similar to Christ – but, very definitely, he resembles a certain kind of Christian. Nicely pressed suit. Tie is always straight. He does not smoke, drink, swear, or go to the movies on Sunday. His shoes are neatly shined and his laces are tightly done up … like everything else about him. Above all, he keeps the right company: all those clean-living stockbrokers and bankers that he meets at the club. He keeps far away from the wrong people: girls who sleep around, men who cheat on taxes, and all the dirty, dark-skinned drug users sleeping on the street. He is a practical fellow, this teacher of morals. Not too much time for ‘fancy doctrines’, or for candles, incense, and vestments. He knows what Christianity is about: obeying the law of God. His children know the law of God. As soon as he comes home from the office, he beats them with a belt if they ever step out of line. Beats them until the blood runs.

His eldest daughter lives in terror of him. From her birth, he has dictated how she dresses and how she spends her time. Now he dictates whom she dates. She has lost much too much weight. But she would no sooner tell her father than admit her anti-depressants or suicide attempts. Her little brother has nightmares every night. Our clean-living ‘teacher of morals’ lives out his whole ‘Christian’ life under a leaden-grey sky. It is natural for him to put his faith in the laws of a pitiless, merciless God.

But what if the sun came out? What if he lifted his eyes and saw the Sun, as it truly is?

What do you think of the Christ? Do you recognise anything in this image of a Christian? The Christ wears no suit but a robe and a sash across his shoulder. He drinks wine, not grape juice. His dusty sandals have no laces. He spends his hours with the women who sleep around, tax-collectors who cheat and steal, dirty dark-skinned urchins living on the streets. He raises his hand to no one but the bankers, trading in the Temple. He is born, not under leaden-grey clouds but the warm, forgiving sun of the Middle East; that fierce hot sun that burns your skin and blinds your eyes. He himself is the Sun. The Sun of righteousness. The Sun that reveals secrets – and leaves hypocrites no place to hide.

A lawyer asks Jesus a question. It is no mistake that it is a lawyer. ‘Teacher, what is the great commandment in the law? Is it fasting? Tithing? Sexual chastity, surely?’ Our Lord Jesus Christ knows where he is going. ‘None of these’, he says. ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your being. Embrace the true faith, immerse your soul and body in the true worship; and love your neighbour – the one who needs you – no less than you love your life. All the commandments are fulfilled in these’. ‘Now’, he says, ‘I have a question for you. Who is the Christ? God or man?’ The clean-living, God-fearing Pharisees reply: ‘A man, the Son of David, a teacher of morals like us’. ‘Why, then’, asks Christ, ‘does David call him his Lord? Why does David prophesy that this Christ shall trample down all his enemies under his feet?’ The Pharisees are silent. They ask him no more questions. They know that the hour of judgment has finally come. ‘Gentle Jesus’ harms no one: but he is still the grit lodged under the eyelids of the hypocrites.

The Sun that comforts all the afflicted, now afflicts the comfortable. ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! Woe to the teachers of morals, the self-appointed guardians of the Law! Your hands are red with the blood of every abused child, the blood of every sinner that you afflicted and rejected – all because you could not see your own sin. The blood of the prophets who exposed your lies, shouts to me from the ground’. It is not unbelievers but believers that killed them. God-fearing believers who presume to look upon the Sun of Righteousness – and go blind. It is not the prostitutes, the tax-collectors, the criminals on the streets but the clean-living exemplars of the law that Christ calls … ‘vipers’.

Beloved in Christ: the sun does not blind the Pharisees, yesterday or today. They blind themselves. They imagine that ‘Christianity’ is a code of law, and Christ, no more than a teacher of morals. But Christ the Sun of righteousness is no Pharisee. He is the sun that gives life to the grass and bathes the flowers in light. He is the sun that warms your cold heart and heals all the old wounds of your soul – above all, wounds inflicted by the merciless, when they believe that they are obeying the law of God.

What is the law, if not to love God with all your heart and mind? To see him as he is, not in the image of your anger and fear. To forget yourself in the true worship and to enter, respectfully, with fear and love, into the majesty of his sunlight. What is the law, if not to do justly … to love mercy … and to walk humbly with your God?

“Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” (Matthew 22.12)

‘Why have you come?’ Every time you walk into this church, a madman asks you: ‘why have you come?’ No, it is not I. A madman with longer, dirtier hair than mine. All tangled up; a filthy beard, matted and stuck together, stinking of insects. An old, torn tunic made out of camel’s hair hanging off his shoulder and a hand-tooled leather belt. He looks like a hippy – which suits him, since every word from his mouth sounds like an addict, high on heroin. ‘Metanoeíte!’ he goes around, shouting at those crowds that come to stare at him. ‘Metanoeíte! Change your minds! Change “the way you think!’ Does he not sound like a madman? He turns the world upside down. Rough places flattened, crooked ways ironed down, and all injustices dragged into the open … from under the robes of judges. ‘Change everything!’ he cries – because everything is about to change. He prefers a prostitute or a criminal to a law-abiding, godly citizen. He plunges them, headlong, into a river. ‘Baptising’, he calls it. He does not wash them; he ‘drowns’ them. No God-fearing, respectable citizen stands a chance around him. If one or two pass by, he shouts: ‘Why have you come, you brood of vipers? Who warned you that your way of life is about to pass away? See, I drown your old order in the river. But he who comes after me will not drown it; he will immerse it in fire!’ Everything familiar will burn up, when the Kingdom of God comes in glory.

Lunatic. He is not exactly tactful. He is as far from respectable as it gets. You would not expect to find him in church. He is John the Baptist; and his wild ravings are summed up in one word: ‘Metanoeíte!’ Repent! For the Kingdom of God is at hand.

How far we have progressed! We go to church in business suits and dresses, not robes of camelhair; or else smart trainers and designer jeans on our ‘day off’. We go to church to hear soft words that reassure us that everything stays the same – not hard words that threaten that everything is about to change. We want our familiar values confirmed, not our world turned down. For fifty years, ‘conservatives’ of every stripe have come running to that ‘bastion of tradition’, the Orthodox Church. They run to us fleeing everything from guitar masses to women ‘priests’ to homosexual couples. They look to us for ‘Christian values’ – as well they might. We are the original Church. We are not about to cut up the Divine Liturgy, or ‘update’ the holy apostolic priesthood, or invert the order of nature. But is our Holy Tradition nothing but a toy of right-wing politics? A dream of yesterday, when the Mass was in Latin; when a kindly old vicar had us over to afternoon tea; and all our neighbourhoods were clean and godly – white, Protestant, and English? Is the Orthodox Church really a stroll down that memory lane? Or something altogether different? Look around. More incense than a Hindu temple. Staring icons with Middle Eastern eyes. And heaven preserve us – immigrants! But only scratch the surface of the Orthodox Church, even in the Middle East or Greece or Russia, and you find something more radical. You find something forever new.

An uncharted country. A witness against the familiar. A testimony to the Kingdom. Look closely: no faith on earth is more radical. That long-haired radical named John, crying in the desert: ‘Metanoeíte! Turn your minds inside out!’ Dressed like a radical, in his rags – but why not?

It is a wedding garment … for a very special wedding.

A king holds a wedding feast for his son. He invites his own people, his pure, godly, and

law-abiding people. One by one, they reply: ‘Thanks, but no thanks. We obey your laws; we do not dine at your table. We have a business to run!’ When the king sends servants to invite them, they beat them and kill them. These godly conservatives. Do they not see that the Kingdom is not laws but a wedding feast? So the king burns the city down to the ground. He goes out into the wasteland, into filthy streets, to gather in the outcasts – the whores and addicts and immigrants, until his hall is full. Only, one guest has no wedding garment. He wears the garments of everyday life: smart trainers and designer jeans – or maybe even his business suit. But no wedding garment. ‘Why have you come dressed like that?’ the king asks him. Silence. ‘Cast him into the outer darkness. This is no stroll down memory lane. It is the feast of the Kingdom’.

Why so harsh? What has this guest done to be cast out? Nothing – but that is just it. For all we know, he is godly, law-abiding … and conservative. Too conservative for the most radical of feasts. Conventional. He remains where he is, as he is: he refuses to become what he could be. He is too sane for the Kingdom of heaven. He takes refuge in a tower of tradition; but little does he realise. Sin is not an offence against the law; sin is refusal to grow. Sin is refusal to change your mind, to turn it inside out, forged in the fire of the divine worship. He has no wedding garment. He is too conservative for the Kingdom.

Beloved in Christ: ‘Why have you come here?’ says John the Baptist. To confirm all the beliefs of yesterday or to share tomorrow’s vision? To prop up your ‘Christian values’, or to immerse yourself in the divine fire? John the madman, the forerunner of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, permits us nothing less. Wherever you see the holy icon of Christ on an iconostasis, there by his side is the madman. The tangled, dishevelled head, eyes full of fire, accusing the hypocrites: the law-abiding Pharisees, no less than the lawless king, who marries his brother’s wife. The only way to silence him is to cut off his head. But his word echoes down the centuries: ‘Metanoeíte! Turn your minds around! Be bold enough to lay down your life. Dare to drown in the waters; to become a new creation in a new wedding garment. What is that garment but your Orthodox identity? Christianity is no ordinary feast; so, no ordinary garment will do.

The Kingdom is not yesterday, but tomorrow. Not familiar, but unfamiliar. It is not a call to ‘be godly’ but to be God – by partaking of the flesh and blood of God himself. Nothing conceivable in the human mind can be more radical than that.

`The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner’ (Matthew 21.42)

Living in a state of constant fear. Repressed. Stifled. Guilt-ridden. Your own personality, broken down, shattered, ground into the dust. Is it the effects of a brainwashing cult? Or Hitler’s Germany, or Stalinist Russia? This is what many people think of … Christianity. Fear. Nothing but guilt and fear. The ‘Christian’ cannot move for the number of laws and commandments that weigh him down to the ground. Do you know what it is like? You sit in a large, empty room. No windows to let in the light. Nothing on the walls. No furniture except a few stiff chairs, arranged in a circle, with all the edges touching. Each person in a chair is afraid of the one sitting next to him; and they all tremble at a figure seated in the centre – let us call him ‘the father’. One stern look from him will chill your blood. You do not dare move a finger for fear of his wrath. Suddenly, a doorknob moves. Someone is trying to come in the room! Do you rush to the door? No: you are bound by chains on the inside. You are more afraid of a stranger outside than the tyrant inside. If a stranger came to free you, you would beat him, throw rocks at him. Kill him. The chains that bind you are inside you. Better live out your life in prison under the familiar eyes of the father, than breathe the unfamiliar air of freedom. Better blood on your hands than disobey the father: get up from your chair, take the stranger by the hand, and walk out.

Who would not hate a ‘Christianity’ like this? What thinking, breathing person would not hate a gospel of fear? Iron bars of rules and regulations that have long since blotted out the face of God? Is it any wonder that some people hate Christianity? Not the depraved criminal or the atheist, but decent people? If they really thought that it was rubbish, they would ignore it. Why, then, this hatred, this desire to stamp it out? Look at what passes for the Gospel. A minister who reduces a young girl to tears in front of his congregation, because she slept with her boyfriend. A priest who uses the trust of a child to abuse her, then tells her family what he heard under seal of confession. An ignorant, bigoted priest who asks a stranger at the door ‘Are you Greek?’ and slams it in his face if he is not. Or the ‘good, respectable’ Christian family, whose washed faces and pressed suits hide the abuse that goes on behind locked doors. But, worse of all: a ‘church’, where the very air is putrid with fear. Where the ‘father’ – whether an Evangelical minister or an Orthodox priest – holds a rule book in one hand and a whip in the other. You recognise all victims of this ‘Christianity’. Pale face, tensed-up limbs, the clenched fist, the forced smile. And, to be sure, fear that a stranger will come in and uncover the truth. This is what people – decent, idealistic people – hate, when they hate ‘Christianity’.

But that ‘church’ is no Church at all. That ‘priest’ is no priest of Christ. That ‘father’ is not our Father in heaven. He is the devil, ‘the father of lies’. He does not own the house. He and his accomplices only hold it in trust for the real owner, who lives … abroad. The one ‘Householder’ of heaven and earth. He whom we recognise, not in a code of law, but in his holy temple; not in rules, but in holy icons, fragrant incense … bread and wine.

The Householder plants a vineyard: his holy Orthodox Church, where he gives his own Precious Blood in the wine that changes us into more than we are. Around the vineyard he sets a hedge of true Orthodox doctrine; above it, a tower where men set apart to be bishops and priests oversee the making of the wine: the salvation of human souls. Most importantly, he digs his wine press: so that human souls may be living grapes, changed by Orthodox worship – the true worship of the temple – into the new wine of his eternal Kingdom. A vineyard, not a court of law. A wine press, not a rule book. This is no den of thieves but the Temple, the house of prayer. Then, he goes into a far country.

In comes the father of lies. ‘This vineyard is mine’, he declares. ‘I will rip up the hedge of doctrine, and plant a million churches in place of the one. I will tear down the tower, and declare every man his own Pope. But best of all’, says the father of lies, ‘I will dig up the wine press. In place of the holy temple, I will set up a prison of reward and punishment. In place of true worship, I will forge chains from endless rules and regulations – until the fear that sucks men dry and spits them out has made all workers in the vineyard into my slaves’. When harvest comes, the Householder sends servants to gather his fruit. Those frightened tenants, too repressed to rebel, obey the usurper. They beat the first servant, stone the next, kill the third. When at last, the Householder sends his only-begotten son, the father of lies shouts: ‘Will you disobey the law and obey him? He is the heir! Kill him, take his inheritance!’ And so is born the bondage of the Pharisees. The grim horror that people mistake for ‘Christianity’. The victory of the ‘angry father’ – the devil himself.

When the Householder himself comes, what will he do to those tenants? He will bind up the father of lies, cast him into the fiery prison of his own making, and say to the rest: ‘Why did you pollute my vineyard with blood? Why did you turn my temple into a prison? Why did you replace my all-encompassing mercy with your chains of fear?’ But that is not all. He will take back the vineyard that is his and give it to new tenants, who will give him the fruits of mercy instead of the leaves of fear. Mercy: the word that convicts every Pharisee. Mercy: the stone that the builders rejected.

Beloved in Christ: what is this stone that the builders rejected? The head of that corner, the Church of Christ, that the father of lies turns into a prison of fear? It is Christ himself. But who is he, this Son of the divine Householder? Is he not his love? The perfect love, that casts out fear? The Love that knows no law, if it binds a soul to fear that was made to breathe free? We in the Orthodox Church are no Pharisees; we have never replaced the Temple with the Law. Our room is not bare. Look at the holy icons on the walls. See the light of God that streams through the windows, even when clouds cover the sky. No one sits in fear, afraid to see the father of lies. He has no rights here! Real Orthodoxy is joy: fragrant incense, glorious vestments … bread and wine. If you seek the law in place of the temple, go kiss a Quran. Embrace your Sharia law: you will not find it here.

Christ our true God comes down from heaven, not to instil in us the fear of the law but to set us free. Not to bind but to loose. Not to make us ‘good’ with the crack of a whip but to bring us from death to Life.

“Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10.42)

You hold in your hand the tiniest feather. So soft, so fragile. The breath of your nostrils could blow it away. How useful is a feather? No use at all. But if a sudden wind carried it off – worse still, if you crumpled it up in your fist and casually threw it away – the image of that tiny feather could haunt you for days to come. Do you have eyes to see just how fragile beauty is? Now look again. It is not a feather but a baby. So small, so helpless, you hold it in the palm of your hand. How useful is a baby? No use at all. But if a sudden sickness carried it off – worse still, if you closed your fist around it and shattered its little limbs – the image of that broken beauty would haunt you. Its cry would ring in your ears for the rest of your life. Now look again. It is not a baby, but a mother and child. A young teenage mother, cradling her child from the cold wind. Hidden away in a cave, filled with livestock; hidden in the womb of the earth. How useful are they to society? No use at all. But if a murderer suddenly entered the cave and stole them away – worse still, if a mob took hold of them and tore them, limb from limb – the image of that mother and her child would haunt the earth to the end of time. God have pity on little things! When we hear of a child, or a little animal, neglected or abused, it cuts into us like a knife. We long only to shelter it in our arms; to love it, as a mother loves her child. When a helpless life looks up at us with gentle trusting eyes, do we ask: ‘What use is it?’ We love it unconditionally, as a mother loves her child. She does not ask: ‘Is it useful?’ She loves it, because loving it is her entire life.

No mother’s eyes ever looked so gently on her baby as the eyes of a certain Jewish girl. No baby ever looked so trustingly at his mother as her child. In a time when weak, sickly children, born in a stable, were left out on rocks to die; when girls who conceived a baby out of wedlock were stoned to death – no two were as helpless as this mother and child. A virgin in every sense. From the eighth day of her birth, she was no use to anyone: the most naïve young girl, raised in the Temple. The girl who knew nothing but how to pray: to love God, no more ‘mysterious’ to her than the breath in her lungs. A gentle, helpless girl who trusted in a voice from a beam of light that told her the inconceivable: a promise that her body, which no man had ever touched, would give birth to God himself. The girl who replied, ‘Let it be to me according to your word’; and, from that instant, Eternity was conceived in her womb. In a cave full of domestic animals, hidden away in the earth, the young mother cradled her Eternal Son; and in a cave, she laid his broken, abused body, when they took it down from the Cross.

Years passed and she grew old in the memory of the day, when a sword of grief cut into her heart, and she became the Mother of everyone who needs a mother since the dawn of time. When the end came, the angel that spoke in the beam of light called the Twelve Apostles to her deathbed. Only Thomas was late. When he arrived from India, he asked to see her grave. In it, they found no body … only the scent of incense and roses.

The Mother of Life. How could the body that held God himself ever decay? The girl who grew up in the Temple. A naïve, helpless, useless young girl, who played in the Holy of Holies, where the priests did not to go. She was herself the Holy of Holies: the womb that held Eternity. What earthly use was she to anyone … except God? A girl as fragile as a feather: the first mere human being to enter the Resurrection.

But she who sheltered God, could not shelter herself.

England was her dowry. From across Europe, pilgrims came to pray at her shrine in the village of Walsingham. To drink from the healing waters, sanctified by her prayers. What cathedral church or rural cottage did not hold her holy image? Was she not our Mother? From the moment that Christ our Lord, hanging on his Cross, said to each of us: ‘Behold your mother!’ and said to her, ‘Woman, behold your son!’ and we, like John the Disciple, took her into our homes? Then a sudden sickness spread over the land. Some men told themselves, ‘If we honour the mother, we dishonour the son’. What use is she, anyway? A woman raised in the Temple who knows only how to pray, not to work. The new faith, with its iron laws of survival, asked only: ‘What is useful?’ Not: what is needful? So they broke into her churches, stole away her images. Mobs took hold of her fragile body and the little child in her arms. They shattered them. They tore them, limb from limb. And to this day, there are still ‘Christians’ who refuse to call on her name.

But if ‘neither the tomb nor death could hold the Mother of Life’, how could anyone take her from us? If her tomb became a ladder climbing to heaven, how could they stifle her prayers? Our mother is always our mother. She does not love because we love her; but because loving us is her entire life.

Beloved in Christ: behold your mother! On this last of the twelve Great Feasts that mark the church year, each of us holds in his or her hand the tiniest feather. A young virgin, who embodies all little things, helpless things, things neglected and abused. A ‘virgin’ in every sense: she who knows nothing but God – but, trusting God, knows the secrets of every human heart. Like Mary of Bethany, she is not much ‘use’. All that she does is sit at the feet of her Master and listen to his words. From the very moment that she uttered the most trusting, the most naïve word ever spoken on earth – ‘Let it to me according to your word’ – she reversed the iron laws of survival. No longer would the strong live and the weak die: because she, who was weakest, became our first living gift to the eternal, inconceivable God. Where did he take his body if not from her body? Where did he take his human mind, his will, his emotions, everything that made him one of us? From the body of this fragile young girl, a feather held in the hand of God. No man on earth could scale the heights of this young Jewish virgin, more honourable than all the angels, holier than every life ever lived – except the life that God himself inherited … from her.

As we elevate her holy image this day, we fulfil ‘the one thing needful’: we consecrate to her the good portion: the lives of us, her children, which shall never be taken from her.

‘Tell no one the vision, until the Son of man is raised from the dead’. (Matthew 17.9)

Did you ever have a favourite place as a child? A magical place, where everything was possible? A place where you ran and hid from grown-ups who did not have the eyes to see or the ears to hear? Maybe a small spot in the garden, by a pool surrounded by the trees and bushes. Maybe a clearing in the woods, a tree house high up in the branches. Maybe a hilltop, where you could see the lights of the town or the fields spreading out to the horizon. If you grew up in the city, as I did, maybe your special place was only a little walk-in closet up in the attic where you could be alone: only yourself – and God. An only child, as I was, always finds special places. In all your lonely hours, you make your own company. Friends step out of fairy stories or off the pages of history. Sometimes, a doll or a teddy bear is the only one who listens to your secret thoughts. Your toys listen, but God hears. In those secret moments, in that special place, a veil is lifted. Things are not as they appear. You catch a vision that no one else can see. At most, only two or three of your closest friends can ever enter the sacred space. You glimpse what life truly is, in a place where you are free to be yourself.

When you grow up, they make you forget your special place. They shame you, twist and mould your heart where everything once was possible – until, at last, you fit in to what society calls ‘real’ life. Your horizon recedes. You learn how to survive and forget how to live. Life becomes conventional and respectable. Go to school, then on to university and when you get out – then what? A job, a spouse or a live-in partner, two or three children and a house in the suburbs. All the veils that we call ‘real life’. You live in a little box that our society assigns you; you live unhappily ever after. Why? Because something inside that you cannot repress still whispers: ‘there is more to life than this!’ What did you give up in fitting in? Your sense of wonder. You let go the adventure; you forgot the vision. A still, small voice that once whispered to you in the garden, or the clearing in the woods, or the closet up in the attic. The voice of God that spoke to you in your special place – in words that only you, and two or three friends, could hear. You learned to adjust to what they call ‘real’ life, where there is no place for wonder – and no place for God.

‘Surely’, they will tell you, ‘there’s a place for God. It’s called “church”. You don’t have to see visions to go to church. Happy banners, hymns, organ music, ladies in pink hats: isn’t that enough “God” for you?’ A headline in a Toronto newspaper once read: ‘Going to church can help teach children our values’. Values! So that’s what we mean by ‘God’. Now that the old dogmas and rituals are thrown out, we have ‘values’. Hard work, clean living. That is what Christianity is all about. You do not need visions, just plain common sense. A practical Gospel, well within the reach of the most ordinary person. What need for candles, vestments, incense, monasteries? Tell those monks and nuns to go out and get real jobs! A king did as much five centuries ago, when he closed the monasteries: when he replaced ‘visions’ with ‘real’ life. Fit into real life! Fit in, and grow up!

Some of us refuse to fit in. Some still remember the monasteries. We never forgot that a job, a husband or wife, three children, a car in the garage, and a home in the suburbs is not necessarily real life at all. It may not be life at all – if you forget the vision. The vision that haunts you from your special place, where only you and two or three of your closest friends could ever go. An adventure, when the veil was lifted. When you were alone with yourself … and God.

Today, our Lord Jesus Christ goes to his special place. To the top of a mountain, ‘apart’, away from the crowds. Away from jobs and spouses and little boxes and ‘real’ life. Does he take just anyone along with him? Only his three closest friends: Peter, James, John. An ordinary person has no eyes to see what he has in store. In his special place, he lifts the veil. The veil of Jesus, the carpenter’s son. He shows them who he truly is. His face shines a million times more brilliant than the sun. His garments, as white as the light. On either side, Moses the law-giver and Elijah the prophet bow down to him. ‘No one down below will believe it’, Peter thinks. ‘Better capture the vision: build a little box for each of them’. Just as he is thinking practically, a bright cloud overshadows him. A voice speaks in words that only the three disciples hear: ‘This is no ordinary man. This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased. Listen to him’. No ordinary mind can take in what these three see on the mountaintop. No one can package it in a little box. They fall face down, down to the earth. What can you say, when you have seen Life himself stripped of every veil? ‘Don’t be afraid’, he says. They look up – and no one but Jesus is there. Along the rocky path downhill, Jesus warns: ‘Tell no one the vision. If you could not endure it, how can they? Ordinary people will build boxes around it. They will surround it with banners and ladies in pink hats. They will change the vision into “values” and call that “real life” – because they have forgotten what life is. Only tell them … after the Son of Man is risen from the dead’. Tell them so that they will know: the Son of Man laid down his life freely, a life that no one takes from him. Tell them after he appears in a secret garden, outside an empty tomb hewn out of the rock. When the veil of his flesh is lifted, to reveal who he really is.

Beloved in Christ: everything that you knew as a child, every secret that you discovered in your secret special place, is confirmed here today. The face that you glimpsed in the veil of a garden pool. A clearing in the woods. A closet in the attic. The voice that spoke to you in tones that only you could understand. Christ our true God, transfigured here on the mount, does not change his face. He only unveils it. He lifts the veil of flesh, to show the Uncreated Light from eternity that is he himself. Just as a bunch of grapes only veils the Precious Blood; just as creation itself only veils the face of our Creator. But be sure to tell no unbelievers the vision. They are too ‘grown-up’ to believe. God the Father has hidden this vision from the wise and prudent – the commonsensical – and revealed it … to babes. To a child, alone in his special place. To the nun alone in her cell. The Father has revealed it to those who do not ‘fit in’.

Those for whom everything is still possible.

‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above’. (John 19.11)

A fly lands on your clotted cream. Right in the middle of afternoon tea. Maybe a fly gets its leg stuck in the jam or the egg and cress sandwich. You hardly think twice, you flick it away. Taking tea in the garden at the height of summer is like a picnic. You expect flies. But did you ever think what a fly can do? Through no fault of its own, a common house fly is potentially the single most dangerous insect on earth. Do you know what it eats? A fly does not eat, it drinks. It pierces its food and sucks it up. Then, it lets a ‘vomit drop’ of liquefied food slip from its tongue onto the surface where it feeds. Disgusting, right? But, when it comes to flies, even the worst parts of London do not compare to Damascus, or Constantinople. Have you seen how flies in a hot, dry climate can turn a carcass black? In a steamy hot climate like Constantinople, once the capitol of our Orthodox empire, do you know what flies used to bring this time of year? Cholera, dysentery, cerebrospinal meningitis, leprosy, infantile paralysis, typhoid. When disease used to spread like a fire through the City, the Orthodox Church decreed: on the first day of August, the Cross of Christ should triumph over death. From the treasury, the priest would bring out the most precious relic: the actual wood of the Cross on which Christ gave himself up for the life of the world. They set it on the holy table, in the great church of Haghia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom. Then, at the end of the Divine Liturgy, they carried the holy relic through all the cramped streets and alleys and open squares of the City. At the sight, the dead did not arise. The sick were seldom healed instantly. But the Cross sent out a message.

A message to the lord of death. To the one that Canaanites and Philistines called Ba’al zebûb –‘Lord of the Flies’.

The Lord of the Flies lands on more than clotted cream, or egg and cress. He lands and lays his ‘vomit drop’ in human minds, in human hearts. He does not eat, he drinks: uses his lies to pierce a mind and suck the truth out of it; to pierce a heart and suck out hope. In the steamy climate of a young mind, whether in a university or an office or a pub, the Lord of the Flies sucks out the mark of the human: the ability to believe. Bacteria grows and reproduces in a marketplace of beliefs. A well-bred, middle-class ‘Christian’ lady, at tea with jam and scones, tells a young person: ‘If Jesus were alive, he would be hurt by all our “triumphalist” dogmas. All religions are really the same, all those “denominations” are really just parts of one big church. What does it really matter?’ An atheist professor, or an atheist boyfriend, tells our young lady: ‘What does it matter? There’s no proof that God exists, anyway’. So, in the hot climate of a thirsting, restless mind, the Lord of the Flies lets his vomit drop sink in. The bacteria of unbelief quickly reproduces itself, in the infected cells of ‘Christians’ who believe the liar, the father of lies. In an age that desires ‘Jesus’ without his Cross, or the Cross – a pendant – without the Resurrection, the Lord of the Flies whispers: ‘Believe everything – and nothing. Believe an easy Gospel, a nice, soft, pleasant, liberal Gospel. Cover the Cross in clotted cream and jam’.

This day, we sent out a message to the Lord of the Flies. We fling down our gauntlet to the lord of death, challenging him to combat. Our gauntlet, in the form of the Cross.

This day, our Lord Jesus Christ stands before Pilate. The crowds in the courtyard shout what ‘liberal Christians’ shout today: ‘Crucify him, crucify him, if he claims to be the Son of God!’ Pilate asks, ‘Where are you from?’ No answer. Pilate is afraid. In his fear, he asks: ‘Don’t you understand? Don’t you know that I have the power to release you or the power to crucify you?’ ‘You have no power at all’, Jesus says. ‘You have no power that I and my Father and the Spirit have not given you. You have no power of your own. Those who handed me over to you, those who do not see me as I am but as they wish me to be – the heretics, the unbelievers – have the greater sin. You are a pawn in the hands of the father of lies’. What is Pilate to make of this? What every unbeliever makes of Christ, to the end of time. Hand him over, over to the mob. Let them crucify him on a hill called Place of the Skull. Ridicule him with the words ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ – as though he were nothing but a prophet, a false messiah. When he thirsts, with all mankind’s burning thirst for God, hold up to his lips the bitter vinegar of unbelief. Then, as his soul parts from his body, the unbelievers mocking him below have no way of understanding his words: ‘It is finished’.

His life is not finished but accomplished. The victory has only just begun. As flies gather around the body, as always in the blazing heat of Palestine, the Cross planted deeply in the earth sinks deeper. Deeper. Until it breaks open the gates of the father of lies.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: this day, we expose the lies. We refuse to cover the Cross in clotted cream and jam. We refuse to compromise with unbelief of any kind and degree: and so, the Lord of the Flies has no way in. Let him try to suck out our hope, to suck dry the truth of the Gospel and vomit forth the bacteria of unbelief. He cannot even penetrate the surface. An invincible weapon lies on the holy table during this Divine Liturgy. True, not the precious relic from Constantinople, the wood of the True Cross – but its icon, which partakes of its power. Power not to release or crucify: the poor power of an earthy state. Rather, the Precious and Life-giving Cross draws power from above: the power of God, the eternal, inconceivable God, to become a man; power of a man to ascend the Cross of his free will and descend into the dead; power of the God-Man to burn out the bacteria of unbelief, to cheat the Lord of the Flies of his prey. In short, to trample down death by his death. The Honourable Wood of the Cross will not raise the dead, as we lift it high from the holy table and carry it to the streets of the city. It may not heal the sick. But it sends this message to the lord of death:

‘The Lord of life reigns. He lives! Perfect God and perfect Man, one Christ, triumphant this day over sin, heresy, and death, through the wood of the Cross that is our life’.

In the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. (Matthew 14.25)

Have you ever prayed for something, as though your whole life depended on it? Prayed for it with the fervour of a madman? Prayed so hard that it felt as though drops of blood were trickling from your face? Christ prayed that way in the garden of his Passion. Have you felt that fear, the terrible fear, surge through you – fear that God will not answer the one prayer that matters most? Maybe you are too sensible to pray like that. Maybe in an age of unbelief, you do not care enough about anything to let your life depend on it. But only let fate, only let the strangeness of life reach out and grasp your own: then you will pray. Even an atheist has been known to pray, when her child lies dying. When you risk losing your job, or home, or spouse – and yes, your own child – you set out far from the land. You leave the familiar shore. Night closes in, even in the middle of the day. If you face losing someone you love, the face of your loved one fades. It recedes into shadow, like the face of a ghost. You pray with your whole being, if you can. But, even then, your prayer becomes like a tattered cloth, waving in the wind. When you pray in desperation, the wind howls around your ears. Every doubt surges upward, through you. The voices that whisper: ‘God is not there. No one is there’. You may see the face of God, far away in the distance. But only take one step toward him. The winds howl, the voices wail, the doubt steps in. You set all your heart on one prayer: and your worst fear is – that, if God does not hear, there may be no God at all.

This is the real agony of prayer. You pray but everything is dead. Does God hear? Is he even there? If you ever prayed for anything as though life depended on it, you are not at all alone. If you ever struggled with doubt, you know the agony of prayer. Long ago, one poor woman prayed that prayer. She was the daughter of a priest. She knew the worst doubt: the terrible fear, surging up inside, that says: ‘if God does not answer, God is not there. Or worse, God hates me. He turns his face away’. How could she not doubt? Her whole life, this woman had lived without the one thing she wanted most: to have a child. Born of her body. A child to hold so close, she would never let it go. In the Middle East, it was not only the woman in her that longed for a child. It was life itself, society itself. A woman without a child might as well be dead. Like a man. When her poor husband went to bring offerings in the temple, those with children shoved him aside. ‘No place for you’. The priest told him: ‘Go away, God doesn’t want anything from your childless hands’. So why even live with his wife? He went into the hills. The poor woman, left there alone, prayed: a pointless prayer, like a tattered cloth waving in the wind. The winds, whistling inside her head: ‘Why has God left my body frail and sick and childless? Even my young body was never able to have a child’. That night, in her garden, a voice spoke to her. ‘What would you do if you had a child?’ ‘Hold her close’, she thought. ‘Never let her go’. But she said to the voice: ‘If God gave me a child now, let her be his, not mine. Let her be my prayer. Let her grow up in the temple. Let her know nothing else but God’.

The old woman had a baby girl. She brought her to the temple, handed her to the priest to grow up there. The old woman’s name was Anna, the wife of Joachim the shepherd. Her little girl, raised in the temple, was Mary, the Ever-Virgin Mother of God.

No easy prayer. It was a fervent supplication, that prayer of Anna for the impossible gift of a child. A prayer, like a tattered cloth waving in the wind. A prayer, not of easy faith; a prayer, born of doubt. Anna left her familiar shore. She set out far from the land. Anna, a poor old woman, who gave away what she had longed for all her life: her only child.

Because of a desperate prayer, a little girl grew up in the temple. Her own prayers were as natural as a child’s game, as easy as her breath. So, when the time came for God to be born, he chose the daughter of Anna to give him what only a woman could: a human body, a human nature. Because of one desperate prayer, Anna, barren wife of Joachim, became the grandmother of God.

As Anna set out far from the land, so does her grandson, our Lord Jesus Christ. Like his grandfather, Joachim, he goes up into the mountain to pray. Night falls. His disciples set out, far from the land. They leave the familiar shore. By now, it is the fourth watch of the night, the hour before daybreak when everything is dead and black. Suddenly, Christ is walking across the water. His face recedes into shadow, like a ghost. Like a tattered sail waving in the night wind, the mind of each disciple fills up with doubt. ‘How can it be he? How can he leave us here, surrounded by night, tossed in the wind? How can we reach him?’ With all his soul, Peter wants to walk out to him. He places one foot on the water and he too walks out, as if on dry ground. He sees the face of Christ off in the distance. But as soon as he sees the howling wind lashing the waves, every doubt surges upward in him. Voices inside his head whisper: ‘He is a ghost. He is not there. No one is there’. He starts to sink. ‘Why did you doubt?’ says Christ – and it is not the voice of anger. It is the voice of love. ‘Why did you doubt me? Why did the darkest hour of the night tempt you to believe that the dawn would never come? You seek one thing, as though your life depended on it. You reach out across a great divide. You fear that God is not there. But then – and only then – the hand of God delivers you’.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: prayer is a voyage far from the land, far from any familiar shore. Prayer is an act of courage. Like a tattered sail in the wind, it can be full of doubt. Like the prayer of Saint Anna, it can be full of despair. One desperate prayer, born of so many years of longing in vain. But the desperate prayer of Anna gave birth to the easy prayers of her only child, that little girl raised in the temple, who grew up to become the Theotokos: her soul, a constant, perpetual prayer, the only life that she had ever known; her virgin body, the temple of the Living God. The desperate prayer of Peter, stepping out into the stormy waters of the night, enabled him to walk on water. Only the winds filled him with fear – and God dispelled those fears with one touch of his hand.

If you have ever prayed one prayer of fervent supplication, one prayer – as the Church puts it – with your whole soul and with your whole mind, expect to doubt. The wind may howl around you, as the night closes in. The waves may surge up inside you. The voice of all your doubts may whisper: ‘He is not there. No one is there’. That is precisely when he is there, more than ever. Anna did not conceive in her youth but only in the last years of her life; she did not keep her little girl to herself, as she once hoped, but gave her – to us. Christ did not walk on water in the bright light of day, when no one doubts his steps, but in the fourth watch of night: the darkest hour just before dawn.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Fathers of the 4^th Oecumenical Synod, 18 July 2010

‘Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them’. (Matthew 5.17)

When you are young, you can afford to be an atheist. When your body is still supple and strong, your hair dark or brilliantly bright, you imagine that you own your life. So you can afford to believe in nothing but your own ego. Even in the prime of life, when your status in your chosen profession is secure, your mortgage paid off, and your income exceeds, say, fifty thousand pounds, you can still afford not to believe. You are utterly at home in the world. You do not need ‘church dogma’ to tell you what to believe. You can buy and sell whatever beliefs you wish. If you believe in anything at all, you tailor it to suit your self-interest. The perfect consumer: you shop around in a marketplace of beliefs. All that is, exists for you to choose from, as you wish. If the ‘idea’ called God strikes your fancy, you do not have to commit yourself. Look at all those religious teachers to choose from! Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus – mix and match, take your pick. If you settle on Jesus, you can decide for yourself who you want him to be. An ‘inspired moral teacher’ or maybe ‘a guerrilla fighter from El Salvador’. Why not a ‘cosmic Christ’ that you can paint black or yellow, male or female, trans-gendered or hermaphrodite? Whatever ‘turns you on’: and when you have become agnostic but still go to church, you can call yourself ‘a liberal’. It sounds a bit nicer than ‘hypocrite’. After all, you do not believe in dogmas. None of your beliefs is consecrated, set apart, independently of how it can serve your interests. It is all about you. Your only unquestionable ‘dogma’ is you right to believe whatever you wish. You do not believe in God; you believe in yourself.

That is how heresy begins. You pick and choose whatever you want ‘God’ to be. You do not deny him like an atheist; you re-create him in your own image. Would you prefer that ‘God’ were different? Trade him in for a cheaper model. Do you know how heresy ends? When you meet God, in his Church – not ‘the denomination of your choice’. Heresy ends when it is not you who choose God but God who chooses you.

Does it take stiff joints or grey hair to make you figure: ‘If God exists, maybe he existed before I did’? Does it take bankruptcy, or a stroke, to convince you: ‘If God really is God, maybe I should meet him on his terms, not mine’? If you are old, poor, and sick, it does not automatically make you an Orthodox believer. But if you are old, poor, and sick, you face one truth that the young, rich, and healthy forget: you are limited. You have to face limits: you face the fact that faith is limited by one factor – it is not whatever you want it to be. It is just what it is. But is not God limitless? ‘Ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible’. How can you set limits to God? So how can you say ‘dogmatically’ who God is? Because God is limitless, not you. It is not about you. If God is ‘ever-existing’, you did not invent him – so you have no right to re-invent him. If God is ‘eternally the same’, you cannot ‘update’ him. All that you can do is recognise him.

For the Jews who first recognised him, God set limits: the Torah, the law, precisely to set them apart from Gentiles who did not recognise him. When they overstepped those limits, he sent prophets to remind them. And, in the fullness of time, God limited himself.

God the ineffable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, became an actual man of flesh and blood. A man called Jesus the Christ. God in the flesh: eternal God came down to earth in order to found the Church – to set us apart, to consecrate us as his own, so that we could see him as he is.

Who do you say that he is? An ‘inspired moral teacher’? What is Christian about that? If you believe it, you are an imitation Jew: a Gentile follower of a dead rabbi. What if he is a miracle-working mouthpiece of God? What makes that so Christian? You are only a watered-down Muslim: an infidel disciple of a dead prophet. Or perhaps he is simply the greatest human being that God ever made? Then you are a deluded follower of a false messiah, who ended up on a cross. Christians do not worship a dead teacher or a false messiah. Christians worship Christ.

But why limit Jesus Christ? Why not imagine him as whatever you want him to be? Is he not limitless? He is limited: by who he truly is. You did not invent him; he invented you.

Fifteen hundred years ago, a synod of five hundred bishops that met in Chalcedon near the shores of the Black Sea did not invent Jesus Christ. They recognised him. Christ as he revealed himself in every detail of his life. The Son of Man, born in Palestine, to bring home the lost sheep of the house of Israel. A real man, forsaken, flogged, crowned with thorns, left hanging from a cross as only a real man could – and, at the same time, the ever-existing, eternal Son of his Eternal Father, begotten before eternity. God in the flesh, who pierces the wall of death and pulls us through. ‘The Son of Man came down from heaven; the Son of God ascended the Cross’ – all because they are one and the same Christ. Thus, the holy bishops of the fourth universal synod ‘defined’ the Christian faith. They set ‘limits’ to what Christians may believe: because ‘to define’ is to set limits. Thus, they consecrated the Orthodox Church, the New Israel, to God and set it apart for all time from those who do not recognise him. Overstep the limits of who he truly is and you may call yourself a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jew, an agnostic – but, if you are honest, you will not call yourself a Christian.

But did not Jesus Christ come to destroy ‘dogmas’, to abolish the law and the prophets? ‘I came not to abolish them but to fulfil them’.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: we did not choose Christ but Christ chose us. We came, hungry and weary in body, to a lonely place of unbelief. We had nothing to eat but five loaves and two fishes. But when Christ consecrated the loaves and fishes, setting them – and us – apart, he gave us a sign of who he is. Five loaves, for the five books of the law: bread that he would consecrate in the midst of his disciples, saying, ‘Take, eat, this is my Body: the law of God incarnate, fulfilled’. Two fishes: his own two natures, human and divine. Two natures of Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour. The dogma of Chalcedon. ‘Never compromise the least of these commandments’, he warns, the least of dogmas that set the limits of the Orthodox faith. ‘They testify, not to themselves, but to me’.

If you believe only in your ego, believe in any Christ you wish. You worship yourself, not him. But if you believe in Jesus Christ, our true God, recognise him as he truly is.

“You have kept the good wine until now”. (John 2.10)

If we had eyes to see, these four walls would disappear. The Church of Christ is not to be found within these four walls. The Church founded by Christ, which has come to be called ‘Orthodox’, was born in the Middle East seventeen centuries before the stone and mortar and wood went into making these walls and columns. If our enemies, visible and invisible, drove us into the desert, into the woods, into caves beneath the earth, and we offered the Divine Liturgy on any stone in the forest, we would be no less the Church of Christ. If we had eyes to see, we would see that the Church is us: the body of disciples, first gathered in Galilee and Jerusalem, first called ‘Christians’ in Antioch. We are not a part of a remote past. We are the eternal present. If we had eyes to see, we could never mistake this Divine Liturgy for a folk custom, staged Sunday by Sunday. It is not simply ‘going to church’. It is nothing less than the worship of the Cherubim, the angels, offered perpetually before the throne of God. But, because our eyes are clouded, we merely dip in, dip out. If our eyes are clouded, all that we see is an irrelevant old ritual in memory of a dead rabbi called Jesus who worked a few miracles two thousand years ago. Because our eyes are clouded, we figure that we have come to see just another man get married to just another woman on our weekly day off. That is what churches are for, aren’t they? But if we had eyes to see, we would realise that this is the day of Resurrection. A day that weds time and eternity, heaven and earth.

What better day for a wedding? Not Saturday but Sunday. Not a private affair, discreetly tucked away on a quiet afternoon; but the holy mystery of the Church, proclaimed loudly and clearly from the rooftops. Not a ‘family gathering’ but the gathering of our family in God. If we looked on this wedding with clouded eyes, we could ask: ‘Where is the organ playing “Here comes the bride”? Where is the bridal veil, the father of the bride, all the pretty bridesmaids and grooms? Where is the vow “Till death do us part”? Isn’t this ritual just part of the laws of nature: birth, marriage, death – “hatched, matched, dispatched”?’ But if we have eyes to see, we realise that Mother Nature is not in charge. Nature, and death, have no power – no authority – to part those that we unite this day. This is no private affair, in a quaint old historic church or a chapel in the valley. This is the cosmic union of heaven and earth. If our eyes are clouded, all that we can see is nature: a man and a woman. But if we have eyes to see, we see the living icon of Christ, the eternal Bridegroom, and the icon of his Bride, our Holy Mother the Church. If all that we see is ‘just another wedding’, all that we can offer is the cheap wine, the poor wine that all too quickly runs out. But if we have eyes to see, we toast them in the good wine, the rarest of all wines: the Blood of Christ, conqueror of death, who unites himself this day to his eternal Bride.

‘Pretty far-fetched’, you say. How can an ordinary man and woman be the icon of Christ and the Church? But then again, how can Jesus Christ be God who has become a man of flesh and blood? Isn’t he just a teacher, who spins out a few miracles? Where does a teacher get the authority to wed heaven and earth? This day, Christ shows his authority: his authority over nature; his authority over death.

Those who have eyes to see bring him a paralytic, a man confined to his bed, lying like a corpse in his own filth. To those who think only of his natural condition, this man might as well be dead. We do not know anything about him, except that he is paralysed. Does he even believe that anyone can cure him? So, instead of performing the ‘natural’ cure, Jesus tells the sick man: ‘Your sins are forgiven’. How absurd! Why does he not simply heal him? ‘Who does he think he is – God?’ ask the academics, with their clouded eyes.
‘What gives him the authority to defy the law of nature?’ Jesus reads their thoughts. ‘Tell me’, he says, ‘which is easier to say: “Your sins are forgiven” or “Stand up on paralysed legs and walk!” What I do’, he says, ‘I do, not because “nature” demands it. Here, now, I defy the laws of nature. I say: “Rise, take up your bed and walk” only so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority over nature, authority over life and death’. And, in spite of every natural law, the man walks. Christ has not come to confirm the laws of nature. He has come to conquer death.

Beloved in Christ: all these miracles of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ are only one, all-encompassing conquest of death. To make the blind see, the lame walk, or the dead rise from the grave is no more miraculous than changing water into wine – if you have eyes to see. If we see ‘just another marriage’ today, we see ‘just another paralytic lying on his bed. We see with the eyes of the world, not the eyes of the Church. Not one of the miracles is a private affair, discreetly tucked away on a quiet afternoon. All are the same holy mystery of the New Covenant, shouted from the housetops: eternity breaking into time, changing ordinary water into extraordinary wine. If our eyes are clouded, what can we see but a quaint old custom, a little private ceremony in a pretty old church? We cannot see the glory of God. But lift the scales, drive away the clouds from your eyes of flesh, and you will see: Mother Nature has no dominion here. She has no authority. All authority in heaven and earth belongs to the One who descended from heaven to earth, so that he can lift us up from earth to heaven.

Like the steward of the feast at that first miracle in Galilee, I say to the bridegroom and the bride: ‘You have kept the good wine until now’. Never exchange it for the poor wine. Never exchange your faith in God, and in each other, for that barren desert of unbelief. You are not ‘just another couple’. You are icons of Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Holy Orthodox Church.

May the word that turns water into wine and makes a paralytic walk fill your life together.

May the prayers of our Holy Mother the Church be more ‘natural’ to you than the breath in your lungs.

And may you always have eyes to see.

‘What have you to do with us, O Son of God?’ (Matthew 8.29)

When you look in a mirror – a ‘looking-glass’ – what do you see? Most of us, I suspect, do not even look in a mirror. We glance. Is my hair straight? Does my necktie match the rest of my outfit? Have I covered the pimple on my right cheek? If you are vain enough, you stare in a mirror for hours and think: ‘How can anyone look that good?’ If you detest the way you look, you shun mirrors, or store windows, or the surface of a pond: anything that reflects the image that you fear. But you seldom look deeply. Deeply: beyond your wisp of hair, your collar, to the person you really are. Most of us do not have eyes to see who we are. What did the Oracle of Delphi warn those ancient Greeks who went to worship the god Apollo? ‘Gnóthi seautón – Know thyself!’ That was the sum of all wisdom, the most courageous act. Dare to know who you are! The Oracle was a mad priestess but that one word was sane. Her body twisted and convulsed, she fell into a trance when the god possessed her. But in her madness, she recognized the road to sanity: ‘Know thyself!’ If you know who you are – not who they say you are, not who you think you are, but who you really are – you will know the One who created you. Do you dare to know who you are? Do you dare to look that deeply in the mirror? Or will you say to the real you: ‘What have you to do with me?’

We do everything to keep from knowing who we really are. We tell ourselves: ‘I am too busy to “think about” who I am. My business suit tells me who I am, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Leave my spare time to me. Let me block it out in front of the TV, let me block out all the questions’. We shun the mirror at the back of our minds, the mirror that asks: ‘Who are you, really?’ If we do not shun the question at work, we shun it at leisure: ‘What am I going to buy?’ becomes more important than who is buying it. We shun it in gossip, in politics, in church. We do not think about the faith; we ask, ‘Who’s bringing the hardboiled eggs?’ We keep busy, we try everything to forget the question: who are you, stripped of all your defences? We fill our lives with trivial worries, trivial concerns. It is like driving a herd of pigs across a field: we are too busy getting them to move to ask why we are doing it. Worst of all, by never asking why, we call ourselves practical. ‘I’m a practical fellow, I don’t think too much’.
But a time comes when you have to ask. Call it … rock bottom. You lose your job. Your loved one. You find a cancer eating away your life. All your excuses, all your petty, ‘practical’ concerns go flying off the cliff. You are left with the question: ‘Who am I?’

When the time comes, we all ask: ‘Who am I?’ At the irreducible core. In those silent moments, when I wake up at four in the morning and cannot get back to sleep. ‘Who am I?’ The time has come. The time – the kairós – the moment of truth, when every mask is torn away and every secret laid bare. It is the time when Christ comes again to judge the living and the dead.

But all that Christ does is hold up the mirror: the mirror of your soul reflected in his face. The mirror that reads, ‘Know thyself!’
When Jesus Christ comes to the region called Gádara, on the far side of the Jordan, the locals have no idea who he is. They are practical fellows: herding pigs to sell to the Gentiles. Busy, practical people. No time to ask questions or look inside. They have a business to run: so they send outcasts, like two men possessed with demons, into the desert, among the graves. Suddenly, out of the graveyard, the two madmen appear. At the sight of Jesus, the two bodies twist and convulse and fall into a trance. They cry: ‘What have you to do with us, Son of God?’ They know him, they recognise him! The demons see what his own people cannot. ‘Have you come here to torment us before the time?’ They bide their time; but the time is now. The kairós has come. Jesus says no word. He does not lift a finger. Simply by being there, he threatens the father of lies – with the truth. Demons, you see, have no bodies. They must lie to us, take our bodies, or fall back into the outer darkness. ‘The swine!’ they scream. ‘Send us into the swine!’ and the herd runs down the bank into the river water.
The whole city of Gádara comes out. To thank the Healer? No, to tell him: ‘Go away, leave us alone! Leave us our swine, our livelihood, our comfortable and familiar life! When we look in a mirror, let us see only what we want to see!’

What the demons shout, we say whenever the truth closes in on our ‘practical’
lives. ‘What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come to torment us before the time?’ But the time is now. The time of the mirror, the moment of truth. What is the mirror that exposes all our secrets? It is the face of our Lord
Jesus Christ, who loves us too much to flatter us with lies. The face that only reveals the truth of who we really are.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: the truth is terrifying. Truth can be brutal. Like a word of power that convulses two men, possessed by demons. Like the word that drives the swine down the steep bank, into the water. Like the word of the priest that exposes every wound that still needs to be healed. But, without the word of truth, ‘the time’ of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ shall never come. Christ comes to remove every mask of madness and lies, to expose all our well-guarded secrets. To force us to ask: ‘Who am I?’ Christ himself is the mirror that cannot lie. The practical people of Gádara do not want the truth, so they tell him to leave. Better not ask: better to forget the truth in a million trivial pursuits. Better to herd pigs than look too closely in a mirror. For all we know, the good people of Gádara lived happily ever after in a familiar web of lies and hypocrisies, telling the truth: ‘We don’t want you here’.

But those two men who hit rock bottom – naked, outcast, living among graves, possessed by tormenting spirits, with no idea who they are – they found out what the Gadarenes never did. They looked in the mirror of truth and are now, and for ever, free.