“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” These must be the most recognized words of the gospel in the United States. We see John 3:16 everywhere: on bumper stickers, t-shirts, in cartoons, in the eye-black under Tim Tebow’s eyes. I once saw a coupon that offered $15 dollars off a full-service oil change if the customer could quote John 3:16. I saw a church sign for a church named “John 3:16 Church.” If it were a Byzantine Catholic parish, I suppose it could be named something like, “Christ the Lover of us all,” but only in America could you see it named after the chapter and verse.

At some point, almost everyone in America has probably looked up this verse. I once heard a priest quip that maybe it’s time we start writing John 3:17 everywhere. Then, after a while, we could move on to John 3:18, and so on. That way, maybe, before they die, people would make it through a whole chapter of scripture.

We quote John 3:16 in our Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. You’ll hear it just after the “Holy, Holy, Holy….” These words have been popular among us Byzantines since before there were chapters and verses to cite. (We liked it before it was cool).

And they tell us that God loves the world. We hear these words so often that maybe they go in one ear and out the other. We might begin to lose a sense of their significance, even of their scandal.

The word for “world” here in Greek is κόσμος. God so loved the cosmos. This word is potent and loaded in the Christian tradition, and particularly in John, who uses it more than anyone. Its meanings are complex and varied and seemingly contradictory. The lexicon gives it no less than eight definitions.

Today we hear from Jesus that God loves the world. But John tells us in another place “Do not love the world or the things in the world.” And, “If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). This may be confusing. We’ve just heard that the Father loves the world, but now we hear if we love the world we do not love the Father?

And anyway, how can God love this world? In this world, some children are murdered before they’re born and others are abused. In this world, men crash airplanes into skyscrapers and kill thousands, as we remember from twenty years ago yesterday. In this world, we drop nuclear bombs on our enemies, and their families and children. The ruler of this world is the devil. We see this wickedness all around us and we don’t love it.

At the root of all these evils is our passions. St. Isaac the Syrian writes that “The world is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them ‘the world.’” The passions, you know, are like greed and sloth, lust and vainglory, envy and resentment, and so on.

When we say that God loves the world, let’s be clear that we are not saying that he loves these things. He does not love the passions and the horrors that impassioned people carry out. God forbid the thought. The word “world” carries many senses, then. And we must carefully consider what is meant.

Jesus is not of the world but is above the world (John 8:23). He creates the world and yet becomes of the world to save the world. We are taught both to love the world and to hate our lives in the world (John 12:25). The devil is the ruler of the world but Jesus is the king of kings and lord of lords. The world brings up these parallels and opposites. And only Jesus Christ and his cross can reconcile opposites.

It’s like we have two worlds here. And I think that’s it really. We live in two worlds at the same time. There’s the world as God creates it and there is the fallen world, enslaved to sin. We must be aware of both worlds – both the cosmos and the chaos – both the way of life and the way of death.

God enters into the midst of both of these by becoming man. By his humanity, he saves, redeems, glorifies, and brings us humans into unity with God – us and also the cosmos, the world. By his incarnation, Christ is cosmically present to the universe. And the whole universe stands in need of his salvific presence, because the whole universe is disordered and suffering from destruction and death of many kinds.

And, make no mistake, death is what we’re being saved from. That’s the whole point of all this here.  God gave his only Son so that we would not perish but have eternal life. Death is an evil. Some of us are accustomed to thinking about moral evil only and we forget about physical evil. We sometimes fail to understand physical evil as evil. We even call it good.

And it has been made good in Christ and in his cross. But we must not forget that this is a paradox, lest we forget all our Lord has done for us. In Christ, all things are new. In Christ, death becomes the means of life, because in him, life goes into the place of the dead, into Hades, so that there is nowhere God is not. Hades was thought to be the place where God is not, the place of the dead. “Will the shades stand and praise you?” asked the Psalmist (Ps. 88:10). He may have thought the answer was no. But now, God is even where God is not.

God is impassible, yet in his humanity he suffers the passion. God is immortal, yet in his humanity he dies. God creates the cosmos, yet in his humanity he is created in the cosmos. God loves the world.

The world is the whole cosmos that God creates. Yet the world is also the passions, the sins, the suffering, and the death. So it gets convoluted sometimes when we’re talking about “the world.” We see the passions and the weakness, the suffering and the death, all of which is evil, and it gets hard to see what’s good about the world.

All of this is reconciled only in the cross. We exalt the cross when we say that we love the world. When we say that God loves the world – that can only make any sense in the context of exalting the cross. God is making the sign of the cross over the whole world. He is blessing us with the cross.

The cross unifies opposites, you see. There’s a vertical bar and there’s a horizontal bar, intersected. The divine intersects the human, in Jesus Christ. Heaven comes down to earth. Life enters into death. Unified, death becomes the way to life through resurrection. The cross is the cosmos as it really is. All of it, in all of its senses, unified.  Opposites are made one in the cross, this wonderful and holy sign.

Sermon on Matthew 22:35-46

If we are practicing Byzantine Catholics, then we are well acquainted with the Book of Psalms. If we are not well acquainted with the Book of Psalms, then we have not yet begun to practice our Byzantine tradition. Our Byzantine tradition of prayer is positively steeped in the Psalter. We pray the Psalms constantly and at every liturgical service, including this Divine Liturgy, though, interestingly, least of all. All of our other services include even more Psalmody. We truly follow the instruction of Saint Paul, when he tells us to “greet one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all [our] heart[s]” (Eph. 5:19). This apostolic tradition is here very much alive.

And remember that tradition is a living thing if it is anything of value at all. The great scholar of history and theology Jaroslav Pelikan said from experience, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; [whereas] traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.”[i]

So while we keep the good tradition of singing Psalms, it is good also for us to find a way of doing it that we will actually do, rather than insisting that only one of the ancient ways is worthwhile. Often, if we take that tack, we soon discover that these ancient ways are rather cumbersome, as it turns out, and so we give up the whole thing. Better, as I say, to sing the Psalms according to a rule we will actually keep in our actual real lives.

And one piece of guidance I would give you, whether you asked for it or not, is that your prayer should include at least some psalmody. Not overmuch, necessarily, but some. It is not necessary for lay people to keep the Byzantine monastic cycle of psalmody, which goes through the entire book, all 150 Psalms, each and every week, and twice a week during the Great Fast. That’s a bit much for most of us who are living in the world and, if we try to do it, we may soon burn out and give up the whole thing. Rather, the tradition that stands there to inspire us. If the monks and nuns of our tradition can keep this great discipline, perhaps we can at least pray a psalm each day. That would be a good thing. Don’t be intimidated. Some of them are quite short. Here is a Psalm in its entirety, which we always pray at Vespers:

Praise the Lord, all you nations, acclaim him all you peoples! Strong is the love of the Lord for us; he is faithful forever (Psalm 116).

There, you see? That’s not too much. You can pray a Psalm each day. And it is worthwhile to do so.

The Book of Psalms contains the revelation of God. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit. And it is the prayer book of Jesus Christ himself. This book in a unique way contains the prayers of God to God. For example, when we pray Psalm 21, we are praying a prayer that was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and which was prayed to our Father in the heavens, by his only begotten Son in his humanity as he hung upon the cross and cried out, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?” “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” This Psalm therefore connects us into an unfathomable inner experience of Christ our God like no other prayer can.

We know this from the gospel. Now, if we were to pray that same psalm apart from its gospel context, we would fathom it even less. In fact, this same great and holy book becomes so unwieldy if divorced from the gospel, that it can even begin to lead some people astray. That which is holy and edifying and divinizing could be confused and distorted and manipulated by the enemy to mean in some cases the very opposite of what God means by it. Never forget that the devil quoted the Psalms while tempting Jesus in the desert (Matt 4:6; Ps. 90:11, 12).

I will give you an extreme example. In the Psalms we proclaim, “Do I not hate those who hate you? abhor those who rise against you? I hate them with a perfect hate and they are foes to me” (Ps. 138:21-22). This is a psalm that we Christians pray. As I said, our monks and nuns pray this prayer every week, and twice a week during the Great Fast. Meanwhile, Jesus has given us a new teaching: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:44). We have here a contradiction, it would seem. Some Christians have been so perplexed by this, that they have removed this Psalm and others like it from their own cycle of prayer. We Byzantines do not do this. Rather we seek to know what God means by it.

Speaking about this very Psalm, St. Basil the Great says, “It is not hard for us, if we wish it, to take up a love for justice and a hatred for iniquity. God has advantageously given all power to the rational soul, as that of loving, so also that of hating, in order that, guided by reason, we may love virtue but hate vice. It is possible at times to use hatred even praiseworthily.”[ii]

And then he quotes the same verse I have already mentioned. It’s clear, I think, that Basil is starting with Christ and his gospel, and is understanding the psalms he’s praying only in that context and from that perspective. Therefore, and only because of this, he is able to see that the “ones” we are to hate are no fellow humans or creatures of God, but only vice and iniquity, which God did not make. In interpreting the Psalms this way, St. Basil is following the example of Jesus himself, as we heard in the gospel this morning.

Today, Jesus reveals a manner of understanding the Psalms to the Pharisees he is talking with. He quotes Psalm 109: “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool” (Ps 109:1). He reveals this to be a Messianic psalm about himself, the son of David who is none-the-less also the Lord of David. In fact, he is the Lord God who created David and knit him together in his mother’s womb.

Apart from the guidance of Jesus Christ, this psalm would never have been understood that way. The Jews were expecting a Messiah, but that he would be God incarnate went well beyond their expectations, even though that truth was already being proclaimed in their own Psalms. They could not see it there. And neither would we be able to see it if we did have Christ to open our eyes to it.

And so, in addition to praying the Psalms each day, which I encourage you to do, also read something of the gospel. Because it is only in the gospel that the revelation of the Psalms is made manifest. We need both if we are to commune with God in our prayer. “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” says St. Jerome, so let us immerse ourselves in them day and night to grow in our relationship and intimacy with our Lord.

 

 

[i] Carey, Joseph (June 26, 1989). “Christianity as an Enfolding Circle [Conversation with Jaroslav Pelikan]”. U.S. News & World Report. 106 (25). p. 57.

[ii] Homilies on the Psalms

Sermon on Matthew 22:1-14 & Mark 6:14-30 

We heard two gospels this morning and that’s because today is both Sunday and the Beheading of John the Forerunner. Strikingly, both of these gospels tell us about a feast, but they are two very different feasts. The gospel for the beheading of John centers on the birthday feast of Herod and the gospel for this Sunday tells us about a wedding feast. Remarkably, too, both stories involve murder. But while Herod’s birthday party (with its themes of lust, vanity, and murder) may serve as an image of hell, Jesus’ parable about the wedding feast is, he tells us, an image of heaven (Matt 22:2).

Still, for a wedding story, this parable is rather violent. Now, some of the guests invited to the wedding feast simply make light of it and – excusing themselves by this or that trifle – do not come. Others, however, shamefully seize and abuse and kill the servants whom the king sent bearing the glad news and invitation. Understandably outraged at this, the king sends in his troops. But they not only kill those heartless murderers, but also burn their entire city.

Having no guests left and finding his first-invited guests unworthy, the king invites in a multitude from the streets. This is where we come in, I expect. But the violence does not end here.

The king sees among the guests a man who has on no wedding garment and asks him how he got in so inappropriately dressed. The man says nothing. He is speechless. He has no defense. Some sources even say that the wedding garments would have been provided by the king in a situation like this. So what’s really going on here, once again, is refusal of the king’s hospitality. So the king has him bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

What is the meaning of all this violence? What kind of party is this? What party comes with such stakes? This is rather like getting a wedding invitation – but in fine print at the bottom is written, “come celebrate with us or die.” It becomes rather clear that we are not talking here about the usual kind of wedding party. We might not want to be invited to a wedding like this – it sounds rather dangerous – but, like it or not, we are invited.

It is a free invitation to celebrate, but it’s an invitation we’d better accept. It’s an invitation with teeth. It is an occasion of great joy, but it is deadly serious. Those unwilling to partake joyfully will have hell to pay. Because this wedding feast, as Jesus says at the outset, is like the kingdom of heaven. The wedding garments we are to put on as we enter this feast are like those we put on at baptism and again at the second baptism of holy repentance. That is, they are Christ himself, for all those who have been baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ. To be thrown out of this wedding hall is to be thrown out the gates of heaven.

But, you know, this party isn’t just exactly like heaven either. For one thing, it’s a party to which both the good and the bad have come. I’ve been to a few parties like that.… In fact, we’re at a party like that right now, if you think about it. This church – this Eucharistic celebration, is like a party to which both the good and the bad alike are invited. The sinners and the saints sit together…. For that matter, they’re usually sitting together in the same seat. If you’re wondering whether you’re a sinner or a saint, remember: you can be both. This struggle between the good and the bad happens mostly on the inside.

This parable reminds me of a passage in C.S. Lewis’ novel The Screwtape Letters, which I highly recommend. It’s framed as a series of letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to a junior demon – his nephew Wormwood – with advice on the best way to tempt a soul to keep him out of heaven and secure his place in hell. The demons sardonically call their victims “patients.”

Well, Wormwood gets in trouble one day when his “patient” converts to Christianity. Screwtape is mightily displeased. But, he assures his nephew, their hope of damning the poor soul to hell is not yet lost. “One of our great allies at present,” says Screwtape, “is the Church itself.”

You see, Screwtape is well aware of what Jesus is saying in today’s gospel: both good and bad guests fill the wedding hall – and the devils can use the bad ones to help corrupt the good. The Church in this world is a mixed bag. Don’t we know it.

Screwtape points out that the new Christian will get to his pew, look around himself and see just those neighbors “whom he has hitherto avoided.” You’ll want to “lean pretty heavily on those neighbors,” he advises Wormwood “It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains,” writes Screwtape. “Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.… Never let him ask what he expected them to look like….”

It may be, of course, that “the people in the next pew” are actually good and holy people. Of course, if they’re not, writes Screwtape “– if the patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge player or the man with squeaky boots is a miser and an extortioner – then your task is so much the easier.”

You see, the demons will use our sins not only to drag us down but also to drag others down with us, if they can. Our neighbors see our sins and our hypocrisy and it sometimes convinces them that the Church itself is hypocritical or ridiculous or even evil. Of course, I’m reminded of that old retort to the common complaint that there are too many hypocrites in church: “Don’t worry, there’s always room for one more.” So, let us not judge one another. Let us look instead to our own sins.

That’s the point, I think. All are invited and welcome to the feast, regardless of their sinfulness. But those who accept the invitation have a serious duty. This love feast is not a free-for-all, come-one, come-all, do-as-you-please, orgiastic bacchanalia, no matter how it has been treated by members of the Church at all levels. This is a wedding feast – a celebration of commitment, fidelity, fruitfulness, life, and love. A wedding is where two become one, and at this wedding, we the Church become one with Christ our Lord. Those unprepared to celebrate these things – those unwilling to put on the wedding garment freely offered by our king – cannot remain in the kingdom of heaven. We are now before the gates of the kingdom of heaven and our king is inviting us in. His invitation is this: Repent, and know the joy only Christ can bring.

Sermon on Matt 21:33-42.

“The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Matt 21:42; Ps 117:22)

Thus Jesus arrestingly concludes his parable of the wicked tenants – with this quote from Psalm 117 and a new image. Remember, he has been speaking of a vineyard, its vinedressers, and its owner’s son – not of a building, its builders, and a stone. Yet he shifts suddenly to this new image.

Partly, this says the same thing in a new way: that the very people the Lord has chosen to love and serve him – the tenants of his vineyard or the builders of his temple – will reject and kill his Son. And partly it says something additional: that after his rejection, he will become the cornerstone. That is, after his crucifixion, he will rise again.

These coming events are much on Jesus’ mind, I expect, because he speaks this parable on Holy Tuesday, only three days before he will suffer his passion and death on the cross, having been turned over to such ignominious death by some of the people to whom he is speaking – the chief priests and elders of the people of God. They are standing in the court of the temple (cf. Matt 21:23). Perhaps being in the stone temple[i] brings to Jesus’ mind the image of the cornerstone from the Psalms.

Here is the scene: the chief priests and elders of the people of God are standing in the temple of God, speaking to the Son of God. They did not know what they were saying when they condemned the wicked tenants of Jesus’ parable to a miserable death. They did not know that they were the wicked tenants who had rejected the Lord’s servants and would soon reject his son. Nor did they know that the condemnation they spoke was against themselves. They did not know to whom they were speaking. And as he is being crucified for them and for us, he will forgive them for they do not know what they do. “Let Israel say, ‘His mercy endures forever’” (Psalm 117:2).

And by his forgiveness and his rising from the dead, Jesus Christ becomes the cornerstone. “That is,” writes the Blessed Θεοφύλακτος, “He [becomes] the head of the Church, joining Jews and Gentiles in one faith. For as the stone which forms the corner of a building makes continuous the walls leading to and from it, so Christ has bound all together in one faith.” The Jews are like the wall that leads to Christ, the cornerstone, and the Gentiles are like the wall that goes from Christ, the cornerstone. Christ makes us a seamless whole. He unites the Old and New Testaments as only he can.

When Jesus suddenly interjects a verse from the Old Testament at the end of his new allegory of the vineyard, he recontextualizes the Psalm – as opposed to decontextualizing it. He gives it or finds in it a true messianic prophecy perhaps never before seen or understood.

Of course it makes perfect sense that we have to read the New Testament in the context of the Old – because the Old Testament comes before. It describes and provides the context in which the New Testament was originally received and understood and so without it, we can never hope to truly understand the Gospel on even a human level.

But with Scripture, interpretation goes the other way as well. We also read the Old Testament in the light of the New. Because, in addition to being written by humans, scripture also has God as its author. God inspires scripture, and he is not bound by time. Our chronology does not limit him. So when Jesus offers us an interpretation of the Psalms, as he does today, we should listen! Be attentive – because – even though the Psalms were written centuries before Christ was born, when Christ interprets them, he speaks with authorial authority. He doesn’t interpret scripture as you or I must, nor does he interpret as the scribes and Pharisees must, or still less as the Sadducees. He, alone among humans, can give scripture authentic meaning that even its original human author did not intend – because he, alone among humans, is the God who inspires all scripture. And “All scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching…” (2 Tim 3:16).

In its original context, it is fairly clear that – by the stone – the Psalmist is referring not specifically or directly to the coming Messiah, but to the nation of Israel. Israel was rejected and oppressed and exiled repeatedly – by the Assyrians, by the Babylonians, by the Persians – and the Psalmist is praising the Lord who has delivered Israel, granted them victory over their enemies, and restored them. Despite being rejected by “all nations” (Ps 117:10), Israel remains the chosen people of God, among whom the Lord dwells in his temple – “the house of the Lord” (Ps 117:26). So, Israel is “the stone which the builders rejected, [which] has become the cornerstone” (Ps 117:22).

But now Jesus teaches us that this also applies to him – personally. That he – a true Israelite – is “the stone which the builders rejected” and that he, personally, will “become the cornerstone”

When Jesus mentions a stone, I think Peter’s ears must have pricked up.  “Oh – a stone – that’s me!” he may have thought – “Jesus calls me a rock and now he’s talking about a stone – I had better pay attention to this.” Be attentive! It seems that Peter did pay attention – because he really latches onto this image. This passage from Psalms is quoted twice more in Scripture, and both times it is quoted by Peter.

The book of Acts records that rulers and elders and all the high priestly family inquired of Peter “by what power or by what name” he had healed a cripple. Peter answered boldly, “be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by him this man is standing before you well. This is the stone which was rejected by you builders, but which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:10-12)

And in his first letter, Peter, the rock, rhapsodizes much on this rocky image of Christ:

“Come to him,” Peter beckons us, “to that living stone, rejected by men but in God’s sight chosen and precious; and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture [That is, in the prophet Isaiah (28:16)]: ‘Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and he who believes in him will not be put to shame.’

“To you therefore who believe, he is precious, but for those who do not believe, ‘The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner,’ and ‘A stone that will make men stumble, a rock that will make them fall.’ For they stumble because they disobey the word…. But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:4-9).

 

 

[i] That the temple is stone: cf. Matt 24:2

Sermon on the Dormition & Matthew 19:16-26 

All things in sacred scripture and holy tradition are interrelated. This makes sense because all of revelation is revealed by one revealer – our one God. And so, I really believe that it is possible to preach a good sermon on almost any topic using almost any Scripture. The connections are usually there if you look deeply enough, I find. However, sometimes they are quite plain.

So it is with the gospel for this Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost and the theme of Mary’s holy death, her dormition which we celebrate today. There is in Holy Scripture not a single word that directly and literally references this holy tradition. But, as I say, all of scripture can be brought in to reflect upon it.

Consider this: the rich young man asks Jesus, “What good deed must I do to have eternal life?” The young man is seeking eternal life, as are we all, though he may have been seeking a way to avoid death altogether. In fact, I think that is likely. But Jesus teaches us and exemplifies for us that in fact eternal life is available to us only through death. Take up your cross, he teaches us and then he does just that himself. There is no crossless Christianity nor any way out of death except through it.

Jesus himself is our life and our way. And the way to life he shows us is through death. But death for us, as for Mary, is a dormition, that is, a falling asleep. Both Jesus and Paul refer to death as a sleep (eg. 1 Thess 4:13-16).

This can be misunderstood, however. Understand that death is not sleep in the sense of unconsciousness. Consider Moses, who has died, speaking with Jesus on Mt. Tabor. Or the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, from which it’s clear that those who have died remain conscious and aware of what goes on in the world. No, death is sleep not in the sense of unconsciousness, but in the sense that, as with sleep, it is a state that leaves us. It is something from which we rise again. And if we are in Christ, even though we die, we rise again to live eternally.

Mary shows us this first. Mary is the perfect model of Christians. She shows us how best to follow her son Jesus Christ. She follows in his way. She, like him, embraces death and she, like him, awakes from the sleep of death and lives on eternally. Mary, in other words, knows by experience the answer to the question of the rich young man. She has actually entered into that eternal life that he seeks and she has done it through her holy death.

She follows him in everything, even death, and bids us to do the same. At a wedding in Cana in Galilee, Mary commands, “Do whatever he tells you.” She says this to the servants at the wedding, and she says it today to you and to me. And what does Jesus tell us to do? Again, we can turn to today’s Gospel and read, “If you would enter life, keep the commandments” (Matt 19:17)

And, when pressed, Jesus then indicates a selection of which commandments in particular we are to keep. I don’t think this is meant in an exclusionary way. Rather, I think the commandments he names here are meant to point toward the whole. All the other commandments also remain divine and worthy of our observance, but nonetheless he does particularly highlight certain commandments. It must be said, he does include here the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, which he elsewhere includes in the greatest commandment. But let’s look also at another one he felt particularly worthy of mention.

He says, as did his Father before him, honor your father and mother. Now this commandment is of particular significance today on this feast of God’s own mother, Mary the Theotokos. I have to ask you; can you imagine that Jesus Christ would have disobeyed this commandment? That would be a blasphemous suggestion. Jesus Christ is perfect God and perfect man. And so, both the perfect giver of this commandment and its perfect follower.

Note also that the commandant is not merely to obey your father and mother, as it is sometimes recalled. Certainly, obedience to our parents has an important place in the following of this commandment, but such obedience does not exhaust it. The commandment is to honor your father and your mother. Which we are to do first of all by living a holy and loving life. Every act of love we do honors those through whom we came into the world. And no good we do would have been done were it not for our father and mother. Even if we don’t like them or even if they weren’t good parents, we honor them by living well – for example, by being good parents ourselves to our children.

Well, Jesus Christ has a father and a mother too, of course, and he couldn’t have asked for better parents. His father, of course, is God. And he honors his father more perfectly than any other son ever has. Causing his father to say, more than once, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” But the commandant carries on to say honor also your mother. And the mother of Jesus Christ is Mary. Being both God and man gives Jesus Christ the capacity to honor his human mother more completely and perfectly than any other son can.

Jesus Christ alone, in his divinity, is the creator of his own mother and so he can begin to honor her from the moment that he forms her in her mother’s womb. The rest of us don’t have that opportunity. But Jesus does. And so he honors her from the moment of her conception. She is filled with grace, which is the life of God from the moment her conception, because Jesus Christ is honoring his mother.

But today we are reflecting not upon her conception, but upon her death. And Jesus not only has the power to honor his mother from the moment of her birth, but also continues to honor her at the moment of her death, even after his own death. And so he is with her. We see him with her in the holy icon of this great feast holding her newborn soul in his arms – she is born again from above in spirit. He holds her now just as she held him when he was a baby. He repays her that kindness, and so honors her. This is an image worth remembering when it comes time for some of us to care for our elderly parents just as they cared for us when we could not care for ourselves.

Just as God is with Mary in a unique way from the moment of her conception, so he is also with her in a unique way at the moment of her death. And he empties her tomb and raises her up just as he will raise up all in Christ, but his mother first of all, whom he honors in sublime fulfillment of revelation.