There’s an infamous story about Kitty Genovese who, in 1964, was knifed in her neighborhood in Queens. She screamed for help. And more than a dozen heard her cries. Yet no one did anything to help or to intervene. Reports have often exaggerated the details of this event, but the fact remains that at least one witness knew she was stabbed and yet did nothing. Not until she was attacked yet again by the same man did someone else call the police. And by then it was too late.

You see, Jesus’ parable today is not so far-fetched. People really act this way sometimes. The priest and the Levite witness the suffering of a fellow man and yet do nothing to intervene. This happens in incidents that grab headlines and it happens in our daily lives.

I hope not many of us have had to witness such atrocities. Those of us who have, I hope, have done something to intervene. But for all of us, it isn’t difficult to find human suffering. Even if our suffering is not so great, we all do suffer and we all, daily, encounter the suffering of one another. If we read the news, it will mostly be about suffering. At work, we may witness spiteful and petty cruelties between coworkers. In our families, we may deal with illnesses. When we go into the city, we may encounter homelessness and addiction.

In my experience, everywhere we go, we see suffering. And wherever we recognize the suffering of another, we may take that recognition, I believe, as a calling from God to intervene. To be an instrument of God’s healing and help. To be a neighbor.

What we should do in each given situation requires discernment, but we can trust that God has put us in the situation for his purposes. Each and every time. There is nothing random or arbitrary about the situations we find ourselves in, though it may seem that way. In truth, God has put us there. And it’s not to bring harm or callousness, but to bring healing and compassion. If you are witnessing human suffering, God is calling upon you to be a neighbor to the one who suffers.

The lawyer, desiring to justify himself, asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” The witness of Kitty Genovese’s attack must have thought, oh she is someone else’s neighbor. Someone else’s problem. Not mine. It’s nothing to do with me. Leave me out of it. When in fact, each witness is given an opportunity by God – not by random chance or accident (which does not exist) but by God, who personally knows and loves every victim, every witness, and every sinner.

When the man is beaten by robbers, God sends him a priest. God calls upon this priest to intervene for good, to help, to show mercy. To the priest, God gives the first opportunity to act as God’s instrument of healing. But the priest passes him by on the other side. He passes by the robbed and beaten man – and he passes by the calling of God in that moment – and he passes by the image of God lying in the dirt. So, when the priest fails to do his will, God sends a Levite. And when the Levite fails, God sends a Samaritan, who acts in every way as an image of Christ to the robbed and beaten victim.

Now Samaritans and Jews would ordinarily have nothing to do with one another – they were enemies – but this Samaritan gives no consideration to that. He sees past that tribal acrimony to his common humanity with this bruised and battered Jew from Jerusalem he finds lying in the road.

Our common humanity has its grounding both in the earth we’re made out of and in the breath of life – the ruach – the spirit that God breathes into our nostrils. We are earth with God breathed in – and no human divisions can surmount that common identity.

Our neighbors are not only those with whom we have certain kinds of kinship. Not only our family members and friends. Not only our coreligionists. If we were to assist only those who share our faith, we would thereby prove the enemies and critics of faith correct. They say that faithful religious people are the cause conflict and violence. This becomes true if we fail to live our faith truly.

Neighborliness is not due only to the groups in which we find ourselves. Not only to the born, the young, the healthy, and the free but also to the unborn, the elderly, the sick, the imprisoned and enslaved. Not only to Americans, but also to the French and to Syrians and Iraqis and all the people of all the nations of the world. Not only to Christians, but also to Muslims and Jews and Pagan, and atheists. Not only to the moral, the innocent, and the orthodox, but also to the immoral, the guilty, and the heretical. Also to sinners. Sinners and hypocrites like us.

How often, desiring to justify ourselves, we say, “Well maybe I’m not perfect, but at least I’m not like so and so. At least I don’t want to do this or that evil. Ugh, how can a person even be tempted by that sin? I’m so far above that.”  Believe me, our own sins are no better. St. Mark the Ascetic writes that “the devil makes small sins seem smaller in our eyes, for otherwise he can’t lead us to greater evil.”[i] The very fact that our own sins look so innocent to us reveals the depth of our depravity.  How much we stand in need of the cross and of the Lord’s forgiveness and his great mercy, available to us all in the holy mystery of repentance.

We enter this week on Friday into the Philip’s Fast, which is a season of repentance. This is an especially good time of year for us to identify with all the other sinners in the world, to stop thinking ourselves better than others, to repent, to confess our own sins rather than listing the sins of others, to fast and to give to the poor, to pray for peace on earth, to be a neighbor to all.

So be a neighbor to all people, not because all people are equally right, or because there any truth the relativistic nonsense that “your truth is true for you but not for me,” but because being right is never a person’s deepest identity. Our deepest identity is that which God creates in us – his own image. Therefore, we must never allow our differences with other people – even when they’re in the wrong – to justify any hatred or indifference toward them.

Paul writes, “There is… one Lord, one faith, one baptism, there is one God who is father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all” (Eph 4:5-6). That is our relationship with all others. Always bear this in mind. It makes us neighbors of all people, even our enemies. As St. Gregory the Theologian writes and as we sing each Pascha, “Let us call brethren even those who hate us.”

 

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[i] “On the Spiritual Law: Two Hundred Texts” No. 94,

All around us, the leaves are dying and falling from their trees. The days are shortening and sunset comes earlier each day. We’ve given up trying to save daylight, whatever that means.

The Western Church has just finished their celebration of Allhallowtide. That is, Hallowe’en, All Hallows’ Day, and All Souls’ Day – the Days of the Dead – during which they remember all those who have died – first all the martyrs and saints, and then all the departed. This seems like an appropriate season for reflecting upon death, as nature itself is falling asleep and darkening.

We celebrate All Saints too, of course, on the Sunday after Pentecost. And we remember and pray for all the departed on Souls Saturdays – usually five times a year. So, we’ve got that covered.

As a priest, I also have the opportunity to remember those who have died at every Divine Liturgy. If you wonder what I am doing quietly in the altar at the table of preparation before the Divine Liturgy begins, among other things, I am praying for the dead. That is when I quietly celebrate the Πρόθεσις or Προσκομιδή, during which I prepare the bread and wine to be offered for the Eucharist. As a part of that rite, I place particles on the diskos for the Theotokos and all the saints – who have died – and also particles for those among the living and among the dead for whom you have asked me to pray or for whom I wish to pray

There are now more among the departed for me to remember. This week, I attended two funerals – one for Katie’s grandmother, who was 106 years old, and another for Joe Katona, a friend and parishioner for St. Michael’s in Toledo. He made a lot of that kolbasz that many of you ordered for last Pascha. So, we pray for them among the departed now. On the diskos, two less particles in the row for the living and two more in the row for the dead.

I also remember at every Divine Liturgy some who died very young. One was a classmate in his twenties. Another was a teenage girl. We know not the hour. Many of us – probably most of us – have been close to someone who has died. We can sympathize with the mourners in today’s Gospel.

The 12-year-old daughter of Jairus was young, but she was dying and, while Jesus was occupied with the healing of another woman, she did die. A man from Jairus’s house came and said, “Your daughter is dead. Do not trouble the teacher anymore.” The mourners gathered swiftly. Already by the time that Jesus reached the house, there were many there weeping and bewailing her.

Death can have this kind of effect on us. I remember suddenly getting a text message that a mentor and friend of mine had died. I immediately fell to the ground. Sometimes there’s an automatic physical response like that to grief. Sometimes there’s not. There’s no right or wrong way to feel when we hear that someone has died.

Death is a mystery. We think we know something about it but today our Lord shows us that even what we think we know we don’t know, actually. One thing we think we know is that there’s no point intervening anymore after a person has died. As the man said, “Your daughter is dead – do not trouble the teacher anymore.” As if being dead meant that the Lord wasn’t going to have something to say or do about it. I mean, that makes sense to us. We have a real tendency to think of death as the period at the end of the sentence – that beyond which there is nothing more to say – or that beyond which point there’s nothing we can do.

The people know that the girl is dead. These people know what death looks like – they were not so insulated from death as we tend to be – and the gospel doesn’t say that the people think the girl is dead but that they know she is dead. But then Jesus comes and says that the girl is not dead, but only sleeping. So they laugh at him. Doesn’t Jesus know the difference between sleep and death?

Well, Jesus knows the way things really are, well beyond the understanding available to those of a worldly mind. Remember, he is the God who calls the things that are not as though they are – who calls into existence the things that did not exist – who gives life to the dead (Rom 4:17). So, when Jesus says the dead are sleeping, he need only wake them up. And when someone has died and there remains no more hope, we can hope against hope because we have such a God as this – a God for whom death is equivalent to sleep (Rom 4:18).

The Lord does just this. He takes the girl by the hand and wakes her up, calling to her, “Child, arise!”

The Lord was prepared to call her death sleep – to call a thing that was not as though it was – and thus to make it so. Remember that he is the word of God through whom all things are made.

When Jesus calls her to arise, her spirit returns to her and she gets up at once. Now, death is the unnatural separation of the spirit from the body. James says, “The body without the spirit is dead” (2:26). So, if her spirit had left her, such that it could return when Jesus called, she had indeed died.

Death is a mystery – but God reveals something of it to us. Our Lord has not left us entirely in the dark about death. Remember, Jesus Christ himself experiences death and rises up from it. He knows about death both in his omniscience as God and as a human in the only way that a human could know about such a thing – by experience. Also, the Holy Spirit reveals to us some facets of the mystery of death through the scripture he inspires (2 Tim 3:16).

From scripture and the witness of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, we can see that death is not annihilation. Atheists will say that what we are after death is just the same as what we are before conception – nothing. But the Lord through the scripture makes it clear that we are everlasting creatures. We begin but we do not end, regardless of whatever we may think, say, or do.

Scripture compares death to sleep. It was revealed to Daniel that “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (12:2). And listen to what Paul says to the Thessalonians, as we read at every funeral:

We would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep (1Th 4:13-15).

Paul often uses the terms death and sleep interchangeably, as does Jesus when referring to the death of his friend Lazarus. Death can be compared to sleep mostly because every time we go to sleep, we wake up again. And in the light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, it becomes clear that we can say the same thing about death: we die, but we wake up again.

Yet, this metaphor of death as sleep can be taken too far. For example, death is not unconsciousness. It is not annihilation, and it is not unconsciousness either. The week before last, we heard the story of the rich man and Lazarus, who die and have two very different experiences, which make it clear that those who have died are not experiencing unconsciousness but are aware of what’s going on – among the living as well as among the dead – and are able to communicate with one another. Notice that Abraham speaks about Moses and the Prophets – people who were born and lived and died long after Abraham himself had died – making it clear that Abraham has been aware of goings on among the living all along since his death.

Speaking of Moses, the consciousness of those who have died is apparent also from the fact that, at the Transfiguration of Jesus, Moses talks with Jesus (Luke 9). Now, the unconscious would not be able to carry on such a meaningful conversation about what Jesus was to do in Jerusalem. So, the dead are not asleep in the sense of being unconscious, but asleep in the sense of waiting to wake up.
Therefore, we remain in meaningful communion with those who have died. Death does not end our relationships, our friendship, or our love.

We are going to die, but, rest assured, having died, we will one day hear, as did the daughter of Jairus, “Child, arise!”

Today, Paul tells us that the gospel he is preaching is not man’s gospel (Gal 1:11). It is not a gospel according to man. He tells us that he did not receive it from human beings, but that it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ (1:12). It comes to us, through Paul and others, from God.

We must always bear this in mind as we sit at the feet of the apostles and listen to the gospel. Paul says the only gospel – for there is no other gospel (1:7) – is not a gospel according to man. Yet, at every Sunday and feast day Matins and at every Divine Liturgy we read the Gospel according to Matthew, or according to Mark, or according to Luke, or according to John. Those are four men, but the gospel is not according to man, says Paul. Paul is also a man.

Still, when we listen to the gospel, we are not merely listening to human beings, if we have ears to hear, but are listening to the Lord himself. At the same time, it is clear the Lord has chosen to speak to us through human beings.

This necessarily informs how we are to understand the holy scripture. The scripture is inspired. It is Spirit-breathed. It comes, as Paul says, by “revelation.” It is a means by which God reveals himself to us – to its authors, readers, and hearers.

The nature of these inspired words is not as simple as it at first appears. God speaks through people, but the words they use are always subject to interpretation. Scripture is authored simultaneously by both God and human beings. Consequently, the words of divinely inspired scripture sometimes have divinely intended meanings that their human authors did not intend.

Later in his epistle to the Galatians, Paul will interpret the story about Hagar and Sarah from Genesis as an allegory about the old covenant and the new covenant we have in Christ. I can tell you: the human author of Genesis surely did not foresee this meaning in that story. But God did, and that’s the point. It’s God’s meaning that we seek above all.

God’s intentions are simply greater than any human author could have possibly foreseen. This is common with messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. That is say, the Jesus Christ we received is certainly the same one that was prophesied throughout the Old Testament, but he is certainly not like what the humans who wrote it were expecting. God obliterates our expectations and fulfills them beyond our imagining.

Therefore, if we are to hear God’s voice through the scripture, we must be to open to the awareness that not even our impossible task of discovering exactly what the historical human authors of the text intended – not even that is adequate. It is also necessary – indeed more necessary – for us to seek out the fuller sense of scripture intended by the Holy Spirit who inspired the human author.

The divinely inspired meanings of scripture – meanings that God intends for us his people to understand – at times vary from and occasionally even contradict the human authors’ original, historical, intended meanings.

Scripture is multivalent. It has many meanings at the same time. One text, for example, has the meanings that its author intended as well as those that its original readers and hearers understood, as well as meanings found later by various types of reinterpretation, including allegory and typology.

It is clear that God does intend some meaning or meanings of every inspired text. That is what it means for the text to be inspired. The difficult task we have is to discern with faith and prayer which of these meanings God intends for his people to understand, and which he does not.

If we readers of scripture (and I hope all of us who can read are readers of scripture – I put the daily readings in the bulletin so that we will read them) if we are convinced that God’s intended meanings may be greater that humanly intended meanings, it can give the text the breath to speak to us in this age as meaningfully as it did thousands of years ago. Think on this: at the very moment that ink was put to papyrus by an inspired human hand, God, who is outside of time, intended a meaning by the selfsame written words for you and me to understand. He was speaking even then to us.

We want to know what God is saying to us, don’t we? Then read the scripture! He is speaking to us in the scripture.

But if there is a distinction between human intention and prophetic or divinely inspired meaning – as well as the possibility of contradiction between the two – how do we figure out what God is really saying to us?

Not by any tool of science or history alone is it possible to discern whether an interpretation of an inspired text is a meaning that God intends. Rather, the tools of faith, prayer, and inspiration must guide the interpretation of inspired texts, because, as St. Gregory Thaumaturgas writes, “No one can understand the prophets if the prophetic Spirit does not give them the ability to receive their meaning.”  Inspiration must be in both the writing and the reading of the inspired text. If God’s meaning is to be revealed to you, he must inspire you!

The only way to know God’s intended meaning of scripture (or anything else, for that matter) is by faith, for “faith is a true knowledge,” as St. Maximus the Confessor writes.  Faith and faithful interpretation of history – and not history alone – will reveal God’s intended meanings of scriptures. Faith, of course, acts in and on history. History and faith are not mutually exclusive. Salvation by faith is a historical accomplishment.

But those of us who seek what God is saying to us in scripture must not only be historians but also, and more importantly, theologians. That’s right, you must be a theologian. Evagrios of Pontus points out, “If you are a theologian, you truly pray. If you truly pray, you are a theologian.”

Prayer is an essential component to the interpretation of scripture and to the seeking of God’s meaning of scripture. Prayer is not a historical critical tool, but it is the supreme theological tool. Without it, no interpreter can find God’s meaning in holy scripture.

When we realize that God is speaking to us through people, as he does in scripture, even at times without their knowledge and apart from their intention, we may realize also that he could speak and is speaking through us and through others to the world here and now today. The Word of God is not only the words of the Bible. Paul was preaching the gospel, and not only writing it for us to read.

And even more importantly, but, as Origen writes, “The Word of God is in your heart. The Word digs in this soil so that the spring may gush out.”

“The reading of the Bible,” is a means by which “the Word digs into us and saves us,” as Fr. Thomas Spidlik writes.  The inspired scriptures have value primarily because of their power to inspire believers – to inspire you – in the true sense – that is, to fill you with the Word by the power of the Spirit. The Word is not just written. It is also read and heard and interpreted. It is also preached. It is also lived, and “the finest exposition of the Bible is the life of the believer.”

If we believers open to the reality that God, and not only this or that historical human, is speaking to us personally through scripture, then what St. Jerome says comes true for those of us who read it: it unites them to the bridegroom Christ.    It aids our divinization (our θέωσης). For us believers, “the reading of the Bible is not only an intellectual activity; it is going to school with the Spirit,” as Spidlik writes.  If we seek God’s meaning in the scriptures, we will behold in scripture the glory of the Lord, and will be “changed into his likeness” (2 Cor 3:18).