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.

Sermon on Matthew 18:23-35.

Today, in a parable, our Lord Jesus Christ gives us a God’s eye view of sin and forgiveness.

An official owes his king ten thousand talents. The king is the Lord. You and I are the official. His debt represents our sinfulness. So when Jesus describes this debt, he is actually describing our sinfulness, which concerns us personally and is worth considering carefully.

There are different estimates as to the actual value of ten thousand talents, (which our translation this morning rightly calls a huge amount). We know that a talent was the largest unit of money at the time. It was worth about six thousand denarii, which was a day’s pay. So, a talent was more than 15 years of pay. So, even if a day’s pay was equivalent to less than half of the current minimum wage in Michigan, ten thousand talents would still be worth more than 2 billion dollars. So we are indeed talking about a huge amount. Imagine the burden of a debt like that. It is an impossibly large sum – more than a laborer could make in two thousand lifetimes.

It will help us to understand Jesus’ rhetoric a bit further if we also consider the word here for ten thousand – it’s μυρίος, which is the largest Greek numeral – and as such, it is sometimes used rhetorically and less technically to mean “countless” or “innumerable” – it’s where we get the word myriad. So the servant’s debt to his master is the largest numeral of the largest unit of money. In other words, it’s as big as it can be – that’s the point, I think.

And it’s also possible that Jesus is making an allusion – because this isn’t the first time that the sum of ten thousand talents is mentioned in scripture. In the book of Esther, Haman, the enemy of the Jews, feeling himself insulted by the Jew Mordecai, offers to the Persian King Ahasu-e’rus – also known as Xerxes – ten thousand talents of silver if he will agree to destroy all Jews (Esther 3:9).

Haman was indebted to his king ten thousand talents, just like the official in today’s parable. And for what? – for seeking “to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate all Jews” (Esther 3:13) – the people of God. So this sum of ten thousand talents here is blood money. The debt of the servant in today’s parable represents our sin – and the wages of sin is death – and that death is born by the true messiah of the Jews – Jesus Christ.

By our sins, we participate in the failed attempt to destroy Jesus, just as Haman, by his debt of ten thousand talents, participates in a failed attempt to destroy the Jews. In both cases, the Lord triumphs over sin and death. Through Esther, he delivers the Jews from oppression in Persia. And through Jesus he raises from the dead. So there are meaningful parallels here, which shows more clearly that this enormous debt is an image of sin and death.

It is fitting that Jesus describes all our sinfulness with a parable about money – because the love of money is the root of all evil. But even if we think our sins don’t involve money, we mustn’t think that if that this isn’t about us – we must not leave this comfortably in the abstract.

We are invited to place ourselves in this parable as the servant, to examine our own consciences, and to discover our own sins against God and against our fellow servants. Sins perish in the light and thrive in the darkness – so let us name them and confess them to one another.

I cannot judge you. You and God alone know which sins trouble your hearts – and I can only know my own sins. Let us all bring our sins to God in holy repentance, as the servant did at first – falling on his knees and begging for the patience and kindness of the Lord. When we do, we will receive the Lord’s forgiveness – which is more than the servant begged for.

Actually, when the extent of his debt is revealed, the servant stupidly asks for more time to pay back his king – it should be clear to us that this is a sum no servant could ever repay. It’s an absurdly large sum! This, I think, is how it must sound to the Lord if we ever say that we’ll make it up to him by being good people for the rest of our lives. That won’t make it up to him! That is good and necessary, but that doesn’t mean that it’s enough. Nothing we do can ever earn our union with God.

We are utterly and absolutely dependent upon his grace. Apart from the energies of God, there is no theosis. We do not partake of the divine nature by our own power, but by the power of God, with which we cooperate. We must make every effort to supplement our faith with virtue, but we must never think that our efforts can succeed unaided (cf 1Pet 1:4-5). They spring from, are supported by, and succeed in and only in the life of God, freely and gratuitously given by God.

So the king does not give his servant more time to pay him back, which would be impossible – no, he forgives the debt completely! He gives more than the servant asks for. The Lord is gracious and we depend upon his grace.

We must realize that our sin is like a debt too large for us to ever repay, and, having received the forgiveness of that debt, let us turn from our sin, repent, and sin no more. We should allow this seemingly inexcusable, impossible forgiveness and lovingkindness to prick our hearts so that we do not remain inert and insensible to our wickedness.[i] With all our hearts, let us turn away from the evils to which we cling to which we are habituated and enslaved.

This turning, this repentance, this conversion, this μετάνοια begins, as our Lord demonstrates in this parable, with forgiveness. Not only with being forgiven, but also with forgiving others.

Our Lord taught us to pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Or, a more literal translation is “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” which closely ties the prayer to today’s parable of debts. So as we forgive, we will be forgiven. And if we are to have any hope for ourselves we must have the hope for others that forgiveness expresses.

After receiving the forgiveness of such an enormous amount, the servant should quickly and easily have followed his king’s example when a fellow servant begged for patience regarding a comparably small debt – a hundred denarii – a tiny fraction of what he had been forgiven.

The wrongs we suffer from our fellow servants – which really are wrongs – sometimes terrible wrongs – are nonetheless small when you compare them to the weight of our own sins against the Lord. So, let us remember our own sins and forgive others, as our heavenly Father forgives us.

Do not nurse hurt feelings or brood on wrongs. Do not let resentments grow in your hearts like weeds growing ever deeper roots. For, according to the measure with which you measure, it will be measured to you (Matt 7:2). If you would be forgiven, you must forgive – even those who don’t deserve it – even those who don’t ask for it – as Jesus and our patron Stephen forgave those who were killing them even as they were driving the nails and throwing the stones. Let us imitate this “indescribable love of God” and forgive everything.

 

 

[i] cf. Chrysostom, The Gospel of Matthew, Homily 61.1