So on this joyous day of Raissa’s baptism, we have a fairly solemn Gospel reading, in which our Lord tells a parable of a certain rich man, who had lots of stuff—like too much stuff, so he didn’t have enough space for all his stuff. And he thought, “Okay, well, I need more space for all my stuff. And so I’m going to tear down my current barns and build bigger ones so I have all my stuff laid up for many years, and then I will say to my soul: soul, you have stuff laid up for many years, eat, drink, and be merry.” And then God says to him, “You fool. Today, this very day, your soul will be required of you. And then whose will all those things be, which you have stored? All that stuff. Whose will it be?”So as I say, it’s a solemn parable, but it’s actually, in many respects, very appropriate, given that, in baptism, you’ll notice, the child is stripped of everything, and goes into the water, and is immersed into the water, naked, and bereft of all stuff: has no stuff at all. Because that’s us. That is our ultimate destination. Nothing will enter the kingdom of God of all those things that we have accumulated in this life. Except, by the grace of God, us. So Jesus is telling this parable in a certain context. He’s telling the parable in the context of a family argument. Someone from the crowd comes up to Jesus and says, “Rabbi, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” And Jesus responds, “Man, who made me a judge or arbiter over you?” And then he says, quite specifically, “Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses.”And that’s the beginning of this parable that we just considered, the reason that Jesus says this parable in the first place. But it’s interesting that if you look a little further back in this in Luke’s Gospel, Luke actually sets up another family feud. And this one should be pretty familiar to us, particularly at this season of the year, when we are celebrating a Marian feast, because this is one of the Gospel readings that we hear, every feast, where we celebrate something about Mary. “And it happened,” it says, “as they went, that Jesus entered a certain village, and a certain woman named Martha, welcomed him into her house, and she had a sister called Mary, who sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to his word. But Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached Jesus and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Therefore tell her to help me.’”It may not be as big a deal as, “Lord, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me,” but this is what happens in families. We get annoyed with one another. Martha is really busy cooking up a storm, and Mary’s just sitting there. Doing nothing. And so, Martha asked Jesus to intervene on her behalf. And Jesus answers and says to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things, but one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”Now we read this at Marian feasts not because the early Christians were really confused, thinking that anybody who has the name Mary must be the same person. They knew that this was a different Mary. But it’s interesting that this also isn’t the end of the reading. It is the end of the reading right here, but we actually skip ahead. In Luke’s Gospel, just a few verses later, when someone bursts out to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you in the breast that nursed you,” Jesus responds, “Say rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God, and keep it.” And we glom these two things together, because this describes the Church’s experience of Mary, the mother of God. And you can see this, even in Luke’s gospel, when, at the very beginning, when all these various things are happening to Mary and to her son, and what does it say? “Mary heard all these things, and treasured them in her heart.” So, the reminder, then, that we begin with today is this reminder of death. Death is coming for us all, even from our very beginning of our life. And we have to, then, think very seriously about what we prioritize in our life. And Mary gives us the clue as to what it is that we actually need to prioritize. What is the one thing that is needful, which will not be taken away from her? And that is, simply put, adoration. And here, again, it’s very appropriate that we have a baptism of an infant. Because if there’s one thing that an infant, a child, knows how to do, It’s to adore its mother. With the mother, the infant is at peace. With the mother, the infant is untroubled, and able to relax, and actually just enjoy life. Take the infant away from its mother, and you notice that sometimes they’re a little bit crotchedy and fidgety, and not quite comfortable. But give the infant back to the mother, and all of a sudden, it’s quiet. It’s calm. It’s at peace And this is the essence of adoration. But it also comes with something else, because one thing that the infant is doing, even at this point, is learning. And in order to learn, you simply have to do one thing: listen attentively. And that, of course, is what Mary is doing. She’s listening attentively at the feet of Jesus. That is the essence of her adoration. That is the essence of what is this act of worship that she is engaged in: that listening attentively at the foot of him who is her ultimate protector, at the foot of God incarnate. But there’s one more thing that is there, because, of course, as I said, we conclude the Gospel reading with, “Blessed are those who hear the word of God, and keep it.” This means two things. One, we, as we hear the word of God, we should treasure it in our hearts, as Mary did all the things that happened to her and Jesus. We should treasure in our hearts the experience of God that we have in our own lives, as we experience his goodness, his grace, his mercy, in all sorts of different ways. Ah, but more than that: that, then, should shape how we act. Shape how we are. Shape how we speak. Because the essence of adoration is love, and the natural response of love is action, action that is focussed on the beloved, whether that be simply sitting and listening attentively, or putting into practice that which you have heard from the beloved. And the motivation has to be love. Because, ultimately, that is the essence of what we will take with us in our journey through life into eternity. Because we can’t take anything with us. Except ourselves, and, by virtue of ourselves, by virtue of the soul being eternal, the relationships that we have, with God and with one another. That’s why the two commandments are summed up as, “Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.” Because this is the basis of our own journey through life into eternity. This is the basis of everything that we have, from here on, into eternity. This is the basis of everything that we will be, from now into eternity. That love that we have for God, that love that we have for one another, that adoration, that joy in the presence of the other. This is the one thing that is needful, and, by God’s grace, it will not be taken away from us, to his glory: the glory of the God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto to ages of ages.Scripture readings cited:* Luke 12:13-21* Luke 10:38-42; 11:27-28 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
Sources cited:from II Samuel 6:14-22:Then David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was wearing a linen ephod. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet.Now as the ark of the Lord came into the City of David, Michal, Saul’s daughter, looked through a window and saw King David leaping and whirling before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart. So they brought the ark of the Lord, and set it in its place in the midst of the tabernacle that David had erected for it. Then David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the Lord. And when David had finished offering burnt offerings and peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of hosts. Then he distributed among all the people, among the whole multitude of Israel, both the women and the men, to everyone a loaf of bread, a piece of meat, and a cake of raisins. So all the people departed, everyone to his house.Then David returned to bless his household. And Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, “How glorious was the king of Israel today, uncovering himself today in the eyes of the maids of his servants, as one of the base fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!”So David said to Michal, “It was before the Lord, who chose me instead of your father and all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel. Therefore I will play music before the Lord. And I will be even more undignified than this, and will be humble in my own sight. But as for the maidservants of whom you have spoken, by them I will be held in honor.”from the Protoevangelium of James:And the child was two years old, and Joachim said: Let us take her up to the temple of the Lord, that we may pay the vow that we have vowed, lest perchance the Lord send to us, and our offering be not received. And Anna said: Let us wait for the third year, in order that the child may not seek for father or mother. And Joachim said: So let us wait. And the child was three years old, and Joachim said: Invite the daughters of the Hebrews that are undefiled, and let them take each a lamp, and let them stand with the lamps burning, that the child may not turn back, and her heart be captivated from the temple of the Lord. And they did so until they went up into the temple of the Lord. And the priest received her, and kissed her, and blessed her, saying: The Lord has magnified your name in all generations. In you, on the last of the days, the Lord will manifest His redemption to the sons of Israel. And he set her down upon the third step of the altar, and the Lord God sent grace upon her; and she danced with her feet, and all the house of Israel loved her.Sources not cited (which I intended to):“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)from For the Life of the World (Fr. Schmemann citing Romano Guardini):Man, with the aid of grace, is given the opportunity of relaying his fundamental essence, of really becoming that which according to his divine destiny he should be and longs to be, a child of God. In the liturgy he is to go “unto God , who giveth joy to his youth.” … Because the life of the liturgy is higher than that to which customary reality gives either the opportunity or form of expression, it adapts suitable forms and methods from that sphere in which alone they are to be found, that is to say, from art. It speaks measuredly and melodiously; it employs formal, rhythmic gestures; it is clothed in colors and garments foreign to everyday life … It is in the highest sense the life of a child, in which everything is picture, melody and song. Such is the wonderful fact which the liturgy demonstrates: it unites act and reality in a supernatural childhood before God. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
So in today’s gospel reading, we get two stories for the price of one. And these intertwined stories actually are the culmination of this particular section of the Gospel of Luke, which begins with the centurion asking Jesus to heal his servant. One of the things that runs throughout this section of the Gospel of Luke is the question, who is this man Jesus? Who is he? And as we look at this section as a whole, and in particular, at this culminating pair of stories, we begin to see exactly who he is. So, Jesus has just gotten back from healing the Gadarene demoniac. Everybody’s really happy to see him back. And in particular, a man named Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, is ecstatic because his daughter is dying. And now he really needs Jesus to come and heal her. And so Jesus does, or at least he starts to try to do so. But, like everywhere he went—and you will remember from another story in this section, the raising of the widow’s son, the widow of Nain—Jesus is accompanied by a crowd. And the crowd is pressing on him from all sides. So his progress is excruciatingly slow as he’s making his way to Jairus’ house. And then it stops altogether as Jesus stops in the middle of this crowd, which is pressing on him from all sides and says, “Who touched me?”Now, we know the story. But there’s another story in this section which has to do with someone touching Jesus. If we go back to the central story in this section, Jesus was invited to the house of a Pharisee named Simon, and he was sitting at table, and as he’s sitting at table, eating with Simon, the Pharisee, and the company of a whole bunch of exalted guests, a woman comes off the street. A woman of the street comes off the street, and sets herself up behind Jesus, and is really making a scene. She’s weeping, and her tears are falling on Jesus’ feet, and she’s bending down and drying off his feet with her hair, and she’s anointing his feet with fragrant ointments. And the host of the feast, Simon, who must be more than a little annoyed by this point at this scene that’s developing, is thinking to himself, If this person was really a prophet, he’d know exactly who touched the kind of person who just touched him. And he’d tell her, “Get out of here. What are you doing? This is terrible. Go away!”Now, Jesus sees Simon’s heart, and he sees the woman’s heart, and he knows that there is an obvious communication gap here. How does he bridge it? And so, as always, he tells a story. “Simon, I have something to say to you.”“Say it, Master.”“There were two people. One owed 500 denari, and the other 50. And the master forgave both the debts. Now, which of the people, do you think, is gonna love him more? The one who owed 500, or the one who owed 50?” And Simon answers, “Well, I guess the one who owed him more money would love him more, right?”And Jesus says, “You’ve answered me rightly. I came into your house, and you did not anoint my head with oil, yet this woman has anointed my feet. You gave me no kiss of greeting, and yet she has not ceased to kiss my feet. I tell you, this woman, who loves much, her sins are forgiven.” And then we get one of the many questions in this section: “Who is this man who forgives sins?”And so this story that we’re in the middle of now, with the woman who has the flow of blood, who’s actually touched Jesus, the hem of Jesus’ garment. And Jesus knows this: He knows exactly who is touching him. Because he is a prophet, and more than a prophet. And as he stops now, he stopped for a reason. He stopped for her. He stopped for her and for her salvation. And, of course, the disciples are all confused. “Master. People are pressing against you on all sides. Why do you ask who touched you? There’s lots of people touching you.”And he says, “No, I felt power go out from me.” And so this woman then comes forward finally, and tells them, in the presence of all of them, how she touched his garment, and she was healed. And it turns out that she’s had a flow of blood that has made her unclean for twelve years. And Luke can’t help commenting, as a physician, that she spent all her livelihood on physicians, trying to get them to help her. And none of them have been able to help her. And now all she did was reach out, touch the hem of Jesus’ garment, and she’s healed. And Jesus says to her, “Daughter, be of good cheer. Your faith has made you well. Go in peace.” There’s another interesting parallel here: immediately after the story of Simon, Luke makes a comment, kind of out of the blue, that there’s lots of people, and, in particular, lots of women that Jesus has helped. And that they have contributed to his and the apostles’ livelihood. They are the ones who are sponsoring Jesus and the apostles, making it possible for them to travel around. And so what we have here, as Jesus has deliberately stopped the entire procession—brought it to a milling halt—is not simply a healing. It’s not simply that Jesus wants to get credit for this healing. It’s that there’s more that needs to be done here. There’s more that needs to be done for the woman. Because she has been, for twelve years, an outcast from Jewish society. She’s been unclean. Everybody knows that. It’s probably why she snuck up behind Jesus and touched his robe without telling anybody. But our Lord is not simply here to heal people. Our Lord is here to heal relationships. And so, as he gets her to tell her story, not only do people realize who he is, realize he knows exactly who is touching him, realize ultimately that he has the power to forgive sins—but she is restored to fellowship in the community. Everybody knows the story. Everybody knows that she’s been healed. And her livelihood, which has been, unfortunately, diverted to these physicians who are completely unable to heal her, can now be used to the glory of God. While he’s still standing, someone comes from the ruler of the synagogue’s house. and says to the ruler, “Your daughter is dead. Do not trouble the teacher. There’s no need for him to come over. There’s no point anymore.” But when Jesus heard it, he answered him, saying, “Do not be afraid, only believe and she will be made well.” And there’s an interesting contrast here between this and the beginning story, where the elders of the Jews encourage Jesus to come and to heal the centurion’s servant, even though the centurion is obviously not a Jew. “He loves our nation,” they say. “He’s even built us a synagogue.” And the centurion, of course, after asking Jesus to come and heal his servant, has second thoughts and he tells Jesus, “No, don’t come. I’m not worthy that you should enter under the roof of my house.” This is a note of honour, in the one point, of understanding of the Jewish custom that to go into the house of a Gentile would make you unclean. But more than that, he says, “I’m not worthy for you to come. I didn’t even think myself worthy to come to you, but say the word, and my servant will be healed, for I am a man placed under authority, having soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” And when Jesus heard these things, he marvelled at the centurion and turned around and said to the crowd that followed him, “I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel.” There’s an interesting corollary here, as well, in that just before Jesus goes and heals the demon-possessed man, he and his disciples get into the boat. Jesus is tired, he falls asleep, and a big storm blows up, and the disciples get all panicky and are scared, and wake Jesus up, saying, “Master, don’t you care that we’re perishing here?”And he arose and he rebuked the wind and the raging of the water, and they ceased. And there was a calm. He turns to them, and he says to them, “Where is your faith?”And they were afraid, and marvelled, saying to one another, “Who can this be? He commands even the winds and the waters and they obey him.”And so, Jesus, who he is, is being made manifest. All he has to do, as the centurion knows full well, and his disciples don’t, is speak the word. And it will happen. It will come to pass. The centurion’s servant is healed. And the disciples, they just don’t get it. Even after seeing the great miracle of the calming of the storm, they’re still asking, “Who is he? Who can this be? He commands even the wind and the water. And they obey him.” But now, Jairus’ daughter is dead. There’s no need to go to his house. And yet Jesus says, when he hears it, “Do not be afraid, only believe, and she will be made well.” And he continues on. And he comes to the house. And they’re all weeping and wailing, and he doesn’t let anyone go in, except for Peter, James, and John, and the father and mother of the girl, and he tells everybody that, “Don’t worry, she’s just asleep,” and then they all laugh at him. They know she’s dead. But this is really interesting. Because, again, just after the middle of this section, Jesus starts telling stories. I mean, he’s told a story to Simon, but now he really starts telling stories, as we heard Father Lawrence speak last week about the parable of the sower. He tells the parable of the sower. And then he tells some more stories. But he tells his disciples in particular, that to them is given the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but not to everybody else, that hearing they may not hear, and so that they won’t understand yet. They’re not ready to understand. But the disciples are ready. So try and understand here. Try and follow. And at the end of this session, when he’s telling these parables, his mother and his brothers are trying to come to him, but they can’t, because of the crowds. And Jesus is told, “Hey, you maybe should stop teaching here, and come, you know, be with your mother and brothers.” And instead of stopping teaching, instead of stopping telling all these stories, he says, “My mother and my brother are those who hear the word of God, and keep it.
So we come again to the story of the rich man and Lazarus, and, since I don’t really want to talk about this story, I feel like that probably means that I should talk about this story. One of the reasons I am reluctant to talk about this story is probably my upbringing. I grew up in a very conservative evangelical Christian community with lots of really nice people there. They loved Jesus.But I do remember there was a certain trend in the sermons where you had to have—and even some people, some of the very nicest people in the parish—they didn’t feel like it had really been a Gospel message unless they were kind of scared. It’s a tradition that goes a long ways back in Protestantism. You have this famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. One of the central ideas or images in this sermon is that God has you in his hand, and he’s dangling you over the fires of the abyss. And you just better hold on and make sure he doesn’t let go. He actually read this in a very dry tone, apparently, but he had people clinging to the pillars; they were shaking in their boots. So there is this tradition, particularly in the post-Protestant Christian West, of a good hellfire and brimstone sermon. That’s not what you’re going to get today.However, the subject of hell has been raised. It’s there in the Gospel, so we need to address it. We need to think about it and talk about it. And one of the things I think we probably need to think about is, why don’t we want to hear it? Why is it, in fact, why is it even a stumbling block for some people who might want to come to the faith?A big part of it is what I just described. It was kind of overused. Admittedly, the Bible does talk about God being angry. He’s angry at sin. He’s angry at what turning away from him, the source of life, does to us who are dependent upon him, the source of life. He’s angry at sin because it’s like any father who loves their children, looking at what sin does to them, all their desires that pull them away from what they should be doing and what is good for them, and seeing the destructive power of that. Of course, you’ve got to warn somebody about that. Of course, you don’t want your children to go there or do that. Don’t play in the traffic. You might get hit by a car, right?But I think another part of it is, this kind of philosophical approach that we have to Christianity. And, you know, again, that’s not something bad. We want to understand who God is. If God is the source of all goodness and you want to understand what goodness is, then of course you want to understand who God is, how he is good, what his goodness means. And then you have this. And we’ve even had Orthodox philosophers write books against this, against the idea of there being hell.And I think this is problematic. Pause for a second and think about this—think about what we’re doing when we’re criticizing God for having this hell thing. And think about it in particular in the context of this story. You have a rich man and you have a beggar. The rich man is clothed in purple and fine linen and lives sumptuously. In that day, they didn’t have nice gaming computers or anything like that, so this is the pinnacle of life. So he’s enjoying all there is to enjoy in the world in which he is. And as he’s faring sumptuously every day, there is at his gate a beggar named Lazarus, who’s sick. And he’s covered in sores. And the only people who seem to minister to him at all are the dogs, which in Jewish tradition are unclean animals, who come and lick his sores. And then they both die.This is not an unusual story in the history of the human race. This is not something exceptional. There are people out there whose lives are miserable, brutish, and short. They didn’t all live in the Middle Ages, but that is the reality that we do encounter at times. And then there are those who have an abundance, an overabundance, more than they know what to do with. They’ve got to build like lots of yachts and stuff to use up all this disposable income that they have. And, you know, then go sailing on the yachts, which I guess is the clothes of purple and fine linen of our day. This is the reality that we have as human beings that we encounter. It is not right. It is wrong. It is evil. It is unjust. And we should be calling it out as such. St. John Chrysostom did. He said, that extra cloak that you have in your closet that you don’t wear, you stole it from the poor.In fact, this particular parable or story—some of the fathers say that it’s not a parable, it’s actually a story, because it’s the only one in which Jesus actually uses the name of a person. All these other parables, it’s like a certain…, but here it’s like a certain beggar named Lazarus. Be that as it may, he tells this story in the context of the Pharisees’ response to him.He’s actually just told the story of the corrupt steward (one of my favorites), where the steward is like, “Hey, my master has found out that I’m embezzling and he’s going to fire me. So what am I going to do? I’m like, I’m too old to dig and stuff like that. So I know.” And he calls his master’s various debtors in to him because he’s the steward. He takes care of his master’s debts. And he’s like, “How much do you owe my master?” And the guy says, “Well, like, 40 bushels of wheat.” “Okay, take your bill and write down 20.” I’m getting the numbers wrong, but essentially that’s it. So he’s cheating his master, and then his master actually ends up commending him. He’s like, “Oh, that’s actually pretty smart, because now he’ll have friends.” And he’s using money, as Jesus says, wisely. This is how we should be using our money. And he points out that you cannot serve two masters. No man can serve both God and the love of money. And the Pharisees laugh at him. “Well, yeah, of course, you’re poor. Of course you’d be valorizing the poor.” And it’s in this context, then, that Jesus tells this parable. This context both of extreme riches and extreme poverty. This context when money and the value of money, the danger of money, is being misunderstood.And again, I want us to think for a second about— I don’t know, let’s play God for a minute. (God forgive us.) And say, “Okay, well, you know, you kind of got it wrong, Lord. It would be better if they both went to heaven.” Okay, well, let’s think about that for a moment. Maybe on some level it would be, but in terms of justice, you’ve just destroyed the whole point of the story. Where is the justice? Here’s the rich man. He gets to enjoy all of life’s bounties and blessings, and here’s poor Lazarus. And there’s no consequence for the rich man not sharing his abundance with Lazarus. And Lazarus has not... well, I guess he’s in heaven, so that’s nice. But then what’s the meaning of that life that he just lived, which is just full of misery and suffering? It deprives it of meaning.Or, okay, let’s try another one with, you know, we’re scientific materialists here. So we’ll just, like, say, “Okay, well, it’s the end.” Great. That’s it. Okay, well, now you’ve really messed up the story. Now everything’s kind of just completely meaningless. The rich man gets to enjoy all this, and then he dies. And the Lazarus gets to suffer, and then he dies. And that’s it. That’s the end of the story. Wait. It’s like, maybe we’re not as good at being God as we think we are.There’s another way to approach this. And here I want to take us back, all the way back, to the father of the faith, Abraham. He has this encounter with God, you’ll remember. The three visitors at the Oak of Mamre come and he entertains them and realizes this isn’t just any three visitors, this is God himself. And God, in fact, as two of the visitors make their way down to Sodom, where Abraham’s nephew Lot is living, God says to Abraham, “Shall I conceal from Abraham what I am about to do? The wickedness of Sodom has reached my ears. I need to judge them.” And Abraham, thinking of Lot, no doubt, says, “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?”I want to pause there for a second in this story. That’s a hugely important statement. A hugely important question. Because it’s a rhetorical question. “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” Abraham’s assumption, the father of our faith’s assumption is, well, of course he will. Of course he’s going to do what’s right. He’s God. He’s the source of goodness. How could there be anything more good than God? And so the question is purely rhetorical, although admittedly, then Abraham then proceeds to engage in a Middle Eastern bargaining session with God, and he manages to get God down from 50… “What if there were 50 righteous souls in Sodom? You wouldn’t destroy the whole city and all those 50 souls, would you?” And “Well, okay, for the sake of 50 souls, if I find 50 righteous souls in Sodom, I won’t.” And it’s like, “Okay, well, wait, what if there’s not 50?” Abraham’s thinking. “Okay, well, but maybe there’s, you know, only 40. I mean, for the lack of 10 people, you wouldn’t destroy the whole city and all those 40 righteous people with it, would you?” He goes, “No, okay, if there’s 40, I won’t.” He gets God all the way down to 10. And, of course, there aren’t even 10 righteous people in Sodom.The two men come to Sodom, and they’re going to just like camp out in the marketplace, and Lot, who is like the only righteous guy, really, in Sodom, says, “No, no, don’t do that. Come, come out, you know, I’ll put you up for the night.” And he gives them hospitality in his home. And then the men of Sodom come and are pounding on Lot’s door, telling him to send out these two men so that they can do whatever they want with them. (Read between the lines. Pretty horrible stuff.) You can see the corruption of Sodom and the effect of the corruption of Sodom on Lot, as Lot says, “No, no, don’t do this. I’ll send my daughters out to you.” Fortunately, he doesn’t have to do that because the two men basically step forward and all of a sudden, a
If our starting point for love as Christians is “love your enemies”, and if our ending point is “love one another as I have loved you”, and if this is supposed to be what characterizes us as Jesus followers, this love should be the defining feature of our church.Note: The inside joke at the beginning of this homily is comes from something I have long said to my parishioners. Based what St. Jerome said about St. John the Theologian, I have always said that I want my last sermon on St. John’s to be simply, “Little children, love one another.” So, immediately after saying this at the beginning of my homily today, I turned around and made as though to go back into the altar… then, obviously, continued for a little while longer.Here is the story about St. John, from St. Jerome’s Commentary on Galatians 6:10:The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, “Little children, love one another.” The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, “Teacher, why do you always say this?” He replied with a line worthy of John: “Because it is the Lord’s commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.”If we do love one another as Christ showed us how to love, in this self-sacrificial way which does not compromise the truth, which looks for the best in the other, which believes the best in the other—because as Paul says, love believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—and if that characterizes us, then, and only then, are we truly the children of God.Scripture references cited:* Luke 6:27-38 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
So today I want to draw our attention to one phrase from the Gospel reading, or at least focus in on that, and talk a little bit about repentance.Repentance is one of those words, of course, that we hear all the time within the church and almost never hear outside the church. And so its definition is often a little bit narrowed in our minds. Repentance in the Greek means change of mind: metanoia, change of mind. And so it’s maybe a little bit broader than simply saying we’re wrong and repenting of that. That’s an important starting point, of course, and we see it here.Because the phrase that I want us to focus on here… as we’ve just heard about Jesus looking at these two boats and saying, “Hey, can I borrow one?” And he puts out with Peter in one of the boats, and he sits down in the boat, because that’s what you did when you were teaching, and he teaches. (I think that would be kind of a fun place to teach from, actually. You just sit in the boat and teach the people who are on the shore. One of these days I should try and do that. But we’d all have to go down to the seashore or to the lake or something.)So he sits down and he teaches them from the boat, and then he turns to Peter and says to Peter, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” And Peter, the expert fisherman, says to Jesus, “Lord, we’ve been fishing all night and we didn’t catch anything. Just a really bad time to be fishing. We won’t catch anything. But at your command, at your suggestion, I’ll go out and do what you say.” So he goes out into the deep and he lowers the nets into the water, and they have so many fish, they can’t even haul the net back into the boat. So he signals to his partners, James and John, and says, “Hey! Get the other boat! Come out of here and help us with this!” And so they get the other boat, and now both boats are struggling: they’re sinking.And the phrase I want us to focus on here is what Peter says next, how he responds to this. He says to Jesus, “Depart from me.” In fact, he falls down at Jesus’ knees saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man”. That last bit, “I am a sinful man”, that’s what we usually associate with repentance. And that’s good, that’s true. We should recognize our own sinfulness. And here Peter is indeed recognizing his own sinfulness. It’s a good starting point. It’s not the only starting point. Sometimes what we need in order to change our minds is simply just a sense that something is missing. Or something’s wrong. Or something just isn’t quite the way it should be. I need to figure out what that is and fix it. But repentance is that. At least that’s the starting point for repentance. Because otherwise, why would we change our minds? If we have no recognition that there’s anything wrong or anything missing, why would we embrace any kind of change? And so, in this case, it’s a good call here. Peter recognizes his own sinfulness, and he falls down at Jesus’ feet.And then we get to this second part, which I want us to think about in terms of repentance. Because if we look at the first part of what Peter says, his response to this is, “Depart from me! Go away. Leave. I’m a sinful man. You shouldn’t be here. You’re obviously holy. And I am full of sin and there seems to be maybe even the judgment of God upon me. My boat is sinking. This is my livelihood. I can’t afford to give this up. I can’t afford this kind of trouble.”And that too, I think, is an important element of repentance. Because Peter’s evaluation of the situation, Peter’s evaluation of the solution to the problem that he faces, is actually all wrong. This is one of the things that I love about the Gospels and how they present the followers of Jesus. They never mince words: yeah, and they got that wrong, and that was obviously wrong too, and they were wrong again. They don’t always get everything wrong. Peter does also say to Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and Jesus says, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for flesh and blood is not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” So he can get it right, and then he can also get it very wrong , as he does just shortly after that, when he tells Jesus, “No, no, you can’t go and be crucified,” and Jesus tells him, “Get behind me, Satan!” And really, the thing that I love about that is, that’s us! We’re all over the place.Sometimes we think we have the handle on it. It might even be an area of our expertise. I’ve studied this lots. I know all there is to know about fishing. And, you know, this is really a dumb idea, but to humour you, Lord, I’m going to go and do it. That isn’t how it says that Peter said it, but maybe that was kind of the thinking behind the scenes, right? And how often is that not us? We have some degree of knowledge and learning and experience, and we think we know what we’re doing, and we think we understand how things should be. And then all of a sudden we realize, Oh, there’s a problem here. This doesn’t actually line up with what is being revealed to me by God.And that can happen any number of different ways. That could be something that you just learn because you made a mistake and you realize, oh, that was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done it that way. Next time I’ll learn. That’s part of repentance. That’s part of that changing of the mind that needs to happen. Or it could be something where we actually had an idea and thought, this is a great idea. This is actually really important. Everybody should believe this idea. And then we realize, Oh, actually, no, that was kind of a dumb idea. Because it becomes obvious to us that it’s not true for whatever reason. Or it could be something that we read in the Scriptures and we just don’t quite understand it. And we’re thinking, Okay, I think I get it. Or maybe not… And we have to struggle and change the way that we’re thinking in order to wrap our minds around it and hopefully understand it and have it change us. Or it might be, as in this case, our sense—and it’s a good sense—that God is working in our lives. It’s a good idea to hold on to because he is. But we don’t always interpret correctly how God is working in our lives and what that should mean for us.I know in the Slavic tradition, there’s very often a sense of, If something goes wrong, it’s obviously the judgment of God on me. And there’s some strength in that initial automatic assumption, as opposed to, say, our North American one, where it’s like, Ah, things are going wrong: it’s obviously the world that’s a problem, not me. We’re less likely to learn that way. But there are also things that can go wrong with that Slavic impulse as well. (I’ve seen it mostly in Slavic cultures, and I’m not saying that all Slavs necessarily have this impulse, or that non-Slavs don’t necessarily have the impulse… Anyhow, enough qualifiers!) When we when we start to look at something negative that’s happening, like the boats are sinking, and then assume that this is the judgment of God on me because of my sinfulness. Okay, well, you can learn from that. Obviously, it was good that Peter recognized his sinfulness here. But you can also get really discouraged and misread what God is doing. Because very often, what God is doing, which we don’t really understand at the time—and it may take us days, months, years to come to the understanding of it—is that he very often blesses us with hard blessings. Things that we don’t quite understand. I can’t seem to get the net into the boat. The boat seems to be sinking. This is the end of my vocation. This is the end of my career. This is the end of whatever. It’s the end of the world as I know it, and I don’t feel fine.But in this case, as we see, Peter’s interpretation, even of the situation, was wrong. The boats didn’t sink. And his understanding of the solution was particularly wrong. He essentially tells God to go away. And again, isn’t that what we often do? We’re sinful. We’re kind of wallowing in our sin, our misery. We don’t really want to change. And we just want God to go away and leave us alone. That would make things simple. We could go back to the ordinary bit where we’re not struck with awe at the enormous catch of fish. And this is too much for us to handle and we’re worried about how this—whatever it is—this disaster is potentially impacting my life. I just want to go back and just be a nice, quiet, normal fisherman in my own little sinful way. But that wasn’t what Jesus was there before Peter to do.And then there is one more thing that Peter says, actually. He says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” He’s recognizing Christ’s lordship, even as he’s telling him to go away. And of course, as I said, the boats do not sink. And Jesus reassures Peter, “Do not be afraid. From now on, you’ll catch men.” And the thing is, there’s one more really important aspect to repentance , which is that when they had brought the boats to land (they didn’t sink), they forsook all and followed him.So we need those first impulses, obviously. We also, being the human beings that we are, we need to wrestle and struggle through this or that or the other false conclusion and false way of acting. But when we see what God is doing, when we see what God is calling us to do, our job then becomes simple. We complete our repentance. We complete that change of mind by leaving everything and following him. Now, leaving everything doesn’t necessarily have to mean literally leaving everything. Obviously, in the case of Peter and his partners, James and John, they literally left everything. But for us, what that means is that everything that we have, everything that we own, all the relationships that we are in, everything that we think is a part of who we are: we need to hold those things lightly. They should not have any weight compared to our commitment to God, our commitment to following the Lord. And if we live that way, then we have essentially left everything to follow him.And so repentance the
Of all the 12 great feasts of the church—or 17 great feasts, or 17 ranked feasts if you’re following Father Alexander Rentel—this is probably one of the most political. This feast, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, commemorates the finding of the cross by the Empress Helen, mother of Constantine, and also the recovery of the cross when it was captured by the Persians, and then the emperor Heraclius conquered them and brought the cross back to Jerusalem. So there’s a lot of politics involved here. I want us to consider where that comes from and where we go with it.The most important thing that we need to start with is, of course, the origin of the feast. But to get at the origin of the feast and the significance of this particular event for Christians, you have to understand the cross. That’s one of the reasons why we just heard a summary version from the Gospel of John about Jesus’ crucifixion. If you don’t understand the cross and what it means and what it represented for centuries up until that point, then you’re not going to get the significance of what happened at that moment.The cross was, of course, the great instrument of torture and death by which the Romans struck fear into the hearts of their enemies. It was one of the most horrifying, torturous, and excruciating ways that man has ever devised for his fellow man to put him to death. When you are crucified on the cross, it’s a long and agonizing, torturous ordeal just to die, because, of course, embedded in the heart of every human being by God himself is the desire to live, is that instinct to preserve life. As you’re hanging on the cross, you start to suffocate because your arms are stretched out and you have to push yourself up to take the next agonized breath, and then you let yourself down because you can’t sustain that. It’s just a long ordeal. People survived on the cross for entire days before they finally passed away in agony, naked, and hung up there for everyone to see what would happen to Rome’s enemies and to tremble. So it was a horrifying and a very political symbol.Imagine now, this is centuries’ worth of the experience of being in the Roman Empire. This is what has been the instrument of torture and death for everybody—except the Christians. For Christians, of course, this now takes on a new meaning. This takes on a new resonance because the cross, this instrument of torture, fear, death, and oppression, becomes for the Christians, because of what Jesus accomplishes on the cross, because of not only his death but his resurrection, it becomes a symbol of God’s power over death, of God’s mercy as he reaches out to us, of God’s love as he embraces us. He stretches out his hands in the person of his Son to embrace us and the whole world by offering us his mercy.The other aspect of the Christian experience up until that point, when the Empress Helen found the precious cross, was one of torture and death. If you hang around here on Saturday evenings, you’ll hear the reading of the lives of the saints, and you’ll hear over and over and over again just how many of them were tortured and died for the faith. Jesus himself prepares his disciples for this. Just before the bit that we read, he says to his disciples, If the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet, because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for my name’s sake, because they do not know him who sent me. And he goes on to say, “If they’ve done this to me, they will do even worse to you.”And again, that prophecy was fulfilled. His disciples, generation upon generation, were tortured and suffered and died for the gospel. But the strange thing was that no matter what the Romans did, they couldn’t seem to stamp this Christianity out. In fact, it was really weird. Christians would go singing to their deaths. The people looking on would be inspired by this, and some of them would stand up and say, “I too want to be a Christian.” This is obviously the best-case scenario. There were also horrible worst-case scenarios where people who professed to be Christians were taken and left the faith at the very last minute because they couldn’t face the suffering and the death that was in store for them.But Jesus is clear, and the apostles are clear, that those who persevere to the end will be saved. You need to be ready to die for what you believe. If it is the truth, if it is indeed the source of eternal life, you need to be ready to lay down your life no matter what torture comes, and persevere in that until the end, because the only thing worth living for, and therefore the only thing worth dying for, is the Truth—the truth that at the heart of the universe is a God of love.So, after generation upon generation of suffering, torture, and death at the hands of the authorities, at the hands of those who ran the empire in which they lived, all of a sudden you had this emperor who came along and first proclaimed an edict of toleration and then began to show his favor to the church. Then his mother came to the Holy Land, seeking out the places that Jesus had walked, and been born, and died, and raised again. She even commissioned one of the first archaeological digs as she learned that this cross had been buried, but people knew where it was. And they took the cross out from where it had lain and found it to be life-giving. They raised it up. She raises it up. The mother of the emperor of Rome raises up the cross and honors it. This could only be a miracle. This could only be the hand of God at work. This could only be the fulfillment of prophecy. And so, the Christians rejoiced and continued rejoicing every year over this amazing work of God.I’ve said often that I feel like we are living in a time that’s maybe parallel to those early years in the Roman Empire. Admittedly, it’s probably kind of hyperbolic. Most of us are not getting killed and tortured for what we believe. It happens. It happens quite frequently over in Egypt, and occasionally we face something like this here. But this should not be a surprise to us. As Jesus said, he has chosen us out of the world. If we were of the world, then the world would love us, but we’ve come out of this world system into the light of the Gospel, and therefore we are considered a threat: potentially hateful, obviously wrong, and dangerous to the existing order of things. And so, yeah, it’s not surprising that they would not like us very much. We should not be surprised.That being said, if we are going to suffer for the sake of the Gospel, we have to be very careful about how we do that. Yeah, sure, it would be great to live in a time when the country was at least theoretically Christian again. We had a time like that: it was problematic, but our laws were kind of informed by the Christian faith, and most of the people considered themselves Christians, at least nominally, and went to church occasionally. That was nice. That was great. We’re not there now, and it would be nice if that came back. But really, we have to think about how is it to come back? We have to be very careful about how we think about that.When Jesus was before Pilate, what does he say? When Pilate asks him, “Are you a king?” Jesus says to him, “Well, you said it.” But then he goes on to say, “But my kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would take up arms and fight for me.” And Pilate knows this stuff. There’s all sorts of insurrection. That’s why Pilate gets sent to this horrible backwater, and he’s not happy to be there, because there are all these insurrections. The Jews keep rebelling, and some guy named Theudas not too long ago rose up with 400 men and was put down in this bloody revolt. This happens over and over again. So when Jesus is saying this, it’s not some kind of abstract concept. No, no, this is exactly what’s happening. But he says, “My followers are not like this. This is not what we do because the kingdom that we belong to is not of this world.”And so, as we celebrate the cross, as we, at the end of this service, fall down in adoration before it, singing, “Before your cross we bow down in worship, and your holy resurrection we glorify,” we need to remember a couple of things. The first thing is when Christ calls us to follow him, what does he call us to do? To take up our cross daily and follow him. What does that mean? Well, it means we have to be ready to die, of course. But it also means that the way that we are living is the way of the cross, is the way that Jesus manifested himself and his love to us on the cross. We do not live, we cannot live for ourselves any longer. We must die to ourselves on a daily basis.So, as we prostrate before the cross, if that’s going to mean anything, that means we have to be like the one who is up on the cross, praying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Caring for those whom he saw at the foot of the cross: he sees his mother and says to the disciple whom he loves, “Behold your mother,” and says to his mother, “Behold your son,” making sure that she would be taken care of. Even in that extremity of death, our Lord was looking out for others. If we are to be his true disciples, we must do the same. And if we are to manifest what he manifested on the cross, we must manifest love even to—especially to—those who seem to be our enemy, because the way that God works: the way that he works salvation in the midst of the earth, is to make us, formerly his enemies, his friends.This is what he calls us to do, so that if, by God’s grace, we have the blessing to be actual martyrs one day, we will be prepared and we will have prepared ourselves and our hearts by being defined so
It is the way that things transpire afterwards that reveals the true significance of events; it is in retrospect that we see the hand of God. And where we see the hand of God and how we understand it is often in and through ordinary things: the birth of a baby girl, stepping across a threshold for the first time, getting clean by immersing ourselves in water, the movement of trees in the wind. We see this as we look at the context of John 3:16, as Jesus reminds Nicodemus of that which he already knows and adds to the knowledge through that which is entirely ordinary: in order to become a member of the people of God, washing with water is necessary, but a work of the Spirit of God must also occur, even if it be as invisible as the wind. This is the spiritual rebirth into a new reality needed to enter this new and lasting spiritual life; this is why and how we must be born again in order to become members of the people of God (the ekklesia) and thus enter into the kingdom of God. And this healing is ultimately to be effected by the same means that Nicodemus and any other Jew already knew: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness for the healing of the people of God and those who looked to it and saw the provision of God were healed, even so, in order for heaven and earth to meet and for the people of God to be able to look up, believe, and be healed of their sins—even so, the Son of Man must be lifted up. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.Scripture readings referenced:* John 3:1-17 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
Forgiveness is hard. It’s not just hard for us—it has been a human problem all the way back. Today’s gospel reading was occasioned by a conversation about forgiveness. Peter says to Jesus just before he tells this parable, “Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother? Seven times?” Wow, he’s doing well, right? Not just once, but seven times. And Jesus, of course, responds, “No, not seven times, but seventy times seven.” And I don’t think he means work out the math and keep track. Then he tells this parable.This parable is, I think, one of the greatest tools in our spiritual arsenal for figuring out how to forgive. I do want to make one comment, though, about the nature of the story. In the parable, it’s a king, but we all know who the king is supposed to represent. And yet, of course, at the very end of the parable the king delivers the servant over to the torturers until every last cent of what he owes is paid. He seems like a pretty strict guy.It’s actually kind of interesting. If you look through the parables Jesus tells, when a character represents God, it’s not infrequent that God comes off as pretty strict, harsh, and even scary. Think about the parable of the talents, where the servant hides his master’s talent. What does he say to him? “Lord, I knew that you were a hard man, reaping where you have not sown.” Or take the parable of the unjust judge. If you’re tracking who God is in that parable, he would be the unjust judge. I sometimes wonder if Jesus is having a bit of fun with us, because as human beings our biggest struggle is that we tend to think of God as harsh, unjust, maybe even terrifying—if he exists at all. Some might even prefer he didn’t exist, because that would feel easier.It could also simply be that the Jews of the time had a very strong sense—drilled into them over many generations—of God’s power, justice, and even arbitrariness. Yet they also held a deep understanding of his goodness. Perhaps Jesus was playing with that tension. But whatever the case, the king in this parable wants to settle accounts, and he has a servant brought forward who owes him ten thousand talents. That’s obviously an ancient measurement we don’t use anymore. For perspective, one commentary notes that in 4 BC the total taxes collected in Judea, Samaria, and Idumea combined was six hundred talents. So this is a debt on the level of a nation-state.There is simply no way the servant could pay it back. Yet he falls at his master’s feet and says, “Be patient with me and I will pay you all.” It’s absurd—he never could. And so he’s in danger of being sold into slavery with his wife and children. But the king forgives him. This is the real revelation of God’s character. If Jesus is playing with our assumptions about God, we tend to assume that God is not only big and scary and perhaps kind of arbitrary, but also unforgiving. He has this law that he wants us to keep. And we have a debt according to that law, and we must pay it off no matter what. We'll be sold into slavery or thrown into prison or handed over to the torturers.But what does the king do here? He forgives his servant the entire debt—all ten thousand talents.So the servant goes away presumably very happy—like he dodged a bullet. But then he finds a fellow servant who owes him one hundred denarii. For context, one denarius was a day’s wage, so this was significant—maybe equivalent to about $10,000 today. His fellow servant begs him (and this is sounding familiar…), “Be patient with me and I will pay you.” Now, this is a debt that he could actually pay: it's within human ability to pay something like this. It might be a stretch, and it might take a while, but it would be something that he could do. But the forgiven servant refuses, demanding payment, and throws him into prison.Now this is where I usually point out—and I will point it out again—this is the biggest and most important weapon in our arsenal as we struggle with forgiveness. Because we can look at this and just see how stupid it is—how irrational and how dumb this servant is, what an ungrateful wretch he is. And, as soon as we manage to get to that realization (which hopefully isn't too hard), we need to then turn that inward and look at ourselves.Have we gotten angry with somebody?Have we got a grudge against somebody?Has somebody hurt us?It might be a very significant hurt, one that would take a very long time to repay, even if there was a willingness to repay.But how often is our response exactly like that servant's response?But today I want to go on and note there are other people in this parable. And that's actually kind of significant. Because, you know, it's not usually just God and me and the guy who was offended. All sin takes place in a context. And generally speaking, it's in the context of a community, in a context of relationships. There are other people who are involved.And one of the things I've often said is how dangerous it is to take offense on another person's behalf. This is really dangerous. Don't do it! That person on whose behalf you are taking offence might end up forgiving the person who has done them the wrong. And then you still are hanging on to the other person’s hurt for dear life, while the person who has been hurt is now fine, having forgiven. They're reconciled and you're left stewing.So, it's interesting to see, given this context of relationship, that there are fellow servants involved here. And the fellow servants hear about this incident. They've heard about both incidents, actually. They've heard about the generosity and the forgiveness of the king and how this person's been forgiven this completely unrepayable debt. And they also heard about this, what the servant then did to its fellow servant.And what do they do?Do they go and they tell everybody about it and gossip and maybe even go up and confront the servant?No, they don't do any of that.It's actually kind of interesting because that is our tendency if we're honest, right?We want to set things right. We want to make sure everybody knows what was wrong. That they shouldn't do that.But, that's actually not what they do.They go to the king, and they tell the king about it.And then the king deals with it, with the very harshness that we actually have come to expect.This, I think, is our greatest tool for forgiveness. Forgiveness is a process. It’s hard. It takes time, patience, and energy—like paying off a huge debt. But it’s also important to get the channels of communication right. Where do we go when we see wrongdoing, injustice, or sin? We go to the King. Tell him about it. He will deal with it.And as I say, I think Jesus is having a bit of fun here with our understanding—or, perhaps I should say, misunderstanding of God. I mean, how do we understand God?His ways are higher than our ways. He is the one who governs the entire universe. There's no way we can understand really what his goodness is like.We can come to some understanding of God through analogies, but when we start to evaluate God's righteousness or his goodness according to what a human being should do, we're just not qualified to judge him in his divine goodness.But we should know that already. He's the creator and sustainer of the entire universe. Of course, he's beyond us. And the laws of the universe—even the spiritual laws that he has laid down—are immutable, and, in that sense, they tend to be pretty harsh.But the good news is that the ultimate revelation that we have of his character is that he forgives.Yes, he will also make sure that justice is done. That is important too. Because otherwise, we end up trying to take justice into our own hands and become a whole bunch of vigilantes running around hurting and killing one another. And that is not a good scene.That's why God says, “Vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord,” as the Apostle Paul quotes in Romans chapter 12.So, leave judgment in the hands of the one who is qualified to judge the universe because he is the one who created and maintains it and who knows the secrets of men's hearts.And when you see injustice, when you see wrongdoing being done, when you see sin that is maybe not being done against you, cry out to him.He will do something about it.But also, and again I want to bring us back to this tool in our toolbox.Remember, as we fall down before him, as the chief of sinners, saying ,“Be patient with me and I will pay you everything” to the King of the universe:* He is patient.* He is loving.* And he extends that love and mercy to us.And the only expectation really that he has of us is that we then turn around and extend what we have freely received and freely give that same love and mercy to those around us, that our actions in this matter, that our forgiveness in this matter, that our love in this matter may mirror his.That we might be to his glory, the glory of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit. Now and ever unto ages of ages. Amen.Scripture readings referenced:* Matthew 17:14-23* Romans 12:19-21 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
A baptismal homily after TransfigurationOur Lord, as he comes down from the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James, and John, comes face to face with his disciples’ failure. He heals the epileptic boy by casting out the demon they could not, then explains to them that “this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.” While it’s not clear why the disciples were not able to cast out this particular demon and heal the boy, it seems likely that their faith failed, in this case, because they felt abandoned by Jesus—as they had when Jesus was asleep in the boat. In that case, as in this, he rebukes them for their lack of faith. But, of course, they were not abandoned by him: he showed up, and got up, and came down precisely when they needed him to, as he always does, and saved the day, the boy, and them—as he does with us. Which is why we need to and ought to fast and pray and have faith in his presence and in his love for us.Scripture readings referenced:* Matthew 17:14-23* Matthew 8:23-27 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
Mary, the Theotokos, represents, for us, who we are called to be, in Christ, and the feast of her “falling asleep”, in which we commemorate her death and her physical resurrection from the dead and her exaltation by her son, shows us our own corporate destiny in Christ. Mary is, for us, the new Eve, and her perfect response to God—her yes, where Eve said “no” to God, her listening where Eve failed to listen, and her treasuring of God’s gift which Eve failed to treasure—allows her to become the vessel by which God brings new life and salvation into the world, and establishes the example by which we are to do the same.I must also note here my debt, in this homily, to Hilary White’s recent article on Eastern and Western depictions of the Dormition and the Assumption: it’s well worth a read! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
The disciples, like Moses, went up the mountain and saw the glory of God, as far as they could bear it. Like Elijah, they went up the mountain and heard God in His divine humility. They saw the new Adam, shining with uncreated light in His unfallen glory, and they heard Him preparing to enter His true glory: the glory of the revelation of His love for us, revealed when He is lifted up on the cross. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
We tend towards a perception of scarcity and competition—and scarcity is indeed a part of our human experience, as Jesus Himself experienced upon the death of His cousin, John the Baptist. But, even in that condition, Jesus acted out of an abundance of compassion. And He heals and teaches the crowd who came to him, and has his disciples feed them, giving thanks (eucharistically) to God for what little they have and then having his disciples distribute to the crowd even more than they need, putting the people in a position of abundance so they can learn. And the teaching is that we ourselves, as we freely receive an abundance of grace and compassion from God as we give thanks to Him, are to provide for all those around us this same context of abundance, an abundance of love, so we can all learn to love.Scripture readings referenced:* Matthew 14:1-21* Mark 6:31-44* Luke 9:10-17* John 6:1-13 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
Jesus was misjudged as he healed the mute man and just went on healing. He told his disciples that if the world misjudged and treated him as terribly as it was about to, that they (and, by extension, we) should expect even worse.Jesus’ injunctions not to judge imply that what he said to his disciples about not lording it over one another should probably apply to how we deal with one another, and this is exactly what we see spelled out in the writings of the Apostle Paul in Romans 14-15. I find it interesting, being myself someone who, like St. Paul, has been proved dramatically wrong, that it is Paul who spells out so clearly how we are to go about not judging one another: * by respecting the dictates of both our own and others’ consciences, * by being open about the freedoms we have in Christ without leading others to disobey the dictates of their consciences, * by valuing our brothers above the exercise of our own freedoms, * and, above all, by realizing: “Who are you to judge another man’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls, and he will stand, for God is able to make him stand.”We are mostly not qualified to judge which is why, when the Church has to judge, it does so corporately, through the hierarchy. Our primary job is to do our best to ensure that, if we are misjudged, we are, like our Lord, misjudged for doing what is right—and then to keep right on doing what is right, and to keep focussing on loving one another and building one another up, just as we see Jesus doing.Scripture readings referenced:* John 15:17-16:2* Romans 14:1-15:7* Matthew 9:27-35* Psalm 69:9 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
We tend to forget that, if we are the people of God, the prophets are speaking to—and generally correcting—us. This is why Jesus reminds his hometown hearers, at the beginning of his public ministry, that the ones who received the word of the prophet and were fed and healed were not the people of God, but the Sidonite widow, who responded to Elijah’s word with faith, and Naaman the Syrian general, who ultimately responded to Elisha’s word with humility.Scripture readings referenced:* Luke 4:14-30* Isaiah 61:1-2a* I Kings 17:8-16* II Kings 5:1-14Inspired, in part, by my grandfather’s poem, “He Closed the Book”. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
The Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, very different people, set an example for us, in their disagreement, on the importance of and how we ought to respond to speaking the truth in love: Saint Paul illustrates for us the importance of speaking the truth, while Saint Peter illustrates for us the importance of humbly receiving a life-giving rebuke (Proverbs 15:31)—both are necessary for us to grow up into the unity to which we are called, as members of the body of Christ.Scripture readings referenced:Official lectionary:* Matthew 16:13-19* II Corinthians 11:21-12:9Fr. Justin’s lectionary:* Galatians 2:11-14* II Peter 3:14-16* Ephesians 4:11-16 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. (Philippians 3:17)The glorification of Righteous Mother Olga of Kwethluk, Alaska, reveals to us (as do the lives of all the saints) that holiness is attainable through the simple acts of love which God gives us the opportunity to do in whatever walk of life to which He has called us—and through the repentance and the joyful response to suffering which Christ sets before us. And that those who are being made saints are already among us, to honour and to follow, as they follow Christ.Scripture readings referenced:* Matthew 4:18-23* Matthew 4:25-5:12Children’s book on St. Olga referenced: https://stjohnofshanghai.org/resources/StOlgaOfAlaskaBook.pdfLife of the Righteous Mother Olga of Kwethluk—Tanqilria Arrsamquq—Wonderworker, Matushka of All Alaska: https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2025/10/27/100561-righteous-mother-olga-of-kwethluktanqilria-arrsamquqwonderworkerErratum: Holy Matushka Olga died in 1979, not 1978. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)If we start with the understanding that God is good (Hebrews 11:6) and follow the example of Christ, focusing on our heavenly reward, the joy of being with our Creator, we will be able to take up our cross daily, as Christ calls us to (Luke 9:23). This is how we acquire the Holy Spirit, as St. Seraphim of Sarov put it, that we—together with thousands around us—may be saved.Scripture readings referenced:* Hebrews 11:33-12:2* Matthew 10:32-33, 37-38, 19:27-30 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
We were a few more at that first liturgy than just the fourteen from St. Herman’s who were sent out to start St. John’s because of the love and support of others who joined us for that first Pentecostal celebration. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
A look at how the Mosaic tradition of appointing elders to judge the people found its fulfillment in the First Ecumenical Council at NiceaNote: I mention the Donatists, but, while I may have implied that the Church ultimately ruled that they were in the wrong, I’m not sure I made it explicit enough that their schism was condemned by the council that Constantine convened as a lack of love and in contravention of Christ’s teachings about repentance and forgiveness.Scripture readings referenced:* Genesis 14:14-20* Deuteronomy 1:8-11, 15-17* Acts 20:16-18, 28-36* John 17:1-13 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com