Second Sunday of Great Lent
Hebrews 1.10-23
Mark 2.1-12
This Second Sunday of Great Lent commemorates what we call the Second Triumph of Orthodoxy. We honor St Gregory Palamas [14th C] who defended the Church’s biblical doctrine of salvation as theosis – God becoming man by nature that man might become God by grace [Jn 1.12-14] – against what had become by that time the Latin doctrine of the Holy Trinity and of Christ that denies the biblical revelation: having been created as icons in the Icon of the invisible God, Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, our natural destiny is to become one with God, born of the Spirit of God from above as children of God, i.e., deified in the Son of God who was humanified as the Son of Man through the Holy Virgin.
God became man that man might become a communicant of the divine nature [2Pt 1.4] by partaking of the flesh and blood Body of Jesus Christ [Heb 3.14], the Son of God begotten of the Father, not made, and in whom and by whom all things were created. The LORD Jesus Christ is the True Light coming into the world. It’s in the Church that is in truth the very Body of Christ risen from the dead that we are granted to draw near in the fear of God, with faith and in love, to receive the Light of Christ that is the Life of men, the Life that is the Heavenly Spirit of God in the Body and Blood of the incarnate God. Partaking of Christ in the Church’s Holy Eucharist, we receive the Heavenly Spirit and we become ‘living souls.’
Let’s remember where we are mystically in these six weeks of Great Lent as revealed to us in the daily assigned Scripture readings of the Lenten Triodion. From our reading in St Luke on the Thurs before Great Lent began, we are given to see that, mystically, we are with the Myrrhbearing women. They are leading us on a descent into the stillness of the LORD’ Sabbath Rest and to the tomb of Lazarus, where Great Lent ends. Through the Myrrhbearers, the Church is leading us into the tomb of our heart, following St Macarios the Egyptian [Hom 11.11]. We follow the Myrrhbearers on this mystical path into the tomb of our heart by taking up the Cross given to us by the Church in the form of Her ascetical disciplines: prayer and fasting and practicing mercy.
Descending into our heart inwardly through the ascetical disciplines of the Cross given us by the Church, we are fleeing Egypt on the inner Exodus of the Gospel. We are fleeing Egypt and making our way to the Land of our Inheritance in the mystery of the Church, in the Body of Christ risen from the dead.
Inwardly, we are leaving the cities of the world. We have made our homes a mirror of the inner stillness of the LORD’s Sabbath Rest. We have turned off all unnecessary noise so that in our own home we are surrounded by quiet to help us descend into the stillness of our soul. We have given our fingers to opening the pages of the Bible to read the daily assigned Scriptures from Isaiah, Genesis, the Proverbs and the Psalms, the Prayer book of the Church, to opening the books that tell us of the lives of the saints, instead of giving our fingers to scrolling through the ‘screens’ on our phones or laptops.
Meanwhile, in our outer man, we still live in the world. But in our inner man, we have turned the eyes of our mind away from the corruption that is in the world through lust, away from the corruption that is in our body and in our minds, in our thoughts and imaginations, through our lust. We have turned our eyes inward, our eyes following the Myrrhbearers into the darkness of our heart that has become a tomb because we are dead in our sins and trespasses. But the spiritual darkness we encounter in our inner man is illumined in the Church by the Light of Christ that illumines all.
The 40 days of Great Lent correspond to the 40 weeks of a baby’s gestation in the womb of its mother. In Lent, we descend into the womb of the Church, the Mother of our God, and into the stillness of the LORD’s Sabbath Rest in the New Tomb hewn out of the rock, in which no one had yet been placed.
Remember, that we began Great Lent standing before the Holy Doors. From the Church’s lectionary, we saw that we were standing invisibly with the Myrrhbearers before the LORD’s Tomb. Remember what they saw. As they observed the Tomb and how His Body, now a corpse, was placed in it, they saw a mystery recorded cryptically by St Luke. ‘It was the Day of Preparation, and the Light of the Sabbath was dawning’ [epefwsken], or: ‘The Light came to rest on the Sabbath’ [Lk 23.54].
What was that Light? It was the Light of Christ that illumines all, the uncreated Light that is the Life of men. And, what is the Sabbath on which this Light emanating from the Tomb in the darkness of Great and Holy Friday evening? The Church Herself tells us at the Divine Liturgy on Great and Holy Saturday: it is the mystical Sabbath Moses was talking about in Gn 2.1-4.
This is the Light of Christ that illumines all. It shines all around us in these 40 days of Great Lent as we are descending mystically with the Myrrhbearing women into the tomb of our heart in the stillness of the LORD’s Sabbath Rest. It is the uncreated Light of Christ’s Holy Resurrection already dawning and already beginning to shine all around us in the stillness of His Sabbath Rest. I wonder if it isn’t that same Light that shone forth from the darkness on Day One of the Creation?
In this Light, if we want to, we can look behind the fig leaves we have wrapped around ourselves and see with our inner eye the sins and trespasses that have made us spiritual corpses, like this morning’s paralytic. This Light of Christ that illumines all shines all around us in the form of the Holy Scriptures the Church sets before us to read each day in Her Daily Lectionary, from Moses, the prophets, the Psalmist, the Proverbs, in the form of Her prayers that She gives us to say at home in any one of Her many Prayer Books, and the prayers of Her divine services, Her Lenten daily Vespers and Matins, the Canon of St Andrew, the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy and all the rest. And in this Light, we see the hope that shines in our darkness, that the darkness cannot extinguish, the real hope that delivers everything it promises and calls out to us with a great voice from the Cross and in front of the tomb of Lazarus, at the door of our heart, ‘Come forth!’ It stirs us to repentance. It is the hope that we see in this morning’s Gospel.
We are the paralytic in this morning’s Gospel. The ascetical disciplines of the Church are the form of the bed in this morning’s Gospel that carries us spiritual paralytics. We can say that the four men carrying us are the prophets, the apostles, the saints and the martyrs. They are following the Myrrhbearing women in a holy and saving procession to the House of the LORD’s Sabbath Rest, to His Tomb that is revealed already to be, from the Light that dawned on it when they placed His Body in it, the Fountain of our Resurrection.
It is the saints, the martyrs, the prophets and apostles, who through their prayers and intercessions open the roof of the House, who roll the stone away and let us down into the presence of the True Light shining in the Glory of His victory over death on us who have become as those who are among the dead. We experience our being let down into the risen LORD’s immediate presence through their prayers, as we descend into the hidden man of our heart through the prayers and corporate worship of the Church.
The goal of our Lenten ‘exodus’, then, is to unite ourselves to Christ in the communion of His saints and martyrs, His prophets, His apostles, in the mystery of His Holy Virgin Mother. That we would unite ourselves to Christ in the fear of God with faith and love and receive the forgiveness of our sins in the outpouring of His Heavenly Spirit to become living souls is what the saints desire for us, as well. For the LORD God who lives in them desires not the death of sinners but that they would turn from their sin and live. St John the Evangelist speaks for all the saints and martyrs, the prophets and the holy apostles, the angels, the Myrrhbearing women: ‘What we have seen and heard we proclaim to you, so that you may have communion with us; and our communion is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We proclaim this to you that you may believe in the Name of Jesus Christ and receive His Heavenly Spirit; for then our joy will be complete in the Resurrection of Christ our God [1Jo 1:3-4]. Amen!
Matthew 21.18-43
Shortly, we will venerate the Icon and sing the beautiful Hymn of Light: ‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; and I have no wedding garment that I may enter! O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’ What is the Bridal Chamber? What is the wedding garment?
Do you know that your Holy Baptism, when you were united to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection, is the Spiritual Marriage of the Church? Raised from the Font, the heavens were opened to you. You were clothed in the Robe of Light, which was Christ Himself. This is the ‘wedding garment.’ When you drew near the Chalice in the fear of God, with faith and love, you partook of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb.
From the moment of your baptism, when heaven was opened to you, have there not been moments in the worship of the Church when the beauty of the Church’s hymns and prayers, the fragrance of her incense, the serene countenance of the holy icons gazing down on you, the spiritual nobility and majesty of the Divine Liturgy, seized your soul and opened to you, if only for an instant, a spiritual Beauty not of this world, and there stirred within you, as it did in Solomon, a visceral love for that Beauty and a longing to make the Wisdom of God your spouse? (Wisd 8.2)
Might this be a vision of the bridal chamber that was opened to you at your baptism?
‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior! And I have no wedding garment that I may enter!’ As Lazarus was clothed in grave clothes, soiled and stinking from his being four days in the tomb, do we not see, if ever a vision of the bridal chamber is opened to us, that we have no wedding garment? Our garments are soiled and stinking grave clothes.
The wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism is Christ the LORD. The LORD, says the Psalmist, is my life and my salvation. And St Paul says, Christ is my life. Christ Himself says to Mary and Martha: I am the Resurrection and the Life.
From this, we can see that the garment is an image of the life we are living; and there are two garments, two lives we may choose to live or choose to put on as we choose to put on a garment. There is the garment of the life of this world that is passing away, sewn with threads of corruption spun from the passions, from the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, from covetousness, which is idolatry. Its patterns and designs are cut out from the lustful thoughts and impure images, the fantasies and desires that occupy the mind.
Then there is the life of Christ, the wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism. If I have no wedding garment that I may enter the sacred bridal chamber of the Heavenly Bridegroom, can you see that it’s because I have given my soul to many husbands; I have chosen Caesar to be my king; I have given myself to the idols of the passions—gluttony, lust, greed, anger and the rest—and that the garments I have chosen to wear are the grave clothes of the corruption that is in the world through lust and covetousness?
‘Despising the divine commands, my soul,’ Mother Church calls out to us at Friday Matins of last week, ‘by thine own choice, thou hast surrendered thyself to corruption. Sunk in slumber through thy many trespasses, thou hast covered with filth the garment that God wove for thee, and made thyself unfit for the wedding of the King. Therefore, cry to the Savior: Tear in pieces my sackcloth and clothe me with gladness.’ (LTS 306)
You have chosen to come to this Bridegroom Matins service. You have chosen to come into the presence of the Bridegroom. You have chosen to draw near the Bridal Chamber; and the Bridegroom comes to us in our filthy grave clothes as He came to Lazarus in Bethany. I think we may say that in the beauty of these Bridegroom Matins, we hear Him crying to each one of us: ‘Come forth!’ Rouse yourself in the tomb of your heart. Hear, feel, the Bridegroom’s voice calling to you. Leave the grave clothes, the garment of this worldly life behind you. What keeps us from putting on the garment of the Savior’s divine commandments? Is it not our own choice to keep wearing the grave clothes of this life? I love those who love me, says the Bridegroom. Those who seek me diligently will find me! Nothing prevents us from choosing to heed the Bridegroom’s call, to rise up and come forth in the repentance of a broken and contrite heart, that the Bridegroom may illumine the vesture of our soul and save us and receive us, clothed again in the wedding garment of our baptism, into the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Resurrection. Amen!
Behold the Bridegroom comes at Midnight!’ Midnight is that ‘instant’ when, ‘in the twinkling of an eye,’ (1 Cor 15.52) the old passes away and the ‘dead are raised incorruptible, and we are changed.’ This change doesn’t just happen. It happens because the Bridegroom comes at Midnight and consummates His union with us, the children of flesh and blood, in the ‘bridal chamber.’ But the Church shows the Bridegroom consummating His union with us in the tomb. For there, having shared in our conception and birth through His Virgin Mother (Gal 4.4), He now shares in our death (Heb 2.14) in the flesh He received from Her, and it is in that instant that ‘we are changed.’
We find the divine mystery of Midnight, then, in the bridal chamber; and we find the bridal chamber in that ‘point’ in our inner man where we are dead. The bridal chamber, that is to say, is found in our heart, ‘for the real death is within, in the heart, and is concealed, and it is the inner man that perishes.’ [Macarius Hom XV.39, 125]
If the bridal chamber is in the heart, then it is in our true ‘self’; for ‘the heart is deep, beyond all things, and it is the man.’ [Jer 17.9] In the bridal chamber, then, we come upon our true self as the image of God. In this image, we yearn to attain to the likeness of God. And this character of the imago Dei which, as Origen wrote, constitutes our very essence, itself reveals that, by nature, we yearn to be one with the Bridegroom in the bridal chamber of our heart; but if Christ is Himself the Image of God in whom we came to be and in whom we move and have our being, then we are given to see that the bridal chamber of our heart comes to be and has its essence and movement from outside itself, in ekstasis, in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD Jesus Christ our God and Savior.
Illumined by the light of this doctrine of the Church, we begin to know ourselves. We see that the essential movement of our heart is the erotic yearning to belong not to ourselves but to the Bridegroom who comes at Midnight.
And so, when the mind that has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom in its heart learns that the Bridegroom is coming at Midnight, it rouses itself. It hastens to descend into the bridal chamber of the heart to cry out: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, O God! Through the Theotokos, have mercy on me!’ For the soul, if she only knows about God in her head, she is still dead and her heart is still stone. The soul who longs to live is the soul who longs to know God directly; but ‘there is no direct knowledge of God without an exceedingly great love, and such love does not come from the head. It must come from the heart.’ [Art of Prayer 20] And so the soul hastens to descend with her mind into the bridal chamber of her heart, for she longs to receive Him and to cleave to Him, to become bone of His bones and flesh of His flesh, so that it is no longer she who lives but the Bridegroom who lives in her.
And the Bridegroom comes. He comes to us in our own flesh and blood through the woman [Gal 4.4]. He comes to us in the Bridal Chamber of the All-Holy Virgin’s sacred womb, in the inmost sanctuary of His Living Temple. Knitting Her pure blood into the ‘schema,’ the ‘garment’ of man [Phil 2.8], He clothed Himself in our flesh and blood and was no more ashamed to call us ‘brethren.’ [Heb 2.11]
And when the soul darkened and weighed down by her many sins, learns that He has come into the ‘house’ [Lk 7.37ff.] of her own flesh and blood [Heb 2.14], she comes to Him with an alabaster jar of perfume, and she stands behind Him weeping. She wets His pure feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair. She kisses them, she pours perfume on them, and through her tears, she prays to Him softly: ‘Thy bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; but I have no wedding garment that I may enter. O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’
And the Savior, ‘spellbound as it were by goodness, love and longing, relinquishes His utter transcendence’ [St Maximos Philo 281] to the point of death on the Cross. Partaking of our death, the Bridegroom breathes out His Spirit on the Cross [exepneusen, Lk 23.46] and destroys the death that separated us from His love in the bridal chamber of our heart;’ [Heb 2.14-15, Rom 8.39]. His Body was ‘placed in the tomb,’ the Tomb was ‘changed’ into the Bridal Chamber, ‘and the Sabbath dawned,’ says St Luke [epephosken, Lk 23.54]. And in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD’s Tomb, the soul was enlightened, and the heart that before was a tomb sealed off by a stone was ‘changed’ in that instant into a bridal chamber and into a heart of flesh, a living heart!
The wedding garment? It is Christ Himself, whose Light we put on when we were raised from the Font, having united ourselves to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection. Can you see, then, that the Baptismal Font is the bridal chamber? And can you see that the Bridal Chamber is the Church? For the Church is Christ’s Body that He received from the pure blood of the Virgin, and in this Body, we are fashioned anew as children of God in the mystery of His Sabbath Rest, in the Tomb of our death that has received the Body of Him Who Is the Resurrection and the Life. When we pursue the Bridegroom in the baptismal Font, we receive His Seed into our dead, stony heart, and in that instant, our heart is ‘changed’ into a heart of flesh, a living heart; and we are ‘changed’ from children of blood born of the desires of the flesh into children of God born from above in the Love of the Holy Spirit.
From an ancient Christian text, we come upon this ancient biblical rubric of the Church: ‘By striving in the visible Church, we enter the invisible Church of the heart and the invisible Church of Heaven.’ (Liber Graduum XII) In the coming week, on the loom of this biblical rubric, we will weave the sights, sounds, movements, smells, all the elements of creation, both visible and invisible, into a wedding garment that can be seen, heard, smelled, and touched with the bodily senses. Who would not want to be clothed in this wedding garment who has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom? For ‘He is the Beautiful and the Good whom all things seek at every opportunity, and there is no being who does not participate in Him, and He attracts the [erotic] desire of all who are drawn towards Him, and He thirsts to be thirsted for, He longs to be longed for, and He loves to be loved!’ [Philo II 280-81]
And if we would clothe the hidden man of the heart with the death of Christ made visible for us in the rites of Holy Week, then would we come invisibly into that ‘Midnight’ when the Bridegroom comes, and we are changed. We become like the children with the palms of victory. They are the emblems of the Cross of Christ our King. And on Pascha Night, we follow, mystically, our King who goes forth from the Tomb like a Bridegroom in procession. He is raising us from our graves and bringing us to our own land into the Jerusalem on high as His prophets foretold. [Eze 37.13-14]
For, if we have received into the bridal chamber of our heart, in the sacramental mysteries of the Church, the Seed of the ‘heavenly man,’ then we carry the Bridegroom’s death in our mortal body. [2 Cor 4.10] That is, we carry the Bridegroom’s love in our body—for His death is the supreme manifestation, the final Incarnation of His extreme humility and compassion in which He created the world, and in which He recreated it when we had fallen. And if we tend that Seed and cultivate it through the ascetical disciplines of the Church, the Cross of Christ the Church gives us to take up if we want to follow Him—for they are the ‘flower of abstinence that grows from the wood of His Cross’ [LT 231]—then yearning for the Bridegroom begins to grow in us into a tree of life, and love for the Bridegroom begins to reign in our mortal bodies. We tend that Seed by taking up the ascetical disciplines of the Church, our cross, our ‘palm of victory.’ By the Grace of the Holy Spirit that shines in them, we strive to be obedient to sin and its carnal desires no more. We strive to lose our life for His sake; that is, in our love for the Bridegroom, we now present our bodies to Him as instruments of righteousness and no more to sin as instruments of unrighteousness. [Rm 6.12-13] Now the Bridegroom’s death is swallowing our death; now our mortal and perishable bodies are putting on the immortal and imperishable ‘wedding garment’ of the Bridal Chamber; now the Life of the Bridegroom begins to manifest itself even now in our mortal bodies [2 Cor 4.10]. It manifests itself in the hope that begins to form in us from the Seed of God’s love poured out into our hearts in the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Church. This is a real and living hope; and it is the pledge of our inheritance, which is our own land that is not of this world. It is the kingdom of heaven with all its glorious riches, found through the doors of Midnight in the deep, beyond all things, in our deep heart, in the mystery of the bridal chamber. Amen!
