In the Name of the Father, and of the son and of the Holy Spirit
My dear Father, brothers and sisters: Happy Feast!
In today’s resurrectional Gospel reading from chapter 17 we are a few chapters further on from chapter 14’s story of the disciples on the sea of Galilee which we heard last Sunday. Peter, James and John had just witnessed the miracle of the Lord’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, the feast which we will celebrate this coming Monday evening and Tuesday, where the Lord’s whole body and radiated with the Uncreated Light of the Godhead, and were coming down dazzled and amazed at what they had just experienced. At the bottom of the domed hill of Mount Tabor, the Lord with three of his disciples encounter a crowd of people and in their midst they come across the father of a child who is possessed with a demon that could not be driven out by the Lord’s remaining nine disciples. To interpret today’s Gospel let us turn to our holy Father St Hilary of Poitiers.
St Hilary focuses his commentary on this passage on the Lord’s rebuke of His disciples’ inability to heal the demon-possessed son.
Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me. And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was cured from that very hour.
This rebuke of our Lord was directed at both His disciples and the crowd that had surrounded them. It is a rare moment of exasperation but also an accurate reflection of the poverty of faith that He saw. The whole Gospel of Matthew up to point has been action-packed with miracle after miracle, healing after healing, exorcism after exorcism. He has walked on water; controlled the elements; miraculously created food to feed 5000; healed the blind, healed lepers … yet still people can’t see Who it is that has visited them. In his commentary, St Hilary says –
Though the apostles believed, their faith was not yet perfect. While the Lord had been on the mountain, they themselves were sitting with the crowd, and a kind of a torpor had weakned their faith. In His absence, their ancient habit of unbelief had stolen upon them.
St Hilary sees that the disciples had become rather vulnerable whilst the Lord had been apart from them on the mountain. Later he even compares this to the vulnerability of the people of Israel when Moses was on the mountain and came down to find the people worshipping a golden calf. During that time away from them, the disciples had perhaps become influenced and immersed in the crowd, in wordliness. They had forgotten that to them had been given the “secret of the kingdom of God”. Just like when Peter took his eyes off Christ and then started to sink, and to doubt, so too, when the disciples took the gaze of their heart from Christ, they too started to sink, to despair and to doubt.
But my dear brothers and sisters, this is not only an abstract story in the ancient Holy Gospels. No, we can also see all this within ourselves. Today Christ does not only rebuke the disciples, and their generation – He also rebukes us and our ungodly generation. For like the disciples, we too behold miracles, see Myrrh dripping off wonderworking ikons, have received countless blessings and little miraculous signs of God’s presence and grace in our own lives. We too have received the priceless riches of the Orthodox faith, have had our sins forgiven and each week behold the bread and wine on the Altar become the Precious Body and Blood of Christ … and yet, we too fail to believe. We too leave the hallowed walls of the Church, where everything makes sense, and our faith seems stronger, and then return back to our homes, neighbourhoods and secular jobs, we return back to the crowd, back to the world. How quickly we can lose our faith, lose our connection to Christ and find ourselves talking, thinking like someone that has no faith. We start to become indistinguishable from the unbelieving crowd.
Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out? And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.
This passage of casting mountains into the sea has always been a difficult one to interpret literally. In his commentary St Hilary offers a spiritual or allegorical interpretation –
He declared that He Himself was like the smallest of all seeds, the mustard seed, referring to the devil as a “mountain” because evil spirits and heavenly powers are found on its heights. He must be ejected and hurled into the depths of the sea, even to the bottom of hell, this will be done through those who pray and fast for this result.
As we begin this present Dormition Fast let us also embrace these unworldly disciplines of fasting and prayer. Let us lose our usual gourmandianism – our habitual obsession with our bellies and with tasty food or in my case sweets, chocolate, cakes and pastries. May the strictness of the current fast help us not merely to diet, but to have more time to pray, more spare money to give alms, more time to read spiritual things and to do good works. If we can unite our fasting with prayer and our prayer with fasting, then we will truly cast the mountains into the sea, and behold the impossible become possible.
Our Gospel then ends with a final prophetic Word from our Saviour as he speaks of His future suffering and resurrection –
And while they abode in Galilee, Jesus said unto them, The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of men: And they shall kill him, and the third day he shall be raised again. And they were exceeding sorry.
Again though our Saviour speaks of the Cross and the Resurrection and the disciples don’t embrace the whole of the Mystery, do not understand or believe what our Lord is saying. St Hilary says –
A sadness follows the acknowledgement of his passion, the sacrament of the cross … had not yet been revealed by the power of the Resurrection.
The disciples only seemed to embrace one side of this Mystery – the Cross – without also hearing the other side – the Resurrection. Today we celebrate the Feast of the Seven Youths or Sleepers of Ephesus where our Lord allowed a miraculous sleep to fall upon the seven young men from Ephesus who were being persecuted for being Christians in the Decian persecution of the 3rd century. They then awoke from this supernatural sleep after 200 years and found that they were in the now-Christian empire of St Theodosius the Younger. However, even in these Christian times, well after the legalization of Christianity its promulgation as the official religion of the State, Christians were doubting the truth of the resurrection. These seven youths became as Apostles of the Truth of the Resurrection and awakened from sleep the Christians who had dared to doubt the central Truth of our Christian Faith.
Dear Father, brothers and sisters – let us not fall into sleep-walk of secularism, let us not be conditioned by the unbelieving world that surrounds us but think, believe and live as true Christians worthy of our name and our calling. To end my homily today I would like to quote from the beautiful letter to Diognetus:
“Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not theirwives.
They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians,not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world isheld together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.”
Amen.