5th Sunday in Great Lent
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
It is a good thing for us to pay attention to what we just heard in the Gospel reading today, not only in the context of itself, but also in the context of what is coming, and how human beings are. Today, our Saviour is telling the apostles precisely what would be coming. He is preparing them by telling them that He would be crucified, that He would die, and also that He would rise again from the dead.
In two short weeks, we are going to be hearing about how the disciples, when Jesus Christ rose from the dead, could not comprehend it, did not expect it, did not know what was happening, and could hardly believe it. Of course, we understand now. However, at that time, resurrection was unheard of. It is not as though they had not been told before, and it is not as though they had not been prepared by our Saviour Himself, that this would happen. Yet, their fallen human experience was so limited that they could not comprehend it. It is not even a question of doubting. It is plain, simple, non-comprehension. The apostles could only comprehend it when they encountered Jesus Christ, face-to-face, risen from the dead. Even then they could not really comprehend it, but they began to make a step in that direction, anyway. During the rest of their lives, they began to live out precisely what are the implications of this Resurrection.
Two of the apostles asked our Saviour if they could sit, one on His right, and one on His left, when He comes in glory. He responded that instead, they would have to be baptised with the baptism with which He would be baptised, and drink the cup that He would drink. When they said that they would be able to do this, they did not know what they were saying. Nevertheless, it came to be. He said that He, the Saviour, the Son of God, did not come to be served. He came to serve. It is in this way that the apostles grew up after the Resurrection. They grew up as servants of Jesus Christ, serving together with Him.
This is the way of Christ – to serve, to be the servant of all. Being a servant in this context is not something that is slavish. It is not something that is done because of fear, since nothing for a Christian should be done out of fear. It is done because of love. We Christians serve. We serve Christ. We serve each other. We serve strangers. We serve the needy. We serve whomever the Lord gives us to serve because we love Jesus Christ. His love propels us into serving in our daily life. One could say that to serve, to try to be of service, is second nature for a Christian. Even if we are compelled to serve, even if we are indentured to serve, the Christian way is, as the Apostle Paul demonstrates to us, that we serve the Master and obey the Master with the love of Christ. We do this, despite any possible maltreatment by a master. Indeed, a harbinger of this behaviour was the Patriarch Joseph before he rose in the court of the Pharaoh.
All sorts of pop psychologists are going to say that if we are busy trying to help people all the time, that is because there is some sort of interior hurt that comes from our childhood and that needs fixing up. They say that we are always trying to help people because we have been bruised ourselves in our childhood, or something like that. There are various theories that are applied one way or another in psychology. Well, when it comes down to it, it is just as well that people might think that we are cracked. I admit it myself, on a regular basis, if you have not noticed. When people ask me : “How are you ?” I say : “I am cracked”. Well, I hope that I am mostly cracked in Christ, but probably there are some other things as well that the Lord is still working on. It does not matter, though, if the world thinks we are cracked, because the way of the Christian is not the way of the world. The way of the world is all focussed on “me” : “I am number one”. “Make me comfortable in this world”. “Let us get as much as we can”. “Let us fill up our barns with wheat (as in the parable the Lord told), and then die bitter”.
That is not the way of Christ. The way of Christ is all love. It is all hope. It is all life. It is life-giving. It is service, because this service that we do in Christ, for Christ, in and with each other, is all part of the same life-giving work. It is all life-giving. It is all because of love, filled with joy. It is true that we get tired (and sometimes cranky) because we get overworked. Still, the fundamental of it all is that we are loving Jesus Christ. We are in love with Jesus Christ, and in this love we want to serve. We look for every occasion to serve, to be helpful, to encourage, to strengthen people around us.
It is that sort of love that I have been blessed in my life a number of times to experience simply by being near it. I have never been near anyone so fiery as Saint Seraphim, for instance, and some other saints like him ; but I have been near several holy persons in the course of my life. Just being next to them can give us a strange combination of a sense of intensity of love for Jesus Christ, a real energy, and at the same time, a great peace – great peace. This is peace greater than we can encounter anywhere else, except sometimes, perhaps, here in the Temple of the Lord together with each other. Perhaps once in a while we may have this moment, this sense of peace in prayer. However, in the presence of such a person, the love of God, the peace and the joy all together are so intense that it is overwhelming. This is how we all ought to grow up and become. There is still time for us all to make steps in that direction.
We cannot on this day omit mentioning Saint Mary of Egypt because she is for us such a great example of what is the meaning of repentance. Repentance means simply to turn about (a 180 degree turn) : turn about from darkness, turn to the light ; turn about from death, turn to life ; turn about from selfishness, turn to love. Saint Mary of Egypt, as we hear in her Life, lived an extremely broken life in which with delight she was pulling people down with her into despair. Yet her heart was searching. When she was confronted by the Lord’s love in Jerusalem, in the Temple of the Resurrection, she did, in fact, turn about completely. Then she gave herself up 100 per-cent to serving Jesus Christ, in love with Him, so much so that she withdrew into the desert. She was not seen or heard of for who knows how long, until Saint Zossima came along to prepare her for her death.
All these things are done and accomplished by the Lord’s love. The Lord prepares you and me, too, for the moments of repentance in our lives, in the same way as Saint Mary of Egypt. He prepares us for great blessings. He is always there, going ahead before us, ready to meet us with His life-giving love. Our responsibility is to be prepared to accept that life-giving love when the Lord presents Himself to us. Our responsibility is, like Saint Mary of Egypt, to turn about from our self-serving to serving Him in everyone, to turn about from loving ourselves and only ourselves, to loving Jesus Christ. Nothing else matters. I become my true self in the context of loving Him.
We have two more weeks in which to focus ourselves in our prayers. We have yet time to concentrate our efforts in abstaining from too much eating (and eating things that it would be better not to eat), and in serving Him and caring for other people. Let us ask the Lord to give us this Grace in the last days of Great Lent, so that when we come to the end of Great Lent and we are celebrating the joy of Pascha, we will be able to encounter the Resurrection with joy and love. The Lord has prepared us for this in the same way that He prepared the apostles for the Resurrection. We will be able to live in the Resurrection during the days after the Resurrection. Through this abstinence, and through the Resurrection, our lives will be straightened to serve Him better in the coming year with more love, more focus, with deeper service, with deeper joy. In doing this we will glorify Him together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.