Holy Repentance leads to Holy Communion.

St. Mary of Egypt
19th century

Our holy mother Mary of Egypt is a glorious example of repentance, and she shows for us, I think, the deep connection that exists between Holy Repentance and Holy Communion.

In her youth, Mary was brazenly impenitent. She was nymphomaniacal, jaded, and profane. For seventeen years in Alexandria, she lived a dissolute and promiscuous life. It is not known how she began to suffer from this “insatiable desire and… irrepressible passion”[i] but I suspect that she had suffered from the sins of others. It is hurt people who hurt people.

Anyway, upon hearing of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and to Jerusalem from her home in Alexandria, Mary resolved to accompany the pilgrims, not as a pilgrim but rather to use them to satisfy her lusts.

By choosing young pilgrims to the Holy Land to be her sexual partners and conquests, Mary heaped evil upon evil. These were people who were trying to repent and experience God and Mary resolves to do her best to distract them from that purpose and to seduce them. She is successful, too, and by prostitution, she pays for her passage to Jerusalem. Beyond even this, she “frequently forced those miserable youths even against their own will [into every] mentionable or unmentionable depravity.” So her sins here are manifold and one sin begets another, just as it does in our own lives.

But the grace of God is all-powerful and God's love for us is not diminished by any of our sins. Mary pays for her passage to Jerusalem with sin, and yet in Jerusalem, despite her own impure intentions, she experiences God. She was “hunting for youths,” but God was hunting for her and “seeking [her] repentance. For He does not desire the death of a sinner.” God brings good out of evil. He does it all the time. Listen to what happens next.

Mary is so jaded and free of compunction for her sins, she is so impenitent about what she has done and is doing that, following everyone else, she marches right up to the doors of the Church of the Anastasis – the place of Christ's resurrection – the Holy Sepulchre – and intends to go in among the pilgrims as if she is one of them – though in her heart there is no piety or fear of God – she is following the crowds for her usual reasons.

God sees through our masks – straight into our hearts. There is nothing Jesus hates more than our hypocrisy. He condemns it again and again with vivid language. We are whitewashed tombs (cf. Matt 23:27). Don't say, “Oh, he's only talking about the Pharisees, not me.” Don't look at Mary's sins and say, “Thank God I am not like her.” Let us remember our own sins and repent of them like the publican (cf. Luke 18:11).

God – who is not mocked and is not fooled by our pretensions – sees Mary coming (cf. Gal 6:7). And, out of love for her, does not let her in. She finds that she cannot walk into the holy place. She tried three or four times to enter but each time was repelled by a mighty force. This is a great mercy from the Lord because this spiritual force opens her eyes to her own sin and brings her to repentance in which is her one hope for salvation – without which we cannot be saved. Take this seriously: St. Mark the Ascetic says, “There is a sin which is always ‘unto death’ (1 Jn. 5:16): the sin for which we do not repent. For this sin, even a saint’s prayers will not be heard.”[ii]

Mary is a creature of extremes. She had sinned boldly and now she begins her repentance with an even greater zeal. After she repents before an icon of the Theotokos and promises to “never again defile [herself] by… fornication,” she is able to enter the holy place. Mary experienced the great mercy of a physical manifestation of the spiritual reality. None of us who are impenitent are welcome in the holy place. Spiritually, we are not in the holy place.

If we are impenitent for our sins, especially if we do not love one another – if we are resentful and unforgiving of those who have wronged us, how can we approach Holy Communion in the body and the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ? Communion in the Lord is also communion with the whole Church. And who's in and who's out of the Church is not a judgment we're competent to make. When we invite the people of God to Holy Communion in the Lord, we proclaim, “Approach with fear of God and with faith.” If you do not fear God or if you have no faith, do not approach! If you do, you will eat and drink condemnation upon yourself because you are not truly discerning the body (1 Cor 11:29). As I say, the force that prevented Mary's approach was a great mercy.

After she did repent, Mary was able to enter the holy place – the Church of the Resurrection – and there venerate the holy cross and she then went the Church of the Forerunner and received the holy mysteries of the Church. Holy Repentance leads to Holy Communion. You can't really have one without the other.

So clearly and emphatically did our holy mother Mary of Egypt understand this, that she then began a life of severe repentance for many years. For seventeen years, she battled the wild beasts in the desert – that is, her own mad desires and passions. When you go to a place of isolation and quiet, you will see more clearly the battle being waged over your own heart.

St. Mary was not a frequent communicant. Only after more than seventeen years of repentance in the desert with severe fasting, ceaseless prayer, and self-discipline did Mary finally again receive Holy Communion from the priest Zosimas.

I'm not going to recommend this degree of severity to anyone. I believe a more frequent nourishment from the body and blood of Christ is helpful and even necessary for most of us as we seek and strive by the grace of God for ever greater union with God.

However, I am going to insist that for the most part, we Catholics have been taking Holy Communion far too lightly for many years – and we do so to our peril. Frequent reception of Holy Communion without holy repentance – will not save us. You can't have one without the other. The first word Jesus preaches to us is, “Repent” (Matt 4:17).

An essential – that is to say, not an optional – part of repentance is the holy mystery of repentance, which our holy mother Mary received in the Church of the Forerunner the evening she began to repent. Whatever you want to call it – going to confession, the sacrament of penance, reconciliation – we can't skip over this entirely and remain in good with the Church. This must be a part of our lives as Orthodox Catholic Christians. This doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the Holy Spirit through the Church and through the Scripture. We can't live without it. I'm serious – there is no life without it. 

How often you need to go personally is a discussion that you need to have with your spiritual father or mother. A good general guide is to go four times a year – once during each of the four fasts. If you haven't been to confession in a long long time, please make a point of going before the Great Fast ends. It's not going to hurt you. It's only going to help you. It's sin that hurts us, not repentance. As St. John Chrysostom says, “Sin is a wound; repentance is a medicine.” Do not be ashamed to repent. Be ashamed to sin.[iii]

Do not utterly neglect to confess. Do not fail to repent. Let us be inspired by the example of our holy mother Mary of Egypt – by her fervor and zeal for repentance – and let us not take too lightly the discipline of God (cf. Heb 12:5). Let us repent and approach with fear of God and with faith.

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[i] The Life of Our Holy Mother Mary of Egypt. http://www.ocf.org/OrthodoxPage/reading/st.mary.html

[ii]No Righteousness by Works 41, The Philokalia, London, 1979, v. 1, p. 129.

[iii] John Chrystotom, Homily 8, On Repentance and Almsgiving

There is one holiness

For All Saints Sunday 

Matthew 10:32-33,37-38; 19:27-30

Icon of All Saints
16-20 c.

Paul addresses most of his epistles to the saints of this or that city. And, I hope, if he were writing to us, he would say the same and would address the saints among us.

Although, when he addresses the Galatians, he does not call them saints. His letter is written to rebuke them because they have been turning to a different gospel, a perversion of the gospel of Christ.

So, if Paul were writing to our church, would he call us saints? Or, would he, as he did addressing the Galatians, leave that part out? Are we following the gospel of Jesus Christ that Paul preaches? Or are we accepting a different gospel, receiving a different spirit, or preaching another Jesus (cf. 2 Cor 11:4)?

Some in Galatia were holding up circumcision and the works of the old law over and against faith working through love in Christ, the love which in truth fulfills the whole law (cf. Gal 5:6,14). This excessive regard for externals I don’t think is the typical error of our age, but we are inclined toward other errors.

Sometimes, we excessively internalize our faith. We regard it as a private matter, not something to be discussed in public. We are sometimes cowards and we sometimes fail to acknowledge Christ before others. Today, Christ tells us that if we acknowledge him before others, he will acknowledge us before his Father. That is, he will make us his saints. Likewise, if we deny him, he will deny us before his Father (Matt 10:32-33).

If we love Jesus, we will keep his commandments (John 14:15). Among other things, He commands us to acknowledge him before others (Matt 10:32). He commands us to go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16:15). And he commands us to baptize every nation in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19).

If we keep these commandments, Christ will acknowledge us before his Father (Matt 10:32). He will remember us forever. And so we will live forever in him, our resurrected Lord. In Christ, we will know the Father, which is eternal life (John 17:3). This is holiness indeed: oneness with God. This is what it is to be a saint.  

This word “saint” is interesting. If we look at the Greek, ἅγιος, it’s the same as the word for holy. Sometimes Greek has many words for which we have only one, as in the case of “love,” but sometimes, it goes the other way and they have one word, for which we have many. And this is the case with the word ἅγιος, which means holy, which means saint, which means sanctuary (e.g Heb 8:2). At times, even Jesus is simply called the Holy – ὁ ἅγιος (e.g. Mark 1:24). This is worth keeping in mind when we think about the saints. Saint and Holy are utterly synonymous. There is no difference at all in the mind of the fathers, or in the mind of Paul. There are not two holinesses, but one holiness. If someone or something is holy, it can only be because they are partakers of the one holiness.

The single greatest teaching of the second Vatican council, in my opinion, is that there is a universal call to holiness. This is not a new teaching. Not by any stretch.  This was already the teaching revealed by the Lord God through Moses in the wilderness of Sinai 3,310 years ago – or so. The Lord our God says in all ages, “be holy, for I am holy” (Lev 11:44-45).

There’s a tall order. The holiness of the Lord our God cannot be overstated. Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord, the God of hosts. Three times holy is he. In Hebrew, this is a superlative. He is the holiest one and the source of all holiness, in whom is any holiness that is.

Yet, as the Lord, he is God of hosts, that is, as Fr. Stephen Freeman puts it, God of a huge crowd. He is in and with and surrounded by his saints. “Orthodox worship and prayer,” Fr. Stephen writes, “is simply crowded. Though we worship only the Triune God, we nevertheless do so in company with a ‘great cloud of witnesses.’” God, who alone is holy, has chosen not to be alone in his holiness, but to surround himself with those he has made holy, those he has made one with himself by his grace.

In the Divine Liturgy, after the consecration, the priest holds the holy lamb and says, “Holy gifts to holy people.” Does this mean you have to be a saint in order to come forward to receive Holy Communion? Yes, it does! There is no difference between “saint” and “holy.”

Then how do we become saints? None of us is sinless – but among the saints are sinners, every degree of sinner, and every kind of sinner – just like us. So when I say, yes, we have to be holy before we come forward, we have to be saints before we receive the holy things which are for the holy ones, I am speaking of a miracle of God’s mercy and grace with which we cooperate through prayer and humility and confession of our sins. We do not make ourselves saints, the Lord makes us saints.

Every saint he makes is unique. We honor them all. We need them all. Just as in one body, every member is different, yet every member needs the others for the whole body to thrive (cf. Rom 12:4-5). Every person that God makes, God wants and needs for his purposes. We are wanted and needed by God. We should seek God’s purpose for our own lives. As Fr. Thomas Hopko points out, if we are condemned or damned it will not be because we are not the Theotokos, or we are not John the Baptist, or we are not Isaac the Syrian. It will be because we are not truly ourselves. It is for not being who God created us to be that we could be damned. The ultimate authority on who we should be and what we should do is our author and creator.

He reveals a lot of this to us through the Church, so don’t think this means that we can go it alone. Because God gave us the Church to guide us into holiness, that is, into the person that God made each of us to be. Going it alone was never his vision for any human being. We are communal creatures. We are a community of persons, in the image of God, who is a community of persons. The Church is that community - that coming together as one with God and one another.

Abba Dorotheos of Gaza has a beautiful image of a wheel, in which the center – the axis – is God, and each of us are somewhere along the spokes of the wheel. You see, the closer we get to God, the closer we get to each other. Also, the further we get from God, the further we get from each other.

For this reason, it makes no sense to receive communion – to enter into communion with God – if we have animosity toward our brother or sister (Matt 5:23-24). There is no communion with God without communion with one another. First of all, we must “be reconciled with everyone and have no animosity toward anyone.” This is the first rubric in the Liturgikon.

Before we dare to approach with the fear of God and with faith, we pray that the holy mysteries be for our healing and not for our condemnation. We pray that the Lord make us worthy to receive. And we pray for mercy. This prayer – this Kyrie eleison – is our path to holiness. Holiness never comes from relying on the self, but rather on the one to whom we pray. To rely on the Lord, who alone is holy and who alone can make us holy.

So, when the priest holds the Eucharist in his hands and says, “Holy gifts to holy people” what can we say? We can only say, “One is holy, one is Lord, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father.” All holiness that is comes from the holy one.

The holy one, Jesus Christ, teaches us how to be holy in today’s gospel. We must confess Christ before others, we must love him more than all others, even more than our fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. And we must take up our cross and follow him (Matt 10:37-38). These are Jesus’ own words. This is his prescription for holiness.

When we are baptized into Christ, we are clothed with Christ and we begin to become one with him. We must thereafter imitate him, especially in his self-sacrificial love, to remain and grow toward ever greater union with the holy one, Jesus Christ, who is one in essence with the Father who is holy.  

Two kinds of enemies

On Matt 6:14-21

Cheesefare Sunday

There are two kinds of enemies we must keep in mind as we fast. There are the enemies we must forgive – and there are the enemies we must destroy.

First, there is the enemy we must love and forgive. Today our Lord Jesus teaches us how to fast, and he begins his teaching with talk of forgiveness. A true fast must begin with forgiveness. We Byzantines take this literally – tonight we begin our Great Fast with Forgiveness Vespers, confessing and forgiving all the wrongs that we have done.  

Just before our Lord teaches us how to fast, he teaches us how to pray (Matt 6:5-13). He teaches us the Lord’s Prayer, which we pray many times daily – and in which we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

                         

And today he elaborates on the meaning of this prayer, saying, “If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but” – and this is a terrifying conjunction – “if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt 6:14-15).

Our Father’s forgiveness is not exactly unconditional – though he makes it always available to us, and no sin of ours can cut us off irredeemably from his mercy. But Jesus himself reveals the condition of our Father’s forgiveness – that is, we must forgive others. We must put aside all our enmity and hate and resentment over wrongs.

St Maximus the Confessor writes, “Strive as hard as you can to love everyone. If you cannot yet do this, at least do not hate anybody. But even this is beyond your power unless you scorn worldly things.”[i] Fasting rightly will teach us scorn of worldly things, which will help us put aside our hate for others. This is necessary because we are not to be an enemy to anyone.

Just because you have an enemy, doesn’t mean that you have to be an enemy. There is probably someone who hates you and opposes the good that you are and the good that you do – a person who makes himself your enemy.

We will have enemies, whether or not we create them by our own evil doing. Jesus assures us that if we follow him, we will be hated, as he has been hated (cf. Matt 10:22; John 15:18). Christ himself has enemies and so, if we become like Christ, we will be like him also in this. Furthermore, he commands us to love our enemies, which presupposes that we will have enemies to love (cf. Matt 5:44).

So, how do I stop being an enemy of my enemies? I forgive and seek reconciliation. I make restitution for any wrongs. If my enemy will not reconcile with me, I can still remain open to the one whose heart is closed to me. I can love and forgive the one who hates and hurts me. I can pray for those who persecute me. All this in imitation of the supreme example of Christ Jesus on the cross, who cries out, “Father forgive them.” And really, it is this cross that gives us the power to forgive. Only in Christ and in his cross can we truly offer forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn’t something entirely within our own power. When the Pharisees say, “Who can forgive sins but God alone,” they have a point (though they fail to see that they are making their point to God himself). But if you’ve ever felt like you couldn’t forgive someone because they have hurt you so deeply or because their crime is so heinous, in a way, you’re right. That is, you can’t forgive them of your own individual power, by your own unaided will. You can’t do it, but Christ can, and in Christ, you can forgive.

Forgiveness is a grace – a participation in the life of God. As they say, to forgive is divine. Only by the grace of God can we find the power to forgive, to release those whose crimes against us have bound them to death, to abandon them utterly to God’s good graces, to seek every good on their behalf.

The process of theosis – our dynamic ascent into ever greater union with God – precedes forgiveness, accompanies forgiveness, and results from forgiveness. In forgiving, we become more like God, who forgives. We are forgiven as we forgive. Forgiving and being forgiven are one action of God in us.

As we enter the Great Fast, let this be our approach and God’s approach in us and between us toward all. Let us invoke blessings and not curses upon our enemies.

St. John Chrysostom points out that “praying against one’s personal enemies is a transgression of law.”[ii] Yet, anyone who prays the psalms will soon notice that they are filled with curses against enemies. So what does this mean for us?

It means that there is another kind of enemy – one with whom we must never be reconciled. In another place, St. John Chrysostom says, “We are commanded to have only one enemy, the devil. With him never be reconciled! But with a brother, never be at enmity in your heart.”[iii]

As an exorcist of demons, Jesus teaches us who our enemies really are. Our enemies are not each other or other parties or other nations, but the demons and the evil that is in our own hearts. It is toward these enemies that we must direct the curses of the psalms and it is against these enemies that we must strive by our fasting.

Just as our fast is entered and sustained in the spirit of forgiveness and patience with others’ faults, so it is also an act of war against our true enemies – the devil and his demons and our own passions. How shall we wage this war?

St. John the Dwarf writes,

“If a king wanted to take possession of his enemy's city, he would begin by cutting off the water and the food and so his enemy, dying of hunger, would submit to him. It is the same with the passions of the flesh: if a man goes about fasting and hungry, the enemies of his soul grow weak and can be conquered thereby.”

We begin the fast by forgiving our pretended enemies – our neighbors and fellow humans – so that then, free from the distraction of focusing our energies on waging a campaign against them, we can turn that power instead against our true enemies: the demons and our own passions.

Against these enemies, let us pray with the Psalmist,

      O Lord, plead my cause against my foes;

fight those who fight me.

Take up your buckler and shield; arise to help me.

Take up the javelin and the spear against those who pursue me.

       O Lord, say to my soul: “I am your salvation.”

Let those who seek my life be shamed and disgraced.

Let those who plan evil against me be routed in confusion.

Let them be like chaff before the wind;

let God’s angel scatter them.

Let their path be slippery and dark;

let God’s angel pursue them.

They have hidden a net for me wantonly;

they have dug a pit.

Let ruin fall upon them and take them by surprise.

Let them be caught in the net they have hidden;

let them fall into their pit.

But my soul shall be joyful in the Lord and rejoice in his salvation (Psalm 34:1-9).

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[i] Fourth Century on Love, 82

[ii] Against Publishing the Errors of the Brethren, 10.

[iii] Homily 20

Confession and Eucharist

The mysteries of the Church - like the Church herself - are each human and divine. They are each an act of God performed through humans upon humans. As with the rest, this is also so of confession and eucharist. Each is both of God and of man. Each is both of the God-man. If I may say so, however, there is a manner in which confession more greatly emphasizes the human and eucharist the divine.

This is so in reference to the forgiveness of our sins. Both confession and eucharist are for the forgiveness of our sin, so why do we need both? Because the Church, which is the assembly of those in Christ, is both human and divine.

God knows what you’ve done. He knows your sin. He knows also whether you approach him in penitence. If you do, He receives you in mercy and forgiveness into communion with himself in the eucharist, which we receive for the remission of our sins and for life everlasting. If you do not, perhaps you eat and drink judgment and condemnation upon yourself. The eucharist offers you the divine seal of your forgiveness in Jesus Christ by uniting you to him - by making you a part of his own body. The miracle of the eucharist - to paraphrase Taft - is not simply to make bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus, but more importantly, to make you, together with all the people of God, the members of his Church, into the body and blood of Jesus.

The human members of this body, however, do not know what you’ve done. They do not know your sin. The Church, as both a human and divine institution must offer its members both human and divine forgiveness. For humans to forgive, they must hear confessions, and so James taught us in our apostolic infancy to confess our sins to one another, not only to whisper them into the wind that only God can hear. God has become a man and he is acting through men in his Church. As a man, he waits to hear your confession spoken with your lips. Your lips, and the ears of the priest who hears what they speak, are entirely human. They are dust and to dust they shall return. It’s true. But it is also true that they are taken on by God himself in his incarnation. They are being raised up and given eternal life. They are being divinized. For the Church in her humanity to offer you human forgiveness and reintegration into her human community, she must hear your human confession. This human forgiveness is necessary for you because it is being made divine and what sins humans forgive are forgiven also by God.