Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awaken out of sleep; for now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent; the day is at hand.”
Perhaps it could be said to us slackers in the Faith, “It’s about time! Get it in gear!” Admittedly, that’s a far less gracious way to put it, but it does capture the apostolic point as we now stand together overlooking the vista of Great and Holy Lent. From the Scriptural point of view, time is of the essence. The enemy, our adversary the devil, like a lion in wait, lingers nearby, assessing our weaknesses, looking for our vulnerabilities, plotting our downfall, if not our very demise, looking to pick each of us off as we negligently stray too far from the Church (1 Pe. 5:8). Every day of this life, our ascended Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ draws ever closer, bringing with Him all His holy angels who will, at His divine command, put in the sickle and reap the harvest, some to Life Everlasting and some of us to the eternal condemnation of Hell (Mt. 13:36-43, 47-50; 25:31-46; 2 Th. 1:3-12; Rv. 14:14-20). Every day, with each breath we take, we, too, draw nearer to that sleep of death which will come upon us at the most inconvenient and unexpected time. Yet, it comes not without forewarning, unless we have made ourselves purposely ignorant of its presence ever lurking in the shadows of our existence, poised like that lion. There is not a one of us here today, unless we are blissfully naïve and purposely ignorant, for whom the words of that old familiar Protestant hymn are not true, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Soon bears us all away; We fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the op’ning day” (O God, Our Help in Ages Past). “[F]ast falls the eventide. The darkness deepens” (Abide with Me). “The night is far spent.”
But, what good is a wakeup call if, in fact, we do not awaken? Do not respond? Do not care? To sound the alarm is not for effect solely. It is so that we may do something before we can do nothing! For there is coming a time, our Lord warns us, when the Light – His Light of Life and Truth and Salvation – will not remain. Therefore, He says to us,
‘Walk while you have the Light, lest darkness overtake you; he who walks in darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the Light, believe in the Light, that you may become sons of Light’ (Jn. 12:35-36).
Good advice. Wisdom! Let us attend! This isn’t rocket science, beloved. This is our very Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ speaking His words to us. “’Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of Eternal Life, and we believe and are sure that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God’” (Jn. 6:68-69). Why, then, if we believe this Jesus to be the Son of God our Saviour, do we treat His words to us so lightly and so casually? His are words of Light not to be taken lightly! His words give Life because they are full of the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life” (Jn. 6:63; Nicene Creed).
All of us: neophytes in the Faith, inquirers, or veterans well-seasoned in the combat of spiritual warfare – all of us stand in need of arousal and renewal, of repentance and regeneration. Wake up! Stand upright! There is not one among us who is righteous, Sacred Scripture reminds us (Ps. 13 [14]:1-3; 52 [53]:1-3; Rm. 3:10-18). There is not one among us who can stand upright on our own two feet before Almighty God because we have all sinned and fallen short of His divine Glory, expelled with Adam and Eve from the Garden of eternal delight and the very Paradise of communion with God (Rm. 3:23). As we are ever reminded in our Funeral Service, in our Trisagions for the Departed, and in our Panikhidas, as does Sacred Scripture, “For there is no man who lives yet does not sin; for Thou only art without sin; Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and Thy Word is Truth” (4 Kg. [1 Kg.] 8:46; 2Ch. 6:36; Pr. 20:9; Ec. 7:20; Jm. 3:2; 1 Jn. 1:8). Who of us faithfully and obediently abides by the Word of God at all times, in all places, under every circumstance? Not who desires to do so, but who actually lives out the Word of God in the obedience of faith? All of us, I pray, want to do so because we love God, but do we all “trust God and do good” (Ps. 36 [37]:3)? Brethren, here is the call of God to recognize in ourselves how deceptive pride is – the very fall of Lucifer himself – and how subtly deep it runs in us, even as the Prophet shows us. And he asks, “’Who can know it?’” (Jr. 17:9). Honestly, none of us can (or maybe want to because it would call us to repent and turn around, and that’s very hard work!). This is why we need the divine Light of Jesus Christ; the divine revelation that is a lamp unto our feet and light unto our path (Ps. 118 [119]:105). His divine Truth that exposes our darkness, not for our condemnation, but for our salvation and sanctification – for the healing of our soul and body (Jn. 3:19-21).
It is here that the Apostle, and in other Epistles, tells us of our proper response to this clarion call of the Fast of Great and Holy Lent: cast off and put on. Cast off, that is, tear off all the works of darkness, all those sins, both great and small, especially the little ones that trip us up, those seemingly inconsequential little foxes that spoil the vines (SS 2:15), that so easily ensnare and entangle our feet (Hb. 12:1), throw them overboard to save the ship from sinking! We cannot be friends with our sins and be friends of God (Jm. 4:4; 1 Jn. 1:6; 2:15-17)! The two are incompatible, Sacred Scripture tells us. They cannot co-exist despite our best efforts and desires for that to be true. We must learn to love God thoroughly, with every ounce and fiber of our being, and despise that which stands in the way between us and the Kingdom of Heaven we so long desire. We must target our passions, St. Paul tells us, and kill them, put them to death, by making no provision to gratify them when they are aroused in us. We must fight against the urge to scratch their itch remembering the expulsion of our first parents from communion with God when they surrendered to their cravings.
Our passions – our desires – are little more than a den of snakes, the Fathers teach us. They dwell in our hearts and they masquerade as angels of light, inspired by the demons (2 Cr. 11:14-15). We are not as free from them as we fancy ourselves to be. Remember how our first mother was led astray by the seemingly innocent pleasure of the forbidden fruit. “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and ate, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he ate” (Gn. 3:6). All of this despite God’s divine counsel to wait and not eat, but to fast from this particular tree. We find it so hard to resist and say no to those passions. They seem to have a life all their own!
A truly free person can choose to say no to their passions, but are we free? So often, however, it feels as though we don’t have a choice and we give voice to that captivity when we confess, “I just couldn’t help myself. I know I shouldn’t but . . . .” We use this as excuses, but, in truth, we are expressing just how much we are dominated by those very passions we are called upon to put off! We are to mortify these passions through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving which are, in themselves, acts of martyrdom. We can do this, however, because we have Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. We have put on Christ Who is our armor of Light, God’s Light, divine and holy Light, that exposes our darkness in order to make our souls whole and well, to restore us to communion with God, to partake once again of the Glory of God in His Paradise (1 Th. 5:1-11).
Beloved, we are not without spiritual grace nor power because we have Christ, or better, Christ has us in the hollow of His nail-pierced hand. In other words, we have been baptized. But, our baptism into Christ is a baptism into His Death and His Resurrection. So, we continually die and rise. We continually put Jesus on in prayer, and in fasting, and in almsgiving, which is, the practice of mercy. We put Him on as we exercise virtue: the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love; the virtues of courage and temperance and generosity and chastity and patience or perseverance and kindness (Ep. 4:1-5:21; Co. 3:1-17). By this practice we steadily deprive the enemy of the high ground in our souls. But, above all, when we put on Jesus Christ in all humility the battle is won because, as the Fathers teach us, there is nothing humility cannot heal. Thus, the Lenten call to humble ourselves so that God might raise us up with Himself (Jm. 4:10; 1 Pe 5:5-7).
The archenemy of our souls, beloved, dresses things up in order to make them palatable to us. He can make arsenic tasty to us, death like life, foolishness like wisdom. Thus, we are to surrender ourselves – yield ourselves – to God as His instruments of righteousness, to reckon ourselves, St. Paul says, dead to sin and alive unto the God of our Resurrection and New Life (Rm. 6:1-23). In these holy days of the Great Fast – our Exodus – let us gird up our loins to flee our land of Egyptian bondage. Let us “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts [desires].” The Light of Christ, beloved, illumines all (Presanctified Liturgy).
Through the prayers of our holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
PROPERS:
Rm. 13:11-14:4
Mt. 6:14-21