06 - AT THE GATE, Oct 20 2024 |
2 Corinthians 6.16 – 7.1 Luke 16.19 – 31 Time was created by God to be a path. In the Church, we step onto that Path and find ourselves, in this life, always on a journey through time to the next service, the next feast. It appears to be a circular path going round and round on itself because every year, we come to the same feasts we came to the year before, and the year before that. Where did this path start? Where does it end? What is the meaning of this liturgical Path? On this liturgical path of the Church, we come again this morning to the Gospel of Lazarus and the rich man. I draw your attention to the gate. It is the rich man’s gate, and it is the starting and ending point we’re looking for. A gate or a door is an opening. It opens onto the inside from the outside, onto the outside from the inside. It would appear that the gate of the rich man in this morning’s Gospel was closed, keeping Lazarus outside and the rich man inside. Reading this morning’s Gospel with the ancient Syriac Christian Tradition, that sees Lazarus as the icon of Christ, let’s contemplate this gate of the rich man by looking at other gates we come upon in the Gospels and in the liturgical life of the Church. Let’s begin by stating that, if the Bible is centered on Christ, ‘He Who Is’ the Icon of the invisible God, then the Bible is iconological, i.e., it is Christological. The iconological character of the bible is exactly like Christ, the Son of God who became flesh - visible, tangible, audible, in every way ‘sensate.’ The iconological character of the bible reveals to us that the visible is not its own entity separate from the invisible. It is the face of the invisible, its covering or veil, its outer form. Inside the visible is its invisible substance and meaning. The visible gates we encounter in the Gospels, then, are each one an ‘icon’ that points beyond itself to the spiritual, unseen substance that fills it with meaning – and that is the mystery of Christ who, through His incarnation, now dwells invisibly ‘inside’ the visible. Can you see from this that the visible is itself a gate? It opens like a gate onto the invisible that is inside it like a city inside city walls. As a gate, it opens onto the spiritual substance that fills it with invisible, spiritual meaning, and so, makes it sacred. Bearing this iconological or Christological principle in mind, let’s go back to the city gate in our Gospel just a couple weeks ago of the widowed mother who had lost her only son. The funeral procession was making its way through the city gates to the cemetery outside the city. The setting is of life, the realm of the ‘visible’ whose realm is the city, passing out into death, the realm of the Unseen, Hades, the invisible outside the city. The gate is where the one realm passes over into the other. And it is there at the gate that she encountered Jesus coming into the city from the cemetery. But look at the Gospel icon more closely: death, in the widowed mother’s dead son, is going through the gate to the cemetery outside. But, Life in the Person of Jesus Christ, is coming through the gate from the realm of death outside. There is a numinosity that overshadows this Gospel taking us, as through a gate, far beyond the historical event itself and into a spiritual presence that we can still feel here and now, 2000 years later. The setting in this morning’s Gospel is also life and death. The rich man’s gate is more than an ordinary iron enclosure. When Lazarus and then the rich man die, it is seen as the gate that opens onto the Unseen, onto the invisible world outside the city of this world. Then it is transposed to an even higher key: just as it was closed against Lazarus outside in the visible world, now it becomes the invisible gate that closes the rich man off from Lazarus in the Unseen world, Hades (the unseen) and from the unseen bosom of Abraham in the Heavenly City of Jerusalem that is beyond the gate ‘outside’ the ‘city’ of the dead. This set of images opens our eyes to see other gates standing in the ‘city’ of the world at the borders of life and death. There are the city gates of Jerusalem. Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, is led outside those gates to Golgotha where He is crucified and buried in a Tomb. But in the dread mystery of Christ’s Holy Resurrection, the Tomb is revealed as a gate that opens onto a ‘Garden,’ which is also outside the city gates, revealed to be an icon of the Garden of Eden that was ‘opposite’ or ‘outside’ the hill country where Adam and Eve settled when they were expelled from the Garden (Gn 3.25 LXX), and Golgotha comes into view as an icon of the City seen by Ezekiel (and by John in the Apocalypse) on the Hill opposite or outside of Jerusalem, where the Glory of the LORD descends after departing from the Temple in Jerusalem in anticipation, already, of Palm Sunday! In all of these gates, including this gate of the rich man, where is the LORD Jesus found? Outside the gate. But the LORD is not these gates. Do you remember that the LORD says of Himself: ‘I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.’ (Jn 10.9) No, the LORD is the Door that is found outside those gates, on the other side, inside the Tomb, inside Hades, the realm of the Unseen. Remember that the LORD said: ‘Narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.’ (Mt 7.14) The LORD’s Tomb, remember, was narrow. Just to peer into it, let alone enter it, Peter and John, and even the angels had to stoop down (Jn 20.5, 1 Pt 1.12, cf. Jas 1.25). And, the LORD says in the Apocalypse of John: ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.’ (Rev 3.20) This is the door of our heart. This is the narrow gate, this is the door that opens into the LORD’s Tomb, the ‘tomb of our heart’ as St Macarios the Egyptian says (Hom 11.11). It opens onto the realm of the invisible, the ‘hidden man of the heart’ (1 Pt 3.4) where the LORD Jesus Christ, the Resurrection and the Life, is found. It says that Lazarus – the LORD Jesus Christ – longed to eat from the food that fell from the rich man’s table. God is love; St Maximos says that, as love, God thirsts to be thirsted for, He longs to be longed for, He loves to be loved.’ (5th Cent Var Txts §84) The LORD, Lazarus, hungers for us to give our love to Him who first loved us. For, He wants to come in and dine with us and give us His eternal life that has destroyed death on the Cross, in our human nature, inside the tomb of our heart. But are we the rich man who have closed the gates of our heart to the Heavenly Bridegroom, the ‘Only Lover of Mankind? From the ancient Syriac Christian reading of this Gospel, we see the sores that covered Lazarus’ body to be the wounds the LORD suffered on the Cross. But He suffers them inside our human nature, inside the ‘tomb of our heart.’ These are the traumas of our inner man, the traumas we try to escape by closing the gates of our heart to stay in the city of carnal desires and sumptuous riches. But, if we would deny ourselves and lose our life for the sake of Christ who first loved us, to find our life outside the city gates united to the LORD in His Tomb, in the tomb of our heart, the traumas of our soul would be healed, for it is by His stripes that we are healed. Can you see now that the journey of the Church’s liturgical year is always taking us to three gates, all of which lead outside the city of this world into the world found inside the LORD’s Tomb? There is the Gate of Heaven, the Virgin Theotokos, found inside the Holy of Holies of the Temple, inside our heart, on Nov 21. There is the Cave of Bethlehem, where the LORD God is found as a little Child with His Beloved Virgin Mother – our Mother in the Church. And, at the heart of them all, of course, is the Gate of the LORD’ Tomb. All of these are the gate of our heart. And what do we find inside each of these gates? We find the LORD of Glory. We find the Door that opens onto Green Pastures, onto the Garden Eden in His Holy Resurrection. The gate of our heart is the starting and ending point of our journey through the Church year. It is the gate of our inner man that opens onto the Door of Him Who Is the Resurrection and the Life, who longs to eat the food that falls from our table – who longs to be longed for, who loves to be loved, because He is love; and in His love we were created; in His love we were meant to rest. He is the heavenly joy found behind the ‘door’ of this visible world, the door of our heart. But, if He is to come in and dine with us, we must open that door. The Church, as our loving Mother, is always showing us how to open that door. We need only to listen to Her and do what She tells us to do. Amen! |