Galatians 1:11-19

Luke 10:25-37

When late winter draws near to Spring, and we hear the parable of the Prodigal Son, we know that we are drawing near the Tomb of the LORD’s Holy Pascha and to the most sacred gates that open onto Great Lent and onto the Path that will take us inside the LORD’s Tomb beyond the sealed entrance. So also, when Autumn leaves fall to the ground and the days draw near the winter solstice, and we hear this morning’s Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan, we know that we are drawing near the beautiful gates of ‘Advent,’ and coming onto the Path that will lead us into the Cave of Bethlehem and beyond to the Tomb of the LORD’s Holy Pascha. We enter the Gates of Advent this Friday. We prepare to enter those Gates with the Divine Liturgy on Thursday morning (Nov 14) at 630 am.

Advent comes from the Latin. We can translate it as: ‘Immanuel, God With Us, is coming, born of the Holy Virgin Mary as a precious Rose in the Cave. (Okay, so I embellished the translation a bit.) Christmas is coming!

Ahead of us on the Path of the inner Exodus of the Gospel, from the Forefeast of Christmas, the Church is calling back to us where we are now standing today before the gates of Advent: ‘Raise your minds on high,’ She cries, ‘Come in spirit to Bethlehem; and with the eyes of your soul look upon the Virgin as She hastens to the Cave to give birth to our God, the LORD of all!’ (Vespers for the Forefeast of Christmas, p. 201)

In the Church, on the Feast of the Theotokos’ Entrance into the Temple on Nov 21, we hear the testimony of Zacharias the High Priest proclaiming Her to be the ‘Expectation of those in affliction’ – of those lying on the side of the road half-dead. Together with the Feast of Her birth on Sept 8, Her Entrance into the Temple proclaims that Christmas is coming! Immanuel, God With Us, is coming to us in the flesh, in our flesh (Heb 2.14), for She is the Pure One who is to be His Mother; She is the Living Temple that is to hold in the sanctuary of Her womb Immanuel, God With Us!

Let us go in spirit to Bethlehem, the Church is crying out on the Path ahead of us, from the Forefeast of Christmas. ‘Let us look upon the Virgin giving birth to God the WORD as a Precious Rose in the cave,’ She cries. This is not a journey to Bethlehem by land, or sea or air. It is the spiritual journey of prayer; it is the inner exodus of descending with our mind into the cave of our heart.

No miles are traveled on this spiritual journey. But it is even so not accomplished overnight. It takes hard, forceful work, it takes vigilance, it takes resolve and determination. It takes time to make that descent. On our own, in fact, we could not do it. But if each day we are uniting ourselves to Christ in the mystery of our baptism, if we are living our life in the liturgical worship of the Church, and not in the ‘Jericho’ of tinsel-town Christmas, and if we are following what the Church tells us to do, well, we will find ourselves following the Holy Virgin as She enters on the Feast of Her Entrance into the Temple, ‘the place none may enter,’ the Holy of Holies. And, ‘She, the Glorious Gate through which human thoughts cannot pass, now urges us to enter with Her into the place none may enter, and to delight in Her divine marvels.’ (FM pp. 171&175) These are the marvels of Christmas and the LORD’s Holy Pascha. They are the mysteries of God, the revelation of our nature and destiny as children of God, that She begins to teach us in the Church, so that by Her intercessions, we may hope to become ourselves ‘a pleasing and beautiful dwelling-place of Jesus, Her Son, our God and Savior.’

The two parables of the Prodigal Son and of the Good Samaritan are two icons of Israel leaving the worship of the God who delivered them from Egypt to go down to Jericho to worship gods who are not gods. Jericho is where Israel played the harlot and gave herself to the gods of her neighbors not long after she entered into Canaan (as we read in Numbers).

These gods are the thieves that set upon this ‘certain man’ going down to Jericho. They are the spirits working in the ‘sons of disobedience’ even today to destroy us. In Israel’s day, they were worshipped in idols of wood and stone. In our day, they are worshipped in the immaterial idols of the passions. They are the ‘harlot’ divine Wisdom warns us against in Proverbs: ‘Give no heed to the harlot. Honey drops from her lips that, for a season, pleases the palate.’ (Prov 5.3) The ‘honey’ of the ‘harlot’ is the dark sweetness of the passions: lust, greed, anger, sloth, vanity, pride that seem to come together in sexual immorality and perversity, in pornography which has become an epidemic in our day and that is acted out in the body of a soul’s unfaithfulness to God, her true Bridegroom and LORD.

But behind the sweet honey dropping from her lips, beyond the short season when her charms ‘please the palate,’ Wisdom warns, the sweet, dark spirit of harlotry is ‘more bitter than gall. The feet of foolishness lead those who deal with her down to the grave with death.’ (Prov 5.4-6) They go down with this certain man from Jerusalem to Jericho, with the Prodigal from his father’s house to the pig-sty.

These charms of harlotry are not the wholesome beauty of a loving mother. There is no love for the soul in harlotry. Harlotry destroys the soul in one way or another. Give yourself to the ‘harlot,’ therefore, and you fall in with the thieves of this morning’s parable. They will strip you, and beat you, and wound you, leaving you by the road half-dead, engulfed by the dark spirits of depression, anxiety, anger, bitterness, even suicidal despair.

These are the evidence that we give ourselves to murder, the murder of our soul, when we play the harlot, the idolater, when we give ourselves to sexual impurities and perversities, to gods that are not God. The rot of the harlot’s ‘sweet honey’ corrupts us in the root of our heart; it leaves us by the road half-dead. I don’t know of any power in this world, whether of law or religion – as we see in this morning’s parable – that can deliver us from the rot of these ‘gods’ hidden in the idols of the passions. For, it is of the evil one, and but one of his demons is stronger than all the armies in the world. Only the LORD Jesus Christ has the power to destroy his power and deliver us from death and to give healing and life to our soul.

And we are drawing near to Advent, when He Who Is the ‘Creator, the Effulgence of the Father, comes to us from the womb of the Most Pure Maiden in the joy and goodness of Christmas. From the pure blood of His Virgin Mother, in the mystery and joy of Christmas, He clothes Himself in me, a man [lying by the side of the road half-dead]; and in His Holy Pascha, He grants the raiment of incorruption to me who have been stripped naked by my many evil deeds.’ (Ode IV & III, Th Compline, Tone 2).

He comes to us today in His Body, the Church, in the Living Waters of His Holy Spirit. These Living Waters permeate the prayers of the Church. In His Holy Spirit, the LORD Jesus comes to us in the beauty of the icons, in the fragrance of the incense, in the noble grace of the Church’s liturgical worship, and, finally, in the sacramental mysteries of the Resurrection and the Life given to us as our food and drink in Holy Eucharist. In the Church’s baptismal Font, the Savior lifts us up onto the mule of His human nature that He received from the Virgin in the mystery of Christmas, and which He has cleansed by His Blood and healed by His wounds on the Cross, and raised to Life in His life-giving death and Resurrection. He would carry us now to the Inn – to Christmas, to the loving embrace of His Holy Mother in the cave of our heart, so that She can teach us how to prepare ourselves to receive Her Son and our God in the joy of His Holy Pascha.

Raising our minds on high, then, let us prepare to enter the beauty and joy of Advent. Let’s begin preparing our homes outwardly, even now, as we prepare our souls inwardly for the joy of Christmas, the Coming of Immanuel, the coming of God With Us! Amen!

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