Ephesians 2.4-10

Luke 10.25-37

It says that a ‘certain’ lawyer rose up to ‘tempt’ the LORD Jesus. But the verb translated ‘to tempt’ also means ‘to test thoroughly in order to prove someone’s character or power.’ If this is the meaning here, then this certain lawyer is doing what St John directs us to do in his first epistle: ‘Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are [the Christ] of God; because many false prophets [many false christs] have gone out into the world.’ (1Jo 4:1)

As we prepare to enter the season of Advent this Wednesday, this morning’s parable is showing us how we can know the true Christmas from the many false Christmases. If the spirit of our Christmas – following St Silouan, for example – transfigures our heart so that we have love for our enemy; or, in the words of the LORD this morning, if it engenders in us ‘love for our neighbor as for ourselves’ (our ‘neighbor’ is given in this morning’s parable as our enemy because Samaritans and Jews were enemies, and so the Samaritan is ministering to his enemy), then we know that ours is the true Christmas because love for the enemy is of the Spirit who is of Christ.

As I just indicated, today we make ready to enter the season of Advent and to take up the Nativity Fast to prepare ourselves for Christmas. Christmas is the coming of the LORD Our God into the world in the flesh. Clothed in our human nature, the Son of God became bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh. He who was without sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God through uniting ourselves to Him in the likeness of His death. That is to say, that Christmas is the first visible manifestation of God coming to be with us in the flesh who are His enemies. Why are we His enemies? Because we are friends with the world (Jm 4.4). We love the idols, not God, with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind; and we love not our enemy but only those who love us.

Our Gospel this morning, then, is teaching us the spirit that must govern our Nativity fast if we truly desire to prepare ourselves for the joy of Christmas, and if our fast is to be a mystical, spiritual path by which we go in spirit to Bethlehem to behold the Virgin giving birth to God in the cave – that is, in the cave of our own heart.

The parable begins: ‘A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.’ Jerusalem is the Holy City where the Temple is. Jericho is where the Israelites of old fell in with the Moabites and offered themselves to idols. This certain man, then – that is, ‘everyman,’ i.e., Adam, i.e., each one of us – went down from the worship of God in the Temple of Jerusalem and offered himself to idols. He was mugged by thieves – the spirits that inhabit the idols – and he was left naked by the road half-dead.

Now, the Temple of Jerusalem and the Holy City of Jerusalem are both images of the Holy Virgin Theotokos. She is the Heavenly Jerusalem, the ‘mother of us all’ (Gal 4.26). But the Holy Virgin is not a goddess. She is fully human. We therefore see in Her that to receive God in love in the womb of our soul, as She received Him in the womb of Her body, is altogether natural to us. It is the destiny that is true to our human nature. For we become, as it were, mothers of God; we are deified, and far from destroying us, we become bushes burning with the Glory of God, and yet we are not consumed. Instead, we become pure, virginal, holy, clothed in the Glory of God. This is what it is to be truly human.

Therefore, when this ‘certain’ man goes down to Jericho, when we go down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when we turn away from God to give ourselves to idols – the spirits of greed, lust, anger and so on – we are departing from what is natural to us, which is union with God. We are giving ourselves to what is against our nature; we are making gods who are not gods to be our gods. They are not gods; they are thieves. And when we fall in with them, they strip us of the Robe of Light given to us at our baptism; they beat us up in our soul and they leave us by the side of the road, broken, confused, anxious, afraid, angry, bitter.

If we are this ‘certain’ man lying on the side of the road half-dead, how on earth can we go and do likewise as the LORD commands which, according to the parable, clearly means: ‘go and give the healing of eternal life to those lying by the road naked and half-dead’?

We can’t! That’s the whole point of the parable. We can give ourselves to rules and regulations – we can be a Levite. We can give ourselves to ‘religion’ – we can be a priest. But if these are not rooted in the ‘blood’ of God which alone is eternal life, but ‘in the blood of bulls and goats,’ in the pious contrivances of human wisdom, they are useless because they are rooted in the dust, they are grounded in death, not in the eternal life of God. In themselves, they have no power to penetrate our spirit and into our heart where we are lying half-dead by the side of the road. If we put our hope in these we only deceive ourselves. In them, we remain ‘on the opposite side’ of the road where we our heart lies wounded, stripped naked, ‘half-dead. The wounds of our soul remain unhealed; we remain half-dead by the side of the road, believing we are ‘saved’ when, in fact, we are not, for we draw near to God only with our lips, but in our heart, we are far from Him (Isa 29.13).

Let’s bring this teaching down to the ground. Dear faithful, if we do not confess our sins, if we do not acknowledge our transgressions, even while we are being ‘religious’ and being ‘moral after school,’ we are joining ourselves to the priest and the Levite, and walking off with them down to Jericho, leaving our wounded soul by the side of the road half-dead. All of our ‘good works’ are useless; they are but tinkling brass because they are not done in selfless love of the enemy but in self-esteem or vainglory. The odor of death emanates from them. They have not the power or the fragrance of eternal life.

We must therefore lay aside every excuse and every defense, all self-justification and pleading, and ‘descend’ into our heart; we must strive to find our true selves, to be genuine, and to let ourselves admit our wounds and our ugliness, and acknowledge that we are so because we have willingly chosen to go down from Jerusalem to Jericho; we have loved our passions – lust, greed, anger, and the rest. We are riddled with self-esteem. We have become fast friends with the world and made ourselves enemies of God.

For to make this confession before God is to let ourselves become vulnerable to Him; but in our vulnerability toward Him, we open ourselves to Him. And now we begin to experience the marvel of the Gospel. The Son of God, whom we have made to be our enemy, comes to us in the flesh in the dread mystery of Christmas. He comes to us as the Samaritan. He comes to us as the One we have excluded from our society. He comes to us in order to pour on us the oil of His Holy Spirit and to give us the New Wine of His Life-giving Blood.

Dear faithful, He gives Himself to us. Do you see? Eternal life is to be with God. When we love our enemy, when we do good to those who revile us and persecute us and say all manner of evil against us falsely for Christ’s sake, we are doing as God does to us; and in doing that, we are making ourselves to be with Christ and not with the idols, and so we are putting on Christ; we are clothing ourselves in the Robe of God’s own eternal life.  

Christ does not give Himself to us in abstracto, as a religious concept. He gives Himself to us concretely as food and drink that nourishes our soul and our body in the Bread and Wine of the Inn’s – the Church’s – Holy Mysteries. His Body, risen from the dead, is united to our body; His Spirit that raised Him from the dead is united to our spirit. We become one with Christ in both our soul and our body. We want therefore to live in Christ in our heart, in our soul, in our mind, and in the strength of our body. By our own strength, we can do nothing that is good – except to choose to unite ourselves to Christ. And, if in our heart, soul, strength, and mind, we live in the Body and Blood of Christ that we received as our food and drink, then the Spirit of Christ will be working in us, giving us the strength to ‘go and do likewise;’ to go and love our enemy as God has loved us. Amen!