Eph 4.1-10

Luke 13.12 – 17

St Kallistos Angelikoudes (14^th cent.) says in his ‘Chapters on Prayer: ‘Historical moments are like mirrors that show images of spiritual realities.’ (Philo V, p. 170) Our Gospel this morning is an icon drawn by the LORD in the colors of space and time. This historical moment, when He healed this woman bent over with an infirmity for eighteen years, is a mirror reflecting the timeless, spiritual reality of Christmas, when the Icon of the invisible Father, Jesus Christ the only-Begotten Son of God (Col 1.15, Heb 10.1), in whom all things came to be, was born in the flesh, in space and time, from the pure blood of the Virgin, and who is now found within us.

St Luke holds our Gospel mirror before us this morning by saying: ‘The LORD was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath.’ The synagogue is where the Jew heard from the Psalms, from Moses and the Prophets; and, as the LORD said to the Jews, scandalizing them: ‘If you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me.’ (Jn 5.46) And He said to His disciples when He rose from the dead: ‘These are the words I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me; that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day’ (Lk 24.44, 46-47).

That is, the ‘something real’ shown by our Gospel mirror this morning is the mystery of the LORD’s Sabbath, which is the mystery of His death and burial and resurrection. What, then, is the ‘something real’ whose image our eyes fall upon when we peer into the mirror of this morning’s Gospel? We see this woman, bound by a crippling infirmity that kept her from standing up straight for eighteen years, healed in her body – for she is made able to stand up straight – and in her soul, for she glorifies God. So, what spiritual reality would this woman being transformed in body and soul be a mirror of?

Would it not be the Gospel of Our LORD Jesus Christ who suffered and died and rose on the third day so that we might be delivered from the spirit of this present evil age that makes us weak and infirm and bends us down to the ground in both our body and in our soul so that we cannot look up to behold and to know the LORD God in whose image we are made?

We see in this woman being made able to straighten up at the touch of the LORD’s Hand and glorifying God an image of the ‘inexhaustible delight and joy that proceed from the radiance of the divine countenance of the LORD upon those who draw near to Him in Spirit and in Truth’ (St Kallistos, p. 173). This divine radiance proceeding from the LORD’s divine countenance is His divine love (eros). It is ‘the power and energy of the Life-giving Spirit that wholly takes possession of the soul from within [the heart], and thus wholly moves it by enticing the soul that beholds in prayer the supreme Beauty. Thus it supremely and truly ravishes the soul away [from this present evil age, and even away from herself] to divine beauty with real love and rapture beyond this world’ (ibid., p. 166).

We see in this morning’s Gospel mirror an image of true prayer. The woman coming to the synagogue on the Sabbath and encountering there the bodily presence of the LORD of Glory, Jesus Christ, is the mind descending in spirit, under the guidance of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms, to the Cave of Bethlehem to behold the Virgin giving birth to the eternal and transcendent God; i.e., in the deep mystery of the human heart’ where we have been in bondage our life-long to the devil who holds us prisoner to the dark and crippling spirits of death that weaken us and make us infirm with forgetfulness and ignorance of God, bending us down to the ground under the weight of sloth and negligence, laziness and indifference to the divine realities of the Gospel. But, in the prayer of the Church, guided by Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms, the mind draws near to Christmas, to the cave of the heart and, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, is led into the presence of the incarnate LORD Jesus Christ that the Scriptures are talking about.

St Paul writes in our reading from Galatians yesterday, that the Gospel is not from man; it is from God. The divine radiance of the LORD’s countenance that the soul is granted to see in prayer, writes St Kallistos, is no idle fancy, nor is it something conjured up by our own thoughts as in a dream.  For it is from the Life-Giving Spirit who is wholly beyond human thought and power. It is the love of God (divine eros the holy fathers call it) that became incarnate and made concretely ‘real’ in the LORD’s Sabbath – i.e., on His death, burial and resurrection. And this love, this divine eros, poured into the hearts of those who draw near in prayer in faith and love, writes St Kallistos, effects ‘a supernatural ravishment that compels the good into the heart apart from the will; it burns and works through the spiritual vision of the ultimate Beauty, God,’ granted through prayer. The LORD’s divine eros, St Kallistos writes, does not burn by the will of man, for it is the ever-moving natural energy of the Life-Giving Spirit working within the heart; it is so far from being moved by man’s will that, on the contrary, by its own nature it moves the will’ (ibid., p. 165-6). In other words, the Spirit of God cannot be manipulated or manufactured from our own sentiments.

Is this not exactly what we see in the mirror of this morning’s Gospel? The LORD ‘places’ His Hand ‘upon’ the woman, and immediately, it says, she stood upright and glorified God. ‘Placed’ His hand ‘upon’ takes us to Lk 23.53, where the body of Jesus was ‘placed’ in the Tomb of the LORD’s Sabbath Rest. And, the spiritual reality that this historical moment is showing us is the LORD Jesus, the Fountain of Life, becoming one with us in the tomb of our heart, in our death, so that we could become one with the Fountain of Life inside the root of our being and receive, poured into our mortal body and soul, the life-giving joy of the LORD’s divine eros that delivers us from the crippling infirmity of this present evil age, and transforms our death into a communion with the Fountain of our Life and the beginning of our eternal life in Christ.

It goes on to say in Lk 23.54 that as they ‘placed’ His Body into the Tomb, the Sabbath began to ‘dawn or shine upon’ – upon what? I believe it’s clear: on the darkness of our being bent down toward death. For, if the LORD’s Sabbath is the consummate manifestation of His love for mankind in which He delivers us from this present evil age, then this Light of divine eros shining from the Tomb of His Sabbath Rest is what was poured into this woman’s body and soul when the LORD ‘placed’ His Hand ‘upon’ her. And we see her immediately able to stand up straight and glorify God. Is this not an image of her experiencing what St Kallistos describes as the ‘inexhaustible delight and joy that proceed from the resplendent radiance of the LORD’ upon all those who draw near to Him in faith and in love? She had entered into the true Sabbath that Moses prefigured with the temporal Sabbath of the Law, and which the author of Hebrews speaks of in his fourth chapter, the Sabbath Rest of becoming firmly established in the love of God in the love of one’s heart.

And so we are now making our way to Christmas, to the Cave of Bethlehem, to the cave of our heart. We have taken up the fast because we want to unite ourselves to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection not just in the sentimental feelings of our soul but in the concreteness of our body. In the midst of this present evil age, we want to find the radiant Light of Christ’s Resurrection that is shining invisibly from the Tomb of His Sabbath Rest within us, from within our heart. And so, placing our trust in the true Church, the true Body of Christ, we take up the spiritual struggle of prayer and fasting as the Church directs us. We enter the synagogue; we study Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms to follow them into the living presence of the incarnate God in the ‘cave’ of our heart, and He places His Hand upon our body and our soul tangibly, concretely, when we draw near to Him in faith and in love and we receive from Him as our food and drink His Life-giving Body and Precious Blood, that we may be transformed and stand upright in the radiant delight and joy of the LORD, glorifying Christ our God who is risen from the dead, and who destroys our death by His death, and gives life to us in the tombs; i.e., in the deep of our heart. Amen!