Acts 16.16-34

John 9.1-38

This morning’s Gospel speaks directly to our inner experience to which, in fact, we may be blind if our inner eyes are turned wholly outward onto appearances, and not onto the spiritual substance within us. It speaks directly to the root philosophical problem: how do you know the Truth? How do you know God? How do you know what man is; how do you know yourself, who you really are?

Our LORD and Savior says to St Thomas in the Upper Room: I am the Way, the Truth, the Life: no man comes to the Father, but by me. [Jn 14.6] In this WORD of the LORD we learn that Truth is a ‘Who.’ Specifically, it is ‘He Who Is.’ We learn that the Truth is dynamic because it is the Way, it is the movement to the Father. The holy fathers teach us, moreover, that this movement of Jesus Christ to the Father is the movement of love and [erotic] desire. And, we learn that the Truth is Life because Truth is He Who is the Resurrection and the Life.

Truth is not an abstract idea. Archimandrite Athanasios Mitilinaios, e.g., says it is experiential knowledge (Revelation V, p. 230). This experiential knowledge is the Tradition of the Church. For, it is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, the Body and Blood of Truth and of Life that moves to and from the Father in love, that has been handed down to us from the holy apostles, who themselves received it from the LORD Jesus Christ who Himself is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

The LORD says to Pilate: ‘To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the Truth.’ If Jesus Christ’s Body and Blood, in which He destroyed death by His death in His great love for us, is the Tradition of the Church, the experiential knowledge of the Church, then the Church – the Body of Christ that was crucified, dead, and buried and risen from the dead, and was then ascended in Glory – the Church is in the world to bear witness to the Truth and to call all men to draw near in the fear of God, with faith and love to life eternal, to come in this life to knowledge of the Truth in Life Everlasting – in the joy of communion with the Father, His Son and His Holy Spirit, His Holy Mother, the Ever-Virgin and Most Beloved Theotokos, and all the saints who from the beginning of the world have been well-pleasing to God.

This, beloved faithful, is the Tradition of the Church. It is the witness of the Church. It is the nuptial Mystery of the Spirit and His Bride crying out to all: ‘Come, all who are thirsty, and drink freely from the Fountain of Life – the living Blood and Water that flow copiously from the crucified Body of Christ Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, who has destroyed death, who has rolled away the stone from the entrance of the Tomb – the entrance to the deep beyond all things (Jer 17.9 LXX) – so that all who wish may turn inward onto the Way of the Inner Exodus of the Gospel to discover and to experience and to live in their soul’s innate, primordial, natural longing for the Heavenly Bridegroom, and enter with Mary Magdalene into the Garden of the Kingdom of Heaven and, restored to their original beauty, become gardeners of immortal plants, gardeners of the Truth in the love of God.

How, then, do we come to know the Truth? For the Truth is God the LORD who has revealed Himself to us! How do we come to know this God who has revealed Himself to us? How do we come to know what we are? How do we come to know ourselves, who we really are?

Leave the arrogance of the world’s scientific and philosophical wisdom behind you. Turn your eyes away from the outer phenomenal world and listen to Holy Scripture. It is the written form of the LORD’s Tomb that is the chief of all the testimonies of God that you read about in the prophets that bear witness to the LORD Jesus Christ risen from the dead, destroying death by His death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life! The words of Holy Scripture are the linen cloths folded neatly, and the turban laid off to the side inside the empty Tomb that, precisely in its emptiness, bears witness to the Fullness of the Truth, Jesus Christ, risen from the dead in the Body that He received from us through His Holy Mother. That is to say: Holy Scripture is the Tomb in which we see inside the mystery of Christ’s Holy Resurrection, which has happened not outside of us but inside of us, inside the tomb of our own heart!

So, when we open the Bible, we are entering the LORD’s Tomb. If we say that we see, we remain in our blindness and we do not come to know the Truth because we remain outside the Tomb in the conceit of our own wisdom. But if we acknowledge our blindness, if we confess our sins, if we keep our mind in the awareness and acknowledgement of our sins and transgressions, and yet we do not despair because our eyes are on the LORD’s Resurrection that has emptied the tomb of our heart of death, then we may see, and with St John believe and understand what the words of Moses and the prophets and the Psalmist were bearing witness to: that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day. (Jn 20.8).

The risen LORD Jesus says to His disciples as He leads them on the Way to the Mountain of His Holy Ascension: ‘It was necessary…so that repentance and the remission of sins should be preached in His Name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.’ (Lk 24.46) Beginning, we should say, not in the ether of an abstract idea but in the concrete place where He destroyed death, the concrete, physical reality of death as the ‘immovable mountain’ (Mt 21.21) that faith alone, that union with Christ alone, can move – in Jerusalem as in the concrete place where He was crucified, dead and buried in the body, in our own flesh and blood (Heb 2.14) in which we were dead in our sins and trespasses (Eph 2.1)!

‘And you are witnesses of these things,’ He says to His disciples. [Luk 24.45-48] Understand, the words of the Church’s preaching and teaching strike our eyes and our ears, and we can see and hear in our mind the Icon that the words of the holy apostles are drawing. It is not an icon of their own invention, so it is not an idol, an empty image whose witness goes no further than itself. It is an Icon of the Truth, of the Life that is the Way that leads to the Father, and that is the mystery in which you were created and came to be! This witness of the holy apostles to Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead is the Music that has gone out into all the world, whose sound vibrates to the ends of the universe, whose note is in perfect harmony with the love of your heart so that when it strikes your heart, your heart begins to sing like the strings of a harp! And you know this WORD is true no longer because someone told you but because you have seen it, you have heard, you have felt it in your own soul that has now become a chamber filled with hymnody from your heart singing hymns of love and praise and exaltation to­ the Heavenly Bridegroom who came to us at Midnight, and rolled away the stone, so that we may pass over into the Garden that is from above and receive the Body of Christ, the Fountain of Immortality, and taste and see how God the LORD is, the first-born of the dead who has blossomed forth as a precious Rose in the tomb of our own heart that we may know Him in the love of God, Jesus Christ, in whom we were created and were made to be. Amen! Glory to Jesus Christ! Christ is risen! Most holy Theotokos, save us!