Hebrews 11.33 – 12.2

Matthew 10.32 – 33, 37 – 38, 19.27-30

The LORD says: ‘He who loves father or mother, son or daughter, wife or children more than me is not worthy of me.’ In another place He says to those who would be His disciples that they must deny themselves and lose their life for His sake if they want to find it. These are very hard sayings, are they not?

But would we think it a hard saying if a woman said to her suitor, if you do not leave off from chasing after other women [whether in your mind or with your eyes or with your legs] and love me with all your heart as your one and only, you are not worthy of me. Would we not think her ‘hard saying’ to be altogether reasonable? How is what the LORD says this morning any different?

And what woman would rue the day she left father, mother, brother, sister, houses and lands to be joined to a wonderful, faithful man as her husband, who cherishes her and loves her as she loves him? Would she not consider that to be the day she found herself and began really to live?

With these little illustrations, I mean to say that our Gospel this morning is a ‘nuptial’ Gospel. It captures the essence of the Bible, which is the cosmic love story of the Heavenly Bridegroom for His Bride, the Church.

For, Jesus Christ is the Wisdom of God known to the prophets of old as Sophia (which is feminine in both Hebrew and Greek). She is more beautiful than the sun (Wisd 7.28). Beholding ‘Her’, Solomon became a ‘lover of Her Beauty.’ He longed for Her – he chased after Her – from his youth, and longed to make Her his Spouse (Wisd 8.2).

The LORD’s WORD in our Gospel this morning, then, is the word of Sophia to all who love Beauty and who long to know it, and to become one with it. Sophia, the Beauty and Wisdom of God, will not consider us worthy of ‘Her’ until we leave off from chasing after other lovers, the idols of our passions, and love Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Wisdom of God incarnate, with all our heart, soul, strength and mind.

Those who love Me, the LORD says, keep My commandments. (Exo 20:6, Deu 5:10, Jhn 14:15, 21). ‘And the commandment of God is a Lamp, and the Law of God a Light,’ says the Proverb [Pro 6.23] I read from the Psalms not long ago: ‘Thy Law is a Lamp to my feet and Light to my paths’ (Ps 118/119.105), and it struck me with force: the Light in which God created the world is the Law of God, and the Law of God was made manifest in the beginning as a divine commandment: ‘God said, Let there be Light and there was Light.’ (Gen 1.3) That is, the Law of God is the ‘form’ of the uncreated Light that shines forth from Wisdom, who is the Very Brilliance of the Father’s Radiance. (Wisd 7.26), so that the world, created in Light, came to be in the uncreated Light of the Law of God.

But did you know that the ancients saw the Law as the form of divine Beauty? A synonym for ‘law’ was ‘harmony’, for the Law establishes everything in its right proportions to make for beauty and harmony. Therefore, when God said, ‘Let there be Light, and there was Light,’ it means, ‘Let there be Law, let there be Beauty, let there be Harmony, let the Life and Light of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, shine out of the darkness so that creation and everything in it comes to be in divine Beauty and Harmony, in Light, that is in the knowledge of God, and in Life, that is, in communion with God.

And therefore, when it says in St John’s Gospel, ‘And the WORD became flesh and dwelt among us’ (it’s the same verb as Gen 1.3; but in Genesis, it’s an imperative; in St John it’s an indicative), it means that the uncreated Light of Divine Wisdom in whom the world came to be, Himself became flesh. That means that our flesh and the world that were in darkness because of our sins and trespasses, became Light, they were deified, they were cleansed of all unrighteousness, all death, and they were restored to their original beauty in the uncreated Light of Wisdom in whom and by whom all things were created.

Therefore, dear faithful, what are we to do if we have awakened as if from sleep to see that our soul longs for the Beauty of God that never fades, and yet we see how ugly we are, how dark, because our heart has become deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt? The LORD’s WORD tells us what we do: we begin to keep the Law of God – which is Christ Himself (Rm 10.4) – and to walk in the Way of His commandments in the hidden man of our heart. This begins by laying aside every excuse, all rationalizations, all blame-shifting and self-justifications, and acknowledging our sins to the LORD in the hidden man of our heart. In this, we will be setting ourselves on the Path of divine Beauty. And if the Path of Divine Beauty is Jesus Christ Himself, then when we set ourselves on that Path and begin walking on it, we will be uniting ourselves to Christ as we swore we would do at our Baptism. And in uniting ourselves to Christ according to our baptismal oath, we will be walking in the Holy Spirit of Christ, and the Holy Spirit will come to us because we are uniting ourselves to Christ, and He will abide in us because we are choosing to abide in Christ, and He will cleanse us and purify us of all unrighteousness, which means that He will empty our souls of death and corruption as He did the LORD’s Tomb.

This is what it is to leave father, mother, brother, sister, houses and lands for the LORD’s sake; this is what it is to lose our life for His sake that we may find it. We find our life not in our father or mother or our homeland, but in the Resurrection of the LORD Jesus Christ. And now is when the Resurrection of Christ – to which we united ourselves when we united ourselves to Christ in the likeness of His death – begins to work in us and reveal itself to us. As we acknowledge and confess our sins to the LORD, and in repentance begin to walk in the way of the LORD’s commandments, He cleanses us of all unrighteousness, all our death and corruption. And as He cleanses us, as He empties the tomb of our heart of all its old deceit and corruption, what comes into view is our ‘original beauty.’ This is our ‘true self.’

And as we begin to live in beauty and become more and more beautiful, aligned with our true self, we discover the primordial longing of our heart; it is not a longing for the world that is passing away. It is a longing for Christ, for He is our Maker and Fashioner and Our God. He is our Beginning and our End. For He is the Image of God in whom we came to be and in whom we find our true destiny. Like the bride loves her husband more than her father, mother, brother, sister, homes and land, and cleaves to her husband in love, and finds her rest and her joy in him, so we love the LORD, our Heavenly Bridegroom, more than father and mother, brother, sister, homes and land; and we cleave to Him in love. We become one Spirit with Him because He became bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh. We love Him because He first loved us. We find our rest and our joy no longer in the world but in Christ Jesus, the Wisdom and Beauty and Power of God. For He is our Heavenly Bridegroom; He is the Only Lover of Mankind. And He alone satisfies our every desire.

But Our LORD promises: if we love Him ‘more than these’, we gain them all back a hundredfold. The man and wife leave their families to cleave to one another in love for each other as each other’s ‘one and only’. And in so doing, they each gain a whole ‘nother family.

When we leave our earthly families in order to cleave to Christ as our Heavenly Bridegroom, we gain His Heavenly Father as our Father, His all-Holy Virgin Mother as our Mother, and we gain all the saints as our brothers and sisters. And in the love of Christ’s Holy Resurrection, we live in the real hope that we may gain our father and mother, our brother and sister a hundredfold – even if they have died; for we gain them in Christ. That means that we gain them in His death by which He destroyed death. That means we gain them in His Holy Resurrection, and in His Holy Resurrection, we will never lose them for in Christ, death has been destroyed! Christos Nika! Christ, the Love of God, has conquered! Amen! Glory to Jesus Christ! Most Holy Theotokos, save us!