Romans 5.1-10

Matthew 6.22-33

We can take as the theme of our epistle this morning ‘having been justified [or made righteous] by faith;’ and of our Gospel: ‘If your eye, the lamp of your body, is good, then your whole body will be full of light.’ To be justified, to be made righteous, is for the lamp of our body, the eye that is the heart, to be illumined. And the Light that illumines the eye is Christ, for Christ is the True Light in whom is the Life of men. (Jn 1.3); He is the Wisdom of God and the Son of God, the uncreated Brilliance of the Father. (Wis 7.26 & Heb 1.3)

The faith by which we are justified or illumined in Christ, then is of the heart and not just of the mind. Faith is doing, not just hearing. For the demons have the intellective faith that is of hearing only and not of doing, and it does not save them. It only makes them tremble. (Ja 2.19) Faithless Israel had faith of hearing only and not of doing; so their faith was empty. ‘This people draws near to Me with their mouths, they honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. Their worship of Me is empty.’ [Isa 29.13] The Pharisees had a faith of the mind only, and not of the heart, and it made them but whitewashed sepulchers filled with dead men’s bones and all manner of uncleanness; i.e., filled with a dead, stony, heart.

Moreover, if the lamp of our body, our heart, is made light because it is illumined with the Light that is Christ, then to be illumined with Christ is to become one with God as the LORD Jesus Christ prays: ‘That they may be one even as we are one.’ (Jn 17.11 & 22)

But the two become one when they cleave to one another in love, each one denying oneself for the other, each one losing oneself in the other. The faith, then, by which we are justified, or made righteous, or illumined with the uncreated Light of Christ, like a lamp illumined by the light that is within it, is the movement of love, the movement of self-denial and of losing one’s life in the other in love for the other. Faith, then, cannot be demonstrated because its movement is far beyond the mind.

Moreover, faith, because it is the movement of love, is knowledge of God. In faith, one knows God from one’s union with God in one’s heart where we are deep, beyond all things (Jer 17.9 LXX), in the realm where God is far beyond rational concepts or intellective dialectic.

St Maximos the Confessor (d. 662 AD) writes: ‘Faith is knowledge that cannot be rationally demonstrated. It is a supranatural relationship through which, in an unknowable and so indemonstrable manner, we are united with God in a union that is beyond intellection.’ (2^nd Century of Various Texts, §12, Philo II p. 190)

St Isaac of Nineveh (7^th cent.) writes: ‘Faith is the door to mysteries. For spiritual knowledge is born of faith, and love is born of this knowledge that faith is.’ (Homilies 46, 47, 62, pp. 223, 226, 298).

God is love, writes St John (1 Jn 4.8). Jesus Christ is the love of God incarnate, and He is the Wisdom of God. It follows, then, as St Kallistos Angelikoudes (14^th Cent.) writes: from the love of God originated all things both visible and invisible. (Philo V, p. 162)

Faith, then, is love for God that opens the Door onto God, so that St Kallistos can say, ‘It is indeed possible to behold the love of Him who is invisible, and indeed, one does behold His noetic and transcendent love most brilliantly that radiates all around Him like so many wedding gifts.’ (ibid., p. 163)

We truly know what we unite ourselves to in love in our inner man. Adam and Eve, for example, came to know the thrill of disobedience by eating the forbidden fruit. Eve desired it. Her desire gave birth to doing. She reached out her hand, she took it, she ate it, she became one with it. Don’t think this is so far from us, dear faithful. Do we not come to know the thrill of sexual perversity by partaking of it, by doing it?

The LORD says, ‘This is the condemnation, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. [Jhn 3.19]

This is why we do not know God so that we become fools who say in our heart, there is no God. [Ps 14.1, 53.1] But we do know sin because we do it, and so we believe its big lie, that there is no God. We do not know true Life, but we do know death from all the thorns and thistles that grow and multiply in our heart from its seed, which is our turning away from God. This is why faith that is not love for God is empty, useless. The heart is not filled with the Light of Christ but with the darkness of death.

To believe in God in biblical faith is to align ourselves with God in our inner man. Such belief is not just hearing but doing His commandments.

He who loves Me, says the LORD, keeps my commandments. And he will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.’ [Jhn 14:21] He who does the commandments of the LORD will know Me because he will be illumined in the uncreated Light of the LORD’s commandments. As St Kallistos said: he will behold Christ’s noetic and transcendent love most brilliantly that radiates all around Him like so many wedding gifts.’ This is the faith that justifies us, that illumines us, and makes us children of the Day. (Ps 36.9)

What, then, are we sinners to do who desire to know the love of God and to be healed of all our diseases and infirmities that are the result of our sins and trespasses? We must believe in the LORD Jesus Christ, and in that belief, we must do. The doing we must do is to repent. The LORD says through His prophet, Isaiah: ‘Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; Put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil, ... Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, They shall be as wool. [Isa 1:16, 18] And the Psalmist says: ‘I acknowledged my sin to Thee, O LORD. I did not hide my iniquity; I said, "I will confess my transgressions to the LORD"; then Thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin. [Psa 32.5] And St John writes: ‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. [1Jo 1.9]

Here then is the faith that illumines the lamp of our eye and justifies us. It is doing repentance in the confession of our sins, and the doing of the LORD’s commandments. Doing this, we begin to walk in the Light of Christ. We begin to walk according to the Law of the Spirit and not according to the law of the flesh. Such doing is the justifying faith that draws near to Christ in the fear of God with faith and love to receive the Medicine of Immortality that heals us and delivers us from death, and makes us one with God. Amen!