Ephesians 4.7 – 13
Matthew 4.12 – 17
Dear faithful, you remember that the LORD said to His disciples: ‘After I have been raised, I will go before you to Galilee.’ [Mat 26.32] And, when the Myrrhbearing women entered His Tomb, the Angel said to them: ‘He has risen! He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see Him, as He told you.’ (Mar 16.5-7)
In our Gospel this morning, we see Christ, having risen from the Jordan and triumphed over the devil in the wilderness, coming to Galilee. But, illumined by the Light of His Holy Pascha, we see Him this morning going before us into Galilee in His Church, in His crucified Body risen from the dead, having triumphed over the devil in His Holy Resurrection. And we see Him settling, as it says, in Capernaum, which, it says, is beyond the Sea.
Capernaum was a village only relatively recently built, after the return of the exiles from Babylon. The name means, ‘Village of Consolation.’ It is situated on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee near the place where the Jordan flows into the Sea.
Geography is theology in Holy Scripture. The geography of Capernaum evokes Ezekiel’s vision of the snow-melt River that issued from the east gate of the Temple that was in the city on top of a Mountain. In the Light that shines from the New Testament, from Christ, the True Light coming into the world, that River is easily seen to be the LORD Jesus Christ, not to mention that its identity as the LORD Himself is explicitly given in Isaiah [55.10 & 66.12] and in Ben Sirach [24.23-34]. And the Temple on the Mountain we know from the Church is the Theotokos.
The River flows, it says, from the East Gate of the Temple into the desert and into Galilee, all the way to the outlet of the sea [Eze 47.1-12], which we recognize at once as an image of the Tomb of the LORD’s Holy Pascha.
In the Radiant Light that emanates from the LORD’s Tomb (Lk 23.54), we recognize Capernaum, the Village of Comfort, as the Church. It is situated on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee as the Church is situated on this side of the LORD’s Tomb, in this world. Capernaum is situated where the waters of the Jordan flow into the ‘outlet’ of the Sea. And in the Church that opens onto Eden, the waters of this life, sanctified by the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Church’s Baptismal Font, filled with the Living Waters of Christ’s Holy Spirit, flow into the outlet of the Sea, the Tomb of the Savior’s Holy Resurrection, and out into the unfathomable Sea of God’s compassion in the ‘deep, beyond all things.’ (Jer 17.9 LXX)
Dear faithful, we were those sitting in darkness, in the region and shadow of death on whom a great Light has dawned. The risen LORD Jesus Christ is that Light, and He has gone before us to Galilee, and He has come to dwell among us in Capernaum, in His Church, the Village of Consolation, having triumphed over the devil in the wilderness on this side, and in hell on the other side!
This morning, we stand in the Church on 38th and 54th. We are standing mystically in Capernaum, the Village of Consolation. Here is where the Great Light of the LORD’s Compassion dawns on the whole earth. Here is where the Great Light of the First Day of the New Creation dawns on the Sabbath [epefwsken], the Last Day of this creation, from the LORD’s crucified Body that has risen, as a Great Light, from the darkness of the Tomb! (Lk 23.54)
It’s our epistle this morning that confirms our Paschal reading of this morning’s Gospel, its theology uncovered by the Angel’s word to the Myrrhbearing Women at the Tomb of the LORD’s Resurrection: ‘Lo, He goes before you into Galilee! There you will see Him as He told you!’
St Paul writes: ‘When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men.’ St Paul is quoting from the 68th Psalm, the source of the Paschal hymn: ‘Let God arise! Let His enemies be scattered! Let those who hate Him flee from before His face! As smoke vanishes, so let them vanish, as wax melts before the fire, so the sinners will perish before the Face of God! But let the righteous rejoice!’
Our Gospel this morning reveals that the ‘Immanuel’ of the Christmas hymn, the ‘God who is with us,’ is the risen LORD Jesus. And He is with us here and now in this world, because He has settled in Capernaum on the western shore of the Sea. He ‘is in our midst’ because He dwells with us here in this world in His Church on this side of the grave, having destroyed death by His death and having opened Eden to all. In the Church, the Edenic mountain rises up to the Heavens before us, beckoning us to descend into the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Church’s Baptismal Font, and to the better and changeless Path that ascends to God.
Remember what He told His disciples in His Resurrection, before He ascended into Heaven. He said that He would not leave us orphan. And indeed, He sent down His Holy Spirit, the Comforter, upon all those gathered in the Upper Room and the Church that before was barren became Capernaum, the Village of Consolation, newly built here in the world on this, the western shore of the Sea, as the Door that carries us through the ‘outlet of the sea,’ the LORD’s Tomb, and out into the deep, beyond all things, in His Holy Resurrection as communicants of Christ (He 3.14) and partakers of His divine nature (2 Pt 1.4).
Dear faithful, we read in the Psalms: ‘As a lump of earth is crushed upon the ground, so our bones have been scattered at the mouth of the grave.’ [Psa 141:7] But, the LORD says to His prophet: ‘I will bring my people again through the depths of the sea.’ [Ps 67.22 LXX] And, sure enough! We read in St Matthew, ‘Going throughout the whole of Galilee [as Ezekiel’s snow-melt River], He preached the Gospel of the Kingdom, and He healed every disease and every malady among the people.’ (Mt 1.23)
Here we see in our Gospel this morning an icon of the LORD going throughout the whole world in His Body, the Church, to ‘gather’ all those who love Him and who seek after Him, who have been ‘scattered’ and brought low because of their iniquities and have drawn near the gates of death [Ps 106.17-18 LXX].
We see in the Winter Pascha’s Feasts of Light, as we call them – Christmas, Theophany, the Meeting of the LORD – how the LORD has drawn so very near to us that He became a partaker of our flesh and blood [Heb 2.14-15], even to the point of death on the Cross. [Phil 2.5-11] And we see in our Gospel this morning that it was from this moment when He settled in Capernaum, in His Holy Church, the Village of Consolation here on this side of the grave on the western shore of the Sea, in the mystery of Pentecost, that Jesus begins to proclaim: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!’
Do you hear? The LORD has come to dwell among us in His Holy Church. God is with us who are sitting in the region and shadow of death. As He comes to the tomb of Lazarus at the end of Great Lent, so He comes to each one of us, His lost sheep, and He is heard even now, in His Holy Church, crying out to each one of us: ‘[You who are lying in the region and shadow of death; you who have been brought low because of your iniquities and have drawn near the gates of death], come forth!’ Enter Eden, for it has been opened to all. Become a communicant of My Body and Blood, for it is the Fruit of the Tree of Life, and eating of it, you shall not die as Adam, but live. So flee the corruption that is in this world through lust and become partakers of my divine nature! (2 Pt 1.4)
Dear faithful: this New Exodus of the Gospel is the Path of Great Lent we are now preparing to step onto! How do we answer the LORD’s call to repent, to ‘come forth’? Let’s begin preparing ourselves mentally for the Great Fast. Let’s ‘repent,’ let’s turn our mind to the East, to Christ, away from the west, away from the darkness of this world. By anchoring our inner man on Christ, by incorporating our worldly life into the divine Life of the Church, we can begin even now to take up our cross to follow Our LORD Jesus Christ into the wilderness of our soul and into the tomb of our heart all the way to the outlet of the Sea in the Joy of the LORD’s Dread, Most Fearsome and Most Holy Resurrection! Amen!
Matthew 21.18-43
Shortly, we will venerate the Icon and sing the beautiful Hymn of Light: ‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; and I have no wedding garment that I may enter! O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’ What is the Bridal Chamber? What is the wedding garment?
Do you know that your Holy Baptism, when you were united to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection, is the Spiritual Marriage of the Church? Raised from the Font, the heavens were opened to you. You were clothed in the Robe of Light, which was Christ Himself. This is the ‘wedding garment.’ When you drew near the Chalice in the fear of God, with faith and love, you partook of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb.
From the moment of your baptism, when heaven was opened to you, have there not been moments in the worship of the Church when the beauty of the Church’s hymns and prayers, the fragrance of her incense, the serene countenance of the holy icons gazing down on you, the spiritual nobility and majesty of the Divine Liturgy, seized your soul and opened to you, if only for an instant, a spiritual Beauty not of this world, and there stirred within you, as it did in Solomon, a visceral love for that Beauty and a longing to make the Wisdom of God your spouse? (Wisd 8.2)
Might this be a vision of the bridal chamber that was opened to you at your baptism?
‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior! And I have no wedding garment that I may enter!’ As Lazarus was clothed in grave clothes, soiled and stinking from his being four days in the tomb, do we not see, if ever a vision of the bridal chamber is opened to us, that we have no wedding garment? Our garments are soiled and stinking grave clothes.
The wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism is Christ the LORD. The LORD, says the Psalmist, is my life and my salvation. And St Paul says, Christ is my life. Christ Himself says to Mary and Martha: I am the Resurrection and the Life.
From this, we can see that the garment is an image of the life we are living; and there are two garments, two lives we may choose to live or choose to put on as we choose to put on a garment. There is the garment of the life of this world that is passing away, sewn with threads of corruption spun from the passions, from the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, from covetousness, which is idolatry. Its patterns and designs are cut out from the lustful thoughts and impure images, the fantasies and desires that occupy the mind.
Then there is the life of Christ, the wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism. If I have no wedding garment that I may enter the sacred bridal chamber of the Heavenly Bridegroom, can you see that it’s because I have given my soul to many husbands; I have chosen Caesar to be my king; I have given myself to the idols of the passions—gluttony, lust, greed, anger and the rest—and that the garments I have chosen to wear are the grave clothes of the corruption that is in the world through lust and covetousness?
‘Despising the divine commands, my soul,’ Mother Church calls out to us at Friday Matins of last week, ‘by thine own choice, thou hast surrendered thyself to corruption. Sunk in slumber through thy many trespasses, thou hast covered with filth the garment that God wove for thee, and made thyself unfit for the wedding of the King. Therefore, cry to the Savior: Tear in pieces my sackcloth and clothe me with gladness.’ (LTS 306)
You have chosen to come to this Bridegroom Matins service. You have chosen to come into the presence of the Bridegroom. You have chosen to draw near the Bridal Chamber; and the Bridegroom comes to us in our filthy grave clothes as He came to Lazarus in Bethany. I think we may say that in the beauty of these Bridegroom Matins, we hear Him crying to each one of us: ‘Come forth!’ Rouse yourself in the tomb of your heart. Hear, feel, the Bridegroom’s voice calling to you. Leave the grave clothes, the garment of this worldly life behind you. What keeps us from putting on the garment of the Savior’s divine commandments? Is it not our own choice to keep wearing the grave clothes of this life? I love those who love me, says the Bridegroom. Those who seek me diligently will find me! Nothing prevents us from choosing to heed the Bridegroom’s call, to rise up and come forth in the repentance of a broken and contrite heart, that the Bridegroom may illumine the vesture of our soul and save us and receive us, clothed again in the wedding garment of our baptism, into the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Resurrection. Amen!
Behold the Bridegroom comes at Midnight!’ Midnight is that ‘instant’ when, ‘in the twinkling of an eye,’ (1 Cor 15.52) the old passes away and the ‘dead are raised incorruptible, and we are changed.’ This change doesn’t just happen. It happens because the Bridegroom comes at Midnight and consummates His union with us, the children of flesh and blood, in the ‘bridal chamber.’ But the Church shows the Bridegroom consummating His union with us in the tomb. For there, having shared in our conception and birth through His Virgin Mother (Gal 4.4), He now shares in our death (Heb 2.14) in the flesh He received from Her, and it is in that instant that ‘we are changed.’
We find the divine mystery of Midnight, then, in the bridal chamber; and we find the bridal chamber in that ‘point’ in our inner man where we are dead. The bridal chamber, that is to say, is found in our heart, ‘for the real death is within, in the heart, and is concealed, and it is the inner man that perishes.’ [Macarius Hom XV.39, 125]
If the bridal chamber is in the heart, then it is in our true ‘self’; for ‘the heart is deep, beyond all things, and it is the man.’ [Jer 17.9] In the bridal chamber, then, we come upon our true self as the image of God. In this image, we yearn to attain to the likeness of God. And this character of the imago Dei which, as Origen wrote, constitutes our very essence, itself reveals that, by nature, we yearn to be one with the Bridegroom in the bridal chamber of our heart; but if Christ is Himself the Image of God in whom we came to be and in whom we move and have our being, then we are given to see that the bridal chamber of our heart comes to be and has its essence and movement from outside itself, in ekstasis, in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD Jesus Christ our God and Savior.
Illumined by the light of this doctrine of the Church, we begin to know ourselves. We see that the essential movement of our heart is the erotic yearning to belong not to ourselves but to the Bridegroom who comes at Midnight.
And so, when the mind that has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom in its heart learns that the Bridegroom is coming at Midnight, it rouses itself. It hastens to descend into the bridal chamber of the heart to cry out: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, O God! Through the Theotokos, have mercy on me!’ For the soul, if she only knows about God in her head, she is still dead and her heart is still stone. The soul who longs to live is the soul who longs to know God directly; but ‘there is no direct knowledge of God without an exceedingly great love, and such love does not come from the head. It must come from the heart.’ [Art of Prayer 20] And so the soul hastens to descend with her mind into the bridal chamber of her heart, for she longs to receive Him and to cleave to Him, to become bone of His bones and flesh of His flesh, so that it is no longer she who lives but the Bridegroom who lives in her.
And the Bridegroom comes. He comes to us in our own flesh and blood through the woman [Gal 4.4]. He comes to us in the Bridal Chamber of the All-Holy Virgin’s sacred womb, in the inmost sanctuary of His Living Temple. Knitting Her pure blood into the ‘schema,’ the ‘garment’ of man [Phil 2.8], He clothed Himself in our flesh and blood and was no more ashamed to call us ‘brethren.’ [Heb 2.11]
And when the soul darkened and weighed down by her many sins, learns that He has come into the ‘house’ [Lk 7.37ff.] of her own flesh and blood [Heb 2.14], she comes to Him with an alabaster jar of perfume, and she stands behind Him weeping. She wets His pure feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair. She kisses them, she pours perfume on them, and through her tears, she prays to Him softly: ‘Thy bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; but I have no wedding garment that I may enter. O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’
And the Savior, ‘spellbound as it were by goodness, love and longing, relinquishes His utter transcendence’ [St Maximos Philo 281] to the point of death on the Cross. Partaking of our death, the Bridegroom breathes out His Spirit on the Cross [exepneusen, Lk 23.46] and destroys the death that separated us from His love in the bridal chamber of our heart;’ [Heb 2.14-15, Rom 8.39]. His Body was ‘placed in the tomb,’ the Tomb was ‘changed’ into the Bridal Chamber, ‘and the Sabbath dawned,’ says St Luke [epephosken, Lk 23.54]. And in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD’s Tomb, the soul was enlightened, and the heart that before was a tomb sealed off by a stone was ‘changed’ in that instant into a bridal chamber and into a heart of flesh, a living heart!
The wedding garment? It is Christ Himself, whose Light we put on when we were raised from the Font, having united ourselves to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection. Can you see, then, that the Baptismal Font is the bridal chamber? And can you see that the Bridal Chamber is the Church? For the Church is Christ’s Body that He received from the pure blood of the Virgin, and in this Body, we are fashioned anew as children of God in the mystery of His Sabbath Rest, in the Tomb of our death that has received the Body of Him Who Is the Resurrection and the Life. When we pursue the Bridegroom in the baptismal Font, we receive His Seed into our dead, stony heart, and in that instant, our heart is ‘changed’ into a heart of flesh, a living heart; and we are ‘changed’ from children of blood born of the desires of the flesh into children of God born from above in the Love of the Holy Spirit.
From an ancient Christian text, we come upon this ancient biblical rubric of the Church: ‘By striving in the visible Church, we enter the invisible Church of the heart and the invisible Church of Heaven.’ (Liber Graduum XII) In the coming week, on the loom of this biblical rubric, we will weave the sights, sounds, movements, smells, all the elements of creation, both visible and invisible, into a wedding garment that can be seen, heard, smelled, and touched with the bodily senses. Who would not want to be clothed in this wedding garment who has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom? For ‘He is the Beautiful and the Good whom all things seek at every opportunity, and there is no being who does not participate in Him, and He attracts the [erotic] desire of all who are drawn towards Him, and He thirsts to be thirsted for, He longs to be longed for, and He loves to be loved!’ [Philo II 280-81]
And if we would clothe the hidden man of the heart with the death of Christ made visible for us in the rites of Holy Week, then would we come invisibly into that ‘Midnight’ when the Bridegroom comes, and we are changed. We become like the children with the palms of victory. They are the emblems of the Cross of Christ our King. And on Pascha Night, we follow, mystically, our King who goes forth from the Tomb like a Bridegroom in procession. He is raising us from our graves and bringing us to our own land into the Jerusalem on high as His prophets foretold. [Eze 37.13-14]
For, if we have received into the bridal chamber of our heart, in the sacramental mysteries of the Church, the Seed of the ‘heavenly man,’ then we carry the Bridegroom’s death in our mortal body. [2 Cor 4.10] That is, we carry the Bridegroom’s love in our body—for His death is the supreme manifestation, the final Incarnation of His extreme humility and compassion in which He created the world, and in which He recreated it when we had fallen. And if we tend that Seed and cultivate it through the ascetical disciplines of the Church, the Cross of Christ the Church gives us to take up if we want to follow Him—for they are the ‘flower of abstinence that grows from the wood of His Cross’ [LT 231]—then yearning for the Bridegroom begins to grow in us into a tree of life, and love for the Bridegroom begins to reign in our mortal bodies. We tend that Seed by taking up the ascetical disciplines of the Church, our cross, our ‘palm of victory.’ By the Grace of the Holy Spirit that shines in them, we strive to be obedient to sin and its carnal desires no more. We strive to lose our life for His sake; that is, in our love for the Bridegroom, we now present our bodies to Him as instruments of righteousness and no more to sin as instruments of unrighteousness. [Rm 6.12-13] Now the Bridegroom’s death is swallowing our death; now our mortal and perishable bodies are putting on the immortal and imperishable ‘wedding garment’ of the Bridal Chamber; now the Life of the Bridegroom begins to manifest itself even now in our mortal bodies [2 Cor 4.10]. It manifests itself in the hope that begins to form in us from the Seed of God’s love poured out into our hearts in the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Church. This is a real and living hope; and it is the pledge of our inheritance, which is our own land that is not of this world. It is the kingdom of heaven with all its glorious riches, found through the doors of Midnight in the deep, beyond all things, in our deep heart, in the mystery of the bridal chamber. Amen!
