TO BECOME CHILDREN OF LIGHT
Galatians 6.11-18
2 Corinthians 4.6-15
John 3.13-17
Matthew 22.35-46
In the world on this side of the grave, time is measured by the astronomical movements of sun, moon, and stars. The LORD reveals to Moses [Gen 1.14] that these heavenly bodies are meant to give light to the world, indicating that time and light go together; but also that beneath the movement of time is a deeper movement of a Light that shone forth in the world before sun, moon, and stars came to be.
God raised this primordial Light into manifestation on Day One of the creation. In this Primordial Light the LORD fashioned the creation in six days, creating man as male and female in His own Image and Likeness on the sixth day. Now, sun, moon, and stars were created on the fourth day. Yet, God created the vegetation that needs light to grow on the third day. They began to grow and to thrive not in the light of the sun, but in this Primordial Light. And, in this Light, not in the light of sun, moon, and stars, the LORD God finished His creation, His poem [poema]. He finished it on the Sabbath. So, in the mystery of the LORD’s Sabbath Rest, we enter inside that Primordial Light and into its movement into the creation that the LORD God created and finished in that Light.
It was on Mt Sinai, when the Law was given through Moses, that the LORD God revealed to Moses the mystery of creation and how it came to be in this Primordial Light that shone in the Law – so that the Law was a luminous shadow of the Primordial Light. In that revelation, He taught Moses that the heavenly lights of sun, moon, and stars are signs [Gen 1.14] – we can call them icons – of that Primordial Light. Moreover, in the book of Genesis, the LORD reveals to Moses that the light those heavenly lights give to the earth has a higher, an “iconic” purpose, and it is not for the growth of vegetation. It is to mark the seasons [the kairous] of the coming of the True Light into the world, Jesus Christ, by distinguishing between the day and the night; we could say, by distinguishing between the manifest or visible of creation and the unmanifest or invisible of the Spirit, or the Light in which we see light and the hidden or unseen, or the “darkness” that is the “Mother of the light” [Gn 1.2-3].
That is, the purpose of sun, moon, and stars is to mark the movement of the Primordial Light coming into the world, who shone from the darkness, from the “womb” of its “Mother,” on Day One of creation. If St John speaks truth when he says that Jesus Christ is the True Light coming into the world, who shone forth from the Virgin and became flesh, then the movement of time in the world on this side of the grave is revealed to be the visible, outward form, the “icon,” of a deeper, inner movement of time, and that is the movement of the Primordial Light, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, He Who Is in the bosom of the Father, coming into the world in His love for mankind, for the purpose of “finishing” the creation in His death on the Cross, and to save all who receive Him – that is, all those who come to the Light and to make them to become partakers of the divine nature by becoming communicants of His most pure body and His most precious blood so that, sharing in His death, we might share in His Resurrection. For, like plants that live and thrive in the light of the sun [photosynthesis], those who draw near in the fear of God with faith and love receive the Heavenly Spirit, and they begin to live and thrive in the uncreated Light of Christ. I.e., their salvation begins. Their deification begins when they receive the Body and Blood of the God who was “humanified.” For, as the woman receives the seed of her husband, so they receive the Spirit of God when they receive His Seed and it is sown in the ground of their soul, and they partake of the body and blood of the incarnate God as their food and drink, of Christ risen from the dead, who in the sacramental mysteries of the Church, His Body, is divided yet not disunited, who is eaten yet never consumed. Receiving the Seed of God, the LORD Jesus Christ in the sacramental mysteries of His Church, they are born from above not of the blood, i.e., the seed, or the desire or the will of the male, but of God, and they become children of God, children of the Light, the uncreated Light that is the form of the uncreated, eternal Life of God that is itself the uncreated form of the incomprehensible love of God [Jn 1.1-4].
This is the theological, the spiritual or mystical reality we are standing in on this Sunday morning in the light of the astronomical calendar of the world on this side of the grave, Sept 13. We stand before the LORD on this the Eighth Day of the week that is mystically the First Day, Day One, of the New Creation in the Resurrection of Christ. Can you see, then, how the movement of the sun, moon, and stars mark the seasons of the Primordial Light? Can you see in this light how the seasons of the Primordial Light are the descending and ascending movements of God’s love for mankind, and of the ascending movement of our love for the Mother of the Light, the Theotokos, and Her Son, the Primordial Light of the Father?
In the movement of the calendar of this worldly time, we came to Sept 8, the eighth day of the Church’s New Year, and we descended mystically beneath the movement of worldly time to come into the Nativity of the Theotokos, and we came into the mystical dawning of joy. Her Nativity is the dawning of joy for it is from Her “pure blood” that the Primordial Light comes into the world. In the sacred darkness of Her womb, in the sanctuary of Her flesh and blood body, He is conceived as the Son of Man and becomes flesh, and shines forth from Her, and annuls the curse. He fills the darkness of our death with His Light that is the Life of men [Jn 1.4]. And by His death on the Cross, which He is made able to suffer because of the flesh and blood He received as His own from His Mother, the Virgin, He destroys death and grants to all who receive Him eternal life in the divine love of the Primordial Light in whom the creation came to be and in whose death and resurrection in the flesh the creation is now finished.
And, again, through the movement of worldly time marked by the movement of the heavenly lights, we have come today to the Exaltation of the Savior’s Life-creating Cross. I wouldn’t say that we are standing beneath the Savior’s Cross. That’s where we stand on Great and Holy Friday. I would say, rather, that we have entered the mystery of the Nativity of the Theotokos to stand in the presence of Her Son, the Primordial Light, in the Garden that was beyond the Cross and in which is found the Tomb of the LORD’s Sabbath Rest. The Church is now preparing us to take up the Savior’s Cross, to elevate it, to lift it high, as our weapon of victory, the weapon of divine love that has destroyed death in the death of Christ, and to follow our LORD who is going before us in His Resurrection into Galilee, i.e., into the wilderness of our everyday life, to lead us up the Mountain of His Ascension and to our grave at the top of that mountain. And, if we are walking in the Light, if we are living according to the commandments of Christ – for these are the very structure of the Light of Christ that is our Life – we see that our dying in this world is the dying of our dying. We see that when we are placed in our grave, having united ourselves to Christ in Baptism, our eyes we will see what we began to see in an unseeing way on the day of our baptism: that all along, as we passed through the movement of time in this life, we have been carried in the arms of the Theotokos into Day One and into the Primordial Light of the New Creation. For in the waters of the Church’s Baptismal Font, our death was transfigured; it became the darkness that receives the Primordial Light, and it became in that moment the beginning of our deification, of our Life in the Primordial Light of Christ. We look into our grave, now, at the top of the mountain, and we see that it has been transfigured to become the gate through which we pass over into the Eternal Life of the Light of Christ in the descending and ascending movement of divine love.
That joy we hear proclaimed in these feasts. The seed of that joy is sown in our souls and bodies not in abstracto but in concreto in the sacramental mysteries of the Church. It is the joy of that Primordial Light in whom our movement through the days and seasons of worldly time are transfigured into the movement of drawing near in the fear of God, with faith and love, to become partakers of the divine nature in the sacramental mysteries of the Church, as we flee the corruption that is in this world through lust in loving obedience to the God who commanded Light to shine forth from the darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give to us the Light of the knowledge of the Glory of God in the Face, in the presence, of Jesus Christ, our LORD, God and Savior. Amen! Most holy Theotokos, save us! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory to God forever.
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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!
