CHRISTMAS IN THE GERSASENES
Galatians 2.16-20
Luke 8.26-39
The blessed season of Advent is coming! Its beginning is but two weeks away. Advent is the liturgical season when the faithful double down in their inner focus to prepare themselves to receive the incarnate God born of the most Holy Virgin Theotokos on Christmas Day. Inwardly, we withdraw from the world with focused intention to climb the steps mystically with our beloved Mother, the Virgin Theotokos, in order to enter the inner sanctuary of the hidden man of our heart, as she herself urges us to do in her maternal compassion for us.
I am giving to you the inner significance of the Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos on Nov 21. It becomes wonderfully meaningful and healing if we engage that Feast inwardly, in our souls, and realize that the Holy of Holies the Virgin enters visibly at the age of 3 is the invisible mystery of our deep heart in the temple of our body.
Commending ourselves to her tender, motherly compassion, with her help we take up the Cross Her Son and our God commands us to take up if we would become His disciples. The Cross is given to us by the Church in the form of the Fast of St Philip.
If the Fast is the Cross of the LORD, then it follows that the Fast is how we make incarnate the mystery of our Holy Baptism, when we unite ourselves to Christ by participating in His voluntary death and resurrection by voluntarily taking up our Cross in the form of the Fast.
Taking up our Cross, we make the power of the Savior’s Cross incarnate in us. It becomes embodied in us. It becomes the principle of our life in this world. And in that power, and in the embrace of the most merciful Mother of the most merciful God, and surrounded by the saints, the great cloud of witnesses who are interceding for us, we undertake the work of faith in order to prepare our souls to receive the King of All who comes to us as a little Child, born of His Most Beloved Mother, the daughter of Eve, the Holy Virgin Mary Theotokos.
The work of faith is to crucify our earthly members: fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry [Col 3.5] that we may receive the King of All who comes invisibly upborne by the angelic hosts to us in the liturgical and sacramental worship of the Church, which is the Body of Christ, the Pillar and Ground of Truth, the Fullness of Him who is all in all.
Dear faithful, our Most Beloved Mother, the Most Blessed Virgin Theotokos, is the boat in this morning’s Gospel in which the LORD with His disciples ‘sails’ to the region of the Gerasenes. They sail, it says, to the Gerasenes that were opposite Galilee. The image is that of the LORD descending from the Edenic Mountain to Adam and Eve who took up their dwelling in the region opposite Eden. The LORD stepping out onto the ‘earth,’ then is an image of Christmas, when He is born of the Holy Virgin and is manifest in the flesh as a little Child.
Now we can see that the ‘certain man’ who came out of the city to meet Him is us who are coming away from the world to meet Him in the cave of our heart on Christmas Day. That tells us that taking up the Advent Fast of St Philip as our Cross is how we come away from the city in order to meet Him where He has come to us – in the cave of our heart.
But, this ‘certain man’ who came out of the city to meet the Savior when He stepped out of the boat onto the earth, i.e., when He is born on Christmas Day, this ‘certain man’ it says, had been possessed by a legion of demons for a very long time, and that he dwelt in the tombs, and that he wore no clothes.
If this ‘certain man’ is a mirror image of us, then what is the Gospel this morning revealing to us by holding up to us the mirror of this ‘certain man’ of the Gerasenes? Is not the Gospel showing us a mirror image of ourselves in our deep heart? Remember the words of St Macarios. Our heart is a tomb. He is simply rephrasing the word of the LORD. Outwardly, He says, we appear beautiful, but inwardly, in our heart, we are filled with dead men’s bones and all uncleanness [Mt 23.27].
If we dare, then, let us look into the mirror image of ourselves shown to us in this morning’s Gospel. The man wore no clothes, it says. Instead, he wore chains and shackles that bound him hand and foot. Yet, he was empowered by the legion of demons to break those chains. And yet, even when he broke those chains by that demonic power, he still dwelt in the tombs. And he would be bound again, and again, and again. Might the legion of demons be all those unclean forces coming out of our heart that defile us, and that separate us from God – we call them passions – and that make us to resemble Lucifer and his demons more than we resemble the Image of God, Christ our God, in whom we were created? St Paul calls these our earthly members that we must put to death if we wish to be united to Christ in the likeness of His death – i.e., if we wish to participate in His death so that we can be raised with Him in His resurrection.
The man wore no clothes, it says. Might we see this as the hidden man of our heart, our true self, beneath the ‘fig leaves’ of the passions, the legion of demons, that we hide behind so that we can appear beautiful – except, of course, in those moments when those demons, those passions, break loose and we reveal outwardly all the uncleanness that defiles us inwardly?
You might be able to discern, if you are not remembering the prayers of exorcism said over us at our baptism, that this morning’s Gospel reveals what’s going on in the waters of the Font, beneath the surface. But it is also clear that this morning’s Gospel is revealing what’s going on beneath the surface of our life as we draw near the Feast of the Savior’s Nativity, Christmas.
The LORD is coming to us in the ‘boat’ of His Holy Mother! He will be found in the cave of our heart, even in the ‘tomb’ of our heart. Therefore, let us go out to meet Him. Let us come away from the city, from the madding crowd of the world. Taking up our Cross, the Advent Fast of St Philip, let us take up the power of the Savior. Not by our own strength, but by the strength of the saving power of the Cross, given to us in the form of the Fast, we can overcome the legion of the passions that defile us – if we want to.
Make the Fast meaningful, powerful, by using it as the means by which you step onto the Path that would bring us to the LORD Jesus Christ who is coming to us here outside of Eden, opposite Galilee. He is coming to us carried in the ‘boat’ of His Most Beloved Mother, the All-Holy Theotokos. Through this inward descent to the cave, the tomb of our heart, that we make invisibly by the power of the Fast, let us draw near the Cave of Bethlehem, taking off the fig leaves, the passions that defile us, one by one until we are naked, so that on Christmas Day, we may present ourselves to the LORD as we truly are in all the uncleanness that defiles us.
This certain man of the Gerasenes who came out of the city to meet the LORD, this man who was naked and unclean and defiled, whose ‘life’ was the death of the tombs, was cleansed, he was healed, and he was found ‘clothed’ and in his right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus!
Dear faithful, our Gospel this morning gives us every reason to expect that if we would take up the Fast as the Church means for it to be taken up – i.e., as the Cross by whose power we put to death the passions that defile us, as we take off the fig leaves that separate us in our inner man from Christ – and come away from the city, and descend in the prayer of the Church into the cave, the tomb, of our heart, the LORD will cleanse us. He will heal us, and we will be found sitting at His feet in our right mind – in our true selves in the image and likeness of God, no longer naked but clothed in the Robe of Glory, clothed with the Power of the Most High, clothed in the Holy Spirit.
This is the joy of Christmas that our minds should dwell richly on, so that with this joy set before us, the joy of seeing the LORD not outside of us but within us, in the cave of our heart, we will want to deny ourselves for His sake, and take up our cross that we might lose our life in His death and so find it in His resurrection on Christmas Day. Amen! Most Holy Theotokos, save us! Glory to Jesus Christ!
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!
