THE CENTURION - AN ICON OF PRAYER & HOLY COMMUNION
omans 6.18-23
Matthew 8.5-13
In the Orthodox Church, our principle of biblical interpretation is the Holy Spirit. As the LORD says to His disciples in the Upper Room before His Passion: “The Comforter, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my Name, He will teach all things and bring to your remembrance everything I have told you.” (Jn 14.26) When we receive the precious and all holy Body and Blood of Our LORD Jesus Christ in Holy Christ, we receive His WORD that teaches and heals and, if it abides in us and we keep it and guard it, as the LORD says, it deifies us. It makes us one Spirit with Christ who has become one flesh with us through His incarnation of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.
We receive the Holy Spirit in our Holy Baptism when we are raised from death to life and we are born of the Spirit from above to become children of God; or, as the LORD says through the Psalmist, we become “gods, sons of the Most High.” (Ps 81/82.6) This is the sacramental mystery of the Church that unites us with the LORD’s holy disciples on the Day of Pentecost in that mystical moment that transcends space and time even as it fills every moment and every place in space and time, as it says in Acts: “They were all together [omou epi to auto].” Again, in the Holy Spirit of the Church, we read this theologically. It means they were all in the same place, in the same mind, in the same mystery – they were in the mystery of the LORD Jesus Christ risen from the dead, no longer bound by space-time, and ascended into heaven and who was invisibly present with them. That ‘omou epi to auto’ is where the faithful come every Sunday morning at the Divine Liturgy. That’s where we are this morning. In space and time we are on the corner of 54th and 38th, on Sunday, July 6, 2025. But in the Holy Spirit of Christ, we are in the presence of Christ who is invisibly present with us even as He sits on His Throne of Glory with the Father in Heaven. And in Christ, we are with all the lovers and disciples of Christ from Adam to now even till the Last Day. We are all together – “omou epi to auto,” in this one mystical place because the Day of Pentecost has come. It is the Day that the Church always now lives in here on earth even as she makes Her way through the centuries in the sacramental mysteries and in the Feasts and Holy Days of Her liturgical year; it is the Day we always now live in as we pass through the days and years of our life. And it is in this liturgical, sacramental, mystical movement of the Church through space and time that the Holy Spirit teaches all things to us, including the meaning of Holy Scripture. The Holy Spirit teaches and brings to our remembrance the WORDs of the LORD, everything He taught His disciples, through Her liturgical rubrics, in the structure and rhythm of Her liturgical worship, in the liturgical calendar of Her Feasts and Holy Days, the lives of Her saints and holy ones, in Her holy icons, Her prayers and hymns, the Octoechos, the Menaion, the Horologion, in the Psalms, the prophets, the books of Moses, and in the Gospels and Epistles of Her daily lectionary.
Can you see – with St John and St Peter and the Holy Myrrhbearers – that when you enter into the mystery of Christ’s Holy Church you have entered into the mystery of His Tomb. And you see that it is empty! There is no corpse here because there is no death here. It has become the place of the living, of those risen from the dead, filled with the fragrance of Christ’s Holy Resurrection, the fragrance of Jesus Christ whose very Name is “Myrrh emptied out!” (Sng 1.3) You have entered another world. Yes, you are still in this world. You are still on this side of the grave. But in the Church, and in the Spirit of the Church that you have received, if He abides in you, if you are keeping the WORDs of the LORD Jesus that He the Holy Spirit is teaching us in the Church, the Body of Christ, and is bringing to our remembrance in all the things of the Church I just mentioned, you live not in this world bounded by death but in the world to come bounded by Resurrection and Eternal Life in the joy of the personal communion of the Holy Trinity.
And in this world of the Church, illumined by the uncreated Light of Christ’s Holy Resurrection that has destroyed death and illumined our darkness, we see that our Gospel of the Centurion and his servant is a historical icon of prayer and of the Church’s sacramental mysteries; and we see that our epistle this morning from St Paul’s letter to the Romans is revealing to us the inner, hidden, theological meaning of this morning’s Gospel as an icon of prayer and the Church’s holy Eucharist.
And if we should need help to see, our father among the saints, John Chrysostom, confirms it for us. He gives us to pray before receiving Holy Eucharist, “I know, O LORD, that I am not worthy that Thou shouldst come under the roof of the house of my soul, for all is desolate and fallen, and Thou hast not in me a place worthy to lay Thy head.”
Now the theological meaning hidden in our Gospel this morning is uncovered. The centurion is an icon of our ‘intellect,’ that spiritual organ housed in our spiritual heart which is able by its very nature to see and to know God directly. For like the centurion, the ‘intellect’ – as we are taught both by the holy fathers of the Church and also by pagan philosophy of antiquity – is the ‘ruler’ of our body, our soul, our mind, our will, our [erotic] desire. The centurion’s servant, now, comes into view as an icon of our soul that is “paralyzed” because of our idolatry, our covetousness, our lust for all the beauty and riches of the earth that belong to God, which we want to have for ourselves, as though we are God, and which, through our lust, our covetousness, our idolatry, we have ‘stolen’ and claimed as ours. There is an unspoken voice in our soul, I think, that is always saying as one of my grandsons said when he was still two: “I want it! Therefore, I should have it!”
The paralysis of the Centurion’s servant is an icon of idolatry, because the idols make those who worship them to be just like them: having eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, mouths that do not speak. In effect, it renders them spiritual corpses. And that is the state of our soul and our mind in the covetousness and greed of our idolatry.
We see the centurion, then, as our ‘intellect’ doing as St Paul directs us from our epistle readings both yesterday and this morning: “Do not present your bodies – which includes our mind, our soul, our thoughts, our desires, our will – to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present your body to God as instruments of righteousness, for,” says St Paul, you have been raised in your Holy Baptism from death to life. You are no longer rooted in death. You are rooted in the uncreated life of Christ’s Holy Resurrection. Therefore, St Paul tells us this morning, “Just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.” Don’t live in the death that is the ‘life’ of sin, says St Paul says. You have been delivered from that living death. But rather, live in the life of the Holy Spirit who united you to Christ and raised you up in Christ from death to life, from the unrighteousness of sin to the holiness of God.
We have received the Heavenly Spirit, dear faithful! We have received the Heavenly Spirit in all the sacramental mysteries of the Church. Now we see the WORD of the LORD by which He heals the centurion’s servant as the mystery of His Holy Spirit. “He sends forth His Spirit,” says the Psalmist, “and they are created. He renews the face of the earth.”
This morning’s Scripture lessons we can receive, therefore, as instruction on how to live our life in this world in the Life of the world to come that now lives in us in the mystery of Pentecost. Let the centurion this morning be the image of our inner man, the hidden man of the heart and present yourself to Christ in unceasing prayer, in what is called the prayer of the heart. Let your intellect be the centurion it’s supposed to be. Take hold of your will and make it a slave of Christ and not to the greed, the lusts of the body or your mind and its thoughts and reasonings. Present yourself to Christ without ceasing in the humility of the centurion. And in the WORD of the LORD, the Holy Spirit, that He sends forth into your soul and that is made “incarnate” in Holy Eucharist, live in the Life of Christ that is in you. Present your inner man always to the Light of Christ shining in the darkness of this world, and that in a way hidden from the world, is enlightening you, teaching you in this world the knowledge of the Truth, who is Christ, and whose Holy Spirit is healing your soul, if you are guarding and keeping the WORDs of the LORD that now abide in you in His Holy Spirit. For with those words of the LORD, the Holy Spirit is preparing us for the resurrection of not only our souls but also our bodies so that we may sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Centurion in the Life of the world to come. 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!
