Remembering Sunday: Jesus Raises a Dead Girl and Heals a Sick Woman
https://www.facebook.com/SaintGeorgeChurchNYC/videos/1174843740924825/
What I remember:
To be honest, my strongest memories of yesterday were not the homily. I am now induced as a Catechumen officially after about a year as a listener. There are still some things that need to be worked out in my faith and understanding before I can fully commit, but I am committed to the process itself of learning these things and growing in faith. After divine liturgy, I had an in-depth discussion with a parishioner about spiritual questions that had been weighing on me. We talked for about two hours. The main points of that conversation:
Orthodoxy will not say where the Holy Spirit isn’t. But they will say, “this is Orthodoxy, taste and see”
It is possible the Western (RC & prot) idea of sins as debits in the divine ledger have something to do with the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in that culture
Salvation is not an individualistic endeavor. It is done in and through relationships of all kinds, particularly your relationship with your spiritual father and other church members.
The Word is rightly a title of Christ, as in the prologue of John (greek logos). If we call the Holy Bible “The Word” we are in danger of worshipping it, and/or our own individual mental model of it, as Christ, rather than Christ himself. Ironically, these attitudes and a culture of proof-texting can lead to one being a Rules Lawyer for Christ. Verbal Plenary Inspiration is not part of our tradition.
The Church is the body of Christ, the people, the assembly of those called out, not the institutional organs, as Roman Catholics often refer to it. This can lead us into a form of idolatry where we put the institution and procedure before Christ, or mistake them for Him, and let them get in the way of a living relationship with the living God.
Heaven and Hell are atemporal and refer to both the future and the present moment. Our encounters with Hell on hearth are proofs of its reality and strong counterpoints against a Universalist understanding of salvation, as tempting as such a thing is to believe.
We will waver because we are human, but Christ is always waiting there with open arms to heal us, to save us, to redeem us. This is the Orthodox understanding of “blessed assurance”, not some protected legal category. It is not particular beliefs that save us but the practice of turning constantly towards Christ and working in concert with the divine will.
Similarly, in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, we are right to say the publican was justified, but he is justified, through, with, and in his orientation towards the divine. Again, a concept of “right relation” rather than a permanent legal category.
There is a lot of flexibility in Orthodoxy when it comes to religious practice. Certain things were codified early on, everything else, we will not say it’s canonical but we will say “do it if it helps”, with spiritual discernment of course. We would never try to reclaim the occult for Christ as some of our Pentecostal friends do.
What does it mean that we worship God but venerate icons and pray to Mary? Surely, some people get confused. But it is Orthodox to understand that Mary simply leads us to Christ. We do not make sacrifices to her. We only make a bloodless sacrifice to God as part of Divine liturgy[2]. When we bow in the direction of the iconostasis in the Divine Liturgy, we say “to you, O Lord” as a reminder of this.They are a window to Christ, as is the Bible, and our prayer life, and relationships.
There are many holy mysteries and things we are not meant to know. Some things we can’t know because of our human limitations. This is OK and expected.
forgive us our debts
I wanted to dig into the claim that the idea of sins as debts is a later invention of the West. We often feel in the West that something has gone terribly wrong, some kind of disembodied turn and a turn of atomization, alienation, the disenchantment of the world (to throw around a few terms used). I agree something is wrong, but we need to be precise in our diagnosis. So, I went back to the Lord’s prayer and the original greek. From the interlinear I get ὀφειλήματα, nominative plural form. With the help of our massively parallel friend Claude, I found some business documents from Greek Egypt, using the term in reference to a business transaction, “debt” in the financial sense. We have, from P.Hib. 1 42, ὀφειλήματι, dative singular form. The context of this papyrus makes this screamingly clear. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.40.4 also uses this term in a more literary or metaphorical sense, to mean social obligations. So, it’s not right to say that the idea of sin as debt was a later invention. It was there from the beginning, as was a concept of substitutionary atonement [1]. Neither substitutionary atonement nor sins-as-debts are foregrounded in Orthodoxy, but it is there in holy tradition.
The actual Homily
What I remember of the actual homily:
We always say “Proskomen!” Or “let us be attentive” before we read the epistle and the gospel reading, to remind us not to daydream but be present, here and now, in what is being read.
The letter of the law is not important, what is important is the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. These are the core and the wellspring of the law, and if we write them on the tablets of our hearts, our thoughts, our mouth, and our hands will naturally glorify God.
Liveblogged summary of re-watch:
We always say “Proskomen!” Or “let us be attentive” before we read the epistle and the gospel reading, to remind us not to daydream but be present, here and now, in what is being read.
The epistle and the gospel almost always have to do with a common theological lesson. So they provide context for one another.
The Gospel is usually the life of Christ, and the epistle shows us how to actually live that out in the life of the church.
In English we say “Law”, but this was due to a translation by St. Jerome into Latin, a better translation might be “teachings” [3]
These teachings demonstrate that humanity was fallen and teach us humility. This is why many of these things were considered “unclean”, such as dead bodies and period blood.
It was very difficult for the apostles to accept the grafting of gentiles into the body of christ. Even after Pentecost, Peter had difficulty with gentiles. It was hard for them to let go of their understanding of salvation as tied in with Jewish identity and following the old teachings, such as circumcision etc.
Great is the mystery of the incarnation. Before humanity was cursed and fallen… now it is being blessed and recreated in our Lord.
We fall into this still sometimes: Spirituality is not memorizing the ten commandments or a set of rules. But that is not what Christ brought: If we have love, we cannot fail but to follow the ten commandments. Spirituality is walking in that one law of love. Our newness of life should be that change of direction.
St. Nektarios lived a life of Love. All the petty squabblings of his age have fallen away with the first creation, but his memory lives on as part of the Second Creation.
Apolstolic Christianity is not about mix/matching/inventing rules or laws, but walking in Love and Truth, in a full way. We can’t do it by ourselves, which is why we are given the Holy Spirit, who pours love into our hearts. We are in a mix right now. “There are two laws inside of me” from Paul. We are both Saint and Sinner (ed: Echoing the teachings last week at the Episcopal church).
That is why we have the ongoing life of the church. So we must never be discouraged, but turn always towards Christ and allow the Holy Spirit to work in and through us.
We must persevere, keep walking the way, and always ask God for the next healing, the next growth, and the next depth in our spiritual life.
Reflections
It’s remarkable that much of what I missed in the homily were things that were reinforced in my conversations after Liturgy. Glory to God. It is also notable that after everything, a man with mild paranoid schizophrenia came up to talk with a group of non-christians I was talking with. I had never met such a man. We tried to treat him with kindness, listening to him but not letting him totally dominate the conversation, and I gave him a fist bump, but following the example of Christ more fully, I wish I had simply given him a hug. He clearly needed one. Nothing external is unclean if we are in Christ (with appropriate spiritual humility and understanding of our limitations). So we must guard our hearts, but not our arms.
footnotes
Substitutionary atonement is not the focus in Orthodoxy, but it is there in holy tradition (holy tradition is inclusive of the Bible, but there’s not as strong or as binary of a canonical/noncanonical distinction like you see in Trent or in Martin Luther’s High German bible).
This also keeps the understanding of “priest” as “one who makes sacrifices” consistent.
This may have also had to do with the translation of Hebrew to Greek. Greek jews of the time would have understood this, but sometimes the context falls away but the words remain, leading to confusion through multiple translations. From Claude:
In the Septuagint (LXX)νόμος (nomos) is the standard Greek translation for תּוֹרָה (torah) in the LXX (3rd-2nd century BC).
Hebrew torah fundamentally means "instruction" or "teaching" (from the verb yarah, "to teach/instruct"), but the LXX translators chose the Greek word nomos, which primarily means "law" or "custom."
This translation choice was significant because:
It emphasized the legal/legislative aspect of Torah
Greek nomos carries connotations of established law, statute, custom
It somewhat narrows the broader Hebrew sense of "instruction/teaching"
The Vulgate (late 4th century AD, Jerome's Latin translation) follows suit and translates both:
Hebrew torah → lex ("law")
Greek nomos → lex ("law")
So the Vulgate reinforces the "law" translation already established by the LXX.
Another synchronicity in my Catholic Prayer Book this morning… “If we love our neighbor, we automatically love God as well. For it is in the unity of this twofold love that God has constituted the fullness of the Law and the Prophets. ~ St Leo the Great
