Sermon for the 10th Sunday of Matthew. - Afterfeast of Transfiguration
Matthew 17:14-23
Three days ago we stood on Mount Tabor. We heard how the face of Christ shone like the sun and his clothing became white as light. Peter did not want to leave. He asked to build three tents and stay there.
Today’s Gospel is what happened next, a few verses later in the same chapter. The Lord comes down with Peter, James and John, and at the bottom there is a crowd, and an argument, and a father on his knees.
First, what happened on the mountain. Nothing changed in Christ. He was always God, light from light, and the divine light was always his. What changed was the eyes of the apostles. He opened them, and let three men see for a moment what was true the whole time.
This took place forty days before the Cross. The glory was shown to men who were about to watch him die.
Now the valley. A boy is tormented. He falls into fire and into water. His father had brought him to the disciples who stayed behind, and they could not heal him.
Read that boy slowly and you may recognise yourself. We have our own turmoils and our fits and our bouts, things in us that throw us down and that we cannot govern. Christ does not stay in the light. He comes down straight into the fits.
The disciples ask him privately why they failed. Because of your little faith, he says. Then he tells them that faith the size of a mustard seed would move a mountain, and that this kind goes out only by prayer and fasting.
We hear that in the middle of the Dormition fast. Prayer and fasting are not punishments, and they are not machinery either. We do not perform them and so lay hold of God. Nothing we do can oblige him to give what is his to give. But they are tools, and they are crucial tools, because they slowly change the person who keeps them. God does not weigh our practices. He looks at the whole state of a person.
Prayer is speech with the Lord, not a list of requests. It is how we talk to someone who is already listening, and much of it should simply be thanks. We ask him for a great deal and thank him for very little. When we keep at it, the noise in us settles and the heart grows quiet.
And the fast is not only about food. Food is where it is learned. What we are trained for is everything else that governs us, and there the fast is harder and far more necessary.
We have the potential to be made gods by grace. But a potential is not a possession. It becomes real only if we let go of the life we have made for ourselves and take God as our goal, and go on taking him as our goal.
The boy is healed from that hour. The Lord then tells the disciples that he will be delivered into the hands of men, and killed, and raised on the third day. Glory on the mountain. Suffering in the valley. Then the Cross.
And we have our own cross. Six days before Tabor he had told them that anyone who follows him must deny himself and take up his cross. It is not usually some great affliction. It is the passion we fight this morning and lose to, and fight again tomorrow. Anger, vanity, appetite. To refuse it once is to carry the cross for that hour.
I would like to recount an experience of Father Nikolaos Loudovikos, who is nowadays an eminent theologian, and which he had as a young priest serving in villages outside Thessaloniki. At the time he felt a profound loneliness, because of the gap between the theology he was studying and the everyday lives of his parishioners. This is his account.
Well, at some point, the following wondrous event happened to me, through which it was as if God taught me many things.
One of those Sundays the Divine Liturgy finished, and the priest tells me, a simple priest and two very simple churchwardens, unlettered men: Let us go and have a coffee, Father, before you leave. Do not leave just like that.
The Liturgy ends, and I was, as always, very sad in my loneliness. And we go to drink coffee in the village square. So, while we were drinking coffee there, suddenly one of the churchwardens turns, looks at me, and says:
Well, Father, Mr Yiannis here and I had a question. Our church here had not been consecrated, and we wondered, not having been consecrated by the bishop, were the sacraments and the Divine Liturgy not valid?
I said to myself, oh, what is going on here. Such a question made an impression on me. And he says:
Do you know what we did? We decided to fast for three weeks, so that God would show us. And we did, and indeed, one Sunday before the Bishop came to do all that, we saw that light again during the Divine Liturgy.
I started to become alarmed. What light? Which light?
That light, the ever-shining one. After you see it, you look at the sun and you think it is darkness. A light which descends and you see things, many things, situations, the present, the past, the future in there.
I began to be astounded. I was dealing with people who had the experience of Saint Gregory Palamas and Saint Symeon the New Theologian. And of course the other man was blessing there, and the simple priest was also saying, yes, yes.
This experience was staggering for me. Of course it did not stop there, but I began to seek out this churchwarden, this simple man. How do you live? How do you live?
Eh, how do I live. Poorly.
What do you do, how exactly do you spend your day, what exactly do you do during the day?
I do, he says, absolutely nothing. I do not do anything special. I love God, but I just have a little patience. I have a little patience.
He had patience. Do you know what patience means? Patience means this cross of freedom embracing others. In there, God is revealed.
This is the magnificent lesson. Hesychasm is lived physiology. It is this opening to communion, and in this way great revelations occur. 1
So we come down from the feast this week and go back to our work, our families and our arguments. We fast and we pray. Not to earn anything, but to have our eyes opened. The light of Tabor is not in the past. It is here, and it is nearer than we think.
Amen.