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Matthew 10:32-38, 19:27-30; Hebrews 11:33-12:2

Who do you love?  This is the question that our Lord asks us in the gospel today.  When asked to give the greatest commandment, our Lord replied, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength and with all they mind…”  Now He asks if we do indeed follow that commandment, or if, perhaps we are distracted from our love of God by the various attractions of the world.  This is a vital point, for in order to truly work out our salvation and to come into union and communion with God, He must be our greatest love, in fact He must be our only love.  All the other loves in our life must be the outgrowth of our love for God and exist in complete harmony and submission to that love.  As soon as an earthly love begins to compete with love for God and begin to create any dissonance in our hearts, then that is the indication that we have stepped aside from this path laid out for us by our Savior.

Our earthly loves come in many sizes and shapes, everything from the “love” (that is, affinity to) simple things like a particular color or a particular food to the more weighty, deeply rooted loves like that of love for mother, father, spouse, brother, sister and so on.  These loves exist naturally in our lives, however, in their natural fallen state they are inflated and expanded so that they take the place of love for God.  In this condition these loves, as natural, beautiful, pleasant and strong as they may be, become barriers to our salvation.  Until these worldly, natural loves are redefined, recast, yes, even reborn into the light of Christ and the love of God, they are not our friends but our enemies.  Does not our Lord tell us in this Gospel today that “a man’s foes shall be those of his own household”.  This does not necessarily mean that the members of our family only are our foes, but even the very members of our fallen nature become our foes. It is our self love that competes with the love for God.  In other words, we become our own worst enemies. 

The Lord tells us, “He that loves father or mother … son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Our father and mother and son and daughter are the attachments of the fallen world that cling to our souls and pull them away from God.  These are certainly our natural, worldly relationships, be it family, friends or loved ones, and they also pertain to our work, reputation, social standing, activities, and interests that bring us pleasure.  Other more concrete things such as possessions and money also have that same pull on us.  Some of these are easy to cut off, others are more difficult, however, if we would follow Christ then all of them without exception must be set aside and either incorporated into our love of God or if they are incompatible with the life in Christ they must be abandoned completely.  It is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that just a little bit of “guilty pleasure” is ok as long as most of the time we engage in righteousness and good things, however, that is a lie that we tell ourselves.  Jesus Christ demands our full and complete love and devotion; anything less is not true love for God.

This sounds hard, this sounds like suffering and sacrifice – and it is for suffering and sacrifice are the very essence of the Cross.  Our Lord Jesus took up His Cross and He suffered and died as a sacrifice for us. He calls us to follow in His footsteps, to walk along the way that He opened for us, and that way is the way of the Cross.  It is a way of suffering and sacrifice, of giving up the pleasures of this world that we might exchange them for the joys and bliss of heaven.  This is what He tells Peter in the gospel: “everyone that hath forsaken houses, or brethren or father or mother or wife or children, or lands, for my name’s sake shall receive an hundredfold and shall inherit everlasting life.”

All this suffering, sacrifice and difficulty that we face in this world is repaid when we shall enter the kingdom of heaven.  We will then look at the tokens of our sacrifice and see that they are turned from sorrow to joy, from painful burdens to priceless gems, from darkness to light.  In order for us to accomplish this sacrifice in this world, we have to keep our attention focused on the next life, to keep our eye on the prize rather than the difficulty that we face getting there.  Too often we focus on this world and only on this world, we excuse our sinful behavior by citing some worldly necessity or by making some meaningless promise to God (trying to strike a bargain with Him).  However, if we keep before us the full beauty of heaven, that vision will drown out the deceptive pleasures of this life.  If we keep in mind the eternal and infinite tortures of hell, then that makes whatever discomfort or difficulty we face in this life pales in comparison and opens the path to enduring whatever difficulty we face in this life so that we might avoid that terrible suffering in the next.

Therefore brethren, “let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”  Only in this way will be claim the promise that our Lord gave to those who left behind the world and followed Him to “receive an hundredfold and (to) inherit everlasting life.”

Our Lord uses two images at this point – water and light.  He begins by speaking of the living water which He will give to all who come and St John tells us that He is speaking here of the Holy Spirit.  This living water is the grace of the Holy Spirit which is poured out upon us without limit.  He finishes His remarks by speaking about the Divine Light which enlightens the world, that is Himself.  He says “I am the light of the world.” He is the light which dispels the darkness of our hearts which are cloaked in sin and covered with dirt.  His light penetrates even that thick darkness and chases it away and reveals to us the love of God.  The Lord constantly says that He and the Father are one and reveals this mystery of the unity in diversity of the Holy Trinity.  Here He speaks of the Holy Spirit Who being co-equal with the Father and the Son comes to bestow the divine grace of God upon us.  And now we can see how it is that each of the persons of the Trinity interact with us and are revealed to us.  The Father is the Creator of all and contains all things in Himself, The Son, being the Light of the world, opens our eyes and shows the Father to us so that we can know Him and the Holy Spirit pours out the divine grace upon us to enable us to act, to follow Christ into the Kingdom of God.

Jesus Christ is the light of the world.  He first and foremost, by His incarnation, reveals the truth of God to the world.  He also shines His light upon the darkness that has enveloped the world and reveals to us the path to come to the Father and to restore our communion with Him which was broken by sin and death.  He enlightens our minds and our hearts that we might see our own shortcomings and sin and opens to us the path to leave those sins behind and step upon the path of salvation leading us into Heaven.  This is the action of our Lord as the Divine Light which illumines all men.

But just knowing about God and seeing the path set before us is not enough.  Just seeing our sins that prevent us from following that path is not enough, we need something more.  We need to act.  But to act we need to be empowered, we need strength, we need the grace of the Holy Spirit.  It is the Holy Spirit Who spurs us to action, it is the Holy Spirit Who empowers us to do good, it is the Holy Spirit Who enables us to repent of our sins and leave them behind.  In order to follow Christ to stand before the throne of God and to glorify Him, we need the Holy Spirit to pour out the divine grace upon us and bring our soul to act; to repent of our sins, to turn away from evil and to turn toward Christ; to embark upon the path of righteousness for without His help we can do no good thing; to follow Christ as He leads us into the Kingdom of God.

On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends upon the Church to cleans us of our sins, to unite us with Christ and to become His Bride.  On Pentecost, the disciples no longer were waiting but they were sent out to preach the Gospel to the whole world.  On Pentecost, we too are sent out into the world, to live the life of Christ and so to witness to our friends, family, acquaintances and all that we meet of the love of God for them.  Christ is the light of the world and the Holy Spirit enables us to become the beacons from which that Light shines to the whole world.  The Holy Spirit fills us the living water of divine grace and makes us fountains of that grace to all around us, pouring out the love of God to the world.

My brothers and sisters, on this day of the coming of the Holy Spirit – be enlightened by Christ, be filled with His light, become a fountain of living water through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  Change the world around you by the love and grace of God.

John 17:1-13

If you were visiting a strange land, you might visit many places and endeavor to meet the people to find out what this land was like.  If, while visiting and talking to people, you were impressed with the richness and beauty of the land and the nature of the people who are friendly and peaceful and who appear to love one another you might begin to ask how is it that this land became so beautiful, how is it that these people learned to live together in such harmony and mutual love.  As you asked about this, you were told time and time again that all these things were due to the efforts of the king.  If this were the case, you might develop a desire to meet this wonderful king for judging by his servants and his works, he must be an exceptional fellow.  Again you ask how one might meet this king and you are told, “Of course you can meet him, he loves to get to know all who wish to meet him.  Come with us and we will take you to him.”

This place, of course, is the kingdom of God and those people that you meet are the servants of God, the saints.  In the lives of the saints we see God and seeing God in them, we develop within ourselves a desire to meet God.  Then, when we ask to meet God, the saints simply reply, “Come with us, do as we do, live as we live and you will meet Him face to face.”  This is how we come to know God, to encounter Him face to face – by living as the saints live, by doing as they do, for everything that they do has only the one goal, to know God. 

The Gospel today recounts the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ just before the trials and sufferings of His betrayal, arrest and crucifixion.  He prays not for Himself, but for those who have followed Him.  In this prayer He says “this is life eternal: that they might know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”  This then is our salvation – to know God.  We have seen the lives of the saints, we have seen the transformation wrought in them by their own encounter with God and now we too desire this same experience.  We desire to encounter God, to know Him – not just to know about Him or to see the effects of His presence on others, but to know Him for ourselves. 

How then do we encounter God?  Our Lord gives to all of us the opportunity to know Him through faith and a pure heart.  As we sing in the beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”  One might think though that such a state of purity is beyond our strength and is impossible for a man to attain on his own. This is true, however, our God loves each of us and desires that not one single person should perish and therefore He has deigned to come to us and show Himself to us and to help us to see and perceive Him better.  Remember the Gospel of the blind man – a man who even from birth was unable to see, and yet Jesus Christ, through the miraculous healing of his sight helped this man to see him physically as well as spiritually.  So also with us, God has not only shown Himself to us in His incarnation, but He helps us by His grace to be able to see Him and experience Him directly in our lives.

The way that He does this is that He guides us in our lives so that we are constantly drawing nearer and nearer to Him.  We see this life in the lives of the saints and so we seek to emulate them.  We are shown step by step how to come to this encounter with God by the life of the Church, the path to salvation. The Apostle and evangelist St John also tells us that if we love God we will keep His commandments.  That is, if we love God then we will order our lives in accordance with the directions that He gives us which show us the way to Himself.  As we live according to Christ’s commandments, as we follow the path of salvation God has laid out for us in the life of the Church then we will consistently come closer and closer to Him.  We are commanded to live a righteous life, that is we order our lives so that in them we strive to imitate the qualities of the life of Christ – His love and compassion, His mercy, His sinlessness, His communion with God.  We strengthen our piety by reading and listening to the Holy Scripture from which we receive this saving knowledge of God and His Holy Will.  We fill our minds and hearts with the lives and spiritual writings of the saints, for they have gone before us and serve as examples and teachers in this path of salvation. 

But most of all we must pray.  Prayer is communion with God – in our prayer, we talk with God and reveal to Him the depths of our own hearts.  We tell God our hopes and dreams and we lay them before Him; we show Him our weaknesses and failings and beg forgiveness and healing; we share with Him our anxieties and worries and we put all such things into His hands to resolve as He will.  Also in prayer, we listen to God, we hear His voice in the quietness of our hearts and in the still small voice of our conscience. So often we neglect this prayer and we forget to pray.  God is waiting for us to talk with Him, to commune with Him, but we do not.  We turn away from Him as though there were more important things to do and see in the world.  We do not experience God or know God because we neglect that relationship with Him that He offers to us.  When we pray we open ourselves, our souls to God and He fills us with His love and His grace.  It is this grace which transforms us, which works in us and empowers our feeble efforts.  This grace is made available to us constantly through the avenue of prayer (does not the Apostle Paul tell us to “pray without ceasing”?)  If we would encounter God and experience His life in us, prayer is of the greatest importance. 

Prayer is both a private and personal thing as well as a public and corporate thing.  It is necessary to have both.  Our lives should be filled with prayer so that as we go about our daily routine, we are constantly taking in the grace of God.  This is, for the most part our personal prayer.  However, in the Gospel, we also heard the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ that we might be one as He and the Father are One.  That oneness is the unity of the faithful.  We are united and joined to one another in the life of Christ and this unity is expressed and strengthened by corporate prayer – when we gather together and lift up our many voices as one and pray with one voice.  The services are not just some duty that we perform or some social gathering, but they are the expression and working out of our unity with one another.  In the services, it is important to attend to what is being said and sung and prayed and to join our voices and our hearts in that prayer so that we participate together as one. Let the hymns and prayers of the services shape your own prayer and unite you with the whole Church that we may become one just as the Holy Trinity is one.  In this way we fulfill the desire of our Lord Jesus Christ for us that we might know God and experience His life in us and that we might become one as the Trinity is one.

This is eternal life, to know the only true God Who has revealed Himself to us in the God/man Jesus Christ.  The life of the Trinity is made manifest in us by uniting us not only to Christ but to one another that we might be one as God is one.  The greatest and most effective way that we have of facilitating this experience of God in ourselves is by prayer, both personal and corporate.  In this manner we commune with God and we share in His life that He gives to us and we come to know Him.

John 9:1-38

“I am the light of the world” – so spake our Lord as He commenced to give sight to the man born blind who had lived in darkness his entire life.  This miracle is one of the great testaments to our Lord’s divinity for only God could give sight to one born blind – that is one who was born without eyes.  Where his eyes might have been, this man had only dry, empty sockets.  Not even the greatest physicians could cure him, for there was nothing to heal, there were no eyes.  This kind of miracle belongs only to the Creator Himself for in order to give sight to this man, first He had to give him eyes – something no man could do.  And so when our Lord acted to give this man not only eyes, but brought light to those eyes as well, He acted according to His divine nature, clearly demonstrating that He and the Father are one.  In addition to the greatness of this miracle there are a few other unique aspects to it.  First, Jesus actively sought out this blind man, whereas in other situations, people who were ill came to Him seeking healing.  The blind man knew full well that his case was hopeless and so even though Jesus was near, he had no thought of seeking Him out and asking Him to do the impossible.  And so Jesus came to the blind man to give him that which no one else could give.  Secondly, this is the only miracle where Jesus used physical material as a means by which to accomplish it.  Other miracles involving physical things such as the multiplication of loaves and fish had those materials as the object of the miracle, not as the means.  Here the spittle, clay and washing were only the means to the end – the giving of sight.

Before delving into the miracle itself, let us consider these unique aspects.  That Jesus sought out the blind man was not so that He could make a show of doing something no one else could do, but rather it was an act of compassion.  Here was a man blind not only physically, but also spiritually, for he had no hope of God’s miraculous intervention.  He could not “see” any way that even God could change his situation.  But Jesus seeing this man sunk in the darkness of hopelessness sought him out to give him not only physical sight, but also to open his spiritual eyes.  In the same way our Lord seeks us out no matter how far in to the darkness of sin we may have fallen.  Even when we ourselves have no hope, He comes to us to give us that hope, to open the eyes of our soul to the love and compassion and power of God.  When we were sunk in sin, He came to us asking nothing but giving everything.    Just Jesus sought out this man to give him sight – so also He seeks us out to open the eyes of our heart that we might perceive His divine love for us.

The second aspect – that of the use of material agents for this miracle – is an example for us of the fact that while God works miracles with only a word or a touch according to our faith, there are times when He uses material “agents” to work in our lives.  Sickness can be healed by the prayer of the faithful, but sometimes it is also healed by the medicines and therapies of the physicians – which are also given by God.  Debtors can be freed from debt by miraculous circumstance – or God may give the means by which a debtor can work to repay his debt and so be freed from it.  God works in our lives in many ways – sometimes by His word and action alone, sometimes by the intermediary of some worldly agent, but always according to our faith.  The blind man had to have faith that even though he knew it was impossible for him to see, Jesus could do the impossible.  The blind man then acted on that faith.  Jesus anointed his eyes with clay and sent him to the pool of Siloam to wash and the blind man did just that, accepting the smearing of his face with clay and then going to the appointed place to wash it off.  Because of his faith (generated by the opening of his spiritual eyes) he received a miracle that only God could give.

Let us now return to the blindness itself.  Here as a man, as I mentioned, who was not only unable to see, but he was also blind in his soul – unable to see what God could do.  Jesus came and gave him sight – eyes to see the world around him and spiritual eyes to perceive the power of God.  Physical sight was the indicator of spiritual sight. 

The blind man then was taken before the pharisees and scribes (the spiritual authority of the people) who when they heard how he gained his sight, tried to tell him that even though he could see, that he was blind if thought that Jesus was a good man.  The pharisees spent their entire lives studying the law so that they could see the nuances of the law more clearly and interpret it with great insight, applying the law to every aspect of life.  But the pharisees, in seeking to see more clearly became more and more blind.  They lost sight of the fact that the law was the forerunner of the Messiah, preparing the way for the incarnation, the coming of the God/man.  The references not only to the coming of the Messiah, but also to His divine nature are found throughout the law and the prophets of the Old Testament, but the pharisees could not see them, instead they focused on the law as an end to itself and sought to appease God by their own efforts. Thus they became blind – and what is even more tragic they became voluntarily blind for having seen the truth, they closed their eyes to it.  Their blindness was the result of their own self-will and self-reliance, resting on their own understandings and expectations rather than seeing what God had revealed in the law and prophets.

How sad this is when a person willfully and voluntarily turns away from the truth of the Gospel, from the divine words and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, choosing instead to fulfill their own lusts and desires.  When we insist on our own way, on our own understanding, on our own self-will, no matter how large or small that insistence might be, we close our eyes to Christ and become blind – blind like the pharisees who refused to see the Hand of God and His work standing right in front of them.

When we find that we are blind, how then can our eyes be opened? What we must do is to have faith that our Lord can heal us, He can restore us to His image – and then we have to act on that faith.  First and foremost we must repent; repent of our self-will, repent of our self-dependence, repent of the fact that we choose our way instead of God’s way.  This repentance is not merely being sorry for what errors we might have made, but it must be a true and heartfelt turning away from our sin.  We have to proceed with the intent and plan to never repeat that sin.  We have to turn away from every temptation – in fact the Gospel tells us to flee from temptation – forcing ourselves away from the thought of returning to our sin and instead turning to Christ.

Having truly repented of our sin, then we turn all of our efforts towards following Christ.  Even as the blind man, against all odds and expectations, immediately obeyed the instructions of Christ to go a wash in a particular place, so also we now must reorder our lives according to the instructions of our Lord – striving to do His will instead of our own. 

Finally like the blind man we must strive to remain firm in our faith, never doubting, but always looking to Christ, focusing on Him as not only the “author”, but also the “finisher” of our faith. It is good to take the example of the blind man for having never actually seen our Lord Jesus Christ (remember he was still blind when our Lord sent him off to wash in the pool of Siloam) with his own eyes, still he held onto his faith in the divinity of Christ even in the face of the arguments and accusations of the enemies of Christ.  He held onto his faith by focusing on the one thing he knew – that once he was blind but now (against all possibility) he could see and that this was the work of God.  In the same way, if we would hold onto our faith as tightly as he, then we need to cultivate this same “narrow” focus in our lives.  See what God has done in your life – His care, His mercy, His compassion, His love – and hold onto that, using it as a “shield” against arguments of those who refuse to see the Hand of God even when it is in front of their own eyes.  Every day, give thanks to God for what He has given you – every blessing you can identify in your life.  Every day, reaffirm your faith in God by proclaiming again (as at your baptism) the Creed, the Symbol of our Faith.  Evey day, cultivate the awareness of God’s presence with you by praying often and dedicating your every task – no matter how minor or mundane it may seem – to His glory.  Focus on Jesus Christ and like the blind man, when Christ comes, you will know Him and embrace Him with love Who has already embraced you with His love.

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