The vanities of this world—power, influence, material wealth, lust, are attractive from a worldly perspective, but they are poison to our souls. They are, as St. Mary found, a dead-end street: good looks fade with age, power and influence too are temporal and riches can quickly turn into poverty with a bad economy or a natural disaster. If our hope is in any of these things, we’re truly to be pitied for all these things are passing away—they burn like grass and melt like wax.
Because He loves us, the Lord desires better for us; He’d have us live with eternity before our eyes, to place our hope in His changelessness and not in those things that are quickly passing away. He desires to help us so that we can put off sin and death, and cleave to Him who is Life.
Worldly success, power, and influence feed our egos; the proud person cannot see God or be united with Him because God Himself is humble, not proud. Pride, is incompatible with communion with Him. God demonstrates Himself to us as the ultimate servant. He condescends to us by becoming man, one of His own creatures, to enter into and redeem human nature. He gives His own life to defeat sin and death for us on the cross. He bears with us patiently in our struggles as a parent bears patiently with his child whom he loves. He disciplines us in love that we may learn and grow to participate more and more fully in the life that He alone is.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus reminds His disciples that He must suffer torture and death in order to defeat sin and death on our behalf—to make a way for us to inherit the Kingdom prepared for us. These are such stirring words; Christ reveals to them that He must die that mankind may live.
Immediately after telling them that He will die on their behalf, that He Himself is the ultimate, final Pascha (Passover), the disciples begin vying for who will be on top in His Kingdom. They picture the Kingdom of Heaven just like the way of the world where influence and power can get you to the top. We can imagine some of the disciples falling prey to this mistaken thinking prior to the descent of the Holy Spirit, because we ourselves might have done the same.
Jesus reminds us all that the way of the world won’t get us anywhere in the economy of heaven. What’s valued in the world is poison for the soul that desires the Kingdom of Heaven.
Instead, Jesus shows us a better way by example: a way that enables them and us to commune with the living God, to find freedom from vain and worldly pursuits, lust for power, and covetousness over what we don’t have. He says, “Whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. For even the son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
Back to Mary: she was busy wearing out her body and destroying both her body and her soul when she was confronted by the holiness of the relics of Christ’s cross; they forbid her entrance to the church of the Cross in Jerusalem. At the same time, the image of the Theotokos struck her, convicted her by her purity; Mary couldn’t enter into the holy presence of Christ’s victory over sin and death; she couldn’t bear communion with Him. The Holy Virgin, whose loving and pure image confronted her, was everything that Mary was not; the Theotokos in her purity and virginity, in her YES to God’s love and calling on her life, in her servanthood and submission, her humility and purity, was a mirror image to Mary’s licentiousness and fornication, her vanity, her NO to God and to His likeness in her. Mary knew no love; the Theotokos knew only love.
In her despair over this realization, she desired a change, a new beginning with even greater fervor than she had desired the flesh up until that point—she turned away from her former life that was death and towards a new life in Christ, Who is Life.
After years of self-abuse, after years of giving into the basest of passions, it took Mary seventeen years of intense struggle through prayer and extreme fasting, learning to cooperate with the work of the Holy Spirit in her life, to find her freedom and win the victory over her passions. And she did by God’s grace—for no one is beyond God’s healing and grace if we are willing to humble ourselves and admit and confess our sins before God.
Mary persisted in her struggle 17 years. Only then did she found her peace. Mary spent the first part of her life completely turned away from God, from Life, or any consciousness of Him, but she repented with as much fervor as she had before given into her passions. You or I may not have the depth of struggles with the passions or pride that Mary did, but then again, do we repent with as much fervor as Mary? Are we seeking constant converse and communion with God?
Perhaps you or I are not so enraptured by this world’s pursuits and temporal vanities, but we all are in need of continued healing and growth in God’s divine grace and of emulating the humility and repentance that Mary exemplifies. We all have need of going the distance in our struggles to be free of the passions and developing a servant’s heart and love for those around us.
Our growth in the likeness of God, our return to our full selves—whom God has made us to be—begins with this humility, with our love for God and each other right here, in the family of the Church. Only from this starting point of healing and repentance do we learn to come outside ourselves to love and to serve our brothers in the world in a way that draws them also to the knowledge, love, and healing of God.
Not through worldly power, influence, or self-reliance do we find the fountain of youth; true immortality is found only in participation in the life, the Reality of the Holy Trinity. Through repentance, prayer, fasting, and the Sacramental life, we become communicants of Life Eternal, children of the Most High God; we grow in those virtues and that Reality that is our true identity. God has overcome the world and he who partakes of Him will rise up to life eternal.
Holy Mother Mary, pray for us sinners!
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
21 April 2013
Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt
