Luke 24:1-12 (Matins)
2 Corinthians 4:6-15
Matthew 22:35-46

"And Made the Starry Host by the Breath of His Mouth"

On these Two hang all the Law and the Prophets.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

What a feat of compression! To distill all Holy Scripture of Jesus time with its 633 Commandments to only Two. This formula was developed by Hillel, born one hundred years before Jesus, in a duel with his rival Shammai. "I can recite the Law and the Prophets while standing on one foot!" Hillel declared in a challenge. "What man could do that?" Shammai replied. Then, assuming the crane-like posture, Hillel said, "The first command is this: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might. And the second is like unto it: thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself." The first part Hillel derives from the greatest prayer of Judaism, the Shema, given to the Jews by God through Moses: Deut 11:13-21. The second part he interprets from the first. For what else could Divine love mean in practice but to love God's precious human creatures as He does?

What we are witnessing here is literary interpretation. And to interpret Divine literature is to participate with God in Divine Creation. For our God is literary in His Nature. In this we imitate Him. His authority on earth lies in the fact that He is the author .... of everything. If concision is the measure of literary excellence, if expressing the most profound matter in the fewest words, then the Hebrew Bible, the Torah and the Nevi'im, tower far above all other literary monuments. Homer describes the Trojan War in twenty-four books and the wanderings of Odysseus in another twenty-four while the Torah relates the Creation of the universe in one chapter and the creation of human kind in another. The words of Genesis, Chapters One and Two, continue to mesmerize with their concise elegance. In one Latin translation, we read with a sense of awe,

Fiat lux et lux fiat.

Let there be light. And light was.

This symmetry is not about creation. But rather, somehow, it is creation .... in a lightning moment. And we recall Mark Twain's comment that

the difference between the almost-right word and the right word
is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Holy Scripture is an epigrammatic distillation of one lightning moment after another.

Indeed, the earliest Hebrew texts of the Torah that came down to us lacked breathing marks, the equivalent of vowels, revealing an intention of extreme minimalism. It is a diamond-like compression, word by word, sentence by sentence. Here, for example, is the biography and Heavenly assumption of Enoch, the father of Methuselah:

And Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him. (Gen 5:24)

The founding of the Second Eden and the Second Fall, likewise, are rendered in gem-like syllables:

And Noah began to be a farmer, and he planted a vineyard.
Then he drank of the wine and was drunk, and became uncovered in his tent. (Gen 19:20-21)

For thousands of years, seekers have peered down into these bottomless pools. From the time of Origen, the greatest of the Fathers, the faithful have engaged in lectio Divina (Divine reading) letting individual words speak into their lives. Individual words. And for this there is Biblical warrant. For St. Paul called these mysterious books "the oracles of God" (Rom 3:2). Yet, the Word of God is far more than a passive oracle, dispensing prophecies or advice, but rather a living, even dangerous, spiritual force:

For the Word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any
two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit,
and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and
intents of the heart. (Heb 4:12)

No wonder the entrance of God into human history should, in large measure, be about "unlocking" the Scriptures:

Then He turned to His disciples and said privately,
"Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see;
for I tell you that many prophets and kings have desired
to see what you see, and have not seen it, and to hear
what you hear, and have not heard it." (Lu 10:23-25)

That is, an essence of our conversion and basic element of our formation is literary. We are summoned by God, from Mount Sinai to the present time, to read, and we are called to interpret what we have read. The masters among us render these interpretations in a conciseness that imitates Scripture .... which is to imitate God. We do not have to look far to encounter these masters. Page through Facebook (of all places!) or Instagram, for example, and you will encounter Holy Orthodoxy through epigrams, the laconic sayings of monks and elders. They touch us. They move us. They change our direction in life .... because they are Biblical in their compression and holy in their matter. And they instruct us in the art of succinctness .... unto no words at all:

Silence is the cross on which we must crucify our ego. (St. Seraphim of Sarov)

And then he quotes St. Ambrose, saying, " I have seen many being saved by silence, but not one by talkativeness" (Little Russian Philokalia of St. Seraphim of Sarov).

By Jesus' time Hillel's formula of Two Commandments had become a kind of "high sign" among the masters of Scripture. In this morning's lesson, we see this in action:

Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying,
Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?

And Jesus replied by giving the high sign.

In St. Luke's Gospel, Jesus Himself begins with the formula:

And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying,
"Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him,
"What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?" So he
answered and said, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,'
and 'your neighbor as yourself.'" And He said to him, "You have answered
rightly; do this and you will live."

"What is your reading of it?" Do you see? Jesus has issued a Divine command in terms of a literature test.

Our New Testament Gospels go to a next level of terseness, for they arise from the atmosphere around the Lord Jesus Himself. He is the Logos, the Word of God, And He spoke everything into being with the Holiest Word, which is the Tetragrammaton — the Unspeakable, Unknowable Poem: the Name of God.

As Jesus of Nazareth, He confounded contemporaries with His trenchant speech. In this morning's lesson, we read that "no one dared question Him anymore," for He drew those around Him into depths which overwhelmed them. No doubt, Psalm 110 was understood among the Pharisees and Elders to be mysterious:

The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at My right hand,
Till I make Your enemies Your footstool."

Jesus asks them,

"If David then calls Him 'Lord,' how is He his Son?"

By the second century Origen would warn his many followers that the primary meaning of Scripture is not its literal meaning, but its spiritual meaning. That is, should we encounter something in Holy Scripture that seems contradictory or non-sensical, then we have received a Divine message: we are standing on holy ground; we are in the presence of Divine mystery. The proper attitude of mind and spirit, therefore, is caution, reverence, contemplation but never derision or doubt.

The mystery of Psalm 110 brought these brilliant minds to a respectful hush. These learned men had benefit of Isaiah 11. They understood what "stem of Jesse" (Isa 11:1) meant. But now they stood before the "root of David" (Rev 5:5) as St. John the Divine would express it decades later in the Fifth Chapter of the Revelation. What?! He is a stem of Jesse, yet He is the root of David born a thousand years earlier?! How can this be?

Here is the Divine mystery of the Advent of God: compact within His Person, the Lord Jesus is the literary Master par excellence. He is the entire alphabet, the Alpha and the Omega. He is the vulnerable infant born to the Virgin Mary and Her Creator and God. Her birth and the birth of the Heavens and the earth all within them proceed from the most trenchant word ever spoken: the Breath of God.

Our God chose to reveal Himself through literature. And the Advent of God proceeded by the Eternal Word entering the human narrative. After all, Euclid had been born three centuries earlier. Could not God have revealed Himself through dazzling mathematical proofs? The ancients understood music theory to point to the Divine world. Could not God have revealed Himself by weaving a music so mesmerizing that it might charm us to Divine contemplation and conversion? But, no. He chose instead a Book .... the Book, which Judaism venerated as the holiest object ever to appear on the earth, placed in a gold chest, called an Ark, guarded by two Cherubim wrought from gold.

God chose to reveal Himself through literature. And the Son of God teaches in parables telling His Disciples that the path to God lay in unlocking these diamond-like passages. Indeed, God is revealed to be literature. God the Son is the Logos, the Eternal Word. As the Holy Scripture opens, we do not read "Let there be light" but rather, "God said, let there be light.'" That is, Creation begins with a Divine poem distilled into subatomic particles that defy our imagination — the entire universe packed into one atom and then released in ten to the minus 34 seconds, which then becomes a physical event of cosmic proportions.

By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made;
and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. (Ps 33:6)

The English word universe itself can fairly be rendered from its Latin root as "one turning of a phrase."

Man begins His career under God's tutelage in this same activity of "speaking the world into being." For the creatures do not simply appear having labels, but Adam must exercise his own literary art to complete them:

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field,
and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what
he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature,
that was the name thereof. (Gen 2:19)

Inescapably, our lives consist in an encounter with God. And our God is a literary genius. He commands that we follow Him. By Divine inspiration, He has written the greatest Book. And that Book is about a Book, the Book of Life, of Which He is the Author, filled with mysterious living characters He has brought into being, our neighbors and ourselves. We must read it. We must understand it. We must live it, for we are born into this Sacred Story, this Living and dangerous literature. With our own appearance in the narrative, we are called to a life of interpretation and understanding — understanding ourselves and understanding and caring about the people around us:

Love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.
And love your neighbor as yourself.

That is, it all begins and ends in love. For this is the greatest commandment issued by a God Who is love. On these Two depend all the Law and all the Prophets and everything.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.