From the pilgrim journey of Three Magi who saw a star to young people who follow that same star today, the summoning King continues to call. He calls into streets and lanes, into highways and hedges, for His zeal to fill His House has never waned:
| "Compel them to come in that my house may be filled!" (Lu 14:23) |
Then, what do we do after We have encountered His royal heralds, and we come? Many of us will burn down our whole lives following this turning point. For now is the day of our salvation. Our royal birthright has been approved and accepted. Nothing will ever be the same again. We attend the King in His courts with single-minded devotion, for it is precisely this devotion, this attentive heart, this animated soul, which was found lacking in those who were invited but who now will never taste. Indifference, you see, is the common thread leading to spiritual deadness and the loss of all possibility.
In this, the nature of the Banquet is revealed. Manifestly, those who taste share a certain mindfulness, receptiveness, and reverence for the King. That is, the King's Banquet turns out to be an interior feast. Mysteriously, we are to become part and parcel with it. Our inner state is intimately tied to our participation in the King's abundance.
In this, we understand that His House can never be overfilled, for everyone born into the world is summoned to become another room:
|
"In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you." (Jn 14:2) |
We are to become the abundant life (Jn 10:10) which Jesus associates with the Kingdom. We are to be freed from the selfish categories of narrow, worldly life. But how does this transformation take place? Surely, He must lead us and guide us. And this He does by way of stories: "Then he told them many things in parables" (Mt 13:3). And surely the Gospels constitute a bountiful stream of stories: yes, parables but also encounters as the various Gospel plots unfold. We find both: fictional stories, speaking into the truth of our lives, and factual stories, which turn out to have literary depth. Think of St. Photini's encounter at Jacob's Well or the encounter of the man born blind or the encounter in the Lost Tribe of Gad .... the list is a long one. These factual stories, these reports of historical events, rank as equal along side the parables in their spiritual richness. And we recall Origen's imperative that the primary meaning of Scripture is allegorical, its spiritual meaning.
This last point is crucial to understanding history and ourselves. For if historical events have an allegorical meaning, then it is also true that each of our lives is an allegory.
On Forefather Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of the Nativity Fast, this principle unlocks the mystery of Jesus' ancestors "according to the flesh." Over the centuries, the Orthodox Church has reflected upon the "intellectual look" of Jesus' Forefathers, as one Orthodox commentator put it. We discern a certain "family resemblance of righteousness": the gentle Abel, not the wrathful Cain; the pious Enoch, not the raucous Nephilim; the trusting Abraham, not the venal sons of Babylon; the animated spirit of Jacob, not the animal appetites of Esau. An earthly family is announced, and its character is presented to the world.
Genealogies have been dutifully assembled in the Holy Gospels According to St. Luke and of St. Matthew to honor this family history. Two family lines descend: one leading to the Most Holy Theotokos in Luke's Gospel and the other leading to Joseph of Nazareth in Matthew's Gospel. Their genealogies tell the story of faithfulness in broad brush: from the unfaithful one, Adam (born 4,000 years before the Nativity by Scriptural reckoning), to the Holy One of Israel, Jesus, Son of God, the Second Adam. These great births form our spiritual monuments, including Noah (born 3,000 years before the Nativity of Jesus), Abraham (born 2,000 years before the Nativity), and King David (born 1,000 years before the Nativity).
As we behold this family tree, which is the Creation of mankind, we marvel that this is our family tree, too. For does not everyone descend from Adam? And who does not descend from Noah? And we add that every scientist in the field of human genetics avers that all human life has descended from one woman joined to one man, a scientific fact. As for Abraham, in particular, Jesus declares, "For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones" (Mt 3:9). Elsewhere, the Lord announces that His mother and brothers are all of those who love God:
|
And He stretched out His hand toward His disciples and said, "Here are My mother and My brothers!
For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother." (Mt 12:49-50) |
Family ties, then, consist in only two things: our love of God and our expression of that love, which is called faithfulness. In this sense all human genealogies finally are spiritual family trees. For our material genes have been factored out: we are all one stock, one family. Where's the distinction? But becoming brothers and sisters of Jesus .... this all-important distinction has do with the state of our hearts and souls. What we do with the royal birthright within us turns out to be the real turning point, the turning point over which God has no final power in the sovereignty of His gift to us of our free will.
God's lesson plan, the story that begins at Creation, continues to unfold all around us involving each and every one of us. For the history of all is the history of each. Is this not true in every family? Is not so that Sr. Mary Martha's story is importantly my story, too? If all goes well with her, all goes well with me. If all does not go well with her, then my life becomes a process of mourning and grieving and wanting to help. This is also true of Sr. Mary Anne's life. And the Sisters, to be sure, pray for me ceaselessly.
Let us go back now to our monumental Forefathers. We see that the Scriptures begin with the story of human-Divine harmony and unity in Eden. Then, tragically, the Scriptures depicts what will become the ruinous archetype for all humankind — the anti-pilgrimage: the self-appointed journey away from God's Wholeness into a landscape of alienation — towards the cities of Cain, towards disease and death, towards personal fragmentation and disintegration, towards ever greater prerogatives for human cruelty, towards subversion of decency and all good, ultimately towards the end of everything.
It is a priest's duty to say the obvious: that the end draws near — in our blighted morality, in our shattered cities and towns, in our desecrated families and churches, in our fatally contaminated and dying planet home, and finally in the unprecedented spectacle of a few people possessing nearly all the world's wealth, building rocket ships to outer space and controlling the fates of national economies, while billions upon billions suffer, with far too many watching their children starve. And as we draw near to God-the-infant-Christ, we must remember: He sees it all.
The anti-pilgrimage is the dominant narrative of our human lifeworld. It is told again and again in each life born into the world. We begin in goodness and then, choosing worldliness, we reject God — the sad story of our time.
But let us consider the positive case: the pilgrimage of those who love God. We have been sharing pilgrimage with these people during the last four weeks, people all over the world who love God. Even now, we are met by them, the world over, with earnest hearts who continue their trek towards Bethlehem. Thousands are seated here right now. Thousands come to the Hermitage through our website every week to join us in our meditations.
And our exemplars are set before us all. Whether they be Noah, Abraham, or Jesus (together with His Forerunner, St. John), the journey is always the same: we leave the world in order to unite with God in the purity of wilderness. Noah's story, the Ur-story of earthly pilgrimage, sees the world literally vanished behind the parting wake of an ark.
The fuller picture revealed in the Torah and the Gospels depicts the same journey: Abraham leading the seed of Israel out of death grip of Babylon, Moses leading the people Israel out of the flesh pots of Luxor, Jesus leading the Israelites out of the spiritual tyranny of Jerusalem and the invented Judah-ism. Here is a three-thousand-year story of liberation, overthrowing the spiritual claims of the three great empires that had surrounded the Levant: Babylonian, Egyptian, and Persian (for Persian overlords planted their cult in the Second Temple).
It is interesting that Jesus is impassive towards the Roman Empire:
| "Render unto Caesar what is Caesars, and unto God what is God's." (Mt 22:21) |
He speaks these words directly following the King's Great Banquet in Matthew's Gospel (which interprets this Gospel passage for us, in my opinion). At a time when tensions between the Jews and the Romans were rapidly progressing to the breaking point, Jesus was impassive towards to the Roman Empire. Well, they're doing a fine job running the world, aren't they? Their roads and bridges are a wonder of the world. The Pax Romanum and the administration of civil justice throughout much of the known world was a feat never again to be matched. And what did they care which variety of Hebrew religion was ascendant in their Provinces of Judaea and Galilee?
No, it was not the Romans who subjugated the lost sheep of Israel with a stranglehold, but rather Judah-ism and the Jews. And the sheep? These were the ones for whom the Father had sent His Only-begotten Son (Mt 15:24) .... the scattered tribes.
King David, who lived nearly a half-millennium before the Babylonian Exile, would not have recognized the Second Temple and would have abhorred its cult of blood sacrifice as his royal descendant, Jesus, most certainly did.
Today, we observe the Forefathers of Jesus of Nazareth. Their story is one of faithfulness achieved through discernment. Countless narratives and counter-narratives concerning their spiritual tradition swirled about them. As we have recently considered, theirs was a diverse culture. Two-thirds of the population of Judah and Benjamin were left behind at the Exile to Babylon, never formed in Mesopotamian religious beliefs and customs. The rest, the great majority, practiced the faith of their ancestors, of course.
Following the Return, the synagogue was instituted to inculcate this new religion, yet many patterns of belief pointing back to the Patriarchs also were expressed. The Gospels, as well as the historical record, bountifully attest these competing points of view and the prismatic and diverse world into which Jesus was born. The King commands that all be brought in, from every corner of His Kingdom — the highways, the byways, the lanes, the hedges. He commands that they all be brought in.
Standing above all is the God Who suffered to empty Himself that we might be filled. He humbles Himself beyond all recognition to be born amongst dung-stained hay in Bethlehem. He is God, and yet He is man. In this fact all humanity begins again. We begin again with the promise of human-Divine harmony and unity as it was in Eden. The God-man would increase "in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men" (Lu 2:52). And He would point ahead to a House of many mansions.
Today, we are invited to this House. Today is the fulfillment of the descent from Adam through Noah through Abraham and down to Jesus, St. Paul, and the Early Christians for whom Abraham (not Moses) was the Patriarch of Patriarchs.
Today, we honor the ones who encountered the royal heralds and received their invitations. They burned down their whole worlds, counting the world and its vain promises as nothing, in order to follow God. They followed Him across an endless sea of rain. They followed Him through wilderness after wilderness. They waited, and they trusted, yes, and they loved their God. They trusted that He saw a higher and better way. And they knew that the way of the world, the way of all flesh, could offer nothing to enliven their empyreal souls.
Today on our long pilgrimage,
other roads begin to converge with our own.
People from all over the world and across all ages
begin to meet, unite, and understand that they are family.
This is the nature of God's House:
a universal love calling out to every living soul.
There is room for all.
The King's zeal is that His House be filled.
And for everyone who bears His pure and eternal love within their deathless breasts,
there will be room.
And they will see the angels of God ascending and descending upon each other,
the sons and daughters of Man.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.