The Two Ways

They are the faithful Adam and Eve. They have fought the good fight, they have finished the race, they have kept the faith (cf. 2 Tim 4:7). Their old age attests this. They have persevered to the end.

By contrast, as St. Irenaeus has written, our would-be Patriarch and Matriarch squandered their opportunity, were found to be unfaithful. They stumbled in their youthful haste and rashness. For old age alone (and then death) can evince who and what we really are. Nothing hidden will not be brought to light (we say) in the light of Christ Who is our Judge.

The legacy of Abraham was enshrined in the First Temple of David and Solomon. For here the journey and ascent we call theosis was formalized into ritual. The priest entered the area thought of as Eden and thence into the Holy of Holies, where One-ness with God was attained.

The Christian depiction of this is expressed in the topos, attested by Jesus, of the Bosom of Abraham (icon posted on our website). Here we see the Three Patriarchs ensconced in Eden with the Man of Eden, John the Baptist, together with the Most Holy Theotokos and all angels. Here is the Christian story: the encounter with God; the calling; the injunction to leave the world, being in it but not of it; faithfulness in adversity; protecting our essential purity, goodness, and Divine birthright; and finally arriving to this One-ness with God: we might be One with the Father even as Jesus and the Father are One (Jn 17:21-23): by the grace of God and through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos.

As we have contemplated on many Sundays, the Levant had become a land of two religions, two ways, during the centuries leading up to Jesus' birth. The first was the religion of Three Patriarchs. The scene of its full flowering was the First Temple. Let us call this the Hebrew religion — the holy way instituted of God providing a path to Himself for the people He has chosen.

The second religion was born of a return to Babylon. It is an inversion of the first story, the Abraham story. It is the anti-theosis.

By contrast the second religion, instilled in the Judean elite for more than three generations in Mesopotamia, would be named for their tribe: a local religion called Judah-ism. Its adherents became known as the Jews. A new temple would be built, underwritten by their Persian overlords. The Jews would speak a new language, the Mesopotamian language, Aramaic, not Hebrew. While one-third of the Judean elite had been carried away to Babylon during the sixth century B.C., two-thirds remained. In addition, the Hebrew people beyond Judah's borders also remained, practicing the religion of the Patriarchs.

As God's Son comes on to the scene, two thousand years after the birth of Abraham, He would call Hebrew men for His Disciples (save one: Judas Iscariot, whose name is a variant spelling of Judah).

This helps us to understand St. John's repeated and antagonistic use of the phrase the Jews in his Gospel. ("Them, not us!") The phrase appears sixty-six times as compared to the 5 or 6 found in each of the other Gospels. In this, the Beloved Disciple singles out the enemies of God as being specifically Judean. We might say the betrayers of God — with Judas being their representative figure — walking away from the true religion.

Certainly, John is not a Jew, nor are his ten co-religionists. They would have been more comfortable in Samaria than in the historical tribal area of Judah. You know the response of the Disciples when Jesus speaks of going to Jerusalem: "Not there! Anywhere but there!" It is noteworthy that the "good Samaritan" of Jesus' parable is set against officials the Zion Temple. There are two main characters in this parable the Priest and the Levite, and there is the good Samaritan. The Priest and the Levite will not touch the bloody man lying on the road lest they become ritually unclean and unable to offer sacrifice at the altar. This is the high point of the religious experience in the Temple: sacrifice, not unity with God. God is a distant figure to them.

This also helps us to understand Jesus' vow to destroy the Temple, that most hated place. And are able to understand Jesus' violent encounter with men selling animals for sacrifice, separating the people from God. For His complaint, in the end, is this: that they have made His Father's house a house of trade, an οικον εμφοριον, (oikon emphorion), trading animal sacrifice in exchange for salvation when

The great hero of the Temple and the synagogue is Moses — a counter narrative to Abraham. Moses is the animal sacrificer par excellence, not Abraham, who is the exemplar of theosis. This is the main charge leveled against Christians: that they would take away the customs of Moses. This was the indictment handed down to the Protomartyr, Stephen:

Significantly, the passage concerning St. Stephen is longest part of the Book of Acts.

You see this is the nominal reason for the Incarnation: the Divine Shepherd Who retrieves the lost sheep. The wolves have entered in. The sheep are scattered. But the wolves, who are disguised as shepherds, are gathering the sheep in the Temple and in synagogues, enjoining them to worship a false religion.

Understanding all this, we can enter a sound reflection on Zacharias, who stands at the altar of the Babylonian-Persian Temple. He represents the view of the Sadducees: all that is necessary to appease the Temple god is blood sacrifice. The Sadducees rejected angels. They rejected an afterlife. They rejected direct relationship with God or His Heavenly ministers. One could only approach the Divine through sacrifice as to a distant figure.

Zacharias is a priest of this class. He stands at an altar constructed by Persians. He does not use the forbidden term YHWH, but rather Lord (Adonai or Elohim) following the Persian, who called their god Lord (Baal or Bel).

In another perspective Zacharias and his wife Elizabeth are a Abram and Sarai. This the is lens they should see themselves in. They are elderly. They are barren. They long for a child. And God has remembered them (this is the meaning of Zacharias' name: "YHWH remembers"). That is, they are to be appraised, weighed, sifted according to their faithfulness, the paradigm of Abram and Sarai.

On a day, Zacharias encounters an Archangel.

But angels, to Zacharias' mind, are not possible. Neither is the near approach of God. He says weakly,

He is a skeptic, you see.

Gabriel has just laid a glorious vision before him:

Zacharias' thinks, "Now, this sounds like sedition. Nowhere is the Temple mentioned or sacrifice."

Zacharias' longed-for son is to be very figure of faithfulness. But he rejects this. The Sadducees cannot square this vision with their religion. He says, in effect, "Your logic doesn't add up."

This is the logic of a limited human, not the logic of God. All things are possible with God. Abraham instinctively knows this. And for this failure of faith Zacharias is forbidden to say another word.

The icon Luke has just painted in words — it's a vivid scene and would inspire painters for many centuries — is conceived as a dyptich, as two icons, each explicating one another. The first is the icon of faithlessness, figured by a Sadducean priest; the other is the icon of faithfulness, the faithfulness of the Most Holy Theotokos, to be celebrated as the picture of perfect faithfulness unto the ages of ages. Yes, Gabriel speaks words that do not square with her understanding. But hers is the anti-Zacharias response:

We learn of the Mary that so many times she did not understand these things. Yet, her response is unfailingly "Be it unto me according to Thy Word." Whatever comes, comes.

Mary's background, of course, is that of the Ancestors of God whom we celebrate today: Righteous Joachim and Anna. We do not find Joachim offering sacrifices. Rather,

This is the very figure of Abraham, the prince of Babylon, who denies himself everything, who lives in tents, and lives only for God. Joachim seeks purgation and purification; he seeks communion with God; he conforms his life to Divine life making prayer his food and drink; he seeks transformation. Again, he is the very image of father Abraham.

Anna, the mother of the Most Holy Mother of God, also commits herself to continual prayer, seeking only communion with God (Protoevangelion of St. James, 3). And their prayers culminate in an encounter with angels.

There is no skepticism expressed here. In fact, at the angels word, she begins to wonder if it will be a boy or girl!

As with Abraham and Sarah, the blessing of a child is the fruit of their faithfulness, not the shadow of any doubt.

And I have never understood priests who tell their people that God welcomes their doubts. It is faithfulness that God requires! The gateway through which God will enter the human lifeworld is faithfulness. God will enter the human lifeworld through a series of gates, the faithfulness of Joachim and Anna and the faithfuless of a twelve-year-old girl: their daughter, Mary.

How utterly different, then, is the other of St. Luke's diptychs, which is the Sadducean version. Zachariah offers sacrifice in order to appease a god. He never thinks of communion with him, much less praying to him. Far from the jubilation and thanksgivings of Joachim and Anna, Zachariah estranges himself from God and His Holy Minister Gabriel.

These scenes in St. Luke's Gospel do not in the middle chapters appear among many others. They to be understood as foundational, carefully laid at the beginning. For this question of two, very much opposed, religions is a central theme of the Incarnation. Jesus enters human history in the midst of a culture war between Judah and all the rest of the Levant.

Zachariah represents all that is wrong with the new-fangled temple in Jerusalem. Both he and the temple are dead to God. Intimacy is utterly lost. Slaughtered animals are a poor substitute for love and the transformation of mankind unto the Image of God.

The parents of the Most Holy Theotokos represent all that is right: their modesty, their humility, and their trust in God. The scene is set in Nazareth, in the very heart of the true religion. They are presented as a second Abraham and Sarah. St. Luke's dyptich positions us, his readers, at a crossroads. He clearly contrasts the two approaches to God. The way to the left, which is the icon of Zacharias and the Sadducees, is the road toward death. The way to the right, which is the icon of Joachim, Anna, and their daughter Mary, is the road toward life.

This is not, sadly, only an ancient story. Walk into most churches in America, and you will find people indifferently offering "sacrifices." Theirs is "checklist religion": Got to church on time. Check. Received the sacrament. Check. God the priest's blessing Check. And then on to their sumptuous homes overflowing abundance of food and drink and multiple big-screen televisions .... while the world suffers. And God waits. He waits for our faithfulness.

I have known many parish priests in my thirty-year ministry. And among the sincere and good priests, their biggest complaint is "My people are playing church." But such people have never taken up the solemn business of personal transformation.

My brothers and sisters, transformation, theosis, is all there is. It does not necessarily happen in a grand church: departing from the world, purgation, illumination, unity with God.

"Be it unto me according to Thy Word," Mary says. And in those words she offers her life. She will never have an honored place in the village. She will never see a comely brood of children around her table. She will never have a husband to have and to hold and to love. She offers all of this, and simply accepts what comes next. That is Christian life. We are not assured of the end at the beginning. We step out in faith. And God will take care of the rest.

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