Daughters of Abraham

Last Wednesday we contemplated a most brilliant presence of light and grace entering the heavy walls of a stone tomb: the Second Temple, which was a slaughterhouse, where the bodies of animals were offered in a vain attempt to trade blood for salvation. If we do not accept the absurd premise of a tower to Heaven ascending from a pile of dead goats, and Psalmist didn't (Ps 50:17), why should the holy and sensitive souls of Jesus' time accept this premise.

In the century preceding Jesus' birth, Judea saw the intense promotion of Judah-ism, originally instituted by Ezra under Persian supervision in their Provice of Yehud (Judah). Yet the surviving literature reveals a diverse population across the Levant. The Pharisees and Sadducees, of course, are prominent in the Christian Gospels. But Josephus and Philo, near contemporaries of Jesus, also describe the Essenes, who closely resembled Early Christians, having a population on par with the Pharisees and living throughout the Levant in every village. The discovery of their enormous library in Qumran near the Dead Sea (stored in an arid place for the same reason the U.S. Air Force stores aircraft in the desert) demonstrates their formidable and influential presence. These devout men and women did not offer animal sacrifices at the Temple. To cite Philo,

This sounds like St. Paul, doesn't it? The transformation of mind ....

Moreover, the Hebrews who fled to Elephantine in Egypt following the Return of Ezra, Nehemiah, and the rest and built a Temple there, not offering animal sacrifice (Bezalel Porten, Archives of Elephantine (Berkeley, 1968). Their Hebrew brethren fled to Samaria also rejecting the Persian religion and built there a Temple. And, of course, there was a group from the historical Northern Kingdom, Jesus of Nazareth and His followers, abhorred the practice. The Master mocked this cult in His Parable of the Good Samaritan, mocked the ritual of the Temple priests and Levites, and exalted the primacy of moral virtue and a pure heart. You see the similarity to the Essense.

The heavy clay and stone of the Second Temple nearly suffocated God's people. It nearly put out the fire of spiritual life. And the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. left behind rubble-strewn fields of rocks and stones, burying the entire Judean life-world. Waiting for the Passover pilgrimage to the Temple, which was mandated by the Sadducees, the Romans slaughtered every man, woman, and child in Jerusalem. Judea's diverse inhabitants were scattered to a new diaspora together with their most important scrolls.

Our understanding of the Early Church, especially in recent decades, has revealed the era of Jesus and His Apostles with a clarity not known since the first century.

A young volunteer visiting the Hermitage said to me a few days ago, "Isn't it remarkable that so much should be revealed now!"

For centuries this rubble, together with the sealed-off ground beneath it, have been mined with the utmost care by armies of archaeologists, epigraphal scholars, anthropologists, and historians. This world had become "all-clay" but now, suddenly, bursts of divine light!

The Church Fathers living three and four centuries after this catastrophe were deprived of this great revelation. We often think of the great Fathers as living proximate to the time of Jesus. They lived three and four hundred years later. May I remind you that this country, by comparison, is only about two hundred years old? The Dead Sea Scrolls, 15,000 fragments of religious scrolls, were unknown to them. About one thousand separate scrolls have been assembled to date. As one example, they did not know of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, called the "Angel Liturgy" describing ideal worship in Heaven — angels, a subject that was forbidden in the Temple. There were this was the hymnody of Heaven, where there is no blood or carnality. Compared to this ideal, bloodless sacrifice, worship in the Zion Temple would have been condemned as the "liturgy of the damned." Now I ask you, How could the purity of Orthodox worship have developed out of this abomination? Before we discovered these most holy documents, the Orthodox Church taught that our divine services derived from the Second Temple. Heaven help us!

Do I say too much? This was the opinion of Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, and perhaps the proximate reason for the Incarnation: to lead God's people out of this darkness and spiritual death.

We Christians venerate not scrolls but the Living Divine Breath. Our sacrifice is a broken spirit and a contrite heart (Ps 50:17). Our hearts quaked within us last Wednesday as we beheld the tender Theotokos, the innocent spirit of blameless Eden, ascending its steps. She would be the dwelling place for the Lord of Light. Her Nativity at the Vernal Equinox points back to the morning of the world in Paradise. For God crafted the universe itself upon the lives of His Holy Ones. And Jesus Himself was born into the world in the dead of winter, at the Winter Solstice, on the darkest night of the year. All this, the kosmos, the world, the seasons, He created with His Divine Breath, which we call the Logos.

This was our theme last Wednesday as we celebrated the first Great Feast during the penitential pilgrimage: the harbinger of light, Holy Mary, entering the claybound world of a benighted and demonic cult.

On the first Sunday following the Entry of Theotokos into the Temple, the Holy Spirit bids us return to this meditation. He has more to say. The figure before us is not the Holy Virgin remembered as a tiny child, but a middle-aged woman, whom Jesus names "daughter of Abraham," a phrase unknown in the Scriptures until this moment. As the subject on Wednesday was the ascent of Abraham's most exalted daughter, so now our focus turns to this woman advanced in years. As the Holy Virgin is a singular Figure, truly unlike any other, this woman resembles common humanity, even ourselves: weighed down with the clay of this world, yet still in her essence a child of God. "We have this treasure in clay jars" (2Cor 4:7), St. Paul both celebrates and laments.

The life of clay has, of course, been Jesus' subject from the beginning: "Metanoeite!" "Be changed! Shake the clay of this world off of you lest it become your everlasting tomb!" Wasn't this His message on the first day of His ministry? Wasn't this His message announced before His own ministry, announced by His Forerunner?

Certainly, this was His message to yet another daughter of Abraham: the woman at the well. The Samaritan woman at the well knows the path of clay all too well. Over many years, she has built a prison-house out of her sexual appetites. Five husbands? Does this not suggest her serial adultery? No man will have her. And the one she has now will not marry her. Her clay jar (another allegory), now old and leaking, is a burden she cannot manage to put down. We imagine that many times she has tried, but she cannot. Over the years is have become part of her. Certainly, among her neighbors this is notable and defining part of her. And now it grows like a tumor.

Then, on a day, she encounters the One Who shatters clay. And she puts her clay jar down (Jn 4:8) never to take it up again. By the grace of God, she is free. Hers is a new and purified life. And she will become St. Photini, "all light," the first Christian evangelist, and Equal-to-the-Apostles.

Is it impossible that a first-century Hebrew woman should become an Apostle? What is more, she attains these spiritual heights before the Disciples have. It is no less impossible that a little girl ascending the Temple steps should overthrow it, becoming a spiritual temple whose heights this benighted structure could never hope to reach.

On the Second Sunday of the Fast, our Gospel lesson presents us with a third daughter of Abraham. She is not the Holy Theotokos. She is not St. Photini. She is more like us. Her life is cut from the same cloth as the Samaritan woman at the well .... or like the majority of women (or men) living today.

She has known the spirit of fornication, and it has come to possess her. Jesus discloses that she has been bound by Satan. The Greek phrase describing her inner state is πνευ̑μα έχουσα / pneuma éxousa. The verb form, έχω, describes someone who is "unable to resist moral corruption, one who is "unable to attain glorious things." It is impossible for glory to reside within them. Why? Because they habituate filth, and God cannot abide, much less dwell amongst, filth. How common is this? To choose animal desire over God's kind of love, which is agápe? I need hardly answer the question. For it has become our cultural normal. The question really is, "How many prefer God's kind of love abstaining from animal desire?" This would launch a full-scale search .... turning up very few.

In this sense, the woman set before us this morning anticipates St. Mary of Egypt, whose life was soaked through with "insatiable and an irrepressible passion," according to her first-hand biographer, St. Zosimas of Palestine. The duration of the Desert Mother's dissipation had been seventeen years. The woman standing before Jesus today in the synagogue has lived this same, vile life for eighteen years .... nearly identical. In this, the Holy Spirit presents us with two "Marys."

If this troubles the historians among us, I call to mind a fact: God lives in Eternity. All points of time are present to Him at once. It is perfectly within the Holy Spirit's purview and prerogative to reach ahead and behind.

I say, "two Marys." For it would be the Desert Mother's encounter with the Most Holy Theotokos which would guide her down a path of contrition, of holy baptism, and thence to a very great fast: alone in the desert for forty-seven years: the forty years required to cleanse the people Israel plus seven.

Jesus now turns His all-knowing gaze to the bent-over woman. During a period of eighteen years, this daughter of Abraham has trodden the path of clay, each year bowing lower and lower to the earthy things she which has made her god. She is in a perpetual posture of unholy prayer. She is permanently bent over. She cannot see anything except earth. She cannot, under her own power, become upright again. In a word, she is possessed. She bows to earth and clay, and clay manifestly will become her portion.

This is not so strange. Do we not see it all around us, all the time, and in every place? Yes, we know those gracious few people filled with light who understand love to be holy and their bodies to be sacred. They surely are ascending to Heaven. Then there is their counter-image: those who have become possessed by animal desire, inevitably becoming riddled with incurable disease, and beginning a process of rotting even before they are dead. Is not their descent to Hell equally obvious? Tragically.

The woman seen in the synagogue on a given Saturday has almost completed her journey to earth. She has become nearly all clay. What began as an error in judgment became habit. Habit became possession. And now her life, being taken over, has hardened into unrelieved prayer before an idol. She bows before the demons who first invited her into carnal life. She has trodden much farther down the clay path than the woman at the well. And now, try as she might, she cannot hide her secret life, hidden so well for so long. Her dark devotions are now manifest to all. And then, on a day, she encountered God.

As He at Samaria, Jesus knows everything that she ever did. His singling out the detail of the eighteen years discloses that He knows the rest of the story as well. His bearing is that of a king. He does not go over to her in solicitude patting her hand, but rather He summons her. He does not stand as she nears His Presence, but He sits in the chair, as a sovereign. He announces her release by fiat: "Woman, you are loosed!" His words are not descriptive. They are a Divine command: the speaking of them is the doing of them.

And He is then met, audatiously enough, on the grounds of His authority:

That is, he quotes from Moses:

Two formidable authorities speak. One speaks from atop Mt. Sinai. The Other is Mount Sinai: the Living God here present. It is high noon at the synagogue on this Saturday. The ruler, in effect, says, "The only way ahead is to walk the path of the clay tablets! It is written!"

Then God speaks. Yes, the clay tablets guide our daily life. They prescribe a safe and salutary path. But what of those who did not heed them? Will the clay tablets now transform the Samaritan woman at the well into a St. Photini? Will clay tables transform this woman, nearly all clay, back into a creature of light? "You desire your justice to be perfect," Jesus suggests, "but where, at long last, is your hesed, your mercy?"

We are told, "glorious things were done." Glory is filling the minds and souls of all present. And the woman, who had been unable to receive glory, just as St. Mary of Egypt had been prevented from approaching the Life-giving Cross, is now freed of her demons. Her prison-house of clay has been shattered. And finally God's light and grace flood into her being, body and soul.

In this gathering of community, where many patterns of Hebrew belief were expressed, the voice from atop Sinai has dominated. But the reply is not from tablets or scrolls but from the One, Whom the tablets and scroll strive to approach. He is the Breath of God, which is always the longed-for end of all our roads. It is this end for which the people gather every Saturday. And on this day, they have seen and heard God.

May we who tread the fasting path toward Bethlehem also see Him. Like this woman of clay, may our paths also be paths of regret and contrition. And in opening our hearts to the One Who Alone is Holy, may we be filled with the glory that proceeds from His hand alone.

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