Fr. Philip LeMasters shares about the reality of Christ's resurrection.

The man in our gospel reading whose sight the Lord restored had been blind from birth, having known only darkness throughout his life. He symbolizes us all, for until the light of the Savior’s resurrection, humanity had wandered in spiritual blindness and captivity.

It is easy to think that we are spiritually strong and healthy when life is good and things are going our way. It is a very different matter, however, when things are falling apart and we find that we have no place to stand.

The darkness roots deeply within us all, both personally and collectively, and nothing but the brilliant glory of the Lord can overcome it. Whether we know it or not, we inevitably sink like stones into the abyss whenever we make anything or anyone else the foundation of our lives.

Those who weep like the widow of Nain today should take heart. The Savior has conquered death and shares His great victory with those Who respond to Him with humble faith and repentance. He has made every day of our lives “the day of salvation.”

We must remember who we are and find our true selves in Him, if we want to avoid the inevitable disintegration of personality and character that comes from slavery to our passions. Then we too will be able to obey with joy the Lord’s command to the formerly demon-possessed man: “Return to your home, and declare all that God has done for you.”

As “the poor and maimed and blind and lame,” we must prepare to accept the extraordinary invitation that is ours in Jesus Christ by gaining the strength to make our daily responsibilities points of entrance to the heavenly kingdom. They are not reasons to shut ourselves out of the heavenly banquet, but opportunities to unite ourselves ever more fully to Him in freedom.

Let us not despair even when the darkness threatens to overwhelm us, but instead mindfully open our hearts to the light of Christ as we trust that He will minister to us at our point of greatest need and make us participants in His salvation.

In light of what such atrocities reveal about the human condition, it is obviously not enough to affirm religious beliefs, to perform certain acts of outward piety, or merely to identify ourselves as Orthodox Christians. Indeed, it is entirely possible to do all those things while remaining blind, embracing the darkness, and becoming all too comfortable with the forces of death and destruction.

As members of Christ’s Body, the Church, we reap the blessings of the faithful obedience of Joachim and Anna and of their daughter the Theotokos. We must now use our freedom to take up our own crosses so that we may unite ourselves evermore fully to Christ in His great Self-Offering for the salvation of the world.

Christ calls us all to become like the Good Samaritan, binding up the wounds of our neighbors and refusing to narrow down the list of those whom we must learn to love as ourselves. Like St. John Chrysostom, let us refuse to think that we can rightly worship the Lord by confining our piety only to what we do in liturgical services. Instead, we must make every dimension of our life a point of entrance to the Kingdom of our great High Priest.

Most people today surely do not think of the weeks before Christmas as a time of preparation for being loosed from bondage to the corrupting forces of sin and death. More commonly, we use this time of year to strengthen our addiction to the love of money, possessions, food, drink, and other worldly pleasures.

In the remaining days before Christmas, let us embrace the scandalous calling to hope in nothing and no one other than the God-Man Who is born to heal and fulfill all who bear the divine image and likeness.

May every step of the journey lead us further away from exile and closer to our true home, the Paradise that our Lord has opened to us through His glorious resurrection on the third day.

As we welcome Christ into our lives and world at His Nativity, we must remain focused. There is no shortage of distractions this time of year that appeal to our passions and threaten to convince us that there are matters more important than accepting His gracious invitation to enter fully into the joy of the banquet of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Savior calls us to embrace our true vocation not only during divine services or in the eschatological future, but in every moment of our lives.

Today is the Sunday before the Feast of Theophany (or Epiphany), when we celebrate Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan and the revelation that He is truly the Son of God. His divinity is made manifest and openly displayed at His baptism when the voice of the Father declares, “You are my beloved Son” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Him in the form of a dove. Theophany shows us that Jesus Christ, who was born in the flesh for our salvation at Christmas, is not merely a great religious teacher or moral example. He is truly God—a member of the Holy Trinity– and His salvation permeates His entire creation, including the water of the river Jordan. Through Christ’s and our baptism, we become participants in the holy mystery of our salvation, for He restores to us the robe of light which our first parents lost when they chose pride and self-centeredness over obedience and communion. He enters the Jordan to restore Adam and Eve, and all their children, to the dignity of those who bear the image and likeness of God.

We remain in a period of preparation to behold Christ at His appearing. The One born at Christmas and baptized at Theophany is brought by the Theotokos and St. Joseph the Betrothed to the Temple in Jerusalem as a 40-day old Infant in fulfillment of the Old Testament law, which we will celebrate later this week at the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the old man St. Simeon proclaims that this Child is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.” The aged prophetess St. Anna also speaks openly of Him as the Savior. At the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple, we celebrate the appearance of the Lord Who fulfills the ancient promises to Abraham and extends them to all with faith in Him. By His appearance, He has enlightened the whole creation. Christ is “the true light which gives light to everyone coming into the world.” (Jn. 1:9)

On the last several Sundays, our gospel readings have challenged us to return home from our self-imposed exile. Zacchaeus gave more than justice required to the poor and those whom he had exploited from his ill-gotten gains, and was restored as a son of Abraham. By her persistence and humility, the Canaanite woman received the deliverance of her daughter as a sign that Christ calls all people to return home to Him in faith. The publican returned to his spiritual home by humbly calling for the Lord’s mercy, even as the Pharisee exiled himself by his pride. The prodigal son took the long journey home after coming to his senses about the misery of being in exile from the father whom he had abandoned.

The themes of exile and return are prominent throughout the entire narrative of the Bible. Adam and Eve were cast out of Paradise. The Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt until Moses led them back to the Promised Land. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah went into exile in Assyria and Babylon, respectively, with only Judah returning home. The Jews endured a kind of exile when the Romans occupied their land and longed for restoration through a new King David. Our Lord provided the true restoration of a kingdom not of this world, leading all with faith in Him back to Paradise through His Cross and glorious resurrection. The canon of the New Testament concludes with the Revelation or Apocalypse, which portrays the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the joyful fulfillment of all things in Him.

On this first Sunday of Great Lent, we commemorate the restoration of icons centuries ago in the Byzantine Empire. They were banned due to a misguided fear of idolatry, but restored as a proclamation of how Christ calls us to participate in His salvation in every dimension of our existence.

We will misunderstand these blessed weeks of Lent if we assume that they are about helping us to have clearer ideas or deeper feelings about our Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection. We will be even more confused if we think that our intensified prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and repentance somehow earn God’s forgiveness or make us better than other people. Quite the contrary, Lenten disciples are simply opportunities to open our souls to the gracious healing of our Lord so that we may share more fully in His life. That is another way of saying that the point of Lent is to grow in our knowledge of God through true spiritual experience and encounter.

If we have embraced the spiritual practices of Lent with any level of integrity for the last few weeks, the weakness of our faith has surely become apparent to us.

The Desert Father Saint Antony the Great once tested a group of monks by asking them, beginning with the youngest, the meaning of a certain passage of Scripture. In response to their answers, he said, “You have not understood it.” Finally, he asked Abba Joseph, who said, “I do not know.” Then Abba Antony said, “Indeed Abba Joseph has found the way, for he has said: ‘I do not know.’”

Today we continue to celebrate the most fundamental and joyful proclamation of our faith: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

As we continue to celebrate our Lord’s glorious resurrection on the third day and victory over Hades and the tomb, we have to admit that all too often we live as though death still reigned. We do so especially when we obsess about how weak, broken, and vulnerable we are, especially in light of the grave.

Forty days after His resurrection, our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ ascended in glory into heaven and sat at the right hand of God the Father. He did so as One Who is fully divine and fully human, One Person with two natures. He ascended with His glorified, resurrected body, which still bore the wounds of His crucifixion. Our Lord’s Ascension reveals that we may participate by grace in the eternal life of the Holy Trinity and share in His fulfillment of the human person in God’s image and likeness. We may experience such blessedness even now by uniting ourselves to Christ even as we live and breathe in this world with our feet on the ground.

We live in a time when many people water down and distort the Christian faith however it pleases them. Some do so in support of their favorite political or cultural agendas, while others simply want a little spirituality to help them find greater peace of mind or success in their daily lives, which do not differ at all from those of people who do not identify themselves as Christians

Our Lord’s ministry violated many of the religious and cultural sensibilities of first-century Palestine in shocking ways. Contrary to all expectations for the Jewish Messiah, He asked for a drink of water from a Samaritan woman with a broken personal history, engaged in an extended spiritual conversation with her, and then spent two days in a Samaritan village. He invited Himself to the home of Zacchaeus, a corrupt tax-collector for the Roman army of occupation. And as we read today, He not only healed the servant of a Roman centurion, but said of this man, “Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” This encounter is truly astounding because the Jews expected a Messiah to defeat the Romans by military force, not to praise the faith of their officers.

We are certainly in a spiritually rich time of year in the life of the Church. Having begun the fast in preparation for the Dormition of the Theotokos, we are now also anticipating the Transfiguration of the Lord, when Peter, James, and John beheld His divine glory on Mount Tabor. As with all the feasts of the Church, the point is not simply to remember what happened long ago, but instead to participate personally in the eternal truth made manifest in these celebrations. And that means nothing less than being transfigured ourselves by our Lord’s gracious divine energies as we come to share more fully in His restoration and fulfillment of the human person as a living icon of God.

Today we continue to celebrate the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mt. Tabor, when the spiritual eyes of Peter, James, and John were opened to behold His divine glory. They saw Him shining brilliantly and heard the voice of the Father proclaiming “This is my beloved Son with Whom I am well pleased; listen to Him.” We also continue to prepare to celebrate the Dormition (or “falling asleep”) of the Theotokos, when she became the first to follow her Son as a whole embodied person into the eternal life of the heavenly kingdom.

It is easy to fall into despair before our own personal problems, the challenges faced by loved ones, and the brokenness of our society and world. It is tempting to refuse to accept that we remain responsible for offering ourselves to Christ as best we can for healing and transformation in holiness, regardless of what is going on in our lives, families, or world

As we continue to celebrate the Elevation of the Holy Cross, we must remain on guard against the temptation of viewing our Lord’s Cross as merely a religious symbol that requires nothing of us. Through His Self-Offering on the Cross, Christ has conquered death and brought salvation to the world. But in order for us to share personally in His eternal life, we must take up our own crosses, deny ourselves, and follow Him. If we refuse to do that, then we will show that we are ashamed of our Lord and want no part in Him or His Kingdom. We will show that we prefer to continue in the old way of death rather than to enter by His grace into the heavenly reign.

Many are strongly tempted today to allow the problems facing our culture and world to distract us from growing to maturity in the Christian life and bearing good fruit for the Kingdom of God. That is perfectly understandable in light of our constant access to global media and the gravity of current events.

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