Below are three of Fr. Abbot's homilies: for the 10^th Sunday after Pentecost and the Feast of the Prophet Elijah; the 12^th Sunday after Pentecost; and the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 2008.

We have another bunch of readings for this Sunday's Liturgy. Along with the usual Gospel for the 10^th Sunday after Pentecost (Mt. 17:14-23), we have readings for the feast of the great and holy Prophet Elijah, whom we celebrate this year on the same day (James 5:10-20 and Lk. 4:22-30). Those readings were chosen, predictably enough, because the name "Elijah" appears in them.

At least this gives me a chance to preach on a Gospel that doesn't occur in the rather limited selection of Sunday Gospel readings in the Byzantine liturgical year. We don't have several cycles of readings as they do in the Roman Rite, only the same one each year, and even within that one cycle there are several repetitions of Gospel accounts. So the preacher always welcomes the freshness of a change!

Let us look first at the Gospel chosen for the Prophet Elijah. For this, though, we'll have to back up a little. It begins with the people in the synagogue at Nazareth speaking well of Jesus and marveling at his gracious words. What words? This selection doesn't tell us, so we'll go back a few verses. They were the words that Jesus found in the scroll of the writings of the prophet Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (this is read, appropriately, on the first day of the new liturgical year).

According to the evangelist, the people were waiting in rapt attention for Jesus' homily on that passage. He began with the solemn pronouncement: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." They people were all happy about that, sensing that some great revelation was about to be given. But what Jesus then went on to say filled the congregation with indignation and wrath. You see, Jesus was not a mere crowd-pleaser. He didn't say what people wanted to hear just so he could receive their praise and be well thought of and well spoken of by everyone (in fact, He would later say: Woe to you when all speak well of you; that's what they do to false prophets). Well, Jesus was no false prophet. He spoke only the truth, whether or not it would be well-received.

What the congregation didn't like about his homily was the fact that He seemed to delight in pointing out God's choice of Gentiles over Jews in a couple of well-known events of the Old Testament, one of which featured the prophet Elijah. Jesus did tend to emphasize certain role-reversals (and the Gospel writers, especially Luke, delight in pointing that out): the first shall be last, the rich man and Lazarus, the beatitudes, etc. One of the points that St Luke likes to make, since he is writing mainly to Gentiles, is that salvation is open to all, both Jew and Gentile, and that through faith in Christ, all have an equal status before the face of God. I think that Jesus was also trying to curb an excessive Jewish nationalism or elitism as well.

So He said: there were many widows during the great drought in Elijah's time, but he was not sent to help any of the Israelites, only a Sidonian woman. And in the time of Elisha, there were many lepers in Israel, but God healed only a Syrian officer. Jesus does not want to say that the Jews are not God's chosen people, only that they are not exclusively God's chosen people, because once the Holy Spirit would descend upon the disciples at Pentecost, people from all nations would suddenly be eligible to be numbered among the elect.

The people in the synagogue were not pleased with the implications of Jesus' words, to say the least. The Lord might well have said to them what he said to the people in the other Gospel reading for this Sunday: "O faithless and perverse generation! How long am to be with you? How long can I endure you?" But according to St Luke, Jesus didn't have time even to say that, for the congregation, filled with wrath, rose up against Him and expelled Him from the synagogue and even from the city, attempting to throw Him down the hill on which their city was built—but since his hour had not yet come, He walked through their midst unharmed.

We see how fickle the crowd was, and we might rightly criticize them for being so. But let's not be too hasty, since we may end up having to point the finger at ourselves as well. The people admired Jesus not for who He was or what He stood for, but simply for the fact that He initially pleased them with appealing words. As soon as his words were no longer attractive to them—since they were a thinly-veiled call to repentance from their narrow-mindedness—they turned against Him. They would respect and honor Him only as long as He spoke words that pleased them. It was with them as it often is with congregations in today's Church, in which people prefer entertainment to the truth. They want to hear cute or interesting stories that don't strike too close to home. But when a preacher calls them to repentance, or otherwise touches a nerve that disturbs their complacency or rebukes their tolerance of sin, they are filled with wrath and indignation.

Just see what happens in most parishes if a preacher dares to speak against abortion, artificial contraception, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and human cloning, or the "gay" lifestyle: people get up and walk out, or complain to the bishop or write nasty letters—simply because the preacher reminded them of the moral teachings of the Faith they are supposed to be practicing! Well, thankfully, the congregation doesn't usually throw the preacher bodily out of the church, but I did read of one case in which that actually happened when a preacher was bold enough to say from the pulpit that homosexual activity was sinful!

While it is obvious in this Gospel that the congregation was acting in a wicked and self-serving manner, we must notice in the other Gospel that even Jesus' own disciples did not fare very well, and also came under the Lord's reproach. Jesus had given them the power to heal and to cast out demons, but when a boy was brought to him in need of healing and exorcism, they couldn't do it! They were certainly not of such bad will as the congregation that ejected Jesus from the synagogue, but as Jesus told them, they were lacking faith.

In this case, I think we can see that faith is closely related to righteousness. In the epistle selected for the feast of the Prophet Elijah, St James remarks—referring to the prophet's ability to work wonders through his prayer—that the prayer of the righteous is powerful in its effects. To be righteous, as we know, means to be in right relationship to God. Scripture says that the righteous live by faith. Jesus said the disciples couldn't help the possessed boy because they lacked faith.

Let's put this all together. If you lack faith, then you cannot be righteous, because genuine faith is precisely that which puts us in right relationship to God. If you are not righteous due to lack of faith, then your prayer will also be ineffective, for Scripture says that it is the prayer of the righteous that has powerful effects. So Jesus was right after all (to the surprise of no one, I'm sure!): you have to have faith; this will make you righteous; then you can pray in the name of the Lord and you are thus quite likely to have your prayer answered favorably. Somehow the disciples were not at that time in the dynamic, conscious, and consistent relationship with God through faith that would have made their prayer for healing and exorcism effective. But after the Holy Spirit powerfully descended upon them at Pentecost, they had gotten it down: even their shadows cured the sick as they walked by! That is because they were so completely filled with God's grace, so in tune, as it were, with the Holy Spirit, that the divine power to heal flowed freely and abundantly through them.

Let's go back one step in this "faith-righteousness-effective prayer" process: St Paul says that faith comes through hearing. So we have first to hear the word of the Lord—the whole and complete word, not just that which we find appealing or easy or compatible with our present opinions. The congregation in the synagogue never even got to the point of faith—let alone righteousness and effective prayer—because they refused to hear the word of the Lord: the word that called them to repentance, the word that was something different than what they would have preferred to hear, the word that cuts through soul and spirit like a two-edged sword. It is only because this word is so sharp and penetrating that our sins can be exposed and cut away, and that room can be made within us for God's truth and love and peace to dwell.

So let us hear the word of the Lord, whether it is easy or demanding, pleasant or painful, because whatever it is, it is for our salvation. Having heard his word, let us believe, and then, by putting our faith into practice, we shall become righteous men and women and can therefore expect our prayer to be powerful in its effects. By the grace of God, we can do this. St James says that Elijah was a mere man like us, but look what he accomplished. For the Spirit of the Lord is upon us as well, and so every year can be the acceptable year of the Lord; every day can be the day of salvation.

We have in this Sunday's Gospel (Mt. 19:16-26) an account that is familiar to us, that of the encounter between Jesus and the rich young man. But we ought not let our familiarity with it make us think we already know its message sufficiently so that we don't have to go deeper into its meaning. Preachers are the ones who agonize most over the word of God, for we are always trying to present the Scriptures in such a way as to continually explore the riches of the mystery of God, and not just give you a tired, warmed-over homily but really communicate an anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Since I myself am not adequate to the task, I decided to take a look at what was said on this Gospel by one of the giants of the faith in these latter days, Pope John Paul II. He reflects on this mystery in the opening chapter of what is often considered the most profound and important of his encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor, that is, The Splendor of Truth. The Pope's thought will form the background for my own reflections on this Gospel.

The young man in this Gospel account is anonymous, so immediately the evangelist takes this encounter out of the particularities of a specific individual in that time and place. He is a symbol of all who approach Christ seeking the full meaning of life. Even though he asked the Lord, "What must I do…" he was not interested in merely learning some new rules. His goal was eternal life, and so his question has the character of "How do I get there?" This is the ultimate question of every human life, even though many are unaware that they have an eternal destiny, and even though many don't explicitly ask the question. Every time people seek in some way—even obscurely or in misguided ways—to transcend themselves, to seek something beyond their present temporal experiences, they are asking about eternal life, they are beginning to turn toward God.

If the rich young man had only desired further instruction in the law, he could have asked the Pharisees or any other qualified teacher. But he came to Jesus. Why? Perhaps, as the Pope suggests, he had heard Jesus preaching on another occasion: "The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Gospel!" The scribes and the Pharisees never spoke like that, so perhaps the young man was encouraged to find God in Christ in a way he'd never found Him through the law.

The young man knows, at least, that he has to do good if he is to receive eternal life. That is why he asks Jesus what good he must do. Jesus seems to stop him short with his immediate reply: "Why do you ask Me about what is good?" The young man might have spluttered: "Well, I thought that if anyone would know, you would!" But Jesus isn't merely an authority on the law, not even the best of authorities. Christ, as the Son of God, is Goodness incarnate, but the young man was not aware of that. Jesus, knowing it was premature to reveal himself as such to the youth, simply directed him to God: "There is only One who is good." This means, for everyone who has ears to hear, that we must turn to God if we are to know what is good. God is the source of goodness and He alone can define it. There is no good outside of God, even though some people can do good things without explicit reference to God. God is quietly at work in those who do good, and He tries to open their minds to turn consciously and freely to Him, that they may begin truly to know and love Him.

The good things that we do are not ways of getting God's attention or of convincing Him that He ought to grant us eternal happiness in Heaven. They are responses to Him who loved us first. Man cannot truly know God unless God reveals Himself. Man as such will always try to seek God, and the various religions of the world are so many attempts to reach out to God, but most are simply products of the innate human longing for God. But beginning with Judaism and ending with Christianity, God Himself has spoken to man; He has taken the initiative. Further, in Christ God has offered us the fullness of truth and love, the forgiveness of our sins and the only key to Paradise and everlasting life. So the young man really went to the right place when He asked Jesus how to gain eternal life!

Jesus led him slowly and carefully to the full truth. The first thing to do, in view of God's revelation to man, is to keep the commandments God has given. That is our basic response to God's initiative. To ask Christ about the good presupposes that one wishes to avoid the evil. So the commandments give us clear outlines of what is good and what is evil. This has to come from God, for it is not arbitrary or subject to changing ideas in different times and cultures. This is what Pope John Paul laments concerning much of modern thought on moral issues. Man has suddenly decided that he alone will define what is good and what is evil, and thus without the grounding of divine and natural law, good and evil become fluid concepts and can be adapted according to the perspectives and agendas of any given society. The Pope says that God has already answered man about what is good, "by creating him and ordering him with wisdom and love to his final end, through the law which is inscribed in his heart, the 'natural law.'"

Jesus gave the man an incomplete list of commandments. What is interesting here is that He gave half of the Ten Commandments, and half of the Two Great Commandments. By giving a sampling of both the Ten Commandments and the Great Commandments, He is referring to them as a whole. This is significant because when the man asks about salvation, he is given more than a moral code. He is given also the double imperative that underlies all morality: Love God and love your neighbor. The Pope writes: "Both the Old and New Testaments explicitly affirm that without love of neighbor, made concrete in keeping the commandments, genuine love for God is not possible."

The rich young man thought he was already doing OK with all this, and he said so; yet he felt there was still something missing, and he said so. Now it was time for Jesus to invite him to take him a step further, a step which the young man suddenly decided he could not take: "If you wish to be perfect, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow Me."

Suddenly all the commandments took flesh, as it were, in Jesus. They were no longer a matter of a more or less impersonal fidelity to rules given from Above. In a moment, it was revealed that the true meaning of all the commandments is the complete and personal following of Jesus Christ. Pope John Paul explains: "Jesus brings God's commandments to fulfillment, particularly the commandment of love of neighbor, by interiorizing their demands and by bringing out their fullest meaning. Love of neighbor springs from a loving heart which, precisely because it loves, is ready to live out the loftiest challenges. Jesus shows that the commandments must not be understood as a minimum limit not to be gone beyond, but rather as a path involving a moral and spiritual journey towards perfection, at the heart of which is love."

Jesus offered an invitation, requiring a choice: "If you would be perfect…" Now perfection does not mean in this case flawlessness and utter impeccability; it means completeness, the full attainment of the goal for which we were created. The Pope says: "Perfection demands that maturity in self-giving to which human freedom is called." So perfection also means full spiritual maturity. He mentioned freedom here, and that is an important point. By saying to the rich young man, "If you would be perfect, sell what you have and follow Me," Jesus was asking him to use his freedom to choose the ultimate and indispensable good: a saving relationship with Himself.

Some people seem to think that "If you would be perfect" is an invitation made only to a select few, while the rest of us follow Jesus more or less imperfectly. But this is not so. To choose truly to follow Jesus is to choose the perfect way, the way of wholehearted discipleship, true fulfillment, and spiritual maturity; choosing a different way is simply not following Jesus at all. And here is where the rich young man failed. He wasn't prepared to discover that the good he was seeking—the thing he still lacked even though his moral life was blameless—would cost him so dearly. He didn't realize that lesser goods would have to be sacrificed in order to obtain the Greatest Good. And frankly, he was hoping that he could somehow attain eternal life without disturbing the luxurious earthly life he was living. He didn't realize that the living word of God cuts like a two-edged sword and calls us out of our comfort zones, shows us the Cross, and asks: Is eternal life worth it to you? Will you take up your cross and follow Jesus? Will you trust Him with your whole life, to give you what He wishes to give—and to take away what He wishes to take?

The young man walked away sad. At least he was honest enough to realize that he was too enamored of this present life and its comforts to leave it all and follow Jesus. Better that than to say you are a follower of Christ but retain the same worldly mentality. But that's still not enough. Jesus asks us daily to use our freedom to choose the way of perfection, that is, to choose to follow Him, loving God and loving neighbor. He knows we're not yet perfect in a moral sense. He still invites us, for with God all things are possible. Let us not go away sad but free ourselves of all that weighs us down, our negative attitudes and petty selfishness or ingrained faults. Give them up, don't cling to them, or they will cling to you when you least want them to. Seek treasure in Heaven, for He who alone is good has eternal riches for those who are willing to give up everything to follow Him.

The Transfiguration of Christ is a great mystery, celebrated with special devotion by the Eastern Churches and, of course, by us here at Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Even though the event is well-attested in Scripture—in three of the Gospels and one of the Epistles—it may seem at first glance to be a kind of isolated incident, something that, because of the extraordinary manifestation of divine glory, doesn't quite fit into the usual presentation of Christ as the preacher and healer from Nazareth. But we'll see that this mystery is quite integral to the whole of the Gospel. I'll be relying on my faithful companion-in-exegesis, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, to help with our understanding of this glorious event in the life of Christ as his chosen apostles.

Like many events in the Gospel, the Transfiguration cannot be properly interpreted unless it is viewed in a wider context than the event itself. We know what happened by simply reading the text: Jesus took three disciples up a mountain, was gloriously transfigured before them, Moses and Elijah appeared, and a shining cloud overshadowed them, out of which the Father spoke. It's one thing to have an account of the event; it's another thing to understand what it means.

So we have to go both backward and forward in the Gospel in order to understand the meaning of the Transfiguration. What happened just before the transfiguration? Three main things: Peter's confession of faith, Jesus' first prediction of his Passion, and his teaching about carrying our crosses as condition for being his disciples.

When Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" Peter immediately proclaimed: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Upon hearing this, Jesus declared that Peter could not have come up with that all by himself but that the heavenly Father had secretly revealed it to him. But on Mount Tabor, the Father publicly revealed the same thing to the three witnesses of the Transfiguration: "This is my beloved Son." So Peter had been given a prediction, so to speak, of the Father's great revelation of Jesus as the Son of the living God.

The Transfiguration is also related to Jesus' prediction of his suffering, death, and resurrection. Jesus made his first prediction right after Peter's profession of faith. During the event of the Transfiguration, St Luke tells us that Jesus was speaking with Moses and Elijah about his imminent "exodus" in Jerusalem, that is, his passion and death by which He would lead his people out of slavery to sin and death and into the Promised Land of grace unto eventual entrance into Paradise.

Thus far we have Peter's profession of faith and the Father's confirmation of it, and Jesus' prediction of his Passion and Moses' and Elijah's confirmation of that. Next we have Jesus' doctrine of the cross. If we believe in Christ as the Son of God, and we accept the gift of grace granted through his saving sacrifice, we must live as his disciples on a daily basis. This requires carrying our crosses, losing our lives, so to speak, in order to recover them transfigured by grace and prepared for the heavenly Kingdom. As soon as He says this, Jesus immediately leaps forward to his Second Coming: "For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." The next thing we read about in the Gospel is the Transfiguration.

So the Transfiguration ratifies Peter's profession of faith, Jesus' prediction of his Passion, and also his prediction of his Second Coming. This mystery, then, far from being an atypical event (which modern scholars are all too ready to dismiss as a fabrication or a literary insertion into Jesus' life of a symbol of post-Resurrection faith), is really at the heart of Christianity. For it connects these essential elements of the Christian revelation: the identity of Christ, his saving work accomplished through his death and resurrection, and his final return in glory. All of this is not only foretold but demonstrated in the burst of divine glory that the apostles witnessed on Mt Tabor. For the "glory of God shining on the face of Christ" (as Paul wrote) manifests his identity as the divine Son of God, indicates the power of his death and resurrection, and offers a foretaste of the coming glory at the end of the ages when He will come to judge the living and the dead.

There's another connection within the Gospel of Matthew between Transfiguration and Resurrection. When Jesus was transfigured, "his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light." When the angel appeared at the empty tomb shortly after Jesus' resurrection, "his appearance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow." It is as if these elements are characteristic of the glory of God: personal appearance as well as raiment shining with dazzling brightness, white as snow, white as light, bright as lightning, shining like the sun.

There are a couple points here that should give us hope that this glory is meant for us and is not the exclusive property of God—though of course its source is in Him alone. First of all, an angel, who is not God but a created being, shines with this light and glory. But we may lament that we are so much more coarse and crude in our sinful flesh than the least of the angels. Then we must look to the humanity of Christ, for the divine glory shone through his own human body, made of the same stuff as ours. We might again object that Christ's sinlessness and the hypostatic union of his humanity with his divinity still places this glory out of reach of our own potentials. But then look at his garment: a lifeless piece of cloth also shone with glory, for it says explicitly that "his garments became white as light." Now we have no excuse. Erasmos remarks: "If the humanly manufactured and humble cloth of Jesus' garments could in a certain sense take on the nature of light communicated to it by the touch of Jesus' body, what are we to say of the souls of… all human beings disposed to receive the light of divine glory…?" We see that with God all things are possible, that even inanimate matter can be pressed into service to manifest the glory of God.

And is that not what happens with the sacraments? The mystery of Transfiguration underlies the mystery of the sacraments as well. For inanimate matter—water, oil, and especially bread and wine—can become vehicles of divine grace and glory, and the very life of God is communicated to us through them, when they come under his blessing through the ministry of the Church.

Let us return to Mt Tabor. As Jesus manifested his glory to the disciples, a bright cloud overshadowed them (another visible form for the invisible Spirit of God, making this a Trinitarian revelation) and the awe-inspiring Voice of the Father was heard: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him." The apostles could bear the weight of all this glory no more. They fell on their faces in fear and trembling, yet marveling at their incredible good fortune to have been chosen to be a part of all this. Erasmo makes a trenchant comment about the disciples' reaction: "The great 'fear' and prostration of the disciples at beholding Jesus' splendor and hearing the Father's voice may surprise us moderns, more accustomed to speaking to and about the Most High with an ease and matter-of-factness that betray either profound ignorance or fundamental insolence in the face of God's holiness and transcendence. Peter, James, and John here know that the Holy God has come close to them, and therefore they instinctively react like wax melting before the approach of living fire. This shows the depth of their spiritual awareness—awareness both of who they are and of who God is."

But Jesus doesn't use his glory merely to overwhelm or terrify his disciples. As suddenly as his glory had appeared it receded, along with the Voice and the Cloud and Moses and Elijah. The disciples looked up and "saw only Jesus," who then came to them, touched them, and said, "Rise, and have no fear." Yet even here Jesus wasn't merely trying to calm their overtaxed emotions. He was making another connection between what they had just seen and what they would have to see shortly. Just before the Transfiguration He told them he was going to suffer and be killed, and now He is saying: have no fear. This applies both to his Transfiguration and his Passion. Do not be afraid because of the dazzling brightness of the Divine Majesty, and do not be terrified at the imminent specter of God's beloved Son tortured and crucified, because this—all of this—is for your salvation. All of this is about being a part of an incredible divine mystery: Christ as Son of the Living God, who dies and is raised up again, who calls us to take up our crosses and "listen to Him," and who will come again at the end of time in his Father's glory with the holy angels.

The mystery of the Transfiguration communicates all of this to us, and more. Let us always watch with Him on the mountain, ready to receive his revelation, ready to follow Him at all costs, ready to enter the shining cloud of his glory. For because of Jesus we too are the Father's beloved children, and the very reason of our being is to be well-pleasing to Him unto ages of ages. Amen.

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