Below are three of Fr. Abbot's homilies: for the 2^nd, 4^th, and 6^th Sundays After Pentecost, 2008.

Today is the second Sunday after Pentecost, but it is the first Sunday of what we might call "ordinary time." The festive season is over and there aren't even any major feast days in sight for a while. So the Church tells us, through the proclamation of the Gospel (Mt. 4:18-23), that it's time to get back to basics, to start putting into practical application the graces we have received during the entire Lent-Paschal cycle. Therefore we go back to the beginning. We start with the cycle of readings from St Matthew, the first Gospel (at least according to the order we find in the Bible), and we also start with one of the first things Jesus did as He began his public ministry: the calling of his first disciples.

Nothing can happen in our spiritual lives or relation to God until He calls us. "You did not choose me," said Jesus, "but I chose you." It is God's call that establishes a relationship in the first place, that is, a conscious, personal relationship. We all have a relationship to God as creatures to Creator from the moment He made us, but He wants us to have much more than that. Yet his personal relationship is established in God's way and time, and on his terms. St John reminds us that we can only love because God first loved us. The initiative is not ours. It's not even possible for us to come to Christ simply because we feel like coming to Him. For Jesus Himself said: "No one can come to Me unless the Father draws him." So it's all about grace, about God's choice, about his will for our salvation.

We see Jesus at work in the Gospel calling the first four disciples, all of whom were fishermen. Note that Jesus tailors his call to what they already know, using terms that made sense to them. He said: "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." They knew what it meant to catch fish, so they could understand the metaphor of bringing souls to Christ, making disciples for Him. If they were carpenters, He might have said: "Follow Me, and I will show you how to build the Kingdom of God." Or if they were farmers, He might have said: "Follow Me, and you will reap a harvest of souls." In any case, we should realize that God deals with us as we are, and invites us to communion with Him in a way that may be mysterious but that is not wholly unintelligible to us. After all, He does want us to respond and He knows what will resonate with us. If He had invited Peter and Andrew using metaphors from, say, 21st-century computer technology, they probably would have looked at him blankly, wished Him well, and gone back to their fishing.

But as we see from the Gospel, Jesus was eminently successful in attracting these first followers. I would venture to say that it was not merely because they could identify with the metaphor He used. It was probably more the attractive power of his own person, the fire in his eyes, the love that flowed from his heart, the power of God that was suddenly yet mysteriously being revealed to them. We see later on in the case of Matthew that Jesus didn't use any metaphors or any sort of interesting dialogue at all. He simply said, "Follow Me," and Matthew got up, left everything behind, and followed Him.

The psalmist tells us that the voice of the Lord is full of power, that the voice of the Lord is full of splendor. The voice of the Lord can make the earth quake, can shatter mighty cedars, can overpower the raging sea. What is even greater than all that is the fact that the voice of the Lord can soften hardened hearts, can open closed ones, can reach the inner depths of the soul which are inaccessible to all else.

This is what happened when Jesus called the four fishermen. The evangelist notes that in the case of James and John, they were working with their father, continuing the family business. He makes it clear that they left the boat and their father and immediately followed Jesus. We just heard last week in the Gospel for the feast of All Saints that whoever loves father or mother, or anyone else, more than Jesus is not worthy of Him. This is no small thing in such a family-oriented culture. But Jesus wasn't one to let cultural conditions limit the power of the word of God. This is one reason why the Gospel of Christ is valid for all times and cultures. Jesus usually did, of course, speak in the idiom of his own time and place, but the message itself is not one that necessarily relies upon a particular culture for its essential interpretation.

Jesus is still walking throughout the world today, though invisibly in the Holy Spirit, offering his invitation to follow Him to anyone who has ears to hear. It may seem that the voices of secularism and hedonism are louder than the voice of the Lord, for many evidently do not wish to take up their crosses and follow Christ. They seem to prefer the wide and easy way, the one that Jesus says leads to damnation. But it's not that the voice of the world is more powerful than the voice of God. True, it may be more shrill, it may clamor noisily for our attention and try to divert us from the word of God. But if we don't hear the voice of the Lord the fault is not in the word of God but in ourselves. When Jesus told the parable of the sower, it was clear that the seed was good. The only reason much of it did not bear fruit is that the environment in which it fell was unfavorable to growth. Likewise, in the parable of the weeds and the wheat, the Master sowed good seed, but an enemy tried to ruin the crop by filling the ground with worthless junk seed.

The Dominican mystic John Tauler once said that we do not hear the voice of the Lord because we have made ourselves deaf to the word of God. This spiritual deafness began way back in the Garden of Eden, when our first parents chose the way of disobedience and thus denied Paradise to the entire human race. But their sin did not create a total deafness to the word of God. We have added to it by our own sins. Tauler says that every time we sin we become a little more deaf to the word of God. We are clogging ourselves up interiorly so that more and more we hear only the voice of our own opinions, the voice of our own desires, the voice that tells us only what we would like to hear, or that confirms us in what we think we know. But the fact is, if we do not decide radically to change, to accept a thorough interior cleansing and renewal, we will continue to grow deaf to the word of God. His call may be echoing across the world and we will not hear it, because we are only listening to ourselves.

Suppose Peter and Andrew had been living lives of sin and had made themselves deaf to the word of God. Jesus could have walked by and shouted: "Follow Me!" But they wouldn't have heard it. "You hear something?" Peter would say to Andrew. "Nah," he'd reply, "just the wind over the water." And then what would have become of him whom Jesus wanted to make the rock of his Church?

We shouldn't blame God if we do not hear his voice. (Now I don't mean we should expect to hear it audibly. If you do start hearing voices from God, please see a doctor and a priest, in that order.) If we do not recognize the ways God is trying to communicate his will and his love to us, chances are it is because we have become deaf to the divine word, gradually perhaps—one doesn't have to be a serial killer or a rapist or a politician in order to go deaf to God. Simply the long accumulation of many little sins is sufficient to do the job, because our habitual sins make us spiritually hard-of-hearing over time. If we are willing, however, to clean out all the spiritual junk that makes us deaf to the word of God, He will deem us worthy for the service of his Kingdom, and we will become his disciples and friends, and the good seed of his word will bear much fruit in our lives.

In the last verse of the Gospel, we see what Jesus did once He called his first few fishers of men to Himself. He went all over Galilee, preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, healing every disease and every infirmity. We should note that Jesus wasn't a kind of supernatural magician, who waved a wand and diseases disappeared. Everything He did for us He did at great personal cost. After recounting another series of healings, St Matthew comments later in the Gospel, quoting the prophet Isaiah, that Jesus "took our infirmities and bore our diseases." The infirmities of all the suffering people that Jesus healed did not vanish into thin air. Jesus bore them mysteriously in Himself, ultimately taking them with all our sins to the Cross, painfully atoning for every single one of them. All this He did out of love for us. He did things the hard way, because the hard way is the way of love, and Jesus will only deal with us out of love.

So let us pray that we become sensitive to the whispers of the word of God, or at least not deaf to his clear and ringing call. Let us be willing to follow Him at all costs, to leave out nets and our father, as it were—make the particular application to whatever we need to let go of in order to follow the Lord more faithfully, more sacrificially. For He calls us to share in his ministry, not only of preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, but of bearing the infirmities of others. This we do by patience, by forgiveness, by serving the others and forgetting ourselves.

Jesus is passing by. He has a word, a call, for each of us. Let us listen carefully, for his words are spirit and life, and to follow Him means eternal salvation.

After preaching on the same Gospel readings dozens of times, one tends to draw a blank when it's time to preach as they come around again. So what one often does is consult commentaries to try to get some fresh insight into the mystery, since one's own little brain can only go so far into the unfathomable riches of Christ. So this Sunday (Mt. 8:5-13), one has turned to one of one's favorite commentaries on the Gospel, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. What follows is, for the most part, either influenced by or shamelessly copped from that fine book.

The first thing we notice in the account of the healing of the centurion's servant is that he came to Jesus. That doesn't seem all that striking; it's just the necessary stage-setting for the healing, isn't it? Well, let's see. The centurion has authority over a hundred soldiers. There are other, higher-ranking officials who have authority over him. But the highest authority, the one with supreme and unquestioned power in the whole empire, and the one to whom the centurion ultimately owes his allegiance and even homage, was Caesar. Why didn't the centurion appeal to Caesar for his servant? Or even some other person who had more power than the centurion did? Why did he seek out a wandering preacher of a strange religion in a conquered territory? He seems to have known the difference between temporal and spiritual authority, between the power of force and the power of love. Perhaps he was also aware that Jesus had healed other people.

The centurion would have been required to address Caesar with divine titles. The Romans generally addressed Jews with contemptuous epithets. The centurion called Jesus "Lord."

Jesus and the centurion have two things in common: they both bear a particular kind of authority, and they are both compassionate. The centurion could have just acquired a new servant if the present one was incapacitated and unable to work. But he evidently loved him, and pleaded for him to Jesus. The servant was not merely paralyzed, but in agony. The Greek says he was "terribly tortured" and the Latin Vulgate is even more descriptive: "He is being twisted in a bad way." Jesus' compassion is immediately aroused and, disregarding all ritual prohibitions concerning entering the house of a Gentile, He said: "I will come and heal him."

What the centurion does next is amazing, not only to us, but even to Jesus Himself. He says to Him, "Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but only say the word and my servant will be healed." Note that the centurion did not first present Jesus with his credentials. His calling Jesus "Lord" is much different than those whom Jesus mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount: those who said, "Lord, Lord, did we not work miracles and cast out demons in your name?" The Lord rejects those who come to Him reciting litanies of their own accomplishments—who say, in effect, "Lord, I am worthy"—but He receives those who come to Him saying (and meaning): "Lord I am not worthy…"

The question remains, however: why did the centurion say this? Perhaps he was acknowledging the religious sensibilities of the Jews. He is unworthy simply because in the eyes of the Jews he is an unclean Gentile. This in itself would be a striking act of humility. The Romans are the powerful ones, the conquerors, those with the wealth and the prestige. The Jews were poor and oppressed and of no account. But the second part of his statement tells us that it was more than his acceptance of being unclean in Jewish eyes. He is unworthy of the Lord Jesus because he knows that Jesus has more power and more right to be addressed as divine than even Caesar does. Jesus also has more power to heal than do the physicians, and more spiritual power than do the soothsayers and magicians. The centurion, somehow sensing Jesus' unique oneness with God, declares his faith that with a single word Jesus can heal his tormented servant.

The centurion understands how authority works. He says to his soldiers or servants, "Go," or "Come," and they do. And he himself has to go or come at the word of his superiors. The marvelous thing about his faith here is that he believes that Jesus has a kind of authority that no general or ruler could ever have. Jesus can say "Go" to a serious illness, and the illness itself will go!

Jesus recognized this faith as being extraordinary, and he exclaimed that He hadn't seen anything like it in all of Israel. This may have made his own disciples feel a little sheepish—those to whom He had to say, "Where is your faith?" or "You men of little faith"—as they heard this Gentile being praised to high heaven by their own Master. But it really was extraordinary. Even the language of the text suggests that the centurion's faith was a greater miracle than the healing of the servant. The usual word for "miracle" in Greek is thauma, which means a wonder or a marvel. Jesus' reaction to the centurion's faith uses a form of the same word: ethaumasen. The Son of God Himself marvels in wonder at the great faith of this Gentile who wasn't even counted among his disciples!

Jesus said, "Not even in Israel have I found such faith." It is significant that He uses the word "found." That means He was seeking faith among his people. He came into this world, seeking a response of faith to what He did and what He revealed. In the Gospel of Luke He says He'll still be seeking it when He returns in glory, but He's not sure if He will find much: "When the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?" (Lk. 18:8).

Erasmo drives the point home about not finding such faith in Israel, showing that it is not heredity, not a nationalistic spirit, not knowledge of the Law, not even observance of the Law that would cause the Son of God to marvel. All these, he says, "pale into insignificance in the light of the centurion's dazzling confession that what Caesar Augustus is to Rome, and he, the centurion, is to his hundred men, Jesus the Lord is to the entire created universe."

Then Jesus in the Gospel drives his point home: "I tell you, many will come from East and West and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness…" The "sons of the kingdom" are those who think they have a right to the kingdom based on bloodlines or any other reason besides faith in Jesus Christ. It happens sometimes that those whom one would think are obvious heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus must cast out because He finds them faithless. Their pride in their supposed election has taken the place of living faith and the continual acknowledgment of their need for God—"Lord, I am not worthy, but save me in your mercy!"

Jesus says that those who believe in Him and do his will are going to recline at table in the Kingdom, while the faithless will be thrown out. There is a little wordplay here, because the words for "recline" and "thrown out" rhyme in Greek. The saved will recline; the damned will be thrown out.

Finally, Jesus does say the word and the centurion's faith is rewarded, for his servant is immediately healed. Jesus says: "Let it be done for you as you have believed." The word for "let it be done" is the same word used in the Lord's Prayer when we ask that God's will be done. It is also the same word God uses (in the Septuagint) when He creates: "Let there be light!" Let it be done! Christ has the fullness of divine power at his command, the power to create and to re-create, to heal and to save. Yet He does not exercise that power indiscriminately, but rather in response to faith.

That is a lesson we must learn from this Gospel. Christ still comes to us seeking a response of faith. This faith in his divine power which is really his divine love and compassion—this faith that says, "Say but the word"—must be coupled with the repentance and humility that says, "Lord, I am not worthy." When God finds this in us, He not only marvels but He acts in our behalf. "As you have believed, let it be done to you." To believe is not merely to make an act of faith or recite a traditional formula—it is truly to put our whole trust in God, to place our whole life at his disposal. If we wish to hear Him say, "Let it be done as you have believed," He has to first hear us say, "not my will but yours be done," for then He knows that we are sincere and genuine, that we really trust Him to give us what we really need. Then He will do whatever is good for our spiritual growth and our salvation.

So let us do this and not become complacent about the place at his table in his Kingdom that we suppose we will inherit. Let us, by our genuine life of faith and, paradoxically, by our profession of unworthiness, find ourselves declared worthy of a place at the everlasting banquet of joy with all the saints in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Every time we announce the reading of the Gospel, and again after the Gospel is read, we all say: "Glory be to You, O Lord, glory be to You!" Why is that? Is it just because we are in a habit of saying that in many places in our worship, so why not here as well? No, I think it has a more specific reason.

We say it just before the Gospel is read because we are acknowledging the privilege God has given us of hearing his word. At Matins, we actually pray beforehand to be worthy to hear the Holy Gospel. It is not a small thing that God has spoken to us through his Son in the Gospels. The fact that his word comes to us at all is reason for us to glorify Him. But then we sing "Glory be to You, O Lord" again after the Gospel. This is because we are thanking and praising Him for what we have just heard: his teaching on a particular point, or the account of a wonderful miracle He has just worked. We ought to sing this response to the Gospel wholeheartedly and with conscious attention. For these are the words and the acts of God, when He walked the earth in the flesh, in the person of his only-begotten Son.

That is also why the Gospels always (or should always) begin with the introduction, "At that time." This is not merely a sort of redundant introduction. Of course those events happened at the time that they happened. But at just what time do we mean? 30 AD? 10 o'clock in the morning? No, all that is irrelevant. The expression "at that time" is a way, known to religious anthropology (as you can read in the works of Mircea Eliade), of speaking of a unique and sacred time, the time that gives meaning to all subsequent times. We must make constant reference to "that time" as our source of truth, for what happened "at that time" defines who we are, our origin and destiny. We might say that "at that time" refers to the kairos and not the chronos, the meaningful moment, the transcendent time of divine intervention into the affairs of men. So, at that time, at that unique and unrepeatable time when God dwelled bodily with men, these things happened which are solemnly narrated in the Holy Gospels, and which we announce with faith, reverence, and joy. So it is truly fitting and right that we exclaim, both before and after: "Glory be to You, O Lord, glory be to You!"

We see this in the Gospel text itself today. After Jesus worked the miracle of healing the paralytic (Mt. 9:1-8), St Matthew says that the crowds "glorified God" for what he had done through Jesus. They glorified God for the manifest miracle of physical healing, but the most marvelous thing was invisible, the forgiveness of the sins of the paralytic. God can see what no man can see. We address Him, in our daily prayer after Psalm 50(51) as the One "who knows the hidden and secret things of the heart of man, and who alone has power to forgive sins." Everyone could see that the paralytic was in need of physical healing, but only Jesus could see that he was in need of spiritual healing as well.

The paralysis of sin was the first thing Jesus had to deal with, for it was the most important one. He had said earlier that it would be better to be saved even if you lost an eye or a hand or a foot in this life, than to be thrown perfectly healthy into Hell because of your sins. Likewise, it would be better if the paralytic would remain physically infirm—if only his sins could be forgiven—than that he be physically healed but lose his soul for not receiving forgiveness of sin. So the paralysis of the soul is a far greater one. We pray in one of our Vespers services: "…deliver me from burning anguish, from all that could paralyze, weaken or poison me; from all that could hinder or undo me in my misery…" So we know that sin can have this paralyzing effect upon the soul.

Therefore, addressing the most important issue first, Jesus said to the paralytic: "Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven." We don't know what the paralytic may have been thinking at that moment. We can probably assume that he was brought to Jesus not for absolution but for physical healing, for word had gotten around that Jesus could cure the sick. Besides, at this early point in Jesus' ministry, no one knew quite what to make of Him, and even his closest disciples had not yet attributed to Him the divine power of forgiving sins. So the poor paralytic might have been doubly disappointed. He may have even thought that Jesus was a charlatan, for not only did He not immediately heal him, but He told him his sins were forgiven, and everybody knows that no man has such authority on earth. (Significantly, we read at the end of this account that the reason the crowds gave glory to God was precisely that God "had given such authority to men.")

The Pharisees echoed the thoughts I'm here attributing to the paralytic, but they, in their bitter and suspicious attitude, were more mean-spirited about it: "The man is blaspheming," they muttered. They give us a good example of how not to be. People often tend to judge or jump to conclusions without having all the facts. They see or hear one thing, or one side of a story, and immediately come to a conclusion unfavorable to the one whom they hastily judge. So-and-so said such a thing, so now I know how he thinks; I saw so-and-so do this, so now I know what kind of person he is, etc. But so much spiritual damage is done by those who judge without knowing all the facts, and without knowing the inner disposition or intention of the other—yet the greater damage is self-inflicted by the one who judges, for that is where the evil lies. We simply have not been given the authority to judge.

The Pharisees saw one thing—Jesus telling a man his sins were forgiven—and so jumped to the conclusion that He was blaspheming, for they could not see into Jesus' heart and know who He really was and why He was in fact able to do precisely what He said. But Jesus could see into their hearts and immediately confronted them with their groundless accusation: "Why do you think evil in your hearts?" But He wasn't too severe with them. What He did next was, in a sense, a way of saying to them: "You are judging about something you can't see. I will now give you something you can see so as to confirm that I was telling the truth about the things you can't see. 'No man can forgive sins,' you say. Fair enough. Would you also say that no man can make this crippled man walk? I'm telling you that I can forgive sins, and with the same divine power I will make this paralytic walk."

He then emphasizes the issue of authority. The miracle He is going to show them would be done "that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins." By this time the paralytic would have shed his previous disappointment as he began to realize that Jesus was going to use him for a kind of "show and tell" concerning his divine powers. A great hush must have fallen over the crowd at that moment. Everyone would know whether the Nazarene was a charlatan or not. He said in advance what He would do to prove his words were true. This moment would make or break Him in the eyes of the people.

Jesus then gave the word of command, with all his divine authority: "Rise, take up your bed and go home!" The people held their breath. The man rose and walked! The crowds were filled with fearful wonder and gave glory to God. I'm reminded of the Prophet Elijah's stunning miracle as he, with utter confidence in God, taunted the pagan crowds and their false gods by drenching a sacrifice and inviting the true God to consume it with fire from Heaven. When God did just that, the crowd fell down with fear, crying out: "The Lord is God! The Lord is God!" In effect, this is what the people did when Jesus raised the paralytic. They didn't have their Trinitarian theology down yet, but if so they would have exclaimed: "You are the Son of God! You are the Son of God!" Yet if any of these people had been present at the River Jordan when Jesus was baptized, and had heard that mysterious Voice from Heaven saying, "You are My beloved Son," the pieces of the puzzle would henceforth be starting to fit.

As for us, we may know our Trinitarian theology, but we may still be suffering from the paralysis of sin. Merely knowing theology, however, will not raise us up. Better to enter the Kingdom of Heaven without theological training, than to be cast into Hell holding your doctorate in theology! It is indeed important to learn as much about God as possible, for He is the center of our whole existence—our Origin and our Destiny—and it should be our joy to study his wisdom and his wonders. But it is still more important to know God personally, through faith and love, for that is how we are saved. To know about God is to say: "He has power to forgive sins." To know God is to say: "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!"

Finally, let us not, by the way we live or think, take on the role of the Pharisees: making accusations without evidence, judging things that only God can judge, getting in the way of what God is trying to do in others. For then we will hear only the reproach of the Lord. Let us rather take our proper place: lying on the paralytic's mat, imploring God for healing and forgiveness! Then shall we hear his words of comfort and mercy, and we shall rise, renewed by his grace and able henceforth to serve Him with a pure heart. Then, as we do at every Gospel reading about what Jesus did "at that time"—for He is still at work in the world at this time—we will exclaim: "Glory be to You, O Lord, glory be to You!"

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