Ephesians 6:10-17; Luke 13:10-17
There are times when we do as little possible in order to meet a
requirement that is not very important to us.
There are other times when we do our very best because it really
matters. Some requirements can be
checked off easily with little effort and do not change us in any significant
way. Those that require dedication from
the depths of our souls, however, will transform us profoundly.
St. Paul, who suffered and struggled so much
in his apostolic ministry, knew that faithfulness to Jesus Christ requires
complete and life-changing commitment.
That is why he instructed the Ephesians to “Put on the whole armor of
God” so that they would be able to resist their many temptations. The challenge was not to fight against human
beings, but against the spiritual forces of evil that so easily corrupt even
the best intentions of people in the world as we know it. If we want to deflect “the flaming darts of
the evil one,” we need the shield of faith, as well as “the helmet of
salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” That is how
we ground ourselves in God’s truth, righteousness, and peace so that we
will be able to resist the corrupting power of evil in our souls.
To view the
Christian life as a battle for which we need the full armor of God is very
different from thinking that religion is about emotion, politics, or simply
being a decent person. The point is not to make ourselves feel a
certain way, to gain worldly power, or even to become moral. Instead, our faith calls us to participate
personally in the healing of the human person that Jesus Christ was born to
bring to the world. As we await the
coming fulfillment of God’s Kingdom, answering that call requires a difficult
and constant struggle. Even though Christ has conquered death in His glorious
resurrection on the third day, none of us has yet fully embraced His victory
over the corrosive effects of sin. Regardless
of whether our temptations are obvious or subtle, we must all engage in a
struggle against the paralyzing forces of evil in our own souls. This is
not a matter of going through the motions to meet a minimal standard, but a
calling to invest ourselves fully in an ongoing battle through which we hope,
by God’s grace, to be transformed in holiness as partakers of the divine
nature.
The woman whom
Jesus Christ healed in today’s gospel lesson certainly was transformed. She suffered from a kind of paralysis because
she had not been able to stand up straight for eighteen years. She was stooped over and had probably lost
all hope of ever being healed. The Lord
saw her in that condition in the synagogue and restored her to health, saying
“Woman, you are loosed.” Since
it was the Sabbath day on which no work was to be done, the leader of the
synagogue criticized Christ for breaking the Old Testament law. He responded that people care for their
animals on the Sabbath, so how could it possibly be wrong to heal “this woman,
a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan bound for eighteen years”? That response
silenced His critic.
There is no
indication that the woman asked the Lord to heal her; instead, He took the
initiative when He saw her that day in the synagogue. He took the initiative in extending His
merciful love toward her in a way that was not minimalistic or
perfunctory. His healing transformed and
empowered her to live as a healthy human being in a way that she had not been
able to experience by her own strength. In the very Jewish context of a healing
on the Sabbath in a synagogue, the Messiah described her as “a daughter of
Abraham,” a rightful heir of the blessings promised to Abraham and his
descendants.
Yesterday the
Church celebrated the conception of the Theotokos by St. Anna. She had been stooped over by her inability to
conceive a child, which was an especially deep wound for daughters of Abraham
through whom God’s promises of blessing were to be fulfilled from generation to
generation. But the Lord heard Joachim and Anna’s prayers and gave this
elderly, faithful couple a daughter through whom the Savior would be born. By loosing Anna from barrenness, God blessed
her in a way that ultimately extended the promises to Abraham to the entire
world. For now all who have faith in
Christ are rightful heirs to their fulfillment.
In these weeks
of the Nativity Fast, we prepare to celebrate the loosing of all people, and of
the entire creation, from being stooped over and corrupted by the power sin. Left to our own abilities, we will remain
bound to our infirmities of body, soul, and spirit. We will be unable to straighten ourselves up,
much less to conquer death. We will be
unable to heal our own distorted natures.
The glorious good news of this season is that the Son of God has made
our healing possible by becoming one of us, uniting humanity and divinity in
His own Person. Because of the
Incarnation of the God-Man, we are all set free to become spiritually fruitful
by the power of His grace. We are all loosed from our barrenness.
If we have any
spiritual insight at all, we will see that embracing that healing is no small
or easy undertaking. Too often, we
become like the ruler of the synagogue who hypocritically interpreted the rules
in a way that ignored the profound importance of healing a beloved daughter of
Abraham. We settle for that in our own
lives when we think that any tendency, weakness, or habit is so powerful that
Christ cannot set us free from slavery to it.
Regardless of how powerfully we are tempted, no power in heaven or earth
can make us sin unless we choose to do so.
As we prepare to welcome Christ at His Nativity, we must remember that
He became a human being in order to unite us to Himself in holiness. So in order truly to celebrate Christmas, we
must be in the process of being loosed from the paralyzing power of sin in our
lives. We must be growing in our ability
to live faithfully as sons and daughters of Abraham who are not defined by our
present weaknesses and infirmities, but by the healing mercy of our
Savior. We must be on the road to
victory over spiritual barrenness as we welcome the Messiah more fully into our
lives and play our unique roles in the salvation of the world.
Of course, doing
so requires constant vigilance against temptation. It requires putting on “the whole armor of
God” through the sacramental life of the Church as we devote ourselves to prayer,
repentance, fasting, almsgiving, forgiveness, and keeping a close watch on our
thoughts, words, and deeds. Otherwise, there
will be areas of our life where we are unprotected and weak against the forces
of corruption, especially those that have taken root in our own souls and
operate with such subtlety that we hardly even notice them. If we settle for just enough religion to make
us socially respectable or feel better about ourselves, we will simply go
through a few motions as we let down our guard and become further weakened in
our ability to resist gratifying our self-centered desires. We will then become
even more stooped over by corruption and blind to the many ways in which we do
not see our suffering neighbors as every bit as much the unique children of God
as we are. Weakness leads to more
weakness, and will make us even less fertile in welcoming the Savior into our
lives and world.
In the remaining
weeks of Advent, let us do all that we can to cooperate with our Lord’s
gracious will to loose us from the spiritual barrenness that holds us back from
being united with Him in holiness. Let
us “put on the whole armor of God” so that we will not settle for some
watered-down view of religion that totally misses the point of why Christ was
born. Let us accept the blessing that is
ours as daughters and sons of Abraham through faith in Him. Surely, there is no better way to prepare
ourselves to welcome the Savior at Christmas.
No comments:
Post a Comment