7th Sunday after Pentecost; Ven. Anthony of the Kiev Caves

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So today I wanted to discuss a little bit, some very basic concepts that are essential for our salvation. And the first is the Word of God. And we have this very simple saying, "the Word of God," this is the Word of God. But the question really is, what is the depth of the Word of God? And we live, I think, a miracle. We're living in a miracle. And each and every one of us here, and those who belong to us but are not here, we have a very profound gift. And it manifests itself, I think, essentially, through the Word of God.

So today we hear the Gospel read, and this is the Word of God. But the thing is, is it just an ordinary thing, or is it something more powerful? And I think that the Word of God is much more powerful than what we would think about when we just read the Scriptures, or we read books and so on. The Word of God is a window from heaven, as it were. And through the Word of God, as we read it and think about it, the light of Christ shines with intensity and with beauty. And so the Word of God has this power. When our Savior even spoke and conducted healings, He would pronounce the Word of God. And through that Word, which we, I think, think of as a concept or something simple, this power was released; the light of God, the light of Christ came through the Word.

And so we have to learn how to receive this Word, because in order for it to penetrate our hearts and penetrate the depths of our minds, we need to receive the Word. And of course, what we're used to is just thinking of words as sort of concepts and descriptions of things and so on. But as I'm trying to say, it's a mystery. It's literally a miracle. And it's a miracle that presents itself each and every day in our prayers. And it presents itself when we read the Holy Gospels and the Epistles and the Word, and what we call the Word of God.

So in order to receive the Word of God, we have to struggle to acquire the mind of Christ. And you might say, how are we going to receive and acquire the mind of Christ? And what this means is that we don't just receive... You can read stories in the Gospels, and they're really wonderful and remarkable. But there's another step. And the step is how can we ourselves dispose ourselves so that we can not just hear the words, the spoken words, but that the mystery of the Word of God enters us. In other words, how can we little by little acquire the mind of Christ?

And clearly, we need to acquire the mind of Christ because when we look out at the world, the world around us—and I mean now the activities of the world—when we look out at the world, we see, I think we clearly see, and particularly these days, we see all kinds of difficulties and evil and darkness. And that's the Word of the world. This is the Word of darkness. This is the Word really in many instances, and without getting into the perversions that we're subjected to, it's the Word of the devil himself taking over the minds and hearts of those who have no discernment and have no focus on what is true, which is what our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ gives us as a gift, which is the Word. The Word that's filled with power, the Word that's filled with light, the Word that's filled with strength, the Word that has the ability to transform and change our minds and raise us up so that we see the divine reality.

And it's so amazing because the natural world itself is filled with so many things that are symbolic, you might say. The rising of the sun. Well, you know, you can see it as a sort of natural phenomenon. It's very beautiful. But if you begin to look at the rising of the sun as a gift from God and begin to contemplate it in, you might say, in the spirit of the mind of Christ, you see something much greater than the sun. You see something that was given to the world to bring forth life, natural life. And of course, our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God and shines bright like the eternal God on high, brings forth not just natural life, but spiritual life. He enters our hearts and transforms them and enters our minds and cleanses them of all evil thoughts and of all profanity and of all darkness.

And so it is, brothers and sisters in Christ our God, that we need through prayer and through reading the Holy Gospels—and reading the Holy Gospels in prayer. And for example, we might read a passage and we look at it and we get the story and so on. But we need to approach it in such a way that we pray that God will reveal to us not just what the story says, but how his saving power and grace manifests itself. And in a sense, it's like learning a new language. And obviously when you learn a new language, you start with pronouncing certain little elements of words and adding to those and little by little you memorize things. And at some point, if you receive at least some level of competency in the new language, you begin to have insights and understandings. Think about that. Starts off with these little sounds that we learn to make and then turns into syllables and into words and so on. And eventually through this development of this vocabulary and this awareness of how the language is given to us, we begin to actually experience profound things. And so it's true learning the language, as it were, of the whole Word of God. And in order to learn this language and to enter into it and to mature in the Word, we have to read it.

Today we have a very interesting account from Matthew. And it says, "When Jesus departed from there, two blind men followed Him, crying out and saying, 'Son of David, have mercy on us.' And when He had come into the house, the blind men came to Him and Jesus said, 'Do you believe that I am able to do this?' And they said, 'Yes, Lord.' And He touched their eyes saying, 'According to your faith, let it be unto you.' And their eyes were opened and Jesus sternly warned them saying, 'See that no one knows it.'" In other words, don't go and broadcast this.

So here's the really amazing thing. The Savior comes to blind men and first he wants to know, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?" And so when we approach the Holy Gospel, we have to ask ourselves, "Do we believe that the light of Christ can shine through the Gospels, through the passages we're reading, and through the words? Do we believe that it can?" And this is an amazing thing because we have to yearn from our heart and ask God to open our eyes that we can actually not just see the words, but we can receive the light and the power that sanctifies and purifies us. And so it is here that we have these blind men being challenged. "Do you believe that I am able to do this?" Do you believe, do all of you believe, that God can open your minds and your hearts so that you can see the reality of the Kingdom of God and that you can begin to not only see it, but you can live according to its ways and its laws and its prescriptions and also live according to its joy and its magnitude and how it changes our life.

And of course, once again, the blind men say, "Yes, Lord," and Jesus says, "According to your faith, let it be to you and their eyes were opened." And Jesus sternly warned them saying, "See that no one knows it." Now this is interesting, "See that no one knows it." And so I think that this implies that we must treasure the personal revelations that God gives to our own hearts and treasure them and not go around and cast them away in idle talk, but treasure them and nurture them and dwell upon them and concentrate on them and feel them as it transforms us, because if we are able to receive the Word of God, not just once again as ideas, but as a living reality, then our lives will change and we will be transformed. Ultimately, the goal is that we will become Christ-like. And when we are called Christians, right? Well, we are Christians through baptism and chrismation and participation in the life of the Church and receiving His body and blood. And so in this sense, here we are receiving Christ and dwelling in His midst in the body, but we have to, as it were, internalize that and preserve it within ourselves.

And so the gospel goes on and says, "But when they had departed, they spread the news about Him in all the country," which is fascinating, because He told them, "See that no one knows it." And then they go out and they spread the news about Him in all the country. Very human, right? They get the obedience and then they immediately go out and disregard it. "As they went out, behold, they brought to Him a man mute and demon-possessed. And when the demon was cast out, the mute spoke, and the multitudes marveled, saying, 'It was never seen like this in Israel.' But the Pharisees said, 'He casts out demons by the ruler of demons.'"

So can you imagine here we are seeing the results of having gone forth in disobedience, and we have this challenge saying that He casts out the demons by the ruler of demons. And they think to themselves, what compelled the Pharisees to say such a remarkable thing? I mean, here these men were blind and now they can see, and they are presented to them. And what compelled them? And it seems to me that this harsh condemnation comes from them because the light that they had received through the miraculous intervention of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, casting out demons, revealed that the Pharisees had within them these very demons. And these very demons compelled the Pharisees to deny Christ and to reject Him, and to speak against Him, and to seek to persecute Him. And once again, we look at the Word and we read it, and then we have to look at ourselves and say, "Do I have a little bit of Pharisee in my heart? Do I have a little bit of Pharisee in my mind? Do I disregard the beauty and the love and the compassion of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ?" and sort of say, "Well, that's here. I'm going to keep that over there and I'm going to live in the world over here." I mean, do we do this? And I think that we do. I think that we all do. We find ourselves on the one hand, we love God, and we accept what He teaches us, and yet on the other hand, we find ourselves in contexts that are very tempting and difficult, and we just close the door and live in the world and become like the Pharisees.

So not only do we need to be healed of the darkness in our own hearts, we need to be compelled to always confess our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ and not put aside the standard that He gives us to live our lives, saying "We'll put that away this evening because tonight I'm going to go out and live in the darkness."

And Jesus then went about the cities and villages teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the Kingdom and healing every sickness and every disease among the people. And so the Kingdom, this is an amazing word. We think of the Kingdom, of course, as a socio-political reality, known more abundantly in ancient times, with this whole idea of Kingdom and power and rule. But what is the Kingdom of God, the gospel of the Kingdom? And the Kingdom of God, of course, is that our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, even as He rises up above us, looking down on us, shines power. It's like the light of the sun is shown upon us to enter our hearts and our minds so that we realize that He comes to us in forgiveness. He comes to us in love. He comes to us in compassion. He comes to us to enable us to be regenerated, to rise out of darkness into light, to rise out of falsehood into truth, and be regenerated by the power of His eternal light.

And brothers and sisters in Christ our God, so we yearn to be, and by doing this, by this emanation of His presence and the reality of His person, He establishes the Kingdom of God. And that is established when we, in faith—and I say faith, because so much of what we do and hear, we're like little children. We hear it, we see it, we even marvel at it, yet we don't understand it. But the one thing we do understand is that our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ is our eternal Lord, and He loves us. And so we are—I am, we all are—like children. We hear the words on the one hand, we ponder them, but we do not fully understand them. And yet on the other hand, we feel the love and the light and the truth that shines forth from the words, from the divine services, and from the mysteries of the church, and it compels us to commit ourselves on the one hand and to just be able to be humble, humble in the sense to which, yes, I don't understand you, but I do believe, and I do want to receive our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ into my heart, into my mind, into my life, so that His light radiates out from me to whom? To those whom we love, first of all. To our spouses, our children, our brothers and sisters.

And we may find ourselves employed in very difficult circumstances from a spiritual point of view. And how do we protect, as it were, and contain, as it were, the light on the one hand, and yet let it shine forth in humility and in grace? So, brothers and sisters in Christ our God, on this most beautiful day that God has given us, let us open our hearts and minds to the words that He has proclaimed, which we hear in the chanting of the services, and let us open our hearts and minds to the truth of salvation. Whether we—and again, we don't understand, honestly, in an academic sense. We don't understand. All the theology books in the world, you could just put them on a shelf, close the door, and forget them. And yet we live a life of Christ through our prayers, through our participation in the church, which is His body. And if you actually think about it, the masses and masses and multitudes of millions of people, Christians over the ages, if you go back from modern times, what percentage were illiterate? It had to be a vast majority. Only a few people could learn to read. There weren't even books. And yet they were able to receive the Word of God as a mystery. And they didn't have little concepts or the ability to write sentences about it. They just received, as a living reality, the Word of God, and it burned in their hearts and their minds, and it transformed their lives and their spouses and their children and their community, and grace was given.

And when trouble came, they had the strength to endure. When persecutions came, they had the strength to endure them. When sickness came, they had the strength to endure sickness. When loss came, they had the strength to endure loss. And we have to be real, no matter how well we think we are, or how well we dress, and so on and so forth. The fact of the matter is, is that we all ultimately endure profound loss. And the thing is, can we have the Word of God so deeply engraved in our hearts and minds that when we face these terrible hours, Christ will be with us, and He'll strengthen us, and raise us up?

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.