I Am The Way

Alexei Evstigeniev. ‘Icon Studio on Mt. Athos’. Oil on canvas, 1997. Private Collection. This is one of those scenes I would like to be able to step into, if such a thing were possible. 

Here is an excerpt from a commentary on today’s Gospel (John 14: 1-6) by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Dominican theologian and Doctor of the Church. Christ in his self-definition ‘I am the Way and the Truth and the Life’ is depicted in the icon on the easel in the painting reproduced above.

                                          ‘I am the Way and the Truth and the Life’

‘Christ is at once the way and its termination. In his humanity he is the way, in his divinity the termination. So, as man he says, “I am the Way”, and as God he adds, “the Truth and the Life”, two words that well describe the termination of that way. For the termination of this way is the realization of our human longings… Christ is the way to reach the knowledge of truth, since he is himself the truth: “Lead me, Lord, in truth, and I shall walk in your way” (Ps 86[85],11). Christ is also the way to reach life since he is himself life: “You have made known the paths of life” (Ps 16[15],11)…

‘If, then, you seek to know what path to follow, take Christ because he is the way: “This is the way, walk in it” (Is 30,21). Augustine, too, has this to say: “Walk in the man and you will arrive at God.” Now, it is better to limp in the way than to make good speed beside the way. For he who limps in the way, even though he makes little progress, draws nearer to the destination; whereas he who walks away from the way gets further from the destination the faster he runs.

‘If you seek to know where you are going stay close to Christ; because he is the truth that we long to reach: “For my mouth will utter truth” (Prv 8,7). If you seek to know where you can stay, stay close to Christ, because he is the way: “He who finds me finds life” (Prv 8,35).’

Fourth Sunday of Easter

Manuscript page from ‘The Meditations of St. Anselm.’ Illumination on parchment by an unknown 12th century miniaturist. Bodleian Library. 

On this Fourth Sunday of Easter we also commemorate St. Anselm (1033-1109), an Italian- born Archbishop of Canterbury perhaps best known for his definition of theology as ‘fides quaerens intellectum’ (‘faith seeking understanding’). And this feast day happily falls on a Sunday when our Gospel is John 10: 27-30, in which Jesus says ‘My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me.’ Because it was a central feature of St. Anselm’s spiritual and intellectual endeavor to explore how God knows and loves man, and how man comes to know and love God. Though St. Anselm is counted among the so-called ‘scholastic’ theologians, who are sometimes criticized for the ‘overlogicalness’ of their approach, it is important to remember that, for St. Anselm at least, it all began with faith. ‘Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe,’ he wrote, perhaps echoing a thought earlier expressed by St. Augustine, ‘but I believe that I may understand. For this, too, I believe, that, unless I first believe, I shall not understand.’ How different all this seems from the world today, in which not only is St. Anselm’s approach generally reversed at best, but more often both halves of it are rejected unconsidered. We might do well to turn to St. Anselm’s own homily ‘On Faith in the Trinity’, still read on this day in some Benedictine monastic communities. Here are some excerpts, which I believe can help us to approach today’s Gospel with deeper appreciation.

‘Holy Writ urges us to seek out doctrine, saying: “Unless you believe, you cannot understand,” thus openly admonishing us to bend our minds toward understanding, since we are shown the means of attainment. I also believe that between faith and the fulness of understanding there is a middle state: I think a certain amount of that understanding which we all so eagerly desire comes to us in proportion to the intensity with which we seek it. From this consideration, therefore, although I am a man of so little wisdom, I do sometimes rise to contemplation in accordance with the measure of divine grace that has been granted to me.’ It is true that, whether we are participating in the Eucharistic liturgy, studying Holy Scripture, meditating upon the writings of our Fathers in the faith, or attending to the various prayers of the Church, we should do so with the devout expectation that we will sanctified by these sources of God’s own self-revelation to man; we will be drawn into the divine life of God; we will be brought, according to our inner disposition and the mercies of God’s grace, into deeper understandings of the truths and realities of faith, which will not be forced upon us, and which are granted only to those who seek and desire them with faith. Then we can hear the Shepherd’s voice. Then we can follow him.

For St. Anselm, a vital precondition for coming to know and love God had to do with how we live our lives. ‘We must first cleanse our hearts by faith,’ he says in this same homily, ‘for the Scriptures say: “Purifying your hearts by faith.” And we must first enlighten our eyes by keeping the commandments of God, for: “The commandment of the Lord is pure, and gives light unto the eyes.” And we must first become as babes in humble obedience to the testimony of God, if we are to speak of wisdom…We must first, I say, if we wish to penetrate into the depths of things spiritual, put away all that pertains to the flesh, and must live according to the spirit.’ In this St. Anselm reminds me of no one so much as St. Nectarios of Aegina (1846-1920), who said that ‘Christianity is a religion of revelation. The Divine reveals its glory only to those who have been perfected through virtue.’ Now a life centered upon the virtues (actions which are true, just, chaste, kindly, honest, etc., and the dispositions which underly them), would seem to some to be simply the end product of faith and understanding. But it works the other way around too: the more we seek to live out the virtues and to love them, the deeper our faith and understanding of things divinely revealed grows. As St. Gregory the Great said of the Good Shepherd in a homily on today’s Gospel passage: ‘Those who love me are willing to follow me, for anyone who does not love the truth has not yet come to know.’ 

Three Fathers on John 21: 1-19

Lucas Gassel. ‘Christ with Peter and the Disciples.’ 16th century Flemish.

Today’s Gospel reading is John 21: 1-19, and I here give extracts from three commentaries, in roughly chronological order, by three of the Church Fathers on this text. St. Augustine (359-430) and St. John Chrysostom (347-407) were contemporaries, while Pope St. Gregory I (540-604) came two centuries later. Each stresses different aspects of the passage: St. Augustine likens the great catch of fish to the Church at the end of time; St. John Chrysostom points to the otherworldly nature of the Christian vocation; St. Gregory focusses on mortal versus immortal life, and on the change which has taken place in the Lord’s resurrected and glorified body. Here are their remarks in the order given above.

‘This is a great mystery in the great Gospel of John…Inasmuch as there were seven disciples taking part in that fishing…they point, by their septenary number, to the end of time. For there is a revolution of all time in seven days. To this also pertains the statement, that when the morning was come, Jesus stood on the shore; for the shore likewise is the limit of the sea, and signifies therefore the end of the world. The same end of the world is shown also by the act of Peter, in drawing the net to land, that is, to the shore. Which the Lord has himself elucidated, when in a certain other place he drew his similitude from a fishing net let down into the sea: “And they drew it,” he said, “to the shore.” And in explanation of what that shore was, he added, “So will it be in the end of the world.”‘ (Matt. 13: 48-49).

‘Let us then transfer our eyes to heaven, and continually imagine “those” things [which are not seen] and behold them. For if we always spend our time with them, we shall not be moved to desire the pleasures of this world, nor find it hard to bear its sorrows; but we shall laugh at these and the like, and nothing will be able to enslave or lift us up, if only we direct our longing thither, and look to that love. And why say I that we shall not grieve at present troubles? We shall henceforth not even appear to see them. Such a thing is strong desire. Those, for instance, who are not at present with us, but being absent are loved, we imagine every day. For mighty is the sovereignty of love; it alienates the soul from all things else, and chains to the desired object. If thus we love Christ, all things here will seem to be a shadow, an image, a dream.’

‘What does the sea indicate but the present age, which is disturbed by the uproar of circumstances and the commotion of this perishable life? What does the solidity of the shore signify but the uninterrupted continuance of eternal peace? Therefore since the disciples were still held in the waves of this mortal life, they were laboring on the sea. But since our Redeemer had already passed beyond his perishable body, after his resurrection he stood on the shore as if he were speaking to his disciples by his actions of the mystery of his resurrection: “I am not appearing to you on the sea, because I am not with you in the waves of confusion.” It is for this reason that he said in another place to these same disciples after his resurrection: “These are the words I spoke to you when I was still with you.” (Luke 24: 44). It was not that he wasn’t with them when he appeared to them as a bodily presence, but…he in his immortal body was apart from their mortal bodies. He was saying that he was no longer with them even as he stood in their midst.’

John 6: 16-21

‘Christ Walking on Water with Peter’. From a Gospel lectionary by Luke the Cypriot. Illustration late 16th or early 17th century Russian. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

In John 6: 16-21, Jesus has just finished miraculously feeding the multitudes and withdrawn hurriedly to a mountain. Why did he do this? Firstly, because he did not want the crowds, in light of the great miracle, to drag him off to make him a secular king. Secondly, because he surely by then had a profound longing to be alone with his heavenly Father in prayer. And because, as the rest of the passage shows, he was about to teach the closest of his disciples some lessons.

More than one commentator has remarked that these disciples got into their boat despite a strong wind because of their intense longing to be reunited with Jesus and went to seek him: their longing to find him, in fact, would have been similar to his own to retreat into prayer and to prepare for his next miracle. An old proverb comes to mind here: ‘Never less alone, says the serious Christian, than when alone’, for then we are in the profound company of our own thoughts, of God, of the saints and angels and the whole company of heaven. It is no accident that the Evangelist here speaks of the lateness of the hour in connection with the disciples’ embarkation in the boat: it was to show the warmth of their longing and love for their Master. And the physical separation between Jesus and his disciples has a deeper significance here too, especially in light of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes which has immediately preceded. For we know that Christ provides for the good of his disciples not only when he is present in the body, but also when far away. 

As the wind rises we are reminded forcibly of Psalm 17: 23-24: ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, these see the works of the Lord, for he raises the stormy wind.’ And why does Jesus show himself to the disciples, walking alone upon the sea? St. John Chrysostom remarks in his commentary on this passage: ‘First he teaches them how great an evil it is to be forsaken by him and makes their longing greater. Second he shows forth his power. For as in his teaching they heard not all in common with the multitude, so in the case of the miracles they saw them not all with the mass of people, since it was needful that they who were about to be given authority over all the world should have something more than the rest.’ Then a very odd thing happens: the disciples want to take Jesus into the boat, but the boat arrives immediately at the shore to which they are heading. Perhaps this occurs for two reasons: to double the magnitude of the miracle (it’s not only about walking on water), and to teach the important lesson that, as soon as we receive the Lord, we are safe.

Fr. Seraphim Rose, the great 20th century Orthodox monk and co-founder of the St. Herman of Alaska Monastery in California, stressed the urgency of our need to seek God. ‘It’s later than you think’, he often said. And indeed he himself reposed in the Lord suddenly and in a most unexpected way before he was even fifty. As the 17th century English scripture and patristics scholar Matthew Henry put it: ‘If we have received Christ Jesus the Lord, have received him willingly, though the night be dark and the wind high, yet we may comfort ourselves with this, that we shall be at shore shortly, and are nearer to it than we think we are. Many a doubting soul is fetched to heaven by a pleasing surprise, or ever it is aware.’

St. John Chrysostom on John 3: 31

Euphrasian Basilica, Poreč, Croatia. 6th century. 

Yesterday’s Gospel passage (John 3: 31-36) finds John the Baptist responding to his own disciples’ questioning about his attitude toward Jesus. In verse 30 he says: ‘He must increase, I must decrease.” And now he goes on to say that ‘The one who comes from above is above all. The one who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of earthly things. But the one who comes from heaven is above all.’ Now St. John Chrysostom (347-407), who tended more toward the Antiochian method of interpreting scripture in plain and practical ways rather than toward the strongly allegorical approach of Alexandria, saw in this passage a simple comparison between Jesus and John. And he emphasized this point: that John the Baptist addressed his listeners on an earthly level because that was what they were capable of hearing, and because he himself was lowly and did not want to grasp after things too exalted, those being the prerogative of Jesus himself, because, as we find later in this passage, ‘The Father loves the Son and has given everything over to him.’

Here is what St. John Chrysostom has to say about human overreaching in this part of his commentary: ‘A dreadful thing is the love of glory, dreadful and full of many evils. It is a thorn hard to be extracted, a wild beast untamable and many headed, arming itself against those that feed it. For as the worm eats through the wood from which it is born, as rust wastes the iron whence it comes forth, and moths the fleeces, so vainglory destroys the soul which nourishes it, and therefore we need great diligence to remove the passion.’ Why did this saintly 4th century Archbishop of Constantinople make this point? It is a good general spiritual observation, of course. But also: ‘This I say, that we may not carelessly pass by what is contained in the scriptures, but may fully consider the object of the speaker, and the infirmity of the hearers, and many other points in them. For teachers do not say all as they themselves would wish, but generally as the state of their weak hearers requires…So too John [the Baptist] desired to teach some great things to the disciples, but they could not yet bear to receive them, and therefore he dwells for the most part on that which is lowlier.’

Yet even as John the Baptist emphasizes his own earthly lowliness, he points toward the Christ in order to lead his listeners toward that which is heavenly. Because he was concerned that they would become irrevocably mired in attitudes and attachments above which they would eventually be unable to rise. St. John Chrysostom: ‘Although I am always telling you this both in private and in public, I effect nothing, but see you all your time nailed to the things of this life, and not so much as dreaming of spiritual matters. Therefore our lives are careless, and we who strive for truth have but little power, and are become a laughing stock to Greeks and Jews and heretics. Had you been careless in other matters, and exhibited in this place the same indifference as elsewhere, not even so could your doings have been defended. But now in matters of this life, everyone one of you, artisan and politician alike, is keener than a sword, while in necessary and spiritual things we are duller than any.’

Let us not imprison ourselves in that which is merely earthly and fail to long for that which is above. Or rather, let us be like many of the Desert Fathers, who saw the earth and all of creation as God’s good gift meant to lead us beyond itself, like a sacred window or icon, into the blessedness and holiness of heaven.

St. Nectarios of Aegina

Island of Aegina, Greece. Harbor and Church of St. Nicholas, Patron of Sailors.

Whenever we feel we have been unjustly treated, perhaps even in serious ways which have grave consequences for our lives, then we might call to mind the example of one of the most revered saints of modern Greece, Nectarios of Aegina. Born to a poor family in northern Greece in 1846, he moved to Constantinople at the age of 14 to work and to further his education. His personal gifts and determination were so great that he quickly distinguished himself as a scholar, then became a monk, deacon and priest, serving the Church in Egypt under the direction of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Sophronios, who in 1889 consecrated Nectarios as Metropolitan Bishop of Pentapolis, an ancient Libyan diocese, though Nectarios’ labors for the Church during this period took place in Cairo. He was removed from office after only one year, the result of the intrigues and political maneuverings of corrupt individuals within the internal administration of the Egyptian Church. After many struggles to regain his reputation and even any kind of public ministry at all, Nectarios was made director of a seminary for priests in Athens, then went on to found the Holy Trinity Monastery for nuns on the island of Aegina, where he died in 1920. He was canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in 1961. Meanwhile, Nectarios wrote a large number of books and articles which have been immensely influential in modern Greek Orthodox thought and spirituality. Only a few have been translated into English, but a new translation of parts of his extensive correspondence has recently appeared. He was known not only for his personal virtue and many miracles, but for the practical and profound nature of his theological meditations and spiritual advice.

To give you an idea of the latter, here are a couple of quotes which I have taken from ‘St. Nectarios of Aegina’, vol. 7 of the series ‘Modern Orthodox Saints’, Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont MA 1981. 

‘Christianity is a religion of revelation. The Divine reveals its glory only to those who have been perfected through virtue. Christianity teaches perfection through virtue and demands that its followers become holy and perfect. It disapproves of and opposes those who are under the influence of the imagination. He who is truly perfect in virtue becomes, through Divine help, outside the flesh and the world, and truly enters another, spiritual world; not, however, through the imagination, but through the effulgence of Divine grace. Without grace, without revelation, no man, even the most virtuous, can transcend the flesh and the world.’ (p. 155)

‘Sacred Tradition is the very Church; without the Sacred Tradition the Church does not exist. Those who deny the Sacred Tradition deny the Church and the preaching of the Apostles. Before the writing of the Holy Scriptures, that is, of the sacred texts of the Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles of the Apostles, and before they were spread to the churches of the world, the Church was based on Sacred Tradition…The holy texts are in relation to Sacred Tradition what the part is to the whole.’ (p. 159)

Some Patristic Thoughts

St. Isaac the Syrian at Work

Not long ago I began following a blog written by the wife of an Orthodox deacon from Maritime Canada who has just returned to her native land after several years of living and studying in Greece. Her recent book, ‘The Scent of Holiness’, is an account of many of the experiences she has had during visits to various monasteries in Northern Greece, and her blog often includes excerpts from spiritual writers, monastics especially, from both ancient and modern times. Just recently she posted this marvelous passage from the Blessed Elder Joseph the Hesychast and Cave-Dweller, which has been excerpted from one of his letters: ‘I found here a haven of stillness; / Be healthy, my soul and my body; / Swim, O my mind, in the sweetest tranquility, / And ask not what your neighbor is doing.’ You can read many of Elder Joseph’s letters in the book ‘Monastic Wisdom’, published by St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery. This passage speaks to me particularly, since I so often find myself irked and exercised by the things other people say and do. But I would ardently like for this not to be so.

Today’s Gospel reading is John 3: 16-21, and in it Jesus says: ‘For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen by God.’ This passage speaks to me too. I desire to ‘live the truth’, as the Lord teaches, but I know that I am not doing so if I am frequently upset and perturbed by the words and works of others. And I do not even need to meet or encounter them myself: all I have to do is open a newspaper and read some current events! But St. Isaac the Syrian, a 6th century Mesopotamian monk who has left us an entire treasury of spiritual guidance in his ‘Ascetical Homilies’, offers some fine counsel in his ‘Chapters on Knowledge’: ‘Whoever takes up fire and flame in the cause of truth has not yet learned truth as it really is. When he has truly learned it then he will crease to be inflamed because of it. God’s gift, and the knowledge bestowed by this gift, are never motives for being troubled or raising one’s voice. For wherever the Spirit dwells with love and humility is a place where peace alone reigns.’

Years ago I was having a lot of trouble trying to cope with an acquaintance who, though in many ways personally charming, experienced great difficulty controlling his unpredictable and violent outbursts of anger. And a friend made this simple comment which has really stayed with me: ‘There’s one thing about anger: it’s a total turn-off.’ Perhaps this is another way of saying what St. John Chrysostom says in his commentary on the third chapter of the Gospel of John: ‘A keen passion is anger, keen and skillful to steal our souls; therefore we must on all sides guard against its entrance…Wrath is a fierce fire, it devours all things; it harms the body, it destroys the soul, it makes a man deformed and ugly to look upon. And if it were possible for an angry person to be visible to himself at the time of his anger, he would need no other admonition, for nothing is more displeasing than an angry countenance.’

I don’t tend to be explosively irascible or have much of a temper myself, but fussing and fuming internally over the activities and expressions of others is not exactly in keeping with Jesus’ teaching either. Which is why I want to make the Blessed Elder Joseph, St. Isaac the Syrian and St. John Chrysostom my particular guides on this very fine Spring day. And St. Leo I, too, a 5th century Bishop of Rome, for he has this to say about our reception of the Eucharist in one of his sermons as found in today’s Office of Readings: ‘The leaven of our former malice is thrown out, and a new creature is filled and inebriated with the Lord himself. For the effect of our sharing in the body and blood of Christ is to change us into what we receive.’

Of One Heart and Mind

Lasha Kintsurashvili. ‘St. Herman of Alaska and the Ermine’. Contemporary Georgian icon.

I have often thought that disparities in possessions and material goods, along with the power and advantages attached to them, find themselves most brutally and destructively felt not between different classes of society but within the confines of individual families and households. Put a bit more bluntly: those who bring home the bacon and pay most of the bills can often, in overt and more subtle ways, wield power which may seem to the benefit of those who have it, but which can result in the humiliation and silencing of those who don’t. And I think that this is largely what our reading from the Acts of the Apostles is getting at today, when we hear that ‘The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.’ The early Christians described here formed a family, members of the Body of Christ which is the Church, and any unhealthy exercise of abusive power based upon inequities leading to the degradation of some and consequent seeming exaltation of others would have been out of place in the extreme. All this is just as true for us today. As St. Fulgentius, Bishop of Ruspe in North Africa in the late 5th and early 6th centuries, wrote in one of his letters, ‘The Holy Spirit…produces in those to whom he gives the grace of divine adoption the same effect as he produced among those whom the Acts of the Apostles describes as having received the Holy Spirit…They were “of one heart and soul”, because the one Spirit…had created a single heart and soul in all those who believed.’

We do find ourselves in a world of inequities, however, even inside the Church, even or perhaps especially within individual relationships and families. So we often must find ways for those inequities to be effectively addressed, and this can be hard. One of my favorite examples of this is that of a woman I know who, having borne her children in the 1950’s, found herself by the early 1960’s in a situation of total dependance upon an alcoholic husband who would neither allow her to work outside the home nor contribute himself to a peaceful family life because of his extreme intemperance and unpredictable fits of rage. So she took a long hard look at the situation and decided to convert to Catholicism, something the members of her extended family had opposed vehemently for years, and to share her new faith with her children: those would be the riches she would bring to the household and that would be her contribution. Many decades later, her husband’s alcoholism has long since run its course, a modest inheritance has resulted in her having more resources than he, and she, her husband and her adult children have lives of faith which sustain them in fundamental ways and have a positive affect on others in turn. Her story, to me, has been a joyous triumph and I enjoy reflecting upon it.

Just as the bestowal of the Holy Spirit was the absolute precondition for the early Christians to be ‘of one heart and mind’, so too in today’s Gospel reading (John 3: 7-15) we find that the gift of the Holy Spirit is required before Nicodemus can believe that he must be ‘born from above’. We really should remember this whenever we think we can bring others to lives of faith through words and reasoning alone. Such tactics have never worked because, well-intentioned though they may be, they are devoid of divine life. Guerricus von Igny, a French Cistercian abbot who reposed in the Lord in 1157, put it this way, beginning with a quote from St. Luke: ‘”The women returned from the tomb and reported everything to the eleven and to the other disciples. Yet the apostles considered it mere foolish talk and did not believe them.” Only later did they awake from their profound sleep of disillusionment and despair. Words brought little benefit to the apostles, until they had received the gift of grace bestowed by the Holy Spirit, when Jesus revealed himself to them in his bodily presence. He convinced them not so much through words as through his breathing forth upon them of the gift of grace.’ 

Second Sunday of Easter

Toros Roslin. ‘St. Thomas Touching Christ.’ Illuminated manuscript page from the Malatia Gospel, Yerevan, Armenia, 1268. 

Today we read what is sometimes called the Gospel of the Doubting Thomas (John 20: 19-31), but it is worth noting that in various local traditions icons depicting the events described in this passage are referred to as ‘The Belief of Thomas’ (Slavonic) or ‘The Touching of Thomas’ (Greek). St. John Chrysostom, late 4th century Archbishop of Constantinople, noted in one of his homilies on John’s Gospel that the Apostle Thomas did indeed doubt that Jesus had risen from the dead, but that the Risen Lord was more than willing to go out of his way to convince Thomas, and that in any case the doubts themselves occurred only before the Lord had breathed the Holy Spirit onto the apostles assembled behind locked doors. Though some might seem to look down on the Apostle Thomas for his lack of faith, we might also recall that not only Peter but all of Jesus’ closest followers abandoned him at the time of his passion and death. And I suspect that many of us can actually identify more with Thomas than with the others precisely because of his temporary lack of faith. After all, were one of our loved ones to return miraculously from the dead–and who among us has not sometimes longed ardently for such a thing?–would we not look closely for that distinctive gaze, that inimitable grasp of the hand, those utterly unique features, snowflake-like in their unrepeatability, of the beloved friend or relative we have tragically lost and now barely dare hope we have had restored? 

St. John Chrysostom in his commentary on the Gospel of St. John goes on to take note of the various ancient traditions surrounding the Apostle Thomas, that he later preached the Gospel not only in Palestine, but in Mesopotamia, Parthia, Ethiopia and India, founding the Church in this last place and enduring there a martyr’s death. ‘Thomas,’ he says, ‘being once weaker in faith than the other apostles, toiled through the grace of God more bravely, more zealously and tirelessly than them all, so that he went preaching over nearly all the earth.’ And the Serbian Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich (1880-1956), in his remarks on the life of Thomas in the collection of daily prayers and meditations for the Church year known as ‘The Prologue from Ochrid’, notes another ancient tradition regarding the Apostle Thomas: ‘Before his death, he and the other apostles were miraculously brought to Jerusalem for the burial of the Most Holy Theotokos, mother of the Lord. Arriving too late, he wept bitterly, and the tomb of the Holy Most Pure One was opened at his request. The Theotokos’ body was not found in the tomb: the Lord had taken his Mother to his heavenly habitation. Thus, in his tardiness, St. Thomas revealed to us the wondrous glorification of the Mother of God, just as he had once confirmed faith in the Resurrection of the Lord by his unbelief.’ 

I have often wondered why Jesus’ body still bore the marks of the crucifixion after the Resurrection, as we find in today’s Gospel. When we ourselves are raised from the dead, will we too bear whatever scars and disfigurements we have happened to acquire during our life on earth? But St. John Chrysostom observes that the marks in the Risen Jesus’ hands and side appeared merely by way of condescension to Thomas, that he might have faith, and by way of instruction for the other apostles and for us. For he actually rose incorruptible, something he calls us to experience someday as well. And the breathing forth of the Holy Spirit by the Risen Christ is ultimately meant to transform us, in physical and spiritual ways, into his own risen image, just as in today’s Gospel it is given to the apostles specifically that they might be God’s instruments in forgiving sins, and so that they might be confirmed powerfully in faith. 

Saturday of Easter Week

Gustav Bauernfeind. ‘Entrance to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.’ Oil on canvas, 1886. Wikimedia Commons.

The words of the psalms found in the liturgy are sometimes overlooked in homilies, but it is often the psalms which strike me most forcibly of all. In Psalm 117(118) today, for example, we find: ‘Open to me the gates of justice / I will enter them and give thanks to the Lord / This is the gate of the Lord / the just shall enter it.’ Now we know from Jewish commentaries on the Old Testament scriptures that these words were used by those going up to the great temple in Jerusalem to worship, to give thanks and to sing songs of praise. They also hearken back to King David, who had so many reasons to thank God for all the times in which he had been miraculously rescued in both personal and military ways. But Christians see in this passage something more: the gate of justice, the gate of the Lord, is the open doorway leading out from the tomb of the Risen Lord on the great morning of his Resurrection from the dead. In a very real sense, it is not Jesus alone who has passed through that gate into his glorious post-Resurrection life, for he did so clothed in our glorified humanity, the humanity he had borrowed from us, in which he had suffered and risen, and in which he was soon to ascend to the right hand of the Father in heaven. As the stone rolls away, and that gateway opens wide, let us imagine ourselves passing along with the Risen Lord Jesus into a world desperate for the salvation he has to offer. For his glorified humanity is also an image of the Church itself, about to be sent forth to proclaim the Gospel of Good News. He is the head, we are the members of his body. To slightly paraphrase the words of the psalmist: ‘We shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.’

And yet, as Pope John Paul II said in his ‘Letter for the New Millennium’, ‘We are certainly not seduced by the naive expectation that, faced with the great challenges of our time, we shall find some magic formula. No, we shall not be saved by a formula, but by a Person, and the assurance which he gives us: “I am with you.” It is not therefore a matter of inventing a new program. The program already exists: it is the plan found in the Gospel and in the living Tradition…Ultimately, it has its center in Christ himself, who is to be known, loved and imitated, so that in him we may live the life of the Trinity, and with him transform history until its fulfillment in the heavenly Jerusalem.’ Coming to share the very life of the Trinity itself, not a life ours by nature, but by adoption as sons and daughters of the Father by grace: this takes us to the very heart of our calling as followers of Christ, and ought to be at the very heart of our prayer life as well.

All of which brings us back to those gates mentioned in the psalm. They are the doorway to the temple in Jerusalem. They are the doorway leading from the darkness of the tomb into the glorious light of new day on that holy Resurrection morning. And they are ultimately the doorway to the temple not made by human hands, God’s temple in the heavenly Jerusalem, into which Jesus entered on the day of his glorious Ascension–but taking us along with him at least in part, since he did so clothed in our own redeemed flesh. And the psalmist gives us a few more hints as to how we can hope to enter more fully through those gates ourselves: they are gates of justice, of praise, of thanksgiving, of confession and living out of faith. May this psalm, and all the scripture readings of today’s liturgy, be so many doorways and windows into heaven, and may we be given the grace to fling them open wide and enter in.