Reflections on Lk 5:29-39 2/11/24

As preached by Brother Theophan
Holy Wisdom Church



Christ tells us here that He came to save the sinners and not the righteous. Now it’s important to realize that there’s a kind of irony at work - because the righteous, the Pharisees, are righteous only in their own perception of reality, but not in the inner world, the heart, which is where Christ is always drawing our attention to. So the sinners are those who are mindful, conscious of their own sinfulness, while the righteous have their heads in the sand - thinking everything is just fine when the whole house is on fire.

It is easy, I think, for me to read this passage and pay lip service and make a half hearted admission of my sinfulness. But when I say this am I really feeling the truth of what I’m admitting to, with all of my being - body, soul and spirit? Or am I paying lip service? The Pharisees stopped at paying lip service only.

Now it would be really all too easy to become lazy and passive here. After all, I live in a monastery. I pray multiple times every single day. I go to church all the time. Am I a sinner? I am protected here from many temptations so how much trouble can I really get into to consider myself a sinner?

The saints often considered themselves the worst of sinners. St Paul counted himself chief among sinners. Were they being disingenuous? Was it “humble bragging”? I don’t think so - rather, in reading the lives of saints like St Silouan we know that the saints were aware of their sinfulness because they were graced with conscious experiences of the unimaginable light, beauty, love and compassion of an all embracing God and this gave them a vision of how far short they fell of it. Think of how tiny we feel sometimes looking up at the stars at night. This captures, I think, some of the cosmic scale that we are dealing with - it begins to put things in the right perspective. When the light is very bright you’re liable to see every mote of dust. It’s hard to notice the filth and disorder in a room if you never draw the blinds or turn on a lamp.

So I think it’s important here to go just a little deeper and consider what sin means. In Greek, the word is amartia and the literal translation, as we all know, is “to miss the mark”. To miss the bull’s eye. To go through life and really miss what it’s all about. The human tragedy, in a sense, is not to realize, to really realize in a way that affects us down in our guts, that we are, in fact, made in the image of God. That God has hidden unimaginable treasures deep inside of us. We are called to something cosmic, but day by day, we live under the tyranny of the trivial.

In many ways, the whole goal of the Christian life is to become who we really are - to consciously assimilate and live out of our deepest self, our inner core, the image that radiates with the light of Tabor.  To be mindful of that unceasingly. That is what is expected of us. And yet do I hit the mark? How often do I really live from this depth of myself - how often do I show and do even some of what I know of this wisdom that sleeps inside of me? How can I see myself in the way that Christ sees me and act in the way He trusts I am capable of? Metropolitan Anthony Bloom said a sinner is someone afraid of their own depths and so a sinner relates to life situations and others from a superficial level.

Now Christ is calling us to a radical shift - the old containers cannot be patched up and recycled to hold the major shifts we are being asked to make. This isn’t a small remodeling job - we are called to a new life in which we replace old habits with new ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, acting. To move past our all too human drift toward selfishness and the comfort of what is familiar and well rehearsed. This is a project that is meant to engage every fiber of our being.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow had many interesting things to say about something he called the Jonah complex which exists inside all of us. The Jonah complex is the deep awe, reverence and even fear we feel when we catch a glimpse of our authentic greatness. As a reaction, we are almost paralyzed by the calling that beckons to us from our depths. It sounds paradoxical but we are afraid, and even terrified, of our authentic greatness - so we sometimes boast and take flight into an imaginary, made up greatness or we feel sorry for ourselves.

It makes us deeply uncomfortable to shine with the Light of Tabor. It makes us deeply uncomfortable to see others shining in that same light because it may require us to do the work of throwing off the shackles that hold us back - fear, lethargy, forgetfulness. The wisest human beings saw this very clearly down through history - in one voice they tell us that most of the time we are sleepwalking through life, mired in the minor cares, worries, and obsessions that will not survive the grave. Sadly all too often we don’t have a vivid realization that the life we lived was a pale shadow of what God is calling us to manifest in this world - and that is to miss the mark, to be off the bull’s eye. Walt Whitman wrote ‘You have not known what you are - you have slumber’d upon yourself your whole life.’

But when we really come face to face with these treasures inside of us - which really are not our possession at all but God’s free gift to us, on temporary loan - our heart is pierced by a dimension that comes from a different place than our mundane existence. Something of the cosmic and eternal shines through. And we realize that this treasure is sort of like a pearl or a diamond with many facets to it - one facet is the sense of wonder reawakening, like we knew in childhood, another facet reflects beauty, gratitude, deep joy, humility. Our heart is tenderized by genuine contrition of having missed our hidden potentials; we experience a deep, aching longing to enter more into the mystery, to actualize these treasures God has placed inside of us. This is the call of our life. And we need Christ to be our Healer, our Physician, the Way we follow to get to our destination.