Sermons & Homilies
“The rich man shall hardly enter the Kingdom of heaven.” That is, only with great difficulty. These are strong words from our Lord. So strong that even the Apostles who, as St. Peter testified directly after today’s Gospel reading, left everything to follow Christ—not simply possessions, but family, relatives, wife, children, lands, and property; everything!—even they responded: “Who then can be saved?!”
How do we sum up a life? How do we encapsulate a person’s whole being into a few words? Often, we are at a loss at a funeral to fully depict the life of the person being commemorated. We try our best with anecdotes, with words of advice that have stuck with us. And so it is fitting today, when we celebrate not the death, but the passing over from death to Life of the Most Holy Theotokos, to find a way to sum up her life. I would offer her own words, the words she gave in response to the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation, as perhaps the most succinct and perfect summation of the life of our Panagia.
Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends, but there remains a gradient of lesser loves, such as feeding the poor or clothing the naked, but are we not often loveless and complacent? Similarly, even if a man has such extremely small faith as the size of a mustard seed, he will be able to move mountains, and yet greater faith will accomplish greater deeds, but at times, are we not so faithless and numb? As we make our way down the road to the Kingdom of Heaven, our virtues and vices collide and vacillate within ourselves, making us confused about the state of our own soul and causing us to misunderstand others.
The Son of God and God has clothed Himself with our humanity, furtherly clothing Himself in the letters of ink of the Holy Gospel. Today, we are given a little glimpse of one of the many qualities of Christ, as in every place of the Gospel.
