Sermons & Homilies
Why doesn’t God hear us all the time? Why doesn’t He always answer right away and give us what we pray for? Oftentimes, it’s the very struggle to be patient and persevere that engenders in us the faith and humility required for God to accept our prayers. That’s why He withholds our requests from us. It’s not because He is heartless and unfeeling.
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If we find ourselves bereft of human sympathy and understanding; if we find that all the powers of our body, mind, and soul are exhausted and depleted and ineffectual; if we feel ourselves to have come to the abyss of despair and utter confusion; then let us take heart!
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After several weeks of almost unprecedented temptations of both soul and body here at the monastery, we have just heard these beautiful and inspiring words from St. Paul in today’s Epistle lesson: “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope” (Romans 15:4). And in today’s Gospel reading we are being given an earnest of this comfort and this hope, as we behold Christ healing the physical afflictions of the blind men and the spiritual afflictions of the demoniac.
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Our faith can only reach full maturity in the crucible of the desert, in droughts of consolation, in periods of dryness and doubt. If we fail to engage in the struggle of prayer and fasting as the Lord urges us to do, then we will ultimately succumb to unbelief.
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The Lord Jesus Christ came swiftly from heaven, unable to contain His ardent love which desires to pour forth all of His goodness upon us. The activity and violence of the demons is strong; but the activity of the very Self-Existing Wisdom, Word and Power of God, leaves no room for the restless vanity of the devil.
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