Coffee With Sister Vassa - THE SEEING MAN IS CAST OUT

After the man born blind was empowered by our Lord to see, he is “ cast out” or excommunicated by the Pharisees. Why did they excommunicate him? Because blind men were useful to their agenda, while “seeing” ones were not.

They first questioned him about his healing on the Sabbath, then called his parents to ascertain that he indeed had been born blind. Finally, they again question the healed man, reviling him and trying to get him to condemn the One who healed him as a “sinner,” who broke their rules about the Sabbath. “ Then they reviled him and said, ‘You are His disciple, but we are Moses’ disciples. We know that God spoke to Moses; as for this fellow, we do not know where He is from.” (Jn 9:28-29) In response to their willful ignorance, the now-seeing man testifies: “Why, this is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where He is from; yet He has opened my eyes! …If this man were not from God, He could do nothing. They answered and said to him, ‘You were completely born in sins, and are you teaching us?’ And they cast him out.” Note that they say precisely the opposite of what Christ said, about the man’s birth. The Lord said that “ neither this man nor his parents sinned,” that he was born blind (Jn 9:3).

In the Russian Orthodox Church, these days “seeing” men are also being reviled and “ cast out,” for testifying to the Word of God. For example, a priest in Moscow, Fr. John Koval, was defrocked for replacing the word “victory” in Patriarch Kirill’s war-prayer with the word “peace.” The message is, priests are to serve the Patriarch’s “words” to the letter, while serving the Word of God is reviled. But let us not be discouraged nor scandalized, because our Lord prepared us for this type of thing: “ These things I have spoken to you, that you should not be made to stumble. They will put you out of the synagogues; yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service. And these things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor Me. But these things I have told you, that when the time comes, you may remember that I told you of them.” (Jn 16:1-4) Happy upcoming Sunday of the Blind Man!

Coffee With Sister Vassa: “SEEING” CHRIST, THROUGH THE THEOTOKOS

 

“SEEING” CHRIST, THROUGH THE THEOTOKOS

“Let us hasten to the Theotokos, we who want to see her Son, brought unto Simeon…./ К Богоро́дице притеце́м, хотя́щии Сы́на Ея́ ви́дети, к Симео́ну носи́ма…” (Ikos, Meeting of the Lord)

Yesterday, many celebrated the great feast of the Meeting of the Lord, known in Western traditions as The Presentation. The above-quoted hymn, known as the “Ikos” (that immediately follows the Kontakion of the feast) reminds us that it is through the Theotokos that both Simeon and the rest of us are given to “see” Christ, – that is, when we “want” to see Him. The desire to see Christ is something we also heard about yesterday, if in our church we had the Gospel-reading about Zacchaeus.

The Lord is “brought unto Simeon,” and brought into Zacchaeus’s world and our world, in the flesh, through the flesh of the teenaged Virgin from Nazareth. It is she who carries Him in her arms into the temple, in obedience to the Law and in obedience to the Spirit, by Whom Simeon came to the temple at this same time, as we read in the Gospel: “So he came by the Spirit into the temple.” (Lk 2:27) Thanks to her, Simeon in his old age is finally able to “see” what he has longed to see all his life: the “salvation” embodied both in Christ and the Virgin Mother, as he professes: “For my eyes have seen Your salvation…”

The Mother of God is seen traditionally as a symbol of the Church Mother. So, the priestly thing she does here, of bringing the Body and Blood of Christ to those “who want to see her Son,” is a thing that the Church does, for and through all of us, the merely-human beings that participate in the Church’s“royal priesthood.” Both the feast of the Meeting of the Lord and the reading about Zacchaeus remind me that our desire and capacity for “seeing God,”called “Theoptia” in Greek, is essential for us to develop and nourish, by taking care of our heart, that it is cleared of grace-blocking and vision-impairing garbage like resentments, self-centered fears, etc., so we can also share this vision with others, as Church, and as did and does the Mother of our Lord.“Blessed are the pure in heart,” our Lord tells us, “for they shall see God” in every circumstance. “Let us hasten to the Theotokos,” dear friends, “we who want to see her Son,” because she and other God-bearers in our midst, both visible and invisible, are able and willing to do that, in the ever-unfolding Mystery of the life of the Church.