The Reading from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians. (2:14-22) and The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (13:10-17)
In today’s epistle reading St. Paul tells the church at Ephesus that Christ is our peace. Those are important words for us. I would like us to meditate upon what that means for our lives. Christ is our peace. The first way in which Christ is our peace is that He himself has broken down the wall that existed between us and God. What was this wall made of and when was this wall built?
It was built first by Adam and Eve when they transgressed and fell in the garden. It was a wall of rebellion (which is sin) against God and His commandments. Due this rebellion, other walls were also built to fortify this wall, such as walls of shame. In this way we reinforce our decisions not to honor and obey and live with God and we further isolate ourselves until we feel that we are completely estranged from everything and everyone that we love, or rather, that loves us. In truth when we live in this kind of rebelliousness we don’t sense that others love us. We only sense that everyone is out to get us. That is a dysfunctional state of being but it is all the more dysfunctional when we apply this to our relationship with God almighty.
But the apostle Paul tells us that these walls have been broken down by Jesus Christ. How did he break them down? He broke them down by offering Himself, His broken body and His shed blood for us and for the life of the world. St. Sophrony of Essex would say that Jesus Christ justified God before man and that He justified man before God. How so?
Christ justified God before man in that He became man and lived with us and sacrificially gave His life for us in order to prove exactly how much God loved mankind. And then Christ justified man before God because by becoming man Himself, the Lord Jesus lived a perfect human life worthy of all praise and honor before God. In doing this He justifies man by showing God that man is indeed worth saving because man can live righteously, in holiness and love for everyone. In Christ we see the potential of man.
So these two sides of the coin work together to demonstrate that Jesus Christ is our peace. We were at war within ourselves, at war because of our sins, at war due to the outward laws and ordinances of the Jewish Mosaic laws and at war with God (or that was how it seemed). But because of His love which is clearly demonstrated for us, no one can open their mouth against the love of God. They try often and appear foolish because God’s love is clearly seen in all of creation and especially in the work of our salvation through the selfless offering of Our Lord Jesus Christ upon the wood of the cross.
St. Paul tells us that Christ “preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near for through Him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” This is firstly a reference to the difference between the Jews and the gentiles, but we read deeper and see it as a reference to those who had some type of relationship with the living God and those who had no relationship whatsoever with the truth of the living God.
The apostle tells us that both groups of people now have equal access to the Holy Spirit because of Our Lord Jesus Christ. We can live in, through and with the Holy Spirit. In fact, we MUST! Whatever you are chasing in life is merely an idol if it doesn’t somehow honor and glorify and bring Christ to the center of our lives.
We chase so many things because we think that they will bring us peace. We chase wealth and power and identity and freedom and autonomy as well as relationships and experiences and affirmation and attention and love. Yet these things cannot give us life apart from the giver of life Himself. We can’t take a top down approach with peace. Peace starts from the foundation which is built on Christ who is the cornerstone of the foundation. Everything is then built upon this foundation so that the whole temple will be solid, and strong. So that it will last forever, because you are meant to live forever with Christ.
Stop pretending to be like the rest of the world when you are not, you are citizens of Christ. You are no longer strangers, so stop estranging yourselves from God through sinful and impure living. And the chief of those sins is to put anything in the place of God. To seek real peace part from Christ. St. Paul give us great encouragement and hope by telling us that we are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. What an honor and a blessing! Although we don’t deserve any of it, the Lord made you a member of His family on the day that you were baptized and chrismated. And we have this as a promise and yet also as potential. God will not revoke the promise, but He also will not force us to live up to our potential. It is given to those who have faith, to those who are faithful.
One of the modern elders of Greece, Elder Aimilianos says that God waits to see if we will be focused on lower earthly things or if we will direct our gaze to what is above, to the spiritual and heavenly things, because this is what God desires to share with us, but He can’t share those things with us when we are fixated on things that are much lower hanging fruit, to what is earthly. If you have your mind and your eyes set on the things that are below you, how will you ever rise to what God has promised from above?
We are truly comforted by these teachings. God isn’t out to get us, and He is not angry with us. You can see His tenderness even in today’s gospel passage and the healing of the woman on the Sabbath. He loves us and desires that we should be with Him, healed and full of life. That is the definition of peace. He knows that we struggle in this life yet He says to each of us, “In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world!” AMEN.
Source: Sermons