Phil. 4: 4-9
John 12: 1-18

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

A 21 year old guy stole a blank check from his mother, filled it out, brought it to the bank to cash, endorsed it in front of the cashier, and handed it to her. The cashier took one look at the check and while engaging the young man in chitchat pressed a silent alarm button which summoned the police. As the police cuffed the young man, he protested, “What am I being arrested for?” The cashier replied, “For trying to cash a stolen check.” The young man asked, “How can you tell that it’s stolen?” The cashier said, “Because, where it says ‘amount’, you wrote ‘$360 gazillion dollars’.”

Now, in theory, there is nothing wrong with giving an extravagant gift, even to oneself, although this one was, clearly, ill-advised.

This morning’s feast celebrates the giving of extravagant gifts. The welcome given to Jesus as he entered Jerusalem was extravagance bordering on near riot. Mary’s unfettered anointing of Jesus with expensive spikenard was an extravagance which ignored cost. And yet… the same people who welcomed Jesus this morning will be the ones, on Friday, who will nail him to the Cross. It makes you wonder what their enthusiasm really meant.
As we prepare to enter the Holy Week of the Passion, let us ask ourselves what our following of Jesus really means to us. How do we view our discipleship to Jesus Christ: Is it extravagance well-spent, or a thankless waste of time as well as an inconvenience? In our following of Christ, do we sacrifice and give generously of ourselves, as did the widow with her meager mite, or do we only give the minimum required of us by the Church? Do we come to the Sunday Divine Liturgy only because we “have to”? Do we only come to other services when there is nothing good on tv? Such an approach to discipleship to Jesus Christ would be hard-pressed to be called “extravagant”. In fact, such an approach to following Jesus Christ can rightfully be called miserly. So the question that this morning’s celebration asks of us, is: Are we minimalist Christians, or extravagant Christians?
The answer to that question depends upon how we view the requirements for being a Christian. For example, do we view the Church’s requirement that we pray and read the Scriptures as necessary, or as nice but un-necessary? It is a common experience for many of us to give up the reading of Scripture and prayer when it no longer “feels” enjoyable. We fall prey to the misguided thinking that it is of no use to read the Scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and no use to pray when we “feel” no impulse to prayer. The fact is that when we make judgments simply according to “feeling”, we often come to regret the short-sightedness of those feelings. Why do we presume that we know better than the Church, and disregard what she tells us is essential for our spiritual health?

The truth is that in order to benefit from our reading of the Scriptures we ought to continue to read them, no matter what we feel, and the way to obtain a spirit of prayer is to continue praying, especially when we no longer feel like doing so! The fact is that the less we read the Word of God, the less we desire to read it, and the less we pray, the less we desire to pray. The desire to do “less” does not end in “extravagance.”

Fred and Lucinda, an 80 year old couple, were having problems remembering things, so they decided to go to their doctor to get checked out to make sure that there was nothing seriously wrong with them. When they arrived at the doctor’s, they explained to the doctor about the problems they were having with their memory. After examining the couple, the doctor told them that they were physically okay, but that maybe they might want to start writing notes to help them remember things. The couple thanked the doctor and left.

Later that night while watching TV, Fred got up from his chair and Lucinda asked, "Where are you going?" Fred replied, "To the kitchen." Lucinda then asked, "Will you get me a bowl of ice cream?" "Sure," Fred replied. So Lucinda then asked him sweetly, "Don't you think you should write it down so you can remember it?" With grim determination, Fred replied, "No, I can remember something as simple as a bowl of ice cream." Lucinda then said, "Well I would also like some strawberries on top. You had better write that down because I know you'll forget it." Fred replied testily, "Thank you, but I can remember that you want a bowl of ice cream with strawberries." Lucinda added, "I’d also like whipped cream on top. I know you will forget that so you’d better write it down." Now outright angry, Fred snapped back, "I don't need to write it down!" and stomped off into the kitchen.

About 20 minutes later Fred returned and handed Lucinda a plate of bacon and eggs. Lucinda stared angrily at the plate for a moment and then, looking up at Fred, said, "I TOLD you to write it down! You forgot my toast!"

We always think that it is the other person who is not ok, and that we are fine. I would suggest that the evidence of our living does not bear out this assumption. As we prepare for Pascha by going to Confession, how many of us have confessed the same sins that we have been confessing for years now? Most of us, I would guess. This suggests that there is something wrong with the way that we are living out our Christian discipleship. Maybe, just maybe, we don’t actually know better than either the Church or Jesus Christ.

If our discipleship to Jesus Christ is characterized by miserliness or by an incorrect understanding, our resulting impoverishment… as manifested by our ongoing sinfulness… is of our own doing. Without the extravagant self-sacrifice that being a follower of Jesus Christ requires… as evidenced by his own example on the cross on Great Friday… then we are in danger of becoming Christian Pharisees, if not blatant hypocrites.

An elderly farmhand came into the doctor’s office with a broken leg. As the doctor attended to the leg, he asked the farmhand, “How did it happen?” The farmhand replied, “Well Doc, it was 50 years ago…” Knowing how the elderly can ramble all over the place when replying, the doctor interjected, “Never mind the past. Tell me how you broke your leg this morning." But the farmhand persisted. "Like I was saying. 50 years ago, when I first started working on the farm, that night, right after I'd gone to bed, the farmer's beautiful daughter came into my room. She asked me if there was anything I wanted. I said, ‘No, everything is fine.’ She then asked me, ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for you?’ So I replied, ‘I reckon not.’” Interrupting the farmhand’s story, the doctor impatiently asked, "What does this story have to do with your leg?" "Well,” the farmhand replied, “this morning it dawned on me what she meant, and that was when I fell off the roof!"

Sometimes, we are a little slow at putting two-and-two together, as our ongoing sinfulness might indicate. For some of us, we have a hard time equating the self-sacrifice of our discipleship to Jesus Christ with the extravagance of thankfulness for that self-sacrifice… and yet, without thankfulness fueling our following of Christ, we will be unable to understand love’s outpouring of itself…either on this morning’s unmeasured anointing of Jesus, or on Great Friday’s afternoon on Golgotha. If we are miserly Christians, then… like Judas Iscariot… our cry will be, “Why was this fragrant oil not sold for three hundred denarii?” And we all know that this objection was NOT about the money!

As we journey towards Golgotha this week, let us ask the Holy Spirit to come and enlarge our hearts and to help us to not take such a miserly approach to discipleship, to the Church’s requirements of us, to life, or to one another.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday

Visible triumphs are few in the earthly life of our Lord Jesus Christ. He preached a kingdom "not of this world." At His nativity in the flesh there was "no room at the inn." For nearly thirty years, while He grew "in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52), He lived in obscurity as "the son of Mary." When He appeared from Nazareth to begin His public ministry, one of the first to hear of Him asked: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" (John I :46). In the end He was crucified between two thieves and laid to rest in the tomb of another man.

Two brief days stand out as sharp exceptions to the above - days of clearly observable triumph. These days are known in the Church today as Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday. Together they form a unified liturgical cycle which serves as the passage from the forty days of Great Lent to Holy Week. They are the unique and paradoxical days before the Lord's Passion. They are days of visible, earthly triumph, of resurrectional and messianic joy in which Christ Himself is a deliberate and active participant. At the same time they are days which point beyond themselves to an ultimate victory and final kingship which Christ will attain not by raising one dead man or entering a particular city, but by His own imminent suffering, death and resurrection.

By raising Lazarus from the dead before Thy Passion, Thou didst confirm the universal resurrection, 0 Christ God! Like the children with the palms of victory, we cry out to Thee, 0 Vanquisher of Death: Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord! (Troparion of the Feast, sung on both Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday)

Lazarus Saturday

In a carefully detailed narrative the Gospel relates how Christ, six days before His own death, and with particular mindfulness of the people "standing by, that they may believe that thou didst send me" (John I I :42), went to His dead friend Lazarus at Bethany outside of Jerusalem. He was aware of the approaching death of Lazarus but deliberately delayed His coming, saying to His disciples at the news of His friend's death: "For your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe" (John 11:14).

When Jesus arrived at Bethany, Lazarus was already dead four days. This fact is repeatedly emphasized by the Gospel narrative and the liturgical hymns of the feast. The four-day burial underscores the horrible reality of death. Man, created by God in His own image and likeness, is a spiritual-material being, a unity of soul and body. Death is destruction; it is the separation of soul and body. The soul without the body is a ghost, as one Orthodox theologian puts it, and the body without the soul is a decaying corpse. "I weep and 1 wail, when I think upon death, and behold our beauty, fashioned after the image of God, lying in the tomb dishonored, disfigured, bereft of form." This is a hymn of St John of Damascus sung at the Church's burial services. This "mystery" of death is the inevitable fate of man fallen from God and blinded by his own prideful pursuits.

With epic simplicity the Gospel records that, on coming to the scene of the horrible end of His friend, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). At this moment Lazarus, the friend of Christ, stands for all men, and Bethany is the mystical center of the world. Jesus wept as He saw the "very good" creation and its king, man, "made through Him" (John 1:3) to be filled with joy, life and light, now a burial ground in which man is sealed up in a tomb outside the city, removed from the fullness of life for which he was created, and decomposing in darkness, despair and death. Again as the Gospel says, the people were hesitant to open the tomb, for "by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days" (John 11:39).

When the stone was removed from the tomb, Jesus prayed to His Father and then cried with a loud voice: "Lazarus, come out." The icon of the feast shows the particular moment when Lazarus appears at the entrance to the tomb. He is still wrapped in his grave clothes and his friends, who are holding their noses because of the stench of his decaying body, must unwrap him. In everything stress is laid on the audible, the visible and the tangible. Christ presents the world with this observable fact: on the eve of His own suffering and death He raises a man dead four days! The people were astonished. Many immediately believed on Jesus and a great crowd began to assemble around Him as the news of the raising of Lazarus spread. The regal entry into Jerusalem followed.

Lazarus Saturday is a unique day: on a Saturday a Matins and Divine Liturgy bearing the basic marks of festal, resurrectional services, normally proper to Sundays, are celebrated. Even the baptismal hymn is sung at the Liturgy instead of Holy God: "As many as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ."

Heb. 9: 11-14
Mark 10: 32-45

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

From the deck of the cruise ship, a passenger, who was standing next to the Captain, could see a bearded man on a small island who was shouting, jumping up and down, and desperately waving his hands. "Who is that?" the passenger asked the captain, who replied, "I've no idea. Every year when we pass, he goes nuts like that."
Every year, when we pass through Great Lent, do we bother to tackle anything about our spiritual life, or is the Lenten season simply another empty church ritual for us? Just going to church doesn’t make us a Christian any more than just standing in a garage makes us a car. So why do we so often assume that the call to repentance is for others, and not for us?
This morning, the church offers St. Mary of Egypt’s life to us as an icon of repentance. Sometime during St. Mary’s long night of tears her heart was broken and purged, and gave birth to humility, which enabled her from then on to lead a life of repentance. In short: She changed! We might well be tempted to think, “But she really needed to change, she was a prostitute!” This train of thought clearly makes the point that it is so easy for us to see where others need to change, and yet to be blind to our own need for change.
In this morning’s Gospel reading, we heard the following: “Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him and said, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask…Grant us that we may sit, one on your right hand and the other on your left, in your glory.’”

Like the apostles, we all… in one way or another, to one degree or another… want to be special, to be singled out. And yet, according to Jesus Christ, the way to greatness is not by being at the top of the heap:
“Whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.”

In other words, Christ was telling his disciples that their take on what being a disciple meant had to change.

Fred walked up to the receptionist in the doctor's office and she asked him, “What do you?” Fred replied, Shingles.” The receptionist winced, and then took down his name, address, medical insurance number and told him to have a seat. A few minutes later a nurse's aid came out and asked Fred, “What do you have?” So he again replied, “Shingles,” and the aid took him down the hall and weighed him, wrote down Fred’s medical history, and then placed him in an examination room. A few minuets later a nurse came in and asked, “What do you have?” Sighing with weariness, Fred replied, “Shingles,” so the nurse immediately gave him a blood test, a blood pressure test, an electrocardiogram, and then told him to take off all his clothes, put on a hospital gown, and wait there for the doctor. Fifteen minutes later the doctor came in and asked Fred, “What do you have?” With no little aggravation at being asked this question yet one more time, Fred snapped, “SHINGLES!” Taken aback, the doctor asked, “Where?” to which Fred yelled, “Out in the truck! Where do you want them?”
Sometimes, although we are using the same words, we are not talking about the same things. This is all too true when it comes to the word “repentance.” We all appreciate repentance, and the change it implies… in theory. It’s when repentance starts getting specific to MY life, though, that the trouble begins and that the reasons occur to me why things should just stay the way they are. Had that been Mary of Egypt’s mindset, she would have remained a prostitute, and we would not be commemorating her this morning. Is it possible that Jesus wants less of us than he wanted of Mary of Egypt… we who also call ourselves his disciples.
A little old man sat rocking happily on his front porch, a look of beatific happiness on his face. A woman, walking by, noticed how happy he looked, and went up to him and asked, “Excuse me sir, but I couldn't help noticing how happy you look: What's your secret for a long and happy life?" The little old man replied, “Well, I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day. I drink a case of whiskey a week. I eat fatty foods. And I never exercise." "That's amazing," the woman replied. "How old are you?" The little old man said, "Twenty-six."

Isn’t it just possible that we don’t get it? Isn’t it possible that our view about repentance’s unnecessariness for our spiritual growth might be wrong? On this last Sunday of Great Lent of 2010, through St. Mary of Egypt’s life, Jesus Christ expresses a last call to us for our repentance and change before we enter the sacred days of the Passion and the Resurrection. Let us pray, during this final week of Great Lent of 2010, that his call does not go in one ear and out the other. As we so often hear in the Divine Liturgy: “Let us attend!”

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Fifth Sunday of Great Lent
This Sunday corresponds closely to the preceding Sunday: just as the fourth Sunday of Great Lent is dedicated to St. John Climacus, the model of ascetics, so the fifth Sunday celebrates St. Mary of Egypt, the model of penitents.
In her youth St. Mary lived in a dissolute and sinful way at Alexandria. Drawn by curiosity, she journeyed with some pilgrims to Jerusalem, arriving in time for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. But when she tried to enter the church of the Holy Sepulchre with the others, an invisible force thrust her back at the threshold. This happened three or four times. Brought to sudden contrition by this strange experience, she prayed all night with tears to the Mother of God, and next morning she found, to her joy, that she could enter the church without difficulty. After venerating the Cross, she left Jerusalem on that same day, made her way over the Jordan, and settled as a solitary in a remote region of the desert. Here for 47 years she remained, hidden from the world, until she was eventually found by the ascetic St. Zosimas, who was able to give her Holy Communion shortly before her death. On this fifth Sunday of Great Lent, the Church sets St. Mary before us as an icon of the essence of repentance.
And now, on this fifth Sunday, all that concerns us and our efforts is coming to its end. From now on we are following the disciples “as they were on the road going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them.” And Jesus said to them: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn Him to death and deliver Him to the Gentiles, and they will mock Him and scourge Him and kill Him, and after three days He will arise” (Mark 10:32-45). This is the Gospel of the fifth Sunday.
Now the tone of the Lenten services changes. If throughout the first part of Lent our effort was aimed at our own purification, we are made to realize now that this purification was not an end in itself but must lead us to the contemplation and comprehension and appropriation of the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection. The meaning of our effort is now revealed to us as participation in that mystery to which we were so accustomed as to take it for granted, and which we simply forgot. And, as we follow Him going up to Jerusalem together with the disciples, we are “amazed and afraid.”