Hebrews 4:14-5:6
Psalm 25:1-5
Mark 8:34-9:1

"Beautiful Are the Feet"

For some members of our band of pilgrims, the journey of Great Lent has taken us to surprising places. We have seen that the "life of service" is not the same thing as religious life. The life of the religious sister or brother or priest is not "one of the helping professions." Religious life is .... religious life — a departure from the world and its faulty sign posts and empty promises. It is "turning off" the TV-radio-Internet of pop culture, "dropping out" from Politically Correct values, "tuning in" to the spiritual life of God and His ways. In a sense, it is to enter a hermitage of the soul and mind, bounded off from the world, which anyone can do. What happens to the car radio, then? Your car now becomes an oratory, where you draw near to God in devotions and conversation. I share that during my seminary years, I had to commute three hours one-way when I could not be resident on campus. I looked forward to this time when I would get into the car as if I were entering a chapel. And I would have all of that time without a telephone, without interruptions, to be alone with God. What happens to the television? Well, it is pitched out the window, so that the home may reclaim its holy character. In time, all things around you will come to sustain and support holy life, but only if you turn away from the world.

Beyond these quiet precincts lies a noisy, aching world that suffers and is desolate, for God is nowhere to be found. People say they feel depressed, empty, that their lives feel meaningless .... because they are. Where God is not, meaning is not. And here in this godless world we are called to care and to help and to serve .... but not for the sake of service. As the Apostles taught us, a function of holy life is this caring and loving and being present. And I will share that being present with a holy life is immeasurably different than being present with a noisy life. One of the first things I learned going through my chaplaincy training at a Roman Catholic medical center (training under a nun) was to clear myself of clutter. And which clutter was that? Myself — my noisy absorption in myself and with the world. For only then would there be room inside me for all the patients and for all the things that they had for me to hold. There are those will choose the helping professions and not religious life. This means jobs to be done but not holy vocation to be lived. And surely we give thanks for these nurses, doctors, teachers, counselors, therapists, social workers, legal aid attorneys, et al. And volunteerism in the Third or Fourth Worlds? Indispensable! But do not choose to be a priest because you "want to help." The world is already full-to-overflowing with depressed men who tried to fill the God-shaped hole inside themselves with service. It cannot be done.

These two different worlds were placed vividly before me years ago when a woman in tears told me at her son's ordination, "Which mother wants her son to start down a road which ends there?" .... pointing up to the Crossing Rood in the cathedral, where Jesus hung on a cross. I am reminded of a homily I heard last week on the feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. A Russian Orthodox priest of our own church reflected on the last martyr to succumb among those holy men chained to a frozen lake. A Roman guard discovered him among the bodies that were being dumped nearby. "You don't have to die!" the guard told him. "We have a warm place waiting for you! Just deny Jesus Christ." But his mother, seeing this, rushed to his side and said, "Don't lose your Heavenly crown! You are so close! Don't fail now when everything counts most!" It was his mother who kissed him goodbye as he departed from the decomposing and vanishing world of dust to the real and permanent Kingdom of Heaven.

The Russian priest reminded us that Mother Church continues to exhort us, "Do not let your vocation slip away! Do not lose your heavenly crown! Keep your eyes on the Kingdom of Heaven!" Who could doubt that this devout mother at Sebaste did not hold our oldest Gospel of St. Mark in mind as she urged her son on, where the Lord Jesus says

This is a moment of high drama. All our life .... and death is laid before us. The greatest challenge we shall ever hear on this earth is heard. No one standing before Jesus could have missed it. Take up a Cross?! And why? For the sake of the gospel.

"Wait a minute!" we might well say. What's that? What does that mean? After all, no Gospel of Mark, Matthew, Luke or John has been written yet. What's the gospel? We look in vain in the New Testament finding a definition.

Our English word gospel is a swirl of meanings as we consider its Anglo-Saxon root, Godspel, suggesting God, good, and spel, which means "story," but also the "spell" that a story is able to cast. We could say "in the spell of God" or "under the spell of good." — a mysterious word to be sure! This word gospel appears not at once in our English Old Testaments, but more than a hundred times in the New Testament.

The Greek word that Jesus actually speaks is

Forms of the word ευαγγελιον are rare in the Septuagint, appearing only twelve times, including such earthbound passages as the "good news" that King Saul is dead and has been stripped of his armor (reported in 1 Samuel and 1 Chronicles). But three of these rare occurrences of ευαγγελιον happen to occur at the most transcendent moments in all of Scripture:

What shall we say of St. John the Baptist if it is not about Eden? Just being near to him one detects the scent of Eden stored in the deepest recesses of racial memory — a goodly scent pouring balm upon the spirit. Among those who actually saw John, there could be no doubt as to his identity: dressed only in natural clothing, having no spot of the corrupt city life upon him, eating the perfect food of honey cakes called manna. (As the Greek word for this manna, ενκρις (enkris), sounds very much like the Greek word for locust ακρις (akris), we have been handed the ridiculous story of a vegetarian from Eden preying on insects!) Who could be the more perfect image of Eden, preserved as it were by God, in perfect communion with God, and showing others the way back to the Garden. As we read in Psalm 81:

Standing on this place, seeing the high mountain summits of Isaiah, inhaling the fresh air of Eden, we are ready for the other meaning of evangelion. Yes, it is the announcement (angelion) of good (eu), but it also suggests the presence of angels and their Heavenly speech. This root word we find 175 times in the New Testament: ανγγελοσ (angel), meaning not "news" or "message" but a magnificent creature of Heaven and the only other creature in the Creation of Heaven and Earth that possesses a soul and the sovereign gift of free will. Well might angels speak to humans, with whom they share a unique kinship.

And now we contemplate two worlds: the gritty world we know, in which no sane person would pick up the instrument of their own crucifixion, and the Kingdom of Heaven, where no one would delay to embrace their Cross .... and the desire of the everlasting hills. Two different and irreconcilable worlds lie before us. Perhaps that is the practical meaning of gospel for us. The Evangelist St. Luke understood this very clearly as he begins his Gospel: bringing us to the place where our world, the dog-pack mentality, meets the place where angels speak to men:

Famously, Zechariah rejects both these tidings and the angel who brings them. His proud skepticism has rung down the ages: "How shall I know this?" Gabriel's response is equally well known as he pours fire from Heaven on Zechariah, who now receives the sign of Jonah, sealing him in "the great fish" of silence.

With the Zechariah story, Luke schools us in the negative case. What does rejection of God look like, after all? So often we insist on our puny powers of reasons as the greater of the two. The example Luke offers is a vivid one. But the Good Physician also means to heal us and follows in the same chapter with the positive case, which soars so high above the former that vowed religious and clergy continue to offer its associated prayer four times a day: the Angelus and the Magnificat.

As with Zechariah, the Archangel Gabriel appears, this time not to a confident and sophisticated priest of the Temple, but to an unlettered fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl. To Zechariah Gabriel offers only the highest honor:

In response to Gabriel's shining words to Zechariah, he growled. What will be Mary's response at receiving her Cross? She lifts up to Heaven some of the most cherished words we possess:

Is this not also the crossroads of our own lives? Are we not constantly standing at a moment of choice between the language and mentality of the world on one side and the gracious speech of angels on the other? Between a dark vale and Heaven?

Lately, we received a volunteer at the Hermitage. Day after day, God spoke into her life with a boldness and precision that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. Does this surprise you? God speaks into each of our lives continually, calling to us in our sleepless nights, confronting us in the circumstances of our lives. He write messages to us on the walls of our daily experience, and scatters divine appointments before us day by day. And He does this through the agency of angels. Which language will you choose to speak? Which world will you embrace? The language of the skeptical world, which is the language of our pridefulness, our constant insistence on our puny powers of reason? Or will we choose to hear the gracious speech of angels .... and answer to them,