Save as PDFIn the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!
When the Lord says, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18, 36), it’s clear that, first of all, He warns us against crazy mistake of Jerusalemn inhabitants who met their King as a man who came to solve their earthly problems, as a statesman who would improve their everyday life, as a new chief called to replace corrupt and demoralized former authorities.
When the Lord says, “My kingdom is not of this world”, he warned His disciples, as it appeared later, against constant attempts to use the stones intended for building the cathedral, for quite other purposes. He forewarns the Church against fighting for earthly blessing to the detriment of Heaven care.
When the Lord says, “My kingdom is not of this world”, He also points us to the fact that the truth of this world and God’s truth are not only incompatible, but are too often in opposition to each other, and “Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds” (Mt. 11,19), that is the wicked and idle world is ready to acknowledge not what is really kind and good but what is convenient and useful here and now.
It’s especially realized clearly now on the fifth Sunday of Great Lent when the Church celebrates the memory of Venerable Mary of Egypt.
Human wisdom, formulated in the eastern proverb, prescribes every person to do three important things for fulfilling life vocation: to plant a tree, to built a house and to grow up a baby. Human wisdom in the form of aphorism shows a man that his life must be given to other people, because a tree, a house and a baby are only symbols of different types of service. Of course, this is a call to self-sacrifice, egoism refusal.
However, today as a reproach to all our philosophizing, all our notions about greatness of a man, the Holy Church offers an image of Venerable Mary of Egypt whose life doesn’t look like the life of heroes of innumerable human wars or brilliant life of film stars.
During her long seventy-seventh year old life venerable Mary of Egypt didn’t do anything for others. And of course, she didn’t plant any tree, didn’t build a house, didn’t give birth to a child and didn’t grow him up. In fact, she always lived only for herself, she devoted attention only to herself, she thought only about herself.
It was so when being a twelve year old teenager she left her parent’s house to indulger herself in crazy and shameless whoredom. In the course of long seventeen years this young girl thought that whoredom was the only sense of human life. Did she think about others at that time: about her unhappy parents forsaken by her or about those who were involved by her crazy lust in everlasting destruction? Hardly. But merciful God who “doesn’t take pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezek. 33, 11) performed a miracle, because “when sin increased, grace was always greater” (Rome 5, 20). And so like in Cana of Galilee ordinary water instantly became wine not by natural physic-chemical transformations, but as a result of miracle, so here a whore burnt by a sin, became a saint at once.
And so a year after year, in fast, prayer, hot weather, desperate loneliness in a desert she fought with all evil accumulated in her soul. Because it’s not enough to realize it, it’s not enough to reject it by the effort of will: it is here, in our memory, our lust, our fragility, in that wasting disease which is the result of the evil. She had to fight all her life, but after all she won. She really led a life of asceticism, cleansed of wickedness, she was able to come into God’s region, not the cathedral, not “somewhere” but the eternity.
She can teach us a lot. She can teach us what we must realize some day: that kingdom region where we enter so easily, the Church, and simply the world itself created by God, has remained clean from evil, though it has submitted, enslaved itself to evil because of us. If we realized it some day and felt there was no place for us there, and in answer confessed, that is turned our back upon ourselves in horror, averted ourselves in unbending resolution, we could also follow her example.
This example of her image is offered to us as a completing moment of Lent this spring and life. A week ago we heard the teaching, the call of Saint John of the Ladder who made up the Ladder of Perfection, with the help of which we can overcome evil and come to the truth. And today we see the example of the one, who, from the very depth of evil, has reached the height of holiness and says to us the words of the Great Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete, “Oh, Soul, God can whiten and cleanse the lepers, don’t despair, though you are a leper…”
Let her image be for us not only new inspiration, new hope, even new joy but a call, an appeal, because in vain do we give praise to the saints if we don’t learn anything from them, don’t try to imitate them.
Venerable Mary of Egypt devoted attention only to herself all her life. The Saint hermit heard only herself, but the words of the Apostle Paul which he said about Christ Saviour, could be quite applied to her: “for by His wounds you were healed”(1Peter 2, 24).
She prayed only for herself but helps us to be saved. She thought only about herself but the memory of her supports us, weak and sinful, in our struggle with sin. She never called anybody to abstinence and chastity but her example of desperate struggle with immoral thoughts gives us, faint-hearted and skeptical, hope for victory. Amen.