Opening the Gates of Salvation
Sermon preached by Subdeacon JD Swartz on Sunday, July 20, 2025
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Liturgically the Church is in a time between fulfillment and the promise of fulfillment, between the feast of Pentecost which we celebrated last month, and the feast of the Transfiguration which approaches next month. We move from the reception of the Comforter toward the vision of the Uncreated Light, from the undoing of Babel to the revelation of Trinitarian Unity. We move from the life of faith towards its fulfillment where, as the first epistle of John tells us, Christ is revealed and we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.
In a way, this time reminds me of Lent in its progression. In Lent we recall creation’s fallenness and its move toward redemption in Christ by way of His death and resurrection. But in this season, we begin not with our fallen nature but with the fulfillment of our Lord’s promise that the Father would send the Comforter, the Holy Spirit – we begin empowered and move towards a recollection of the eschaton – the fullness of time, when all is complete. To borrow a phrase from Metropolitan John Zizioulas, we remember the future, that time when we shall see the Lord in His Glory.
But this is a process that is shaped by experienced within bodies which are informed by chemicals in our brains, by genetics, by learned behavior, by repetition and habit, and through interaction with one another. As Christians we do not simply have a starting point from which our lifetime flows, but a goal toward which we grow. As Orthodox, we call this goal theosis – deification, union with God by participation in His divine energies. It is by remembering that which has not happened yet that we are meant to order our lives. It is through the perfect image of love found in the revealed Holy Trinity which we find our model of love for one another. It is not an excuse to say that someday things will be better, but a demand to make better the now.
In today’s Gospel, the faith of four men affected the forgiveness and healing of a fifth man. Scripture says, “And when Jesus saw their faith..,” not the faith of the paralytic, or at least not his faith alone, but their faith. Our interdependency is not simply an aspect of Christianity but is foundational to it. “Our life and our death is with our neighbor,” taught St. Anthony the Great; and it makes as much sense that the inverse is true – my neighbor’s life and death is with me. In Lent we remember our unworthiness of this daunting task, and in Pentecost we are reminded that we have been empowered by the Holy Spirit to fulfill it.
Each year as we prepare for Lent, we sing “Open unto me the doors of repentance, O Lifegiver,” knowing full well that He already has – it is we who shut the doors upon ourselves and upon one another. In the Paschal Orthros service we hear, that Christ “didst open to us the gates of paradise,” and that He “didst break the unyielding everlasting bars which held men prisoner [in hades],” but nowhere have I seen that these are separate actions or that the broken gates of hell and the opened gates of Paradise are not the same gates seen from one side or the other.
“Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise,”[1] the Lord said to the thief crucified to His right, but then, where did Christ go at his death? To Hades. What do we make of this? Might it be that the thief also went to Hades and was there with Christ, and that wherever Christ is, there is paradise. So, I ask you – where isn’t Christ? And if He truly is everywhere present and filling all things, why does it seem that there is often such little paradise to be found on earth?
We love to blame the other – those outside the Church, the demons, the devil; but at every liturgy we reaffirm the words written in the epistle to the Hebrews[2] when the priest says, “O God of spirits and of all flesh, Who has trampled down Death, and made powerless the Devil, and given life to Thy world.”
Fear not the devil, brothers and sisters, but instead fear the coldness, or worse, the indifference found in your own hearts towards the world. The onus is not upon those outside of the faith to bring Life to the world; it is ours, we who have tasted Life. But too often we busy ourselves with repairing the gates of hell, and often without intention, but we gatekeep Christ and safeguard the Savior from those who we find unacceptable.
The 17th century poet John Donne wrote, “Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind.” The spiritual death of my brothers, my sisters, my neighbors, and my enemies are sins that I do not wish to bear. Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote, “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”. And if this is the case, we do not love at all, we simply feed our selfishness.
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Maria of Paris who died in a Nazi gas chamber. She said, “We like it when the ‘churching’ of life is discussed, but few people understand what it means. Indeed, must we attend all the church services in order to ‘church’ our life? Or hang an icon in every room and burn an icon-lamp in front of it? No, the church of life is the sense of the whole world as one church, adorned with icons that should be venerated, that should be honored and loved, because these icons are true images of God that have the holiness of the Living God upon them.”
At Pentecost the hymns told us, “Blessed are You O Christ Our God, You have revealed the fishermen as most wise, by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit, through them You drew the world into Your net;” and “when he distributed the tongues of fire He called all to unity. Therefore, with one voice, we glorify the All-holy Spirit!” You are empowered to love, and to love more greatly and more deeply than you may think or believe – you can love one another into the Kingdom of Heaven and reveal paradise on earth now.
St. Maria said, “Christ who approached prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners can hardly be the teacher of those who are afraid to soil their pristine garments, who are completely devoted to the letter, who live only by the rules, and who govern their whole life according to rules.” She also put it plainly, saying, “The way to God lies through loving people.” People are messy and difficult, wonderful and beautiful, scared and mistrusting, generous and kind, hurt and afraid, and sometimes all of those things at once – and we are here together, empowered and taught to love them all.
Amen.
[1] Luke 23:43
[2] Hebrews 2:14