Boundless Love
Sermon preached by Inga Leonova on Sunday, March 22, 2026
Antiochian Women’s Month 2026—“Between Memory and Hope: The Special Commemorations in Lent”
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.
We have been focusing this Lenten season on the theme “Between Memory and Hope.” Each of the homilists pondered it in light of the theme of each Lenten Sunday. As I was preparing this reflection on the story of Mary of Egypt, I was marveling at the many facets that this story offers when viewed through this lens: what has been, what may have been, how the stories are told, and where the light shines through them, the light everlasting, the light of hope that is offered to us all if we are able to see and follow it.
I have tried to think how many times I have heard the Life of St. Mary of Egypt read in the church. Twenty? Thirty? I have been asked to read it several times myself, and it has always felt like a gift, a special treat during the long and solemn cycle of Lenten services. And whether reading or listening, it has always been a magical experience: a darkened or slowly darkening church, a single candle, and a story that I know by heart and yet am always eager to hear again.
The Life of St Mary of Egypt is attributed to St. Sophronius, the seventh-century Patriarch of Jerusalem. He is said to have written down an oral tale circulating among the monks of Palestine for some hundred years prior. It is told by a monk named Zosimas, who has traveled to a desert monastery in search of spiritual instruction. As is the custom of the monastery, Zosimas goes to the desert during Lent to spend forty days in prayer and contemplation. In the desert, he meets an old woman, withered and naked, with whom he shares his cloak, and who tells him her remarkable story. According to the story, she began her life as a teenage prostitute in Alexandria, having sex with as many men as possible. Actually, “prostitute” is not quite an accurate term, as she did not charge for sex, making a living instead by begging and spinning flax. After seventeen years of this libertine existence, she is moved to join the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. She pays for the voyage in her customary way, turning the religious journey into a traveling orgy. Upon arrival in Jerusalem, she discovers that some mysterious force prevents her from entering the church where the wood of the Cross is being venerated. She is overcome by contrition for her licentious life, and cries out to the Theotokos, pledging the rest of her life to repentance if she is permitted to venerate the Cross. She is thereby able to enter the Church, and after venerating the wood, she departs to the river Jordan. She partakes of the Holy Communion in a small chapel and buys two loaves of bread, with which she crosses the river into the Negev desert. She spends the next forty years there, subsisting first on that bread, and then by some miracle.
Having told Zosimas her story, she implores him to bring her Holy Communion next year. He promises, having witnessed her rise in the air as she was praying. When he brings her Communion, he discovers that there is no boat for him to cross the Jordan. As he despairs, he sees the woman make a sign of the cross over the water and then walk over it as if over the dry land. She receives the holy gifts from him and departs in the same manner, making him promise to come back the next year.
Next year, Zosimas again comes to the desert to find the body of the woman, lying dead, with her face turned east. Her name, “Mary,” and a request to bury her are scribbled on the rock. He realizes that Mary reposed on the day he saw her the previous year, after receiving the Holy Communion. As he despairs of his weakness and lack of tools to dig a grave, a lion appears and helps him dig, and together they bury the body of the saint. Zosimas returns to the monastery, and the story of Mary becomes famous among the monks of the Holy Land and beyond.
As I pondered this tale, I often wondered why it was such a favorite. It is, undoubtedly, a story of remarkable metanoia, of repentance that transforms soul and body. There are, of course, two stories of repentance in it. There is one of Mary, but also of Zosimas. He enters the tale as a self-righteous ascetic who feels that he has reached the pinnacle of the ascetic life, and then is brought to humility by his encounter with Mary. It is also a very beautiful piece of literature, far surpassing many formulaic hagiographies.
And yet the story as it is told raises some questions. My friend, a writer and poet Dave O’Neal, wrote a beautiful piece some twelve years ago called “The Harlot Kōan.” In it, he suggests that the portrayal of Mary as a libertine sex addict does not ring true to historical circumstances. Dave sees Mary as a likely victim of sexual abuse, a woman whose early experience of abuse has damaged her understanding of what a loving relationship is like. He also suggests that she was probably forced to make a living by selling her body. The traditional narrative, however, portrays her as a great sinner.
These incongruities have always troubled me as well. And yet I love the story deeply despite these misgivings. Why?
The answer came to me a few years ago. The story of Mary and Zosimas is a love story. It is a story of both human and cosmic love, and that is what grabs one’s heart and does not let go. Everything about the arc of Mary’s life is about love. It is no accident that in Western tradition Mary of Egypt is blended with Mary Magdalene. Together, they are the archetype of a “woman who loved much,” as Christ says about the woman who anoints his feet with precious myrrh and wipes it with her hair. That passage in the seventh chapter of the Gospel of Luke is perhaps the most erotic in the Gospels. Whether we see Mary as sexually liberated or a survivor of abuse, she can be seen as one who has nothing to offer but herself, and herself she offers. Even if she is seeking “love in all the wrong places,” it is still seeking love. And then what happens is that a greater love than men can offer calls out to her. I have always marveled at her impulse to board that ship to Jerusalem, as she was hardly a religious type interested in relics and pilgrimages. The only explanation for her daring act is that something—someone—called out to her.
There is a scene in a great French movie “Of Gods and Men” about the life and martyrdom of the monks of a monastery in Algiers during the civil war. An elderly monk, Brother Luc, sits with a young local woman who is in love with a boy, and she asks him whether he has ever been in love. He responds affirmatively. She asks, “What happened?” And he replies, “Then I fell in love with someone else, and that was the love I have followed for sixty years.” He speaks of Christ. I believe that this is what happened to Mary. And this is what happens to everyone who leaves everything in life behind and follows that one love, the love for God.
It is not an accident that this all-consuming, transforming love strikes one who is, by all accounts, a sexual libertine. Philip Sherrard, in his writings on the divine Eros, points out that erotic desire is fundamental to our yearning for God. Erotic desire is the desire for being with the other, for joining, for perichoresis, interpenetration. In Greek, the word ‘perichoresis’ is used to describe the relationship of the persons of the Trinity, the mutual indwelling. When Jesus speaks with his apostles in the Gospel of Luke before the Last Supper, he says, “I fervently desire to eat this Passover with you before my suffering.” The word for desire (both in Greek “epythimia” and in Hebrew “tschuka”) is the same one that is used to describe erotic desire and yearning. So Mary experiences this divine erotic desire to be with God. To fulfill it, she must shed all her trappings, everything that binds her body and soul to the noise and distraction that stand between her and the object of her desire. She is one who is able to experience this love because, as the woman in Luke’s story, she is open to kenotic love, she is open to giving herself. And in this joining, she is given the experience of communion, which is the fulfillment of the divine plan for humanity, the theosis, the breakdown of the boundaries erected between people and God after the fall. Mary, who has never read any Scripture, quotes from it because she has assumed it empirically, by the Spirit, because it has become part of her nature. She walks on air and water, she is able to traverse great distances in the blink of an eye. She is not a super-human, she has rather become as humans were meant to be, and this becoming is the joyful fruit of metanoia, of the transformation inspired by the one love that surpasses all.
And then, of course, there is another love story here, the love that strikes Zosimas, his adoration of this remarkable woman he encounters in his Lenten wanderings. It strikes him with the force of revelation. Here is someone whose monastic life has become stagnant and pedestrian, yet he is still yearning for God, he desires God. And he is given a gift of this encounter that changes his life forever. It is obvious from the story that he falls in love with her on the spot, as he is neither repulsed nor horrified by the stories she tells him about her terrible transgressions. Zosimas encounters a saint, and his heart recognizes her. This is the love that brings him back to the Jordan in the subsequent years. This is the love that summons the marvelous lion to help him do Mary the last honor of a burial.
I have often wondered why Mary asked Zosimas to bring her the Holy Communion when, by all evidence, she was already living in a divinized state of communion with God. And then I thought of that line from the Gospel of Luke, of Christ desiring to share his body with those he loved, and of us sharing his body and blood and becoming, mystically, one body, the communion of saints. Mary’s partaking of the Holy Communion is another act of love, the physical sharing in the body of the Church to which she and Zosimas both belong. Our participation in the Eucharistic banquet is not an act of individual piety; it should be, as hard as it sometimes is, an act of love, of desiring to partake of this mystical interpenetration with Christ and with each other that he has enabled by sharing himself at the Last Supper with those he loved.
And it is this love that inspired the story of Mary of Egypt and the Elder Zosimas to become “the greatest Lenten story ever.” It is the story of divine love that conquers all: doubt, illness, gluttony, lust, pride, and the laws of biology and physics. Because, as the Apostle tells us, “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Amen.