| It is often said that all preaching should be about the Kingdom of God. I suppose it was because that was what Jesus talked about most during his three-year public ministry. In Matthew’s Gospel the Lord mentions “the Kingdom of Heaven” 32 times. In Luke and Mark the phrase “Kingdom of God is preferred.”
Of all the amazing trailheads the Lord opens in his conversations, for example, this one is most intriguing and inspirational. He spoke to the Samaritan woman: “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father…But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:23-24) Here John echoes the Prophet Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts nor are my ways your ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
Something that we believers often forget — God, as spirit, cannot be localized or tied down to any place or thing, either “here or there.” He cannot be made into our psychological profile. He cannot be ascribed our response to life as though He were just a “bigger” one of us! He certainly cannot be controlled or manipulated – though how mightily we often try! He is Spirit – the Unseen One. Jesus, in fact warns us not to pay attention to those who say, “Looks here He is,” or “Look there He is.” And our prayers tell us that God is everywhere, filling all things. As usual, it is not either/or but both. St. Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians confirms this: “For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us, even by me and Silvanus and Timotheus, was not ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but in him was ‘yes’…” (2 Corinthians 1:19)
Now, Jesus does say that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you and among you, but he does not mean that to us exclusively. In God plays no favorites. As St. Paisios of Mt. Athos remarked: “The reason everything is alive and exists at all, is because of Grace. To say it only exists here but not there, makes no sense at all. To suggest this or that is the only way God behaves or acts is the supreme human folly.
And so Jesus directs us not to hold too tightly to things that are temporal which “moth and rust consume and thieves break in and steal.” Instead he directs us to the heart where the pearl of great price and the divine and eternal Kingdom reside. This is the key — on the path to God two places of worship mark the stages, the material temple and the temple of the heart. We are summoned to make our best endeavor to worship at the temple of the heart. Long before He dwelt in the house of brick and mortar, God dwelt in our very depths, where we are most ourselves and He loves us there with an everlasting love. We just have to let God BE God! We need to live “out of our hearts” for Him!
Worship in spirit and in truth is a matter of the heart. There is a “heavenly liturgy” in which the entire cosmos participates. You can hear it in the silence and in the sounds of nature and in daily life. There is nothing small and insignificant in God’s creation. Everything is a sacramental. If we do not learn to worship at the temple of the heart, we will miss it and, when we come to the material temple, we will not know how to worship “in spirit and in truth”, there or anywhere. It will just be motions. We must pray for the eyes to see and the ears to hear, that the Lord will send us His peace and our entire lives become a divine vision. It is the heart in which this vision is born – not in our brain, or cleverness, or erudition, or theology. It is for this reason that the ascetic Fathers counseed us to “descend with the mind into the heart” if we wish to experience God’s overwhelming Love for us while at the same time discovering our truest self. The heart we speak of here, of course, is not the muscle in our chest, it is the mystical dwelling place of the Most High God at the center of our persons.
The Episcopal motto of John Henry Newman (1901-1890), Oxford University theology professor, a Bishop, and pious pastor, was “Cor ad Cor Loquitur” – “Heart Speaks Unto Heart.” In choosing this motto, he revealed the fact that he knew the secret, he knew what the Eastern Fathers’ emphasis was all about, namely, that all spiritual growth and development, all spiritual healing and wholeness, the reaching of our spiritual goals in life, indeed, theosis itself – all take place in the heart. Not wishing to create an impassable divide between the heart and the mind, the words of the motto clearly indicate that the “laboratory of the soul”, the locus where God dwells by the giving of the Holy Spirit to us – is the heart.
Newman wrote a prayer that illustrates how deeply he regarded the heart: “Shine through us Dear Jesus, help us to spread your fragrance everywhere we go. Flood our souls with your spirit and life. Penetrate and possess our hearts so utterly that our lives may only be a radiance of yours. Shine through us, and be so in us, that every soul we come in contact with may feel your presence in our soul, your heart in ours. Let them look up and see no longer us but onlyYou! Stay with us, and then we shall begin to shine as you shine; so to shine as to be a light to others; the light, O Jesus, will be all from you, none of it will be ours; it will be you, shining on others through us. Let us thus praise you in the way you love best by shining on those around us. Let us preach you without preaching, not by words but by our example, by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do, the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear for you and You for us. Amen.”
The Lord Jesus calls us to become true worshippers, to become acquainted with and to practice worship “in spirit and in truth.” We must find the way to our hearts and when we do, we will know what it means. For many, the heart has become a strange, foreign land. The world would have us continue to be strangers to our hearts, lose contact, become blind to the spiritual treasure in it. The hardness of the world stifles the gentleness and compassion of the heart, and the world has a vested interest in keeping that estrangement, for it is through the heart that we come closer to God. That is an eventuality that the Prince of Darkness can never abide.
The pathway is open. By daily prayer and times of stillness, by reading God’s Holy Word faithfully every day and taking it into the heart, by nurturing our hearts with the Holy Mysteries, and through the doing of love for others with humility and compassion – the pathway to our spiritual heart becomes clearer by the day – even with the physical and emotional heart struggles that our human nature endures. These are simple ways we can adopt for ourselves in our spiritual quest for God. It was St. Augustine who, perhaps more poetically and powerfully than any, expressed this “heart’s desire”, when in Chapter 27 of his Confessions he wrote:
“Late have I loved You, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved You! For behold You were within me, and I was outside; and I sought You outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that You made. You were with me and 1 was not with You. I was kept from You by those things, yet had they not been in You, they would not have been at all. You didst call and cry to me and broke open my deafness: and You didst send forth Your beams and shine upon me and chased away my blindness: You didst breathe fragrance upon me, and 1 drew in my breath and now I pant for You: 1 tasted You, and now hunger and thirst for You: You touched me in my heart, and I now I burn for Your peace.”
May God give each of you a new discovery of your heart, may you come to want Him more than ANYTHING, and may you live burning for His love! Christ is Risen! Truly, He is Risen!
Faithfully in the Resurrected Lord,
Fr. Dimitrios |
