Fr. Timothy Barkley
St. James Orthodox Church
(8/14) The Teacher and three of his friends walked down the hill into the crowd.
A man panted up to him: "Teacher, I brought my son to you – my only child. He is demon-possessed. Your disciples couldn’t help. If you can do anything, please …!"
A young man in his wake, catching sight of Jesus, fell to the ground, convulsing and foaming at the mouth.
Undistracted by the pyrotechnics, the Teacher asked the father, "How long has he been like this?"
"Since childhood. Sometimes the demon throws him into the fire or the water to kill him. If you can do anything, please, help us!"
"’If you can?!?’ If you have faith, anything is possible. Without faith, nothing is possible."
"Lord and master, I believe! Help my unbelief!"
And the loving and merciful Jesus spoke the command, and the demon was cast out, and the son healed instantly.
In this Gospel reading appointed for today (the seventeenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, also found in Mark 9 and Luke 9), the Church teaches us many things, about faith, about sickness and health, about spiritual authority, about maintaining our relationship with our loving God, and the consequences of not keeping ourselves spiritually fit. Let’s
focus on a couple of these.
Faith … the joining of our own entire being – body, soul and spirit – to the outpouring of God’s energies called "grace." Sometimes we have great faith, like the friends of the paralyzed man who brought him to Jesus, and when they couldn’t get to Jesus through the crowd, busted up the roof to let their friend down in front of Jesus. When Jesus saw
their faith, he healed the paralytic.
And sometimes our faith is weak and tender. All we can do is come to Jesus and, like the father in today’s Gospel reading, cry out, "Help!" And because he is merciful and loving, he helps. It’s best not to judge others: "your disciples couldn’t do anything!" as if it were the disciples’ fault, as if they were some kind of vending machine that dispenses
healing on demand, even for those who have no faith. It’s only by owning our need that we can get it met.
After Jesus cast the demon out of the son, the nine disciples who were unable to heal him came to Jesus for reassurance. They had just been sent out to "heal the sick and cast out demons" (Matt. 10), and here was a sick guy with a demon, and they were helpless. "Because of your little faith you were helpless," Jesus replied. "This kind doesn’t come out
except by prayer and fasting."
Evidently, the disciples had been commissioned to heal and liberate, but hadn’t been praying and fasting. The divine commission isn’t enough, all by itself. We need prayer and fasting, with faith, to do the hard work of the Kingdom of God.
We are all commissioned to go into the world and liberate a hurting and captive people. But … interesting, the connection between prayer and fasting, on the one hand, and faith on the other. How are they related? And what if this story is not only a historical recounting, but also an allegory of the liberation of our souls and bodies from enslavement
to that which is not worthy of our calling as humans?
What if the son is the soul of each of us, imprisoned in the deceptions and webs of the demons and our own misplaced desires and drives, seeking liberation to become what it knows it was meant to be? What if the father is each of us crying out to the source of life and love for an outpouring of grace? What if this isn’t about "them then," but about
"me, now"?
Prayer – not just reeling off our needs and the list of our loved ones to God, but the intentional spending time with him, listening as much as (if not more than) speaking – brings us into correct relation to him. And fasting – the setting-aside of our "clean" desires (because if they were "dirty" we wouldn’t do them at all, ever) and legitimate needs
in order to draw close to God – in voluntary weakness, creating dependence on God’s grace, crying out, "strengthen me, or I die" – calls from our loving God an abundance of his divine energy to bear us up.
The Body of Christ, in the infinite mercy of God, gives us the gift of seasons of fasting, to reach out together to our loving God and to seek and find his grace. We encourage one another and pray for one another as we struggle together for our salvation. "We go to heaven together, but to hell alone." One of those seasons just ended. Have we chosen to
embrace the gift given and draw near to God?
We don’t fast to make ourselves miserable. If that’s why we fast, the Church is not our home. And we don’t fast to demonstrate our ascetic prowess. That passion-filled ascetical pride is fatal to our souls Rather, we fast to draw away from our passions, those disordered appetites that are contrary to the realization of our calling as humans, and to
draw near to our loving God, to receive his grace and the life of God, to partake in the divine life that is life in Christ.
And thereby we find ourselves. We are liberated from the demons, both internal and external, that afflict us. We are free to realize our human destiny. By fasting and prayer, we become fit to do warfare against the spiritual wickedness that assails us, and to prevail.
Sometimes the "demons" are external supernatural forces. More often, they are our own internal conflicts, the result of allowing our "nous," the "eye of our soul," to be darkened by the disordered passions so that we can’t any longer see the path of our destiny. By weakening our passions, fasting and prayer clears our vision so we can get an unobscured
fix on our goal and see the pathway that leads there.
Fasting, with prayer, casts away from us the sin that so easily entangles us and opens us to God’s energies. By kicking away external props, fasting helps us see our dependence on God, the source of strength and wholeness. Weakness in body can strengthen our soul. Fasting = fitness, a lifelong exercise program for our salvation.
Whatever demons assail us, be they internal or external, faith-filled fasting and prayer avails to cast them from us and frees us to be who we were created to be – humans, in the image of God, ever growing into his likeness.
Let us cry out to our loving God, "I believe! Help my unbelief" as we draw near to him in fasting and prayer, seeking liberation from those who afflict us, and freedom to become truly human. And then let us go forth, into an afflicted and diseased world, and proclaim the true freedom of the sons of God.
Read other homilies by Father Barkley
About St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown
The Holy Orthodox Church is the Church founded by Jesus Christ and described throughout the New Testament. All other Christian Churches and sects can be traced back historically to it. The word Orthodox literally means "straight teaching" or "straight worship," being derived from two Greek words: orthos, "straight," and doxa, "teaching" or "worship."
As the encroachments of false teaching and division multiplied in early Christian times, threatening to obscure the identity and purity of the Church, the term "Orthodox" quite logically came to be applied to it. The Orthodox Church carefully guards the truth against all error and schism, both to protect its flock and to glorify Christ, whose Body the Church is.
St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown is a congregation of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. We are the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Christian Church whose roots trace directly back to first century Antioch, the city in which the disciples of Jesus Christ were first called "Christians" (Acts 11:26). The
Orthodox Church is the oldest and second largest Christian group in the world. We are called by God our creator to worship and follow Him, and to proclaim to the world His message of love, peace, and salvation.
God loves all mankind and desires that all human beings should believe in Him, know Him, abide in Him, and receive eternal life from Him. To accomplish this, God Himself came into the world as a man, Jesus Christ, becoming man that we might become like God.
The Antiochian Archdiocese, under the leadership of His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph, sees itself on a mission to bring America to the ancient Orthodox Christian Faith. We join our brothers and sisters in the various Orthodox Christian jurisdictions — Greek, Orthodox Church in America, Romanian, Ukrainian, and more — in this endeavor. In less than 20
years the Archdiocese has doubled in size to well over 200 churches and missions throughout the United States and Canada.
