A Plea for Hope Amid Despair

"Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed."

Oh hear me Jesus, Messiah God!
Say the Word, O' My Lord, and heal this deadly wound which debilitates my soul.

Give your Light to my blind eyes, and speak hearing to my deaf ears. Touch my lips but with a kindly knuckle, and loose this knotted tongue that forbids my speech.

My God! I am swimming in misery and tears. I beg of you! Reach out thy hand to a drowning man, as you once did for Peter in a storm. I trust in you, my Lord.

Do not cast me out, for my repulsive face, but feed me, Lord, with a morsel of Thy Living Bread, and raise to Life this leprous corpse!

If Thou dost will, you can give life to my paralyzed limbs. Give me hope, that I might stretch out my withered hands. Lift me up, Lord! Thou canst make firm the tottering gait of my crippled feet.

Oh Christ, when thou dost look at me, do not pass by and leave me fruitless and accursed, as you did the barren fig tree.

I have waited here all of my life for your shadow to pass over me, to maybe hear your voice speak my name. I know Thou canst make me clean and wholesome to behold. Have mercy on me, Jesus!

Thou art my chiefest desire, above all else. Do not despise my tears, my God, but save me for Thyself, that I might come into thy presence to adore Thee. Let me walk by thy side and sit at thy feet to listen to your words of eternal life, and let me live among thy people in your City on a Hill, Jerusalem, in Heaven.

I love you, my Lord, for you first loved us.
Amen.

-- based on a sermon preached by
St. Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390 AD)

As Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans (7:24): "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" We should all know that we are spiritually dead, if we do not have a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Adam and Eve were created in the image and likeness of God. Yet while the image is good and permanent, the likeness was to be learned and earned, by walking with God in the Garden of Eden, by having a long term relationship with Him. They had to learn by imitation and discussion about how they should live, even in the Garden.

But there was a trap in the Garden, put there by the Deceiver, Satan. God warned them to avoid it. They didn't listen. By succumbing to temptation and sin, after listening to Satan, all of their learning to be like God was corrupted. Their likeness was broken, and their relationship with God was also broken. We still have the ability to learn to be like God, but now it is broken,  and desperately needs to be fixed.

That is why Jesus came to Earth, so that He could call us back from the brink of despair. He calls us to turn back from listening to the Deceiver. He promises to forgive our foolishness, and wants to fix those parts in us that are broken. He wants to show us how to live correctly, even in this fouled up world.

That is why we must be "born again" by the Baptism of water and the Holy Spirit, so that we can refuse to listen to Satan, and choose to stay in a restored relationship with God. By the rebirth of Baptism, our ability to learn how to be like God is fixed.
We have been reoriented to look toward Jesus, and to listen to his words in the Gospels, until we find that we can speak to Him ourselves and hear Him reply. From there, we can make progress in learning and growing in the likeness of God.

Salvation is our renewed journey, our walk with God in a restored relationship. We spend our time generously to be with Him, as with our closest friend, and among his other friends, the Church. In this way we begin anew the transformation of our hearts and minds into his likeness. We already have his image. That is what makes us eternally valuable and gives us dignity as human beings. But the likeness needs to be restored by pursuing that relationship that Jesus wants to have with us. That's what atonement means, to begin again in a reconciled relationship. We have a new friend! God! Spend your time to get to know Him. If you learn to imitate Him, it will change your life.

But we do not yet have the full likeness of God in ourselves. Rather, we still have our ignorance, our old habits and our mental baggage, which we must struggle to overcome. As a result, we still have an obdurate stumbling block of human fallibility, which repeatedly causes us to sin. Most of us never get completely past that, and even the saints say that they continue to struggle with it.

"For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do." (St. Paul, Romans 7:19)

But Jesus, because He was God coming down to save us, gives us the power to be conquerors, each day resisting temptation. And He no longer counts it against us when we nevertheless fail, each and every day. We have this hope, that He will finally remove our fallibility, and heal our bruised and stumbling ability to follow Him. We believe that He will do this when it is our turn to die. Because of sin, we are mortal. But He is ready, when that time comes, to raise us to eternal life.

And on that day, if we have sought to know God, and asked for a restored relationship with Him and with his Church, then we can knock confidently upon the gates of Heaven and know that they will be opened to us. And Jesus will be waiting to renew our humanity without the stumbling blocks that have thus far caused our earthly fallibility. So that, in Heaven, we shall be able at last to achieve our own full likeness to our Creator and Saviour, in accord with the Holy Spirit who guides us from within. And without the sin in our lives, there will be no further cause for death. We will have eternal life.

Amen. Let it be so, Lord.
(A personal meditation on the Eastern Orthodox theology of Resurrection and Salvation... a different perspective)