My Brother is My Life
Sermon preached by Subdeacon JD Swartz on Sunday, August 4, 2024 at St. Mary Orthodox Church in Cambridge, MA
“And behold, they brought to him a paralytic, lying on his bed; and when Jesus saw their faith he said to the paralytic, "Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven." “And when Jesus saw their faith..,” not the faith of the one brought for healing, or at least not his faith alone, but theirfaith. Our interdependency is not simply an aspect of the Christian faith, but is foundational to our understanding of the cosmos, beginning with human connection and culminating in the redemption of creation. “My brother is my life,” said St Silouan, a monk of Mount Athos, and “Our life and our death is with our neighbor,” taught St. Anthony the Great. Today’s Epistle goes into great detail – “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Never flag in zeal, be aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints, practice hospitality.”
But even with such exhortations from Scriptures and the Saints, there are far too often new, inventive, and even theological rephrasings of the question posed in Luke Chapter 10 by a certain lawyer seeking to justify himself by asking, “And who is my neighbor?” We may even find ourselves asking, “And who is my brother? Who is my sister?” Or like Cain we ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” When faced with that which makes us uncomfortable, we react with outrage and offense, and to protect ourselves we fence off those we deem unacceptable from those we believe belong or, if we accept their belonging, we write them off as odd or foolish and not worthy of our genuine concern. This is not the Faith.
It is easy to see humanity and Christ in those whom we love and yet so easy to miss in those we disagree with or even, God forbid, hate. In today’s Epistle, St Paul says to hate what is evil, but never who is evil – quite the opposite, actually - “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” This statement being in the lineage of Christ’s own words found in Matthew Chapter 5, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” St Nikon of Optina tells us, "You must love every man, seeing in him the image of God, disregarding his vices. You must not dismiss people with coldness."
These Saintly teachings, and Christ’s commandment here are not suggestions for simply being better people, but a radical embracing of our fundamental interconnectedness and the recognition that our paths to theosis are not for us alone but are strands working together to restore and save the nature of the cosmos. Those who brought the paralytic to Christ in faith, participated in his forgiveness and restoration; but just as the religious leaders could not see Jesus’s authority to forgive sins, and even like the Apostles who did not understand the revealed Messiah at the Transfiguration – and by the way, there’s Liturgy tomorrow night for the Feast – we do the same with the hatred and indifference in our own hearts against our neighbors, our brothers, our sisters, and our enemies – we do not recognize or understand Christ.
Let us bring one another to Christ in faith, with hope and love, that we may all be united in and with Him. Let us do the work of restoration and reconciliation for those who love us and those who would call us enemies so that all may know love and, through love, Christ; in this, there is no room for outrage, indignation, abandonment, or heartless and callous defenses of the teachings of the Church. May it become natural for us, in all sincerity, to say to all, “Your sins are forgiven!”