A HOMILY FOR THE SECOND SUNDAY OF GREAT LENT
About Saint Gregory Palamas and the Divine Splendor of Holiness
Brothers and sisters!
Six weeks have passed since our Holy Church first began urging us to look deep into our souls and carefully at our way of life: to consider what we need to change and for what we ought repent. Two weeks have now passed since the start of the Great Fast, when we began in earnest the actual task of Lenten self-amendment and repentance. And now, today, with the commemoration of Saint Gregory Palamas, the Church of Christ, for our edification and instruction, begins to bring to our attention special examples of saintly, grace-filled people who knew how to repent truly; who understood how to cleave to God. Saint Gregory is the first of these, because he was both a great practitioner and teacher of mental prayer, of the Prayer of Jesus, and a great theologian who upheld the Church’s teaching concerning divine grace. In other words, Saint Gregory points out to us the way to self-amendment, to spiritual transformation and transfiguration, through the synergy, the cooperation, of our labor of repentance and the Lord’s grace.
Saint Gregory Palamas was born the year 1296. He was of noble ancestry, and his father Constantine was a respected counselor of the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II Paleologus. Constantine Palamas was himself an adept of mental prayer, to such an extent that during meetings of the Imperial Council, his mind was uplifted to heaven and he could not hear what the others were saying. Often, he had to be stirred from his ecstasy. So devout, however, was the Emperor Andronicus that he was not angered by this. Instead, it only caused him to hold his counselor in even higher esteem.
Young Gregory received a brilliant education and seemed destined for the highest office. But at the age of twenty, he renounced the world and entered the monastery of the Great Lavra on Mount Athos. After some years he took up his dwelling in a wilderness cell on the Holy Mountain, where he battled with the demons and became a living vessel of grace.
It was at this time that Gregory stepped forth as defender of the holy faith against the heretic Barlaam of Calabria, who taught that the superessential and supremely divine grace of God is not eternal, but temporal and created. Barlaam called the Orthodox ditheists and polytheists, because the Church distinguishes between the essence and energies of God, and teaches that both are divine in the full sense and equally increate, although God’s essence is unknowable to us, while His energies – of which grace is one – are knowable. And not only do we know the uncreated and divine energy which is grace: we can participate in it as well.
Saint Gregory’s teaching was upheld by three great councils, the collective authority of which is regarded by the Orthodox Church as for all purposes equal to that of an oecumenical council.
In his last years, Saint Gregory served as Archbishop of Thessalonica, where he earned the love of his flock on account of his pastoral care, and its admiration on account of his inspired teaching and miracles. In 1359 he reposed in the Lord in that city, and his holy relics remain there till this day.
Brothers and sisters, it is only in the light of the Orthodox doctrine of uncreated grace that we can begin to fathom the glory, majesty, and celestial beauty we see in the saints. Grace is not something made by God, which He gives us while remaining separate from it and us. Rather, it is God Himself, and through participating in it we become in very truth partakers of the divine nature,[1] as the holy Chief Apostle says. Partaking of the divine nature through grace, we are in all truth united with the Divinity, although not, of course, with God’s unknowable essence.
To partake of grace, we must strive to purify our heart of everything unworthy of the Lord, everything alien to Him: all our sinful thoughts, words, and deeds. Besides the Sacraments or Mysteries of the Church, our chief weapon in this battle is prayer, especially mental prayer, which is both an expression of humility and repentance, and a plea for the assistance of divine grace. Those who prevail in this combat are filled with the divine energies and become, as it were, “gods by grace.” Such men and women are the ones we call saints: the ones to whom our Holy Orthodox Church now begins especially to direct our gaze amid the struggles of Great Lent. So doing, she reminds us of the splendid reward that awaits spiritual struggle. Although deified, the saints did not cease to be by essence human beings like ourselves. But nonetheless, having received God within, as iron receives fire and becomes red-hot, they showed beforehand by becoming vessels of grace what the entire creation will become when, at the end of days, God will transfigure it with His light and become all in all.[2]
Dear Christians, let us rejoice in our high calling; let us rejoice that we are called to become partakers of the divine nature, as Saint Gregory Palamas teaches and shows by his life. But let us not forget that such deification is only possible if we undertake the struggle of faith, the struggle exemplified by the Lenten labors of repentance and self-amendment. Like the saints, let us give, if not blood, then at least sweat, and we shall receive Spirit. Let the will of God become our will, and the Lord will reward us with the inspiration, desire, and strength to become, if not in this life, then in the next, gods by uncreated grace. Amen.
[1] II Pet. 1:4
[2] I Cor. 15:28
