How Heavy is the Logos?

This Sunday is the post feast of our Monastery of the Holy Transfiguration. We also celebrate the apostle Matthias who was added to the apostles after the defection of Judas so that it be 12 apostles with the Mother of God to await in the upper room the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost and the foundation of the

Church. Today, Jesus gives us a parable special to the Gospel of Matthew to help us understand the great mystery announced in the beginning of that Gospel: “Jesus will save his people from their sins”. Today God, the King, wants to do something very special with each of us.

Before getting into what our English Bibles say, let me share to you what the original Greek text says: God, the king, wants to συνᾶραι λόγον μετὰ τῶν δούλων αὐτοῦ, literally God, the king, ‘wants to lift up the Logos, the Incarnate Son of God, together with us his little servants’. The Greek verb ᾶραι first conveys the physical gesture of lifting up a weight. God wants to do weightlifting with us... weightlifting of what? of the Logos! In the Bible the word ‘glory’ is the same word as ‘heaviness’. God wants to lift up together with us his little servants the ‘heaviness’ of the Logos, the glory of the Logos! A Greek reader of

this parable will first have this image: God wants us to

participate with Him in a lifting up, a glorifying, of His Son, Jesus Christ. God the Father, wants us to participate with Him in the mystery of forgiveness of the debt of our sins obtained by His Incarnate Son. How beautiful our God’s designs!

The parable then exposes the abysmal contrast of what God the King forgives - a debt of ten thousand talents - and the forgiveness of a hundred denarii that our brother or sister owes us. In this God the King still wants us to lift up together with HIM, to be in togetherness with HIM in ‘lifting up’ debt. The initial physical picture given by the Greek words, is a weightlifting with God the King. Like a father educating his little son would say to him: “let us lift this weight together”, though he, the father, does most of it.

The father wants his little son to participate and share the joy of winning the weightlifting contest! Jesus underlines the abysmal contrast: while there is a common weightlifting of the glory of His Son Jesus Christ, who through His death on the Cross, burial, resurrection and ascension into heaven is saving us from our sins, the lifting up on the part of God is much more than the lifting up that God invites us to in conjunction with Himself.

How much more? Mathematics, speaks to me! After all, I got a doctorate in Mathematics at Columbia University as the

ticket my father asked me to pay to be able to enter the monastery. So, according to Jesus’ numbers given in today’s gospel, when we do this holy weightlifting with God the Father, God is lifting up 600,000 times more weight than we are. Imagine the picture, if you can: at a weightlifting contest, God the King, and me side by side lifting up the same weight.

God lifting up 600,000 more than I! And yet we are together! This is what life of grace is about. God wants our full free engagement, but it is only to do 1/600,000th of what He does! Father Theodore is our baker at the monastery. The nourishment Father Theodore gives us is only 1/600,000th of the nourishment Jesus gives us in this Divine Liturgy!

And yet God is still asking Father Theodore to be our baker. We have here a profound illustration of God's infinite mercy versus human pettiness. Our own sins forgiven by God through the death on the Cross, burial, resurrection and ascension into the glory of heaven of Jesus equal an unpayable 600,000 greater weight than the offenses any of our brothers or sisters can commit against us, comparatively a trivial mini-weight. God’s royal forsaking of justice to do mercy cancels our incredibly massive spiritual debt.

It is a lifting up of debt through grace that asks for no prior payment, no fasting, no sacrifice... only that we freely offer a repentant and merciful heart. Our hearts have indeed this abysmal capacity of ‘lifting up together’ with our merciful God. Are you obsessed over a brother's or sister’s minor faults, are you judging a

brother's or sister’s faults? Does that ever happen to you? Beware: anyone obsessed over a brother's or sister’s faults or judging a brother's or sister’s faults, anyone keeping grudges incessantly against a mother-in-law or anyone else, has not yet understood his or her own spiritual poverty, has not begun true repentance. We are to humbly learn the incredible: true mercy. We are here to learn to pardon brother or sister without demanding any payback before or after.

We are here to learn to see Jesus, suffering personally on the Cross for us, bearing 600,000 times weightier than what we bear when we

carry our cross, that cross which we find so easily in our lives. We have a God who is inviting us ‘to lift up together’ with Him, we ‘lift up’ our light momentary burden of forgiving in a joint movement with Christ forgiving and healing our nature and lifting us up with Him into the glory of the Logos, into His Kingdom. If we refuse to engage in mercy, if we refuse to lift up the offense committed against us, God can only refuse His mercy. We are freely making the choice of

condemning ourselves to the worst. May we not put Jesus into the necessity of pronouncing the last words of his parable: “you will be confined to jail”.

Jesus comes to lead us to freedom, to lead his disciples to be apostles of mercy and forgiveness everywhere, preaching the kingdom of God with power and authority over demons, with power and authority to cure diseases. The premise of opening our hearts to forgiveness, to that spiritual poverty, is voluntary poverty. That is why Jesus says: “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics”... voluntary poverty in all things is the door to ‘lifting up the Logos to glory’ in a forgiving heart.

Glory to Jesus Christ.