In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Every year, on the fifth Sunday of Great Lent, we celebrate our venerable mother Mary of Egypt, one of the greatest saints shining in the firmament of our holy Church.
Seen from one perspective, she led a remarkable life: after undergoing an instantaneous conversion that was accompanied by miracles and audible divine guidance, she lived as a hermit for forty-eight years in the desert beyond the Jordan River.
But from another perspective, her life was entirely unremarkable: our only record of her existence comes to us from the Life of Mary of Egypt by Saint Sophronius of Jerusalem. She was not a famous person; she wrote no books and made no works of art; she did not wield political, military, or economic power; she did not become wealthy.
In other words, Saint Mary is a perfect example of true greatness as Our Lord describes it to his disciples in today’s Gospel reading. She did not lord herself over anyone, or exercise any authority. Instead, in total hiddenness, unknown to all, she put herself at the service of the entire world through prayer, ascetic struggle, and repentance.
But, someone might ask, was she really such a fine example? In what sense, someone might ask, were her activities—all of this praying and fasting and tears—in what sense was this service to the world? Jesus says that the greatest are those who become servants of all, and Saint Mary, such a great saint, does not immediately seem to fit that bill.
In rejecting fame, self-expression, power, and wealth, we might also see Saint Mary as rejecting other people. Indeed, throughout history this accusation has been leveled against those who devote themselves to asceticism through the monastic life.
Even in the days of so-called Holy Russia, any number of princes and tsars questioned the social value and Christian love of those leading the monastic life, mainly as the same princes and tsars sought to secularize monastic properties. The Soviets attacked clergy and monks as social parasites, doing nothing good for their neighbor and merely living off of the largesse of others. Even modern-day elders, such as Saint Paësius of the Holy Mountain, have had to answer questions from well-meaning visitors: Why don’t you leave your cell and go out into the world, where you are needed?
The same Saint Paësius instructs us, however, that these types of questions show a grave lack of spiritual understanding. The saint, who served as a radio operator during the Greek Civil War, likens monks and nuns to spiritual radio operators, able to call in “air support” for the world in its struggles. He would say that one more infantryman—one more person out in the world—cannot make the same difference, in terms of spiritual battle, that an ascetic in the desert can make.
From this point of view, Saint Mary, among the greatest of ascetics, was not abandoning the world, but benefitting the world immensely through her prayer. Indeed, it is the teaching of the saints that the world is only sustained by and for the prayers of the righteous.
In this way, Saint Mary’s self-denial and retreat into the desert was not an abandonment of the world, but a profound act of Christian love.
There is another, and perhaps equally important, sense in which we can see Saint Mary’s ascetic life as a life of service. This has to with her repentance, and the nature of repentance in general.
We might be inclined to see repentance as a purely personal matter: having our own change of heart, getting ourselves right with God, turning back toward the good and away from sin. And indeed, repentance is a personal choice, one which God offers to us all, but which not all take.
But repentance, insofar as it involves transforming the self, takes on a larger significance. If we rectify our heart and mind and relationship with God, then we also rectify our relationship with the rest of creation. Repentance is a personal act, but it has cosmic consequences.
On Forgiveness Sunday, we asked forgiveness from everyone, not just those we’ve specifically sinned against in some external fashion. In the Russian tradition, we read of examples of penitents asking forgiveness of pets and farm animals and prostrating in the four directions to ask forgiveness of the entire world. This asking of forgiveness from all people, and even all creatures, points toward the cosmic dimension of sin—every sin we commit, in word, deed, or thought, pollutes the creation and puts the world a little more out of order.
Likewise, then, when we repent, we are putting some small part of ourselves, and hence some small part of the universe, back in order, oriented toward God.
When Saint Mary gave her life over to repentance, she took everything she had—her very self—and devoted that to the world-changing act of repentance.
Because she repented with her whole being and thoroughly restored herself to a right relationship with God, she made the whole creation better. By seeking God’s healing for herself, she allowed more space in the universe for his reconciliation and love.
This is part of the meaning of Saint Seraphim of Sarov’s oft-repeated maxim: “Acquire peace within yourself, and thousands around you will be saved.”
And so it is with confidence that we can say that Saint Mary fulfilled the Lord’s words, becoming a servant of all through her prayer and repentance, and so became truly great in the kingdom of heaven.
Moreover, if we take this lesson to heart, we can allow Saint Mary to do one further service for us: leading us by her example to deepen our own prayer and repentance, not just as self-therapeutic acts, but as signs of our love for our neighbor. We may not be hermits in the wilderness, but we can make our prayer, too, into an act of love for the world. And our repentance, our turning back to a right relationship with God, can become for us, too, a personal initiative that allows a bit more grace into fallen creation.
As we enter into the final week of Great Lent, let us ask Saint Mary’s prayers to redouble our own efforts to pray and repent, offering up everything as a sacrifice of love for the sake of the Lord and our neighbor.
And to the Lord our God, our Creator and Redeemer, be all glory and adoration, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Unity in Trinity, unto ages of ages.