After we met Jesus last week and asked Him: “Where do You dwell, O Lord?” and wished to follow Him, this Sunday comes for us to begin discipleship at His hands. But discipleship with Jesus means changing our thinking, changing our minds, and also changing our standards and values, changing our view of everything. Discipleship is not a claim that we are followers of Jesus, for behold, Judas, for example, was of His followers but was not discipled at His hands. Discipleship is that the disciple becomes the image of his teacher; it is a process of changing the being. We say in Arabic: this one is his father’s son, that is, an image of him in his conduct and speech. Saint Basil the Great asks ” what is the mark of the disciple of Christ? It is to be conformed to everything he sees in Christ, as the seal imprints its image on soft wax”[1].
We must understand from this moment how to be discipled at the hands of Jesus. Discipleship is not hearing words, or hearing preaching. “The discipleship of the apostles was not hearing Jesus, but a life of communion: they ate with Him, drank with Him, walked with Him, and saw God in Him, manifest in the flesh, so that they might learn how they too might become sons of God,” as Saint Cyril of Alexandria says.
How do we eat and drink with Him and eat with Him while we do not see Him:
A mystic says:
By God, no sun has risen nor set but Your love is bound to my breaths
Nor have I withdrawn to a people to converse with them but You are my talk among my companions
Nor have I set out to drink water out of thirst but I saw a phantom of You in the cup
Therefore this Sunday takes us, with Saint Gregory, to change all our concepts. This station takes us to understand the nature of the relationship with Jesus, that is, to realize how we must think as Jesus thinks. The nature of the relationship is always determined by how we think of—, and the change here is a change of our inner depths, so that we no longer think with the logic and rationality of the world, but with the rationality and logic of God, so that God’s standard becomes the standard by which our life walks.
Saint Gregory confronted the danger threatening Christian life from limited rationality, this danger that appeared from the dispute between him and Barlaam over the manner of dealing with God and the essence of the relationship in worshipping Him, living with Him and walking toward Him. The problem lay in analyzing everything rationally with mathematical logic.
Today all concepts and standards of dealing change for us. Sin is not the violation of God’s commandment, as if it transgresses the divine commandment, and this transgression is as if an insult to God, and as if God is the one harmed. Sin, as Saint Palamas defines it, is the rejection of God’s fatherhood, the rejection of the paternal love, and the rejection of divine grace. In the parable of the prodigal son, the son sinned by depriving his father of himself, not by dividing the inheritance and squandering it, by depriving him of his existence as a son in his bosom. Therefore forgiveness was not by expiating his sins, but by returning to him, to his first station as a son, and restoring his dignity that he chose to lose. God here was not insulted; rather, He suffered, He became wounded. We can say here that God made Himself capable of suffering.
Sin is not disobedience but disregard. Adam’s problem does not lie in his not obeying the commandment and carrying it out, but as much as his problem is that he wanted to think and plan and live apart from God, to become a reference to himself, to be a standard to himself. Forgiveness is realized when man returns to God. Christian life is not that we acknowledge the existence of God — for even the demons believe and tremble — but that God be in us, our mover, that is, that we live and move by Him. Life with Him is not information about Him but experiences with Him. Barlaam is the model of the deception of religion as knowledge, while Saint Palamas represents the experience of religion as life.
Today we learn how to be discipled and follow Jesus. To call ourselves Christians does not mean we are apostles of Christ. To be apostles means that people can see the face of Jesus in us, and we reflect His values and teachings in society.
Man lives by divine grace, and every other grace leaves the crippled one crippled, and does not raise him nor heal him. Divine grace makes us live as gods, and living as gods does not mean living as Superman, but living as brothers of Christ, not according to the rational scales of the sons of this age, but according to faith in a Christ who abolishes among us the debate according to the narrative of the people of the world, so that we live within the narrative of God Himself.
[1] The Book of Morals (Moralia), roll 80