Do you remember being 2 years old? Probably not, but I bet you’ve known some two-year-olds.
What happens when they are trying to do something and you offer to help? If your interactions with two-year-olds are the same as mine, they look at you, make a face, then they turn away and scream, “No!”
They don’t want your help. They want to do it on their own. They want to figure it out without help.
Teenagers are the same way.
I remember, as a teen, I would often be trying to figure something out and my dad would offer to help me . . . but I didn’t want his help. I wanted the satisfaction of doing it on my own.
Well, the spiritual life often ends up being like this too.
We try to save ourselves. And, when we have a spiritual crisis, we try to fix it on our own.
What often gets left out of the picture is faith.
As we try to do it on our own, we forget that faith means trusting God.
It means we have to “die” to ourselves, our own
The Good News is that this “death” is the birth of trust in God.
—
Sunday was the 4th Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of St. John Climacus.
Climacus is the Greek word for “Ladder.” St. John received this epitaph as a result of a spiritual work he wrote for a neighboring monastery. He called his book, The Ladder of Divine Ascent.
In this book, St. John describes 30 logoi or steps for progressing in the Christian life—hence the “ladder.”
The French Orthodox theologian, Olivier Clement, summarized the spiritual journey in St. John’s book very well:
First of all the break with the world is described in all its unavoidable violence.
Then follow the basic attitudes of purification: obedience, repentance, ‘mindfulness of death,’ penthos (spiritual mourning, with the gift of tears).
They make possible the fight against the passions, those forms of idolatry: anger, resentment, idle or lying talk, discouragement, gluttony, impurity, avarice, insensibility, sloth, vainglory, pride, blasphemous thoughts.
They also make possible the corresponding virtues and this correspondence denotes a metamorphosis: for example, gentleness, silence, chastity, detachment from possessions, vigilance.
Praxis culminates in simplicity, humility
and discernment.The last four logoi are devoted to union with God:
hesychia (peace, silence, contentment), pure prayer, impassibility (a sign of resurrection), and love. (The Roots of Christian Mysticism, pp. 353-4)
Though this is a long quote, I wanted you to read the entire section that describes The Ladder of Divine Ascent. It shows you the full spiritual journey in its fullness.
Though this work was written by a monastic for monastics, it still has a lot to say for us, both as laypeople and as people who live in the 21st century, a world far removed from the 7th century Sinai desert
The first point that still rings true is the very first step: we must break from the world, with all its enticements.
In other words, what St. John is asking us to do is die to the world.
We must make a break, die to ourselves, to our own egos, to our own desires, before we can begin the spiritual journey.
If we’re able to “die” now, while we’re still alive, then we’re free from the attachments of this world that enslave us and we’re free to move towards God.
We’re free to live in a new sort of way . . . the way of love.
In short, when we choose to “die” now by detaching from the world, instead of trying to “do it on our own,” we begin the journey of healing
This beginning for us is what today’s Gospel lesson recounts.
There, we encounter a man who, like the two-year-old or a teenager, wanted to heal his son on his own.
When that didn’t work, he turned to the disciples, who also tried to do it on their own
What both the man and the disciples lacked was trust . . . they hadn’t yet “died” to themselves and trusted Jesus.
This is what we call faith or belief.
It’s more than a mental attitude and it’s more than knowing your creed or theology well.
Trust is a lifestyle.
It’s a way of life that means you’re completely dependent on God, even in the direst of situations.
The man in our story was in such a situation
Scripture tells us that it got so bad that sometimes the spirit caused the boy to throw himself in a fire or into a body of water—an attempt at physical death.
So, this man and his son were in a dire situation. They were looking for a miracle.
The disciples tried to help. But they couldn’t. The boy remained just as sick as he had been.
So, left without a choice, they turned to Jesus.
I imagine they didn’t want to go to Jesus. After all, that would be admitting defeat.
Jesus, through his career, had been instructing the disciples, teaching them that faith, above all, is the prerequisite for the Christian walk . . . but, time and time again, they had failed to trust.
So, when the man and the disciples turn to Jesus, what does he ask? He asks about their faith.
“Yes,” said Jesus, “if you yourself can! Everything is possible for the person who has faith.” (Mark 9:23 GNT)
With remarkable courage, the man is honest with Jesus. He wants to trust . . . he wants to trust badly, but he can’t.
It’s just not in him.
The father at once cried out, “I do have faith, but not enough. Help me have more!” (Mark 9:24 GNT).
Jesus does indeed help but in a strange way.
He doesn’t give the man trust, but rather, he gives him a reason to trust God.
Jesus noticed that the crowd was closing in on them, so he gave a command to the evil spirit. “Deaf and dumb spirit,” he said, “I order you to come out of the boy and never go into him again!” The spirit screamed, threw the boy into a bad fit, and came out. The boy looked like a corpse, and everyone said, “He is dead!” (Mark 9:25-26 GNT)
This is a death and resurrection moment.
For a brief moment, the boy is dead. The father can no longer trust himself to help his son. He can no longer trust doctors to help his son. He can’t even trust Jesus’s disciples to heal his boy.
The trust the father must have, at this very moment, is trust in
The answer to, “Help me have more [faith],” was for Jesus to create a situation in which the man could do nothing but trust.
And, when he did, Jesus raised the boy up and he was fully healed.
Jesus shows us that trust and new life comes from death. Now, in our case, Jesus asks us to voluntarily die so that he can raise us up.
This, my friends, is the beginning of the spiritual journey . . . this is trust that comes only from death.
This is what St. John calls the “break from the world.”
It’s a death to the world so that we become alive spiritually. We learn dependence on God.
Each one of us, in our own baptisms, ritually died in the waters
Like the father, we approached the font and asked God to help us have more trust, more faith
And, in response, Jesus, through the priest, picks us up and drowns us. We become a corpse
But, then, just as in the Gospel story, the priest raises us up again. We rise from the waters a new creation.
The question now becomes, will this ritualistic death become a functional death?
Will our baptism actually be, for you, a break from the world?
Will you actually take up the challenge to trust God and begin your spiritual journey
Those are questions only you can answer
But, if you choose to die to the world, if you choose to trust in God, then you will truly be reborn and you’ll be able to begin the climb to heaven.
—