St. Mary of Egypt Model of Repentance
5th Sunday of Lent, April 10, 2022, Mark 10: 32-45
We are almost at the end of our Lenten journey for this year. Next Sunday we arrive with Christ in Jerusalem for Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week. We have arrived at the 5th Sunday of Great Lent – St. Mary of Egypt Sunday. She is of course the model of repentance, demonstrating that no matter how dissolute and far from God’s ways we find ourselves, while we have breath it is always possible to turn to God in repentance, and He will joyfully bring us into His loving embrace.
St. Mary of Egypt is a model to us of someone who fully embraced the truth. From 12 years old until 30 years old she had fully embraced a life of abandonment to passion, in a desperate attempt to find some connection to love and intimacy and belonging. St. Mary, sought to fill this hunger through sexual encounters, and her lust was all consuming. After 17 years of trying without any lasting success to satisfy her insatiable desire through sensuality, God in His all-loving compassion directs her to a Christian pilgrimage in Jerusalem – “The Exaltation of the precious and Lifegiving Cross.” As St. Mary puts it, “God was seeking my repentance for He does not desire the death of a sinner but magnanimously awaits his return to Him.” She knew no other way to try to fill this great hunger – the same hunger God places in each of us – the hunger for life and communion with Him. St. Mary was desperately aware of this hunger, and God in His mercy allowed His most Holy Mother to reach out to her, blocking her entrance into the church, where the Holy cross was being venerated and showing her how depraved and impure she had become through her immorality, She immediately repented completely and vowed to “never again defile my body by the impurity of fornication and to renounce the world and its temptations and go wherever You will lead me.” Receiving the assurance of God’s acceptance of her unreserved repentance, St. Mary was able to enter the church, venerate the life-giving cross and told “If you cross the Jordan you will find glorious rest.”
St. Mary then single mindedly dedicates herself to the pursuit of God and this new revelation and crosses the Jordan into the desert with only 3 loaves of bread. She spends the next 47 years of her life battling with her passions and the demons in the wilderness, completely without human companionship. The Most blessed Theotokos is her hope and rescuer, bringing her back always into the light and protection of Christ as St. Mary struggles with hunger, heat, cold, tormenting thoughts… The first human contact she has after her 47 years in the desert is when God brings the Elder Zosimus to her, and we learn of her wonderous existence through him. God transforms her so thoroughly that when the righteous elder Zosimus finds her, she is praying elevated 3 feet off the ground, walks across the surface of the river Jordan, is transported hundreds of miles in a single hour, knows what is happening in Zosimus’s monastery, and freely quotes scripture, although she had never read a bible.
It is a most remarkable story and one that the entire Orthodox Church has treasured since the early 7th century. It shows of course the great and ever available love of God, Who wishes that not one person should perish, but that all should come to Him and be saved. But what is also of immense value to consider is the complete and total commitment that St. Mary exhibits, putting her entire heart, soul and force of will towards seeking God, once she has seen the falseness and delusion of her previous life. There is nothing of, “trying to do a little better” no measured plan to improve, simply a radical and full about-turn, rejecting all that she now sees was false and harmful, and embracing without question a radical striving to seek God. She is a wonderful example to challenge the sin of “lukewarmness.” It is an in-your-face rejection to Satan’s most powerful strategy to lull us along into complacency, the “Later” strategy. “You can make a better, more considered and reasonable new plan for repentance and commitment to God “LATER.’” This is what makes her story so powerful that the Church gives it to us as a last gift before entering Holy Week. It is time to once again to renew our Lenten battle and throw away the “Later,” and right NOW, re-commit to passionately uniting ourselves to Christ, if at least for the next week! Do something more, even St. Ephraim’s prayer twice a day!
Today’s scripture reading says, they (the apostles) were “Amazed and they were afraid” as Christ once again tells them of His purpose in going up to Jerusalem. “the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death and deliver Him to the Gentiles; and they will mock Him, and scourge Him, and spit upon Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.” Christ took on a body that He might find death and blot it out. (St. Athanasius 4th C). He fulfilled all the prophets had said about Him throughout the history of Israel. He came to die for us!
It is basic human nature to deny that which we do not wish to hear. Not to think about the raw reality of our life here on planet earth. It’s often not a very pretty picture. Through sin, corruption and death entered the world, and its effects are monstrous and monumental. We all live in this sick environment that has clouded and obscured the ever-present radiance of God’s reality. This is not His will or doing, it is ours. It is the effect of our turning away from Him in rebellion and choosing to go it on our own. In fact God does all that He can, while still respecting the great gift of free will that He has given us, to turn our mess into blessings and lead us back to Him, to our true home, to life and salvation. But we have to be freely willing to come to Him, to choose to admit that we are helpless and very badly deluded, and that our grasp on what is truly and eternally real is pathetically distorted. As Christ demonstrated to us in the garden of Gethsemane, no matter how much we want something, and even feel and pray that it is right and proper and God’s will, we must always say, “However, not my will be done but Yours.” Like the disciples, we are often afraid to ask for the full truth of God’s light to expose our ways and our faulty thinking, and this renders us unwilling to accept God’s pure and never changing truth. We have a hard time handling true reality, we prefer our delusions. Facing this is what repentance is all about and the fruit of a good lent is awakening to it.
So as we approach Holy Week and travel with our Lord, through all of the timeless and eternally significant events of His passion and resurrectional power; through the events that have eternally shaped the redemption of our human race and ushered us into the kingdom of heaven and made possible the realization of our true destiny as the children of God our Father, let us always be mindful that we have much to learn and much to unlearn, as we serve God and each other through taking up our cross and laying down our lives for others. May His ways become our ways in our thinking and in our actions, as we seek to serve Christ and His Church. May He find us to be faithful and loving stewards when He calls us to His great judgement seat at the end of our lives and at the end of the age. Glory to Jesus Christ!