Our Venerable Father and Confessor Chariton; The Holy Martyr Ludmila and Viacheslav, Czech Prince; Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv who repose in the Nearer Caves of the Venerable Anthony; Blessed Hieromartyr Nykyta Budka, First Bishop of Canada.
2 Corinthians 4:6-15; Luke 6:17-23.
Read 2 Corinthians 4:6-15
St. Paul writes, “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Cor 4:6)
St. Paul writes that the light shines in our hearts because the heart is the place where we come to see/know God. This is also what Christ tells us in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8)
In our tradition, The Fathers call this spiritual faculty of the heart the nous, the inner eye by which man was made to know God. St. Athanasius the Great, in his classic work On the Incarnation, teaches us that man was created to preserve his likeness to God “by keeping Him in his knowledge.” But when man turned the gaze of his heart away from God, and towards material things, that knowledge grew dim, and he went looking for light elsewhere. With this in mind we can understand the darkness St. Paul speaks of, as not only the darkness before creation; but the darkness of our fallen heart.
The loss of the divine vision, due to the fallen condition of our hearts, is one of the reasons that St. Athanasius gives for the Incarnation. Because our minds had “fallen to things of sense,” St. Athanasius says, the Word appeared in a body so that He might “centre [our] senses on Himself.” The light we could no longer find within, we now behold “in the face of Christ.” As the Psalmist sings, “In your light shall we see light.” (Psalm 35:10) We do not see God by our own light, but by His.
This is why the heart must be made pure. Another one of our monastic fathers, St. Diadochos of Photike, teaches that grace is planted in the depths of the heart at baptism, yet it remains hidden “even from the perception of the intellect itself” until we begin “to love God with full resolve.” Then, little by little, grace makes its riches known. The light is already within us; the ascetic struggle of prayer, watchfulness, and the remembrance of God is the cleaning of the lamp.
St. Paul is honest about what this looks like: “we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Cor 4:7) We are afflicted, perplexed, struck down. Yet, as St. Athanasius reminds us, the saints are the living proof of Christ’s victory, those in whom “the life of Jesus [is] manifested in our mortal flesh.” (2 Cor 4:11)
So the invitation is simple. Guard the heart. Return to it in prayer. St. Diadochos counsels us to give the restless mind “nothing but the prayer ‘Lord Jesus.'” For the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has already shone in our hearts. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see Him.