Like the rich man, many want a spiritual pat on the pack for continuing down whatever passion-driven path they have followed so far.

Christ calls us all to become like the Good Samaritan, binding up the wounds of our neighbors and refusing to narrow down the list of those whom we must learn to love as ourselves. Like St. John Chrysostom, let us refuse to think that we can rightly worship the Lord by confining our piety only to what we do in liturgical services. Instead, we must make every dimension of our life a point of entrance to the Kingdom of our great High Priest.

There is simply no way around the truth that how we relate to other people reveals whether we are participating in the life of our Lord as we conform our character to His. What we do and refuse to do for neighbors who need our time, attention, and generosity in any form, we do or refuse to do for Him.

When the struggle is hard and we cannot imagine being set free, we must remember the difference between a person disintegrated by the power of evil and one gloriously restored as a living icon of God.

Like conscientious gardeners, we must doggedly tend the garden of our souls with prayer, fasting, almsgiving, confession, and repentance.

Let us look to the Savior’s raising of the son of the widow of Nain as a sign that we must entrust ourselves only to the One Who has conquered the grave, for slavery to the fear of death is the reason that it is so appealing to entrust ourselves to false gods as a distraction from facing the truth about ourselves and our world.

We must simply keep letting down our nets in obedience to Christ according to the particulars of our lives and circumstances.

We must simply keep letting down our nets in obedience to Christ according to the particulars of our lives and circumstances.

Only we can unite ourselves to Christ in His Great Self-Offering for the salvation of the world.

As members of Christ’s Body, the Church, we reap the blessings of the faithful obedience of Joachim and Anna and of their daughter the Theotokos. We must now use our freedom to take up our own crosses so that we may unite ourselves evermore fully to Christ in His great Self-Offering for the salvation of the world.