Homily 704 – 16APE
Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, Ames, Iowa
September 20, 2026
Epistle:  (203) Galatians 2:16-20 and (181) 2 Corinthians 6:1-10
Gospel:  (37) Mark 8:34-9:1 and (105) Matthew 25:14-30

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God.

To me, the most important commandment Christ gave to the world.  Whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

I really do believe that, properly understood, this one statement can be the Golden Rule for the Christian life.  In my opinion, it is maybe even more important than the traditional Golden Rule.

Properly understood is the key.  There are three aspects to this commandment.

First, the one who desires to follow Christ must deny himself – deny yourself.  Now, this doesn’t mean deprive yourself.  It isn’t necessarily fasting or almsgiving or another of the ascetical disciplines.  Those do help us, of course, but they are only one part of self-denial.

Ultimately, self-denial means to deny our ego.  That sounds like a lot, so let me explain that a bit.

The creation of humanity set many aspects of us into a particular order.  First and foremost was the *nous*.  That is the Greek word translated as “mind, or intellect, or being,” but what it truly is has no translation in English.  It is the part of us that connects to God.  Everything else about us – our sense of identity or ego, our thoughts or intellect, our self-perception and feelings – everything else was supposed to be under the influence of the nous.

But in the Garden of Eden, our first parents in communion with God in that Garden, were warned by God that one tree in the Garden was dangerous – the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil it is sometimes called.  The implication of that tree is that they only knew life with God, which is Good.

Now, we know the story – the serpent convinced Adam and Eve that God was holding them back, and not letting them fulfill their potential.  He put what today would be called “spin” on a warning from God.  “Oh, it’s really not that.  It isn’t what He really meant.  You won’t die.”

It was the first human experience with what we would today call an “ego play”.  The serpent played to the ego of Adam and Eve.  And Adam and Eve chose to follow it.  They evaluated the situation – themselves – and decided – themselves – how they would proceed.  Themselves.

What they did after that isn’t terribly relevant.  That moment where they put self above God – their ego before their nous – was the moment that humanity fell, meaning separated itself from God.

Yes, that is a bad as it sounds.  Everything we experience today is directly from this fallen state of being, this fallen state of existence.  We have no memory of any other way to exist.

So now, the ego takes a new dimension.  The ego is trying to operate as it always has – to protect us from harm.  The ego is what wants to blame something other than ourself to the pain that we experience, to the things that go wrong, even to our own failures to unite with God.

“It can’t be your fault” is the common message of the ego.  You’ve done nothing – it is something, or someone, else.  It tries in all things to do what it was created to do – protect us, and our image of ourself.  Problem is, it no longer has the nous to rely on, to control it, to remind us that God is in charge and God loves us, and God keeps us safe – we do none of this ourselves.

We fast forward a bit and move to part two – take up the cross.  I’m sure this didn’t mean crucifixion to the people who heard Christ say this.  That was the furthest thing from their minds.  It had a more likely meaning of a boundary stake.  The place we are very sure about.  Our preconceived notions or our “fundamental givens” in life.  We had to give those up.

Just like Christ gave them up in the Garden of Gethsemane.  He said, “I don’t want to drink this cup, but your will be done My Father.”  And that conflict within Him – His ego versus His nous – was absolute agony.  Luke 22:44 says “And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

It wasn’t as much the physical crucifixion of the cross that created the agony in Him.  It was the subjection of the ego to the nous.  That is what created agony.

And that is the cross that we have to take up.

We have to give up everything we hold dear – our very sense of self – and subject that to God’s will, accepting whatever happens as God’s salvation for us, and God’s way for us.  Just as Christ did.  We pick up the same cross that Christ picked up in the Garden of Gethsemane.

And finally, the quote “easy part.”  We follow him.  We no longer live for ourselves.  We die to ourselves as St. Paul writes, and we live to serve others, which is what Christ did on Earth.  We think of others, we help them when we can, we no longer see gender, we no longer see religious belief, we no longer see nationality, we no longer see race.

We only see Christ.  And when we start to drift away, when we start to evaluate what we want, we return to Christ.  That is amartia, sin, and metanoia, repentence.  That is the life we lead.  Like Christ, we don’t worry about what is good for us, and we worry about what is good for others.  We know that what God has for us is sufficient, and is for our benefit.

We can afford to let the remainder go.

And in that letting go, in that removal of all the barriers and excuses and self-images we have, what we find at the base of all that is Christ, existing in us.yuu

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Glory to Jesus Christ!