A Lenten homily for St. Mary of Egypt Sunday from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church by Priest Paul Siewers.
(Above) Saint Zosimas gives communion to St. Mary of Egypt after her desert sojourn.
Throughout Great Lent the Church in her wisdom has reminded us of God’s goodness in spurring us to forgive and repent. On the first Sunday the Church reminded us of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, and how the restoration of the icons led us to venerate and humble ourselves before the holy icons and to ask our Lord, His Mother, and the saints for their help. Then the second Sunday she reminded us of St. Gregory of Palamas and how grace is the connecting point directly of the divine with our physical embodied existence, an important reminder for our repentance in Lent. At the middle Sunday of Lent we venerated the Cross as a reminder of how it is the bridge given us to heaven, through the beautiful struggle of ascetic repentance. Then on the Fourth Sunday we remember traditionally the Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus, the ascetic self-emptying steps that lead us to put God and our neighbor first, not our own will.
Today, the last regular Sunday of Great Lent in this year 7534 on the biblical calendar, 2026 on the civil calendar, is the memory of Saint Mary of Egypt. An highlight of Lent is the Standing Saint Mary Service we offered here Wednesday night, with the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete read with all its marvelous examples from Scripture of repentance and faith, and the Life of St. Mary. Now at Divine Liturgy we prepare to partake of the Body and Blood of our Lord while commemorating her and asking for her prayers for our Lenten journey toward Pascha.
Saint Mary we know was a great sinner, who today might be labeled a sex addict or even celebrated as a kind of pro-sex feminist. However, while she had a successful crafts business to make money, she was obsessed with sensual pleasure and identified with her passion so there seemed to be nothing else to her life but that identification. It was as if every day was a Pride Parade for her, wrongly essentializing her life as her passion. In Orthodoxy we should never identify with or essentialize our passion, we seek to self-empty in Christ, not to self-assert. That is the new Commandment our Lord gave us, to love as He loved, even to die for others.
Maybe our own life may seem less extreme than St. Mary’s, but consider how we may identify with our passions nonetheless. Career. Comfort. Pleasure. Seemingly simple indulgence on the internet or in an encounter with another. We often are immersed in such seemingly invisible supposedly small sins as if were living in a giant MyPillow and trying not to notice. But encounters in our Church ministries can sometimes help put this in perspective—in our parish prison ministry, in hospital visits and visits to shut-ins. Consider volunteering to help with these Orthodox ministries. The things that bother and stress us often are related to our living lives apart from God, in a kind of bubble of lies about ourselves and others. Even a simple negative encounter in traffic or at the grocery store, someone hogging the aisle or maybe us forcing another to wait as we rush ahead, is an opportunity hopefully for self-reflection and repentance.
All these indulgences of our passions and identification with them in seemingly low-key ways enmesh us in the idea that Jesus Christ has not really come to save us, which the Apostle John says is the spirit of Antichrist. Remember our Lord’s message to the Church at Laodicea in the Book of Revelation, which Father Seraphim Rose suggested could be a message to these latter days. Our Lord said, “I wish that you were either hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm I will spit you out of my mouth.” This is in its own way even more dangerous than St. Mary’s sinful state, and we may be in it every day. But her example encourages us to heroism with God’s help. Struggle and humility are two great virtues in Lent preparing for the resurrection of Pascha.
St. Theophan the Recluse devoted himself to prayer of the heart, examining his sins, and communicating truths of our faith as a help to others in 19th-century Russia and worldwide. Let’s hear a brief selection from his homily for St. Mary Sunday. St. Theophan writes: “What we can learn from the conversion of St Mary of Egypt, or about the veils of sin…. The example of the repentance of Saint Mary of Egypt is so comprehensive and so instructive that the holy Church especially wants to impress it on our hearts.…. Let us hearken to this lesson… in order to point out how each one of us can and should dispose ourselves to be worthy of the same grace.
“You will see that she was completely immersed in sin and did not even think of abandoning it. But grace comes, and, by its striking action, awakens her from the slumber of sin. Awakened, she sees the calamity of her condition and resolves to change it for the better. It was as if someone was immersed in a mire and an outsider came and with his strong arm pulled him out of its depths and set him down free on solid ground….
“…But what must we do to ourselves in order to deserve this grace of conversion?… I will briefly show you. Let us take a person in such a situation that only one simple thought came to him: whether or not to take care of himself and think about correcting his life.…. do not cast it away, but take hold of it at once and begin to perform operations, so to speak, on yourself that would give this thought the opportunity to take possession of all the powers of your being…. Sin entangles the soul in a multitude of snares, or hides itself under various veils, because in itself it is ugly, and would repel anyone at the first sight. These veils are: the deepest and nearest veil to the heart, which is composed of self-delusion, insensibility, and carelessness; higher above it and closer to the surface of the soul lies the veil of distraction and the concern for many things; then follows the upper veil—the predominance of the flesh and the surface order of external life, permeated with sins and passions…. First, curtail your usual affairs and relationships. The eyes, ears, and tongue are the widest channels for sinful sustenance…. Second, take hold of the body: deny it not only pleasures, but also reduce the satisfaction of the necessary demands of sleep and food….This is what prudent fasting accomplishes. Third, solitude and fasting make it easier for the soul to turn to itself. But, entering inside itself, it encounters terrible confusion there, caused by the concern for many things and scattered thoughts…. Here we need to suppress them and cast them out of the soul and heart, even if only for a short time…. For this reason, it is necessary to gather the scattered children—the thoughts—into one, as a shepherd gathers the sheep or as a glass convex collects the scattered rays of the sun, and turns them all toward yourself. This is accomplished by attention, or sobriety. Fourth. Allow the concerns to finally subside, the thoughts to calm down, the mind to gather itself …. You now stand next to your heart. Before you is your inner man, immersed in the sleep of carelessness, insensibility, and blindness….
“…. To make the effect of all these thoughts more sure, enclose all of them in a single image and bear it in your mind as a constant stimulus. …. Now the sinner is revealed to himself; he is not insensitive to his dangerous situation and often wants to arise and go, but this is not all done. What is clearly missing here is the main thing: a grace-filled awakening. Labor has been used, what was sought has been discovered, but all this constitutes only attempts, efforts to attract grace on our part, but not the very thing that we are seeking. We seek and knock, but the gift is in the will of the One Who distributes “to each one individually as He wills” (1 Cor 12:11).
“…. Pray both in church and at home, compelling the Generous One to grant you, as your daily bread, grace-filled help for salvation. Thus labor and strain, ‘seek and you will find.’ Thus ‘knock and it will be opened’ to you (Matt 7:7)…. It will come, that is, what was given freely to the holy Mary of Egypt! … This is why the example of [her] is now offered to us within the season of Lent… to turn us toward a careful analysis: did we prepare as we ought to have. Anyone who has properly prepared should feel awakened, revitalized, and ready to exert effort in the matter of salvation. His goal is not just to go to Church and fast, but to acquire grace, or to recover what was lost, or to strengthen its fire which had begun to fade. And this outer order is needed, but the main thing is the change of inner disposition. If one has been made worthy of this, give thanks to the Lord; if not, then there is still time…. The Lord is near. Draw near to Him, and there will surely be a union between the Lord, the lover of fellowship, and your soul, created in His image and likeness, sought by Him and possessed by Him.” (From Now is the Accepted Time.)
Dearly beloved in Christ, today is also the feast of the Holy Aristobulus of the Seventy, a very early apostle to the deserts of Britain. Let us also ask his intercession for our Lenten struggle, that coming through Pascha, we as a mission family will be strengthened for missionary work in the coming year. Holy Saint Mary of Egypt and Saint Aristobulus of Britain pray to God for the conversion of our hearts each day, so that our light may shine before men for Christ. Amen.
