Why Outward Holiness Fails Without Heart Transformation

Homily by Fr. Matthew Brown | November 09, 2025| St. Mary Magdalen Orthodox Church (OCA), New York City

The Epistle reading today gives us a good reminder and warning to meditate upon prior to the upcoming fast.

The Nativity fast starts on Saturday, on the 15th, so less than a week.

And fasting, along with other spiritual disciplines and other various practices of piety, like wearing a headscarf or whatever it would be, are dangerous.

And we’re given sort of a reminder of this through the practice of circumcision.

And Paul talks in here about, you know, neither circumcision or uncircumcision avails anything in Jesus Christ.

And he talks about people who go around and boast in how many people they’ve gotten circumcised.

And what Paul, in this epistle and elsewhere in his writings, talks about repeatedly is the idea of the circumcision of the heart.

And so we have this theme that runs through Paul’s writings, that runs through Jesus’ writings, which is this emphasis on the heart, and that that is the place for growth and the measure of holiness.

And what we often do, right, what was being done in the case of circumcision, in that case, and what we do with a lot of forms of piety or spiritual disciplines like fasting, is that we use them as proxies for holiness.

We say, well, if I, you know, keep this fast and I say my prayer rules and, you know, I do all these practices, I fast, I go to confession at the right intervals, then we think that we’re good and okay.

And then we begin to take, looking at other people, and we look at these various practices that they engage in, these forms of piety, and if they’re not what we think they should be, we form judgments about people and their character and their virtue based on those practices.

Now, it’s fine that these things function as proxies, but what often happens is that they function as substitutions.

They become a replacement, right, for the actual character and virtue that we’re trying to achieve, right?

If I’m practicing fasting, right, the real goal of that is self-control. It’s compassion and identification with the poor, right?

It’s cultivating a heart of gratitude even for small little things. This is the point.

And so what often happens, right, like if I wear a headscarf or something or I dress modestly, it’s like the point is not to play some sort of race to the bottom to see who looks the most plain, right?

The point is I’m trying to, I’m acting modestly out of care and concern for others, right?

And not trying to sort of undeservedly, and I think this is at the heart of what modesty really is, it’s what we’re really trying to get at even if we miss the mark of it all the time.

Because it often gets co-opted for status jockeying, right, modesty does.

But the real point is I’m not trying to claim any undeserved credit or attention, right? That’s what modesty really is at the heart of it, right?

So if I’m in the worship service, right, I’m not going to come in wearing, you know, I’m going to come in wearing like a tank top and flip-flops or something, right, because I don’t want to distract, because I’m not the center of attention, right?

It’s a recognition of where attention should properly be fixed at any given moment or place, right?

But what we do in these cases like this is we mistake the foliage of the tree for the fruit, right? We make the error of the fig tree.

In Christ this happens, this gets commemorated a lot in the hymnography in Holy Week.

And it occurs in the Passion narratives, you know, it’s one of these events that happens before sort of all the events sort of get kicked off in motion for Holy Week, is Jesus with the disciples comes across the fig tree that is barren, it’s not bearing any fruit, and he curses it, and they come back the next day and all the leaves are withered up.

And so what’s important to recognize is that the leaves in front of a tree, following this analogy, serve the purpose of providing the nutrients so that the tree can grow fruit, right?

The leaves are in service to producing the fruit.

In the same way, spiritual disciplines like fasting or any other sort of practices of piety we might engage in have the purpose, right, of eliciting and encouraging and cultivating virtue in our lives.

That’s their purpose. But what Paul reminds us of, right, is that it’s very easy to lose sight of that.

And for the things that are sometimes indicators or signs, and this is what sort of practices like fasting or any sort of like other pious practices people engage in, is that they are both sometimes a genuine expression, right, of the state of our heart, right?

And all the times, too, they are also a practice we engage in to cultivate and change the state of our heart, right? They do both those things.

But when they become the heart itself, right, it becomes corrupt and twisted and sinful.

And that mistake right there is the cause of what most people say when they say something like, you know, I love God, but I don’t like the church, or I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious, or something like this.

Or people who got burnt out or had bad experiences at church and say, well, I don’t want a church that’s full of hypocrites, you know?

If someone says that, just say, well, you know, come on in. We need one more, you know?

But the point being is that that mistake right there, right, is what I call the sin of religious people, right? It’s the sin of the Pharisees, right?

And it’s very easy to get caught up in this, and Paul reminds us of what the point of all these activities are, is that they’re always trying to drive to a real transformation of the heart, right?

Or is he using this interpretation of circumcision that he’s working with here, that you want the circumcision of our heart, this transformation of our whole being, right?

And so some of it’s about establishing priorities, right? That virtue has the priority over the spiritual disciplines, right?

We don’t want to let tail wagging the dog here, and so that misalignment causes a lot of problems in the spiritual faith.

And it becomes an occasion, right, for pride and satisfaction and vain attention for virtue that we, for virtue and the status we associate in our mind with that virtue that we have not earned, right?

And so what these practices become, and our tricky little egos do this and lie and deceive to us, is a shortcut where we can have all the outward signs and attention and satisfaction of achieving virtue without actually accomplishing it.

And there’s something gross about that, right? And so we’re given this warning by Paul.

The Gospel Reading and the Shape of Real Virtue

If we turn to the Gospel reading, we can see an example of what it means to acquire virtue, right? We see that we have two characters.

So let’s focus on the story of a great example of how we can really achieve sort of the transformation and the healing that we want in our lives, right?

We have two characters.

We have Jairus, the father, whose daughter is deeply ill and who eventually dies before Jesus gets there, and the woman with an issue of blood, right, who’s unclean, who shouldn’t be out in public, right, but is touching people, right?

And, I mean, apparently made Jesus ceremonially unclean, right? Though Jesus has no concern about that, right, in this Gospel.

Then we have two different characters who are both desperate. They’re desperate, and they’re at their wit’s end.

And this is a great reminder that it’s of why desperation and failure can often be our best friends, right?

Because it’s often only in those most desperate moments that we will step out and do the necessary difficult thing that we’re avoiding, that is, the thing that is necessary to actually heal us or transform us, right, or get us to that next level or step that we need to be at in our spiritual life.

And so in both these cases, you have Jairus, who’s, it’s important, he’s the leader of a synagogue, which means going out to Jesus is a risky thing.

He is risking his reputation in this moment for this. He’s willing to sacrifice it. He’s willing to be a fool. He’s willing to be humiliated.

He’s willing to lose his status for his daughter.

There’s something about desperation when we’re pushed to the brink of death, right, which both these characters are definitely in that arena, that it really focuses us about what actually matters is important.

This is the beauty of suffering and of difficult times and hardship, right, and losing great things or being on the cusp of losing something that really matters to us, is that it brings us the clarity that we lack during most of the time in our life, and we immediately know ourselves.

We immediately know what we want and what actually matters.

And so there is a gift of clarity and insight that can often only be given if we’re put into situations like the woman with the issue of blood or like this other man.

And what you see here is there’s a total lack of concern for how they’re perceived and how other people see them. They don’t give a damn at this point, right?

It’s like they’re way beyond that now. My daughter’s almost dead. I don’t care how I look. I care about sort of like rules of ritual impurity.

I don’t care about outward signs of piety at this point because I’m laser focused, right, on the healing and transformation I need to get.

And they’re willing to put themselves out there in that way.

And in both those cases, when they take that risk, right, then they have that transformation that they have.

And that woman, it’s amazing how she gets healed by touching him and Jesus calls her out. He exposes her, right? Because she has been living in the shadows.

She has been living untouched by other people, right? And it’s with the touch of Christ, right, by being humanized. And this is often what goes on.

You see this with a lot of characters like her, is that they’re given dignity and humanity and that that is what transforms them.

And that’s part of the gift that they give. Because the healing that Jesus gave her was not just the healing from the physical and bodily ailments, right?

This was never really the end point of what Jesus is trying to do.

Whenever he’s giving these physical healings, they’re a step along the way to some sort of deeper inner spiritual healing.

And what he gives her in addition is he gives her her dignity and her place back in society.

He puts her out there, she opens and tells the story, she confesses in front of everyone and that liberates her in that moment too. And so she’s restored.

Hope Against Hopelessness and the Temptation of Cynicism

In the case of Jairus, he hears that his daughter has died and so he’s at this point where he has every right to give up hope.

And people have given up hope, but God doesn’t. Jesus doesn’t at this point and he presses on nevertheless.

And this is a great reminder that when we’re in these desperate situations, when we’re pushed sort of to the edge of our own sanity and what we think we can tolerate, that there’s a temptation in that moment to give up hope.

And then to fall back into sort of a cynicism where we mock and laugh at those who have hope, which is what happened in the story.

Jesus says, she’s not dead, she’s only sleeping, let’s go. And everyone else, it says they laughed at him.

I’m sure they were laughing at Jesus behind his back. And yet he presses on and they laughed in the face of God’s promises.

The same way that Sarah laughed in the face of God’s promises for children. And were found to be shamed by their own cynicism and lack of hope.

And so we’re reminded that yes, these points of desperation in our lives can be great opportunities, but they’re also very risky and there’s always the temptation of losing hope in some way.

And so there’s a great need for us in our spiritual lives to guard our hearts against a kind of despair, right, that would turn our heart to rot inside.

And it shows that there’s this need for us to practice faithfulness and trust in God in those moments. And that when we do that, God shows up, right?

He raises the daughter back from the dead. And so we have an example of what this real transformation looks like, right?

Which real growth and transformation of holiness is often messy and vulnerable and risky, right? And it’s not all put together real well, right?

And we often don’t want to be in places like that.

We want a kind of piety and transformation and holiness that’s clean and tidy and follows the rules and is predictable and that we have control over.

But that’s not where the growth actually happens.

Spiritual Practices as Sharp Tools

And so, again, just like Jesus says, I didn’t come to abolish the law to fulfill it, these spiritual practices are there as tools, but they’re sharp tools.

They’re tools we can cut ourselves on. And we have to know how to wield them right, like a surgeon with a scalpel, right?

So that we’re a surgeon and not a butcher to our own lives or the lives of others with these spiritual practices we have.

The spiritual practices of fasting or almsgiving, right, or the sacraments of communion are powerful tools.

And we should treat them with a kind of reverence and respect for them and use them well.

And if we use them right and well, right, for their purposes, we don’t mistake the leaves for the fruit, then they can actually be extremely effective in producing virtue in our lives and liberating us from the vices and bad habits that oppress us.

Glory to Jesus Christ.