Perhaps once, without you realising it, you touched the heart symbol below a video, that imperceptible press of the thumb, small like an insignificant gesture but charged like a confession of faith. It was a snapshot of a digital “miracle”, uploaded by some virtuous person, with intentions, into the crucible of social media. An audiovisual material that promised the ineffable, the touch of God, caught within the net of views. We no longer bow, we do not shed tears, nor do we ascend some mount of prayer; we only consume. We judge, we are moved, we approve, and we press “like”. As if faith is a public statement and the miracle, a commercial version of divine providence.
Yet elsewhere, far from the technological stammering of our screen’s pixels, a soldier of Rome, a mouth immersed in the silence of duty, approaches Jesus without pride, bereft of titles. He does not bring with him a camera nor an entourage – only the anguish of the father. He does not advertise his request, nor does he seek to certify his conviction with documents and miraculous photographs. On the contrary, he feels entirely unsuitable and worthy of rejection.
He recognises in Christ something that we, in the age of superabundant information and of miracles-on-demand, refuse to see: the power of the Word as absolute principle. Just as he himself gives a command and the subordinate obeys without objections, so too Jesus, without moving, without touching, can overturn decay. He is able to command death because His Word does not spring from a voice, but from authority.
And so, the miracle is restored to its true face; not as a “magical episode” to fascinate the spectators, but as a fissure in the narrative of perishability. God does not work for the public; he does not ask for cinematographers or advertisers, nor scriptwriters of piety. Those who hasten to exploit His light, are submerged in a kind of spiritual narcissism, disguised as zeal. Instead of pointing towards Him, they turn the lens upon themselves, as if declaring their participation in a competition of godliness.
In essence, they transform the miracle into a spectacle, and hope into a public utility enterprise. They wear the mantle of sanctity with the air of a martyr and the self-satisfaction of a television presenter. They think they are serving God whilst they exploit Him – and all this delirium of exposure, makes a mockery of the sacred in the eyes of the distrustful and wounds those who know faith as a secret brand. Because the miracle cannot withstand the shop window: it is naked, delicate, made to pierce the silence, not to conquer the “likes”.
Faith, as the centurion embodied it, is not expressed with speeches nor with theological analyses. It is a silent act, almost guilt-ridden. It acknowledges, it does not claim. And as the authority of Christ rises on the horizon of his thought, this man of another faith crushes the entire system of merit-based reward. He does not put forward works, he does not submit a curriculum vitae of spiritual achievements. He only confesses his need. So simply…
Saint Theophylact of Bulgaria comments on this theological clarity in an almost strategic manner: “If I… command the soldiers under me, you are much more able to command death and the diseases” (Gr. Εἰ ἐγὼ… τοῖς ὑπ’ ἐμὲ στρατιώταις ἐπιτάττω, σὺ πολλῷ μᾶλλον δύνασαι ἐπιτάττειν τῷ θανάτῳ καὶ ταῖς νόσοις).[1] Here, God is recognised as Ruler not of the “miracle”, but of reality as it is. The diseases, he says, are His soldiers – subjugated, ordered, executing. That which to us seems illogical, inconceivable, here invades as order, as a deterministic force subject to the mouth of Christ.
In this subversion all the tactics of piety collapse, the supplications that look more like offerings to heaven – “look how good I was”. Because here, the only thing that has value is the admission of inadequacy. And Christ responds not to the performance, but to the disposition of emptiness. And then, from the mouth of Jesus, not only is praise uttered; a warning is also pronounced. Piercing, painful, unveiled – a sword that separates the familiar from the foreign, the sons of the kingdom from the guests from the east and the west (Matthew 8:11). Those who thought themselves heirs, because they bear the marks of tradition, of correctness, of the legal form of faith, will be thrown outside, into the darkness (Matthew 8:12); and there is nothing more eloquent than the image of the teeth gnashing in the absolute outside.
The enigma, the stripping bare, the denunciation is not addressed to a specific generation of Jews, but to the perpetual “we” of every religious schema that rests on the idea of election. Not of the real, but of self-election: that which is based on language, on origin, on tradition, on the integrity of the external order. In the mirror of this word is reflected every Church that substitutes the living with the repetitive, every believer who converts salvation into a procedural certainty.
How many times, behind the sermons, behind the liturgical processions and the ecclesiastical offices, is hidden the conviction that God belongs to “our own”? That He owes us because we honour him, supposedly, with lips that chant, while our heart fades into apathy? These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me (Matthew 15:8; cf. Isaiah 29:13). The crowd cheers today. It brandishes palm branches with the same ease that tomorrow it will raise cries of curse. So light are our hands; so hastily we exchange acceptance with rejection. We forget that we are breath, beings of clay; and we are unmindful that even this breath is borrowed.
The miracle, ultimately, happens not when Jesus touches, but when someone opens a void for him. The “at that moment” is not a temporal point, but an existential fissure: the opening of a silence within, inside which Jesus heals from a distance. Neither work nor ritual is required. Only the recognition of need.
We, the postmodern sons of the kingdom of God, the possessors of dogmas and of hagiography applications, who collect sayings and digital prophecies like a spiritual trophy – we who store miracles in bookmarks, live as if the Holy Spirit could be encased in cloud files; as if God is visible only if he becomes famous on the internet. But He remains outside. The wind blows wherever it pleases (John 3:8).
The word of the centurion –terse, precise, military– still carves the darkness like a gleam that does not show but performs. And the Word of God, when it enters a person, leaves behind neither visual effects, nor sound; only silence. That terrifying, complete silence after the lightning, when all things have once again become simple. And the world seems, at last, healed.
Republication is permitted provided that the author’s name, Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene, is cited.
[1] Theophylact Archbishop of Bulgaria. Τα Ευρισκόμενα Πάντα. Ἐν Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Volume 123. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1864, 220.The Silence Under the Roof
Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene (translation from the original Greek text)
Perhaps once, without you realising it, you touched the heart symbol below a video, that imperceptible press of the thumb, small like an insignificant gesture but charged like a confession of faith. It was a snapshot of a digital “miracle”, uploaded by some virtuous person, with intentions, into the crucible of social media. An audiovisual material that promised the ineffable, the touch of God, caught within the net of views. We no longer bow, we do not shed tears, nor do we ascend some mount of prayer; we only consume. We judge, we are moved, we approve, and we press “like”. As if faith is a public statement and the miracle, a commercial version of divine providence.
Yet elsewhere, far from the technological stammering of our screen’s pixels, a soldier of Rome, a mouth immersed in the silence of duty, approaches Jesus without pride, bereft of titles. He does not bring with him a camera nor an entourage – only the anguish of the father. He does not advertise his request, nor does he seek to certify his conviction with documents and miraculous photographs. On the contrary, he feels entirely unsuitable and worthy of rejection.
He recognises in Christ something that we, in the age of superabundant information and of miracles-on-demand, refuse to see: the power of the Word as absolute principle. Just as he himself gives a command and the subordinate obeys without objections, so too Jesus, without moving, without touching, can overturn decay. He is able to command death because His Word does not spring from a voice, but from authority.
And so, the miracle is restored to its true face; not as a “magical episode” to fascinate the spectators, but as a fissure in the narrative of perishability. God does not work for the public; he does not ask for cinematographers or advertisers, nor scriptwriters of piety. Those who hasten to exploit His light, are submerged in a kind of spiritual narcissism, disguised as zeal. Instead of pointing towards Him, they turn the lens upon themselves, as if declaring their participation in a competition of godliness.
In essence, they transform the miracle into a spectacle, and hope into a public utility enterprise. They wear the mantle of sanctity with the air of a martyr and the self-satisfaction of a television presenter. They think they are serving God whilst they exploit Him – and all this delirium of exposure, makes a mockery of the sacred in the eyes of the distrustful and wounds those who know faith as a secret brand. Because the miracle cannot withstand the shop window: it is naked, delicate, made to pierce the silence, not to conquer the “likes”.
Faith, as the centurion embodied it, is not expressed with speeches nor with theological analyses. It is a silent act, almost guilt-ridden. It acknowledges, it does not claim. And as the authority of Christ rises on the horizon of his thought, this man of another faith crushes the entire system of merit-based reward. He does not put forward works, he does not submit a curriculum vitae of spiritual achievements. He only confesses his need. So simply…
Saint Theophylact of Bulgaria comments on this theological clarity in an almost strategic manner: “If I… command the soldiers under me, you are much more able to command death and the diseases” (Gr. Εἰ ἐγὼ… τοῖς ὑπ’ ἐμὲ στρατιώταις ἐπιτάττω, σὺ πολλῷ μᾶλλον δύνασαι ἐπιτάττειν τῷ θανάτῳ καὶ ταῖς νόσοις).[1] Here, God is recognised as Ruler not of the “miracle”, but of reality as it is. The diseases, he says, are His soldiers – subjugated, ordered, executing. That which to us seems illogical, inconceivable, here invades as order, as a deterministic force subject to the mouth of Christ.
In this subversion all the tactics of piety collapse, the supplications that look more like offerings to heaven – “look how good I was”. Because here, the only thing that has value is the admission of inadequacy. And Christ responds not to the performance, but to the disposition of emptiness. And then, from the mouth of Jesus, not only is praise uttered; a warning is also pronounced. Piercing, painful, unveiled – a sword that separates the familiar from the foreign, the sons of the kingdom from the guests from the east and the west (Matthew 8:11). Those who thought themselves heirs, because they bear the marks of tradition, of correctness, of the legal form of faith, will be thrown outside, into the darkness (Matthew 8:12); and there is nothing more eloquent than the image of the teeth gnashing in the absolute outside.
The enigma, the stripping bare, the denunciation is not addressed to a specific generation of Jews, but to the perpetual “we” of every religious schema that rests on the idea of election. Not of the real, but of self-election: that which is based on language, on origin, on tradition, on the integrity of the external order. In the mirror of this word is reflected every Church that substitutes the living with the repetitive, every believer who converts salvation into a procedural certainty.
How many times, behind the sermons, behind the liturgical processions and the ecclesiastical offices, is hidden the conviction that God belongs to “our own”? That He owes us because we honour him, supposedly, with lips that chant, while our heart fades into apathy? These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me (Matthew 15:8; cf. Isaiah 29:13). The crowd cheers today. It brandishes palm branches with the same ease that tomorrow it will raise cries of curse. So light are our hands; so hastily we exchange acceptance with rejection. We forget that we are breath, beings of clay; and we are unmindful that even this breath is borrowed.
The miracle, ultimately, happens not when Jesus touches, but when someone opens a void for him. The “at that moment” is not a temporal point, but an existential fissure: the opening of a silence within, inside which Jesus heals from a distance. Neither work nor ritual is required. Only the recognition of need.
We, the postmodern sons of the kingdom of God, the possessors of dogmas and of hagiography applications, who collect sayings and digital prophecies like a spiritual trophy – we who store miracles in bookmarks, live as if the Holy Spirit could be encased in cloud files; as if God is visible only if he becomes famous on the internet. But He remains outside. The wind blows wherever it pleases (John 3:8).
The word of the centurion –terse, precise, military– still carves the darkness like a gleam that does not show but performs. And the Word of God, when it enters a person, leaves behind neither visual effects, nor sound; only silence. That terrifying, complete silence after the lightning, when all things have once again become simple. And the world seems, at last, healed.
[1] Theophylact Archbishop of Bulgaria. Τα Ευρισκόμενα Πάντα. Ἐν Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Volume 123. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1864, 220.
