The fifth week of Lent has been rather unusual this year, as it has been intersected by the celebration of the Feast of the Annunciation. Normally, the fifth week of Great Lent has a special solemnity about it, with the reading of the whole of the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete and joyfully concluding with the singing of the Akathist to the Mother of God. The special character of the fifth week is also given by the reading of the life of St Mary of Egypt, to which this Sunday is dedicated.

You can read the life of St Mary of Egypt here.

In brief, it is the story of a girl who ran away from her home in Egypt and threw herself into a wild and dissolute life. After fourteen years she chanced to join a group of pilgrims to Jerusalem, (although not for reasons of devotion). She found herself held back from entering the church to venerate the Holy Cross by an invisible force. After repeated attempts, she realised that her sinful life was blocking her entrance and she promised to repent. After venerating the Cross, she headed for the Jordan desert, where she remained and reached a very high level of holiness. She was discovered by a monk named Zosimas, who was able to give her Communion at the end of her life, bury her body when she died and share her remarkable story.

This brief outline does not do justice to the life, but it gives the background to the main point I would like to share with you this morning which is this:

Zosimas had grown up in a monastery and devoted himself heart and soul to the monastic life. But at a certain moment, the thought came to him that there was no-one who could teach him anything. Not only that, but he compared himself to his fellow monks and they didn’t come out of the comparison very well! Spiritually, he was in trouble!

He prayed to God for help and was told by an angel to go to a certain monastery on the banks of the Jordan river. Here he would find “how many other ways lead to salvation”.

In this monastery every Lent, after the services of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the brothers left the monastery, crossed the Jordan and spend the next five weeks alone in the desert, returning for Palm Sunday and Holy Week. The life of St Mary of Egypt stresses that no monk asked another how their time in the desert had been spent, or looked to see how much food they had taken with them. “Each one took what they needed”. No-one was to compare himself to anyone else.

It was during this Lenten sojourn in the desert that Zosimas encountered Mary, who has already been living there for 47 years. The story of their meeting is extremely touching. Both fall to the ground asking the other for a blessing. Eventually Mary concedes, gives the blessing, and they both stand up and talk. Zosimas realises that she knows his name and knows that he is a priest. Later he realises that she quotes from the Scriptures, although she can’t read, she rises from the ground during prayer and like our Lord himself, walks on water as on dry land. Needless to say – that’s the end of his spiritual pride!

There are, of course, other lessons to be learnt from the life of St Mary of Egypt, but as we start out on the final days of Lent, maybe it is good to remind ourselves always to be open to learning from our brothers and sisters in Christ. No-one is self-sufficient. As today’s Epistle says: For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

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