Greetings for the feast of the Holy Martyr Mamas: a shining beacon of holiness and complete abandonment to God, despite his young years.
As the offspring of a family anchored in pure faith in the age of the martyrs, the youth, St Mamas, put nothing before his loyalty to Christ.
In today’s Gospel reading, we hear of the rich young man, who struggled with the thought of letting go of his wealth to follow the Lord: material wealth and security that came between him and life in Christ.
But… as we have reflected – year by year – for each of us who are far from rich, there may be an equivalent obstacle to abandoning ourselves to life in Christ and following Him freely with focus on Him alone.
Attachment to earthly comforts – our homes and possessions, our holidays and trips, our clothes and accessories, our social engagements and calendars, our careers and professional or social reputation – may all come between us and Christ, and be chains to the world that prevent us from true discipleship and honest service to the Lord.
Even the most basic things – too much food, too much sleep, too much television, social media or computer consumption can come between us and Christ – who might say of each of us, that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for us – with our individual attachments, comforts and perhaps even passions – to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
We have to be clinically honest with ourselves and ask – have we put our hobbies and interests, social engagements or diary commitments before being present at the Divine Liturgy – whose celebration is the greatest thing that humans can do on earth?
Have we neglected the Great Feasts of the Church, perhaps because social commitments have taken precedence over the celebrations of the great events in the life of the Lord or the Mother of God, or great saints?
Have we justified missing the Liturgy or other services because we are tired, even though we know full well that the Saviour was so exhausted when He fell beneath the Cross and the weight of the whole of humanity, when He carried each and every one of us to Golgotha, dragging Himself in the broken, tortured weakness of His flesh to the Place of the Skull? Even when He was tired to the point of dereliction, the Saviour did not give up on us, so when we are tired, should we give up on Him?
Have we been weak and indulgent, failing to even fast for one day out of obedience to Christ through the tradition of His Church – convincing ourselves that we can’t go a single day without milk in our tea or butter on our toast – using health, tiredness, inconvenience or worldly excuses to justify needless leniency?
Have we neglected our prayers because social media, television, the theatre or a trip to the pub with our friends has been higher on our priority list? Have we found more time for our friends than we have for God?
Are we more motivated to meet our peers, than to meet God in the Holy Mysteries, in prayer, in pilgrimage, or in the silence of our hearts?
When we fail in such things, our fall is very often not a one-off-event, but a manifestation of a serial behaviour, of a fault-line in our spiritual lives, and an attachment, that comes between us and Christ – our equivalents to the young man’s wealth, and reminders of camels and needles, and the threatening and frighteningly low probability of us entering God’s Kingdom.
Do our attachments form an obstacle, or even a barricade between us and God, and block any progress even towards His Kingdom, let alone getting anywhere near its entrance?
But… to return to St Mamas…
His parents, Theodotus and Rufina, were dead, having perished in imprisonment for the Faith in the Roman persecution of the Christians. Any wealth or possessions of the once illustrious family had been confiscated and lost when they were arrested.
His mother Rufina had begged the Lord to find someone to care for her prematurely -born child, who entered the world in a prison cell, and the Lord called a rich Christian widow to adopt the child.
As an open and faithful Christian, the faith of young Mamas became an increasing danger as he entered early adulthood, and it made him a target as his parents had been, in ongoing persecution.
Like his parents, Mamas was arrested, but his noble, patrician family background and his confident and capable character led the governor Democritus, in Cappadocian Caesarea to refer his case to the Emperor Aurelian, hoping that this promising young man could be saved from Christianity and lured away from Christ.
The emperor sought to buy Mamas and steal him from Christ by offers of a comfortable life, with wealth and influence – the prospect of him becoming a rich young man.
In the lives of the martyrs – time after time – we hear the judge seeking to entice the one being accused and tortured for Christ: the enticement of a warm bath house to the forty martyr’s of Sebaste; the offer of a military career and imperial commission to the great warrior saints; the offers of rich marriages and socially-eminent husbands to the aristocratic women great-martyrs, renounced and betrayed by their noble pagan families.
Life’s comforts and security were the lure used to draw Christians away from their confession of Christ again and again.
In the passions of the martyrs, we hear their rejection of the offers what amounted to a living death in miserable earthly existence after having denied and blasphemed God.
Occasionally we glimpse those who gave in.
We know of the single apostate of Sebaste who preferred the warmth of a bath house to suffering with his fellow soldiers perishing in a freezing Armenian lake.
We know of the weakness and apostasy of St James the Persian, under the persecution of the Sassanian King, Yazdegerd I, and of his repentant confession and death by gradual mutilation.
We know of the apostate monks of the Holy Mountain, who betrayed Orthodoxy and accepted the unia, only for their dead bodies to be cursed with hair and fingernails growing century after century, making them a terrifying spectacle for those who saw the physical sign of betrayal.
Mamas, too, was offered enticements and incentives, but refused and remained anchored in Christ.
In contrast to both emperor’s offer of wealth and influence, and the portrait of the rich youth of the Gospel, we encounter the fifteen year old Mamas divinely delivered from imprisonment, and living in the wilderness, in fasting, prayer and constant communion with God – surrounded by wild animals with which he had the relationship of Adam and Eve in paradise:
With his life with his foster-mother Ammia a thing of the past before his arrest, we see a young man with no earthly possessions, wealth or material chains to the world – despite the traps and offers that had been set before him, and despite the former wealth and social position of his family.
Unlike the rich young man of the Gospel, this spiritually-rich youth had nothing material to chain him to earthly existence or to come between him and the Lord, yet even in his poverty and abandonment in Christ, there was still one last danger that could imperil his soul and make him a slave to the world. Undue attachment to worldly life itself – life according to the ways and influences not only of the world, but its fallen ways of thinking and existing.
Even though he was so young, St Mamas gave no thought to self-preservation when he had been discovered by the pagan authorities.
When the governor sent a detachment of soldiers to search the mountain and arrest Mamas, they mistook him for a simple shepherd, though he invited them to his dwelling, and gave them milk to drink, revealing his name.
Whether they failed to understand, or were avoiding detaining him we shall never know, but His life tells is that he told the soldiers to go ahead of him into Caesaria, as he followed them to the gates of the city, and Saint Mamas, accompanied by a mountain-lion, whom he rides to his martyrdom in many of his icons.
He was unbreakable in this second trial by the deputy-governor Alexander, not even weakening as he was tortured.
He was thrown to wild animals in the arena, but they would not touch this teenage boy who had lived in peace and harmony with the animals of the wilderness, and so, one of the pagan priests mortally wounded him with a trident.
The passion and witness of this young, but fearless martyr need to make us take a long hard look at ourselves, asking uncomfortable questions about who resolute we are in confessing Christ, whether we are willing to sacrifice the attachments, comforts and security of our lives to follow him, and to even ask whether we are so attached to life itself, that this holds us back from being free and liberated followers of Christ.
It is not only riches that can come between us and the Kingdom, and to see today’s Gospel as only being about wealth is dangerous and a deception.
How far we would go to both pursue and preserve our Faith, and what are we willing to sacrifice and leave behind to follow Christ.
There was no chance of a camel passing through the eye of a needle, as St Mamas rode into the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven mounted on the lion of courage, journeying to martyrdom and willing to surrender and give up everything – including his temporary and fleeting earthly life to follow Christ – the Way, the Truth and the Life.