Fifth Sunday of Advent: When Grace Makes All Things Pure
You’ve felt it—that moment when someone’s simple kindness slices through your cynicism, when a child’s trust catches you off guard, when beauty ambushes you despite your carefully constructed defenses. These moments reveal something the readings today insist upon: **purity isn’t about what you avoid touching, but about what has touched you**. Paul writes to Titus that *to the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure* (Titus 1:15). This isn’t moral scorekeeping. It’s ontological diagnosis.
The Pharisees in Jesus’ day had created elaborate systems to maintain purity—what to touch, what to eat, who to avoid. They believed holiness meant careful separation from contamination. But Jesus systematically violated these boundaries, touching lepers, eating with sinners, letting “unclean” women approach Him. The disciples absorbed some of this anxiety about contamination, about being polluted by association. In Mark’s Gospel, they’re arguing about greatness, about hierarchy, about who gets to sit closest to power. They’ve missed everything. When Jesus asks what they were discussing, they fall silent—the shame of being caught reveals they already know their concern is petty. Yet Jesus doesn’t shame them further. He sits down, assumes the position of a teacher, and **descends to meet them where they actually are**.
This is the pattern John’s prologue celebrates: *He came to His own, and His own people did not receive Him. But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God* (John 1:11-12). The Word doesn’t remain at a safe distance, protecting His purity from our contamination. He enters completely, assumes our nature, takes the risk that we might reject Him. And we did. We do. Yet **this entering, this kenotic descent, is itself the purification**.
Here’s where you must face something uncomfortable: What are you protecting? What contamination are you so carefully avoiding that you’ve stopped actually touching lives? Perhaps it’s the mess of other people’s problems—you maintain “boundaries” that are really just sophisticated withdrawal. Perhaps it’s your own inner chaos—the wounded, angry, hungry parts of yourself you’ve locked away because they’re “impure.” You’ve developed a theology of separation that sounds spiritual but produces isolation. Paul’s diagnosis cuts deeper than mere behavior: *Their very minds and consciences are defiled* (Titus 1:15). The defilement isn’t in what they touch but in how they see. They’ve lost the capacity to perceive reality as it actually is—shot through with divine light, groaningly pregnant with glory.
The disciples’ argument about greatness reveals this same corrupted perception. They see the Kingdom through empire’s lens: hierarchy, competition, scarcity of honor. Someone must be greatest, which means everyone else must be lesser. Jesus places a child in their midst—not as an example of innocence to emulate, but as a living icon of receptivity. **The child doesn’t earn position, doesn’t strategize for advancement, simply receives what’s given**. Cyril of Alexandria writes that “the child is set as a type of those who through faith and love have become humble in mind, and have chosen to be lowly.” It’s not about becoming childish but about recovering the child’s capacity for unhesitating reception.
John tells us that *from His fullness we have all received, grace upon grace* (John 1:16). Notice the physics: grace piled on grace, not earned or distributed according to merit but overflowing like water finding every crack and crevice. This abundance makes the disciples’ argument absurd. There’s no scarcity in the Kingdom that requires competition. Yet you live as if there is. You measure yourself against others, anxious about your position, your influence, your recognition. This anxiety corrupts your perception until you can no longer see the grace already present, already given, already working.
When John the disciple objects—*Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in Your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us*—he reveals how quickly the community of grace becomes a gated community. The man wasn’t doing it wrong; he was doing it outside our control. Jesus’ response should startle you: *Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in My name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of Me. For the one who is not against us is for us* (Mark 9:39-40). The Kingdom is larger than your gatekeeping, your credentialing, your anxious boundary maintenance.
Augustine captures this perfectly: “Many who seem to be without are in reality within, and many who seem to be within are in reality without.” You cannot see into hearts. You don’t know who is genuinely encountering Christ and who is merely performing religious identity. The posture Jesus calls for is radical openness—the purity that flows from a cleansed perception, not from careful avoidance.
This is where the inner work becomes urgent. Descend into the places where you’re still operating from empire’s logic—from scarcity, from anxiety about position, from the need to control who’s in and who’s out. Feel the contraction in your chest when someone outside your group succeeds. Notice the small satisfactions when someone you’ve judged as “impure” fails. **These are not minor character flaws; they’re symptoms of defiled perception**. You’re seeing through contaminated lenses.
Paul’s instructions to Titus about church order aren’t arbitrary rules but the outworking of purified perception. Elders must be *self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined* (Titus 1:8), not to create elite hierarchy but because leadership in the Kingdom operates by completely different physics than worldly power. Those who would guide others must first have undergone the descent into their own chaos, bringing Christ into their wounded places, allowing grace to do its slow work of integration. Otherwise they simply replicate empire with religious vocabulary.
The cosmic reality here is staggering. The entire created order is groaning, Paul tells the Romans, waiting for the revealing of the children of God (Romans 8:19). Your purity—your cleansed perception, your capacity to see grace already present—matters not just for your private spiritual state but for creation’s liberation. When you receive the child, receive the small act of kindness, receive the work of the Spirit in unexpected people, you participate in reality’s transfiguration. You become transparent to the glory that’s already present but hidden by corrupted seeing.
John’s prologue reaches its climax: *The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth* (John 1:14). Notice that seeing glory happens precisely through flesh, through dwelling among, through the particular and material. This is the pattern—incarnation, not evacuation. Athanasius writes that “He became what we are that He might make us what He is.” The Word doesn’t avoid contamination by entering our mess; He transforms it from within by assuming it completely.
Fifth Sunday of Advent brings us to the threshold. The preparation is nearly complete, not because you’ve perfected yourself but because you’ve begun to see differently. You’ve started to notice grace already present, already working, already transfiguring creation from within. The child in your midst—whether an actual child or the receptive, unjaded capacity within yourself—calls you beyond anxious boundary maintenance into risky receptivity.
Here’s what this demands practically: Stop using “discernment” as permission for chronic suspicion. Stop spiritual gatekeeping disguised as protecting truth. When you encounter someone doing genuine good outside your tribe, **resist the urge to qualify or diminish it**. Notice that urge—it’s the defiled mind protecting itself. When the mess of other people’s lives invades your comfortable order, resist the instinct to withdraw into purifying separation. Descend instead, bringing Christ’s presence into the chaos.
The pure heart sees God, Jesus teaches in the Beatitudes. Not someday, not eventually, but now—in the child placed in your midst, in the cup of water given to the least, in the unexpected places grace breaks through your defenses. John Chrysostom preaches that “nothing is as pleasing to God as living for the benefit of others,” because this mimics the kenotic pattern of divine love itself—the Father’s venturing outside absoluteness, the Son’s scattering as Word, the Spirit’s adaptation to our capacity.
Paul insists that *older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good* (Titus 2:3). This isn’t Victorian propriety but recognition that speech patterns reveal perception. Slander flows from defiled seeing—interpreting others’ actions in the worst light, obsessing over faults, savoring small scandals. The pure heart, the cleansed perception, interprets with charity, sees the image of God struggling to emerge even in the broken.
The promise John offers is stunning: *To all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God* (John 1:12-13). This is new birth, new nature, not improved old nature. You’re not being asked to try harder to see purely with defiled eyes. You’re invited into a transformation that recreates perception itself. From His fullness you receive grace upon grace—not to hoard but to extend, not to weaponize against the impure but to participate in the ongoing purification of all things.
The child in your midst right now—the call to receptivity, to descent, to cleansed perception—is Jesus Himself. To receive the child is to receive Him; to receive Him is to receive the One who sent Him. And somehow, mysteriously, *whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward* (Mark 9:41). The Kingdom operates by abundance logic: nothing is wasted, every small act of grace participates in the cosmic transfiguration, every cleansed perception becomes a window through which glory breaks into a defiled world.
As Advent draws toward its fulfillment, you stand at the threshold between two ways of seeing. The defiled perception that measures and judges and protects and excludes, or the pure heart that recognizes grace already present, already working, already making all things new. Gregory of Nazianzus declares that “that which He has not assumed He has not healed.” Christ assumed all of it—your corruption, your wounds, your defiled perception—not to destroy it from outside but to transform it from within by bearing it completely. Your purity, then, is not your achievement but your participation in His completed work, your permission for grace to cleanse the very organs of perception until you see what’s really there: a world groaning toward glory, grace piled upon grace, the Word still becoming flesh in every receptive heart.
The Greater Horizon 