My brothers and sisters, we have once again concluded the course of the Great Fast, and entered into this joyous and triumphant weekend which the Church interposes between the struggles of Great Lent and the sorrows of Holy Week. Yesterday we celebrated Lazarus Saturday, on which the Lord Jesus Christ resurrected Lazarus the Four Days Dead. This was a feat far greater even than His earlier resurrections of the son of the widow or the daughter of Jairus, for each of those had died but recently, while Lazarus himself was already buried and rotting in the tomb. The fact that Christ raised Lazarus was without doubt the greatest proof of His divine power which He had yet showed to the people of Israel; and indeed, this miracle led directly to the events of today’s feast, as we have just heard read from the Gospel of John: “Much people of the Jews therefore knew that he was there: and they came not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead” (John 12:9).

In fact, these two feasts — Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday — are uniquely conjoined to one another in the liturgical rites of the Church. The same festal troparion is shared by both feasts. Yesterday on Lazarus Saturday, the resurrectional service of Sunday was sung in advance: the resurrectional Evlogetaria and “Having beheld the resurrection of Christ” were sung during Matins, and the Sunday dismissal was likewise given at the conclusion of yesterday’s Saturday Divine Liturgy. Because although Lazarus himself was the one who was raised from the dead, nevertheless it was as Christ said: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25). The resurrection of Lazarus was the beginning of the resurrection of Christ, and so the Church begins already to sing the Sunday resurrectional service on Lazarus Saturday. The closest parallel to this unique liturgical phenomenon of which I can think is Bright Week itself, during which each day is considered to be a part of the one eternal and Eighth Day of Pascha.

It seems to me that through these things, the Church is teaching us that we cannot rightly understand today’s feast of Palm Sunday without meditating deeply upon yesterday’s feast of Lazarus Saturday. There are, of course, nearly limitless layers of meaning and spiritual knowledge contained within both these feasts. But for now, let us focus on only a few brief words from the account of these holy days written in the Gospel of John. In my opinion, these few brief words are the most poignant in the whole of the Gospels: “come and see.”

This short phrase appears only three times in the Gospel of John. Twice it occurs in the very first chapter: first when the disciples ask Christ: “where dwellest thou?” (John 1:38), and afterward when Nathanael asks Philip: “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” and Philip replies in turn: “come and see” (John 1:46).

With what blessed simplicity does this phrase call forth faith, and hope, and love toward the Lord Jesus Christ! God Himself calls out with these words to each one of us, through His Son and through His Son’s holy apostles: “come and see.” If any of our hearts yearn for truth and goodness, for meaning and beauty, for peace and mercy and love, then all we need do is to “come and see” all of these things and more shining in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ.

But there is a third time that the Gospel of John contains the words “come and see.” We heard these words in yesterday’s Gospel reading as Mary and Martha and the Jews mourned over Lazarus, the friend of Christ already four days dead, and Christ asked where the dead man lay: “Lord, come and see” (John 11:34). When God speaks these words to men, He speaks of peace and joy and life unending. But when man speaks these words to God, he speaks only of the misery and decay and death which our innumerable sins have brought upon both ourselves and the whole of God’s creation. “Come and see.” Small wonder, then, that the third and final repetition of these words was followed one of the most famous verses in all of Scripture: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35).

Yet Jesus did come, and He did see, and He there wrought a miracle more glorious than any in all the history of the world until that time. He proved in very truth the words He had just spoken to Martha: “Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?” (John 11:40). And so even the tragic inversion of those uniquely poignant words, “come and see,” is transfigured into unspeakable joy by our Lord Jesus Christ, Who alone is the resurrection and the life.

In the Gospel of John, there is no further repetition of the words “come and see.” But I think that the Church Herself calls these words out to us all once again on today’s feast of the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem, on the eve of Holy Week. Come and see: Christ enters triumphant into the Holy City, the King of Israel, the Conqueror of Death, the Son of the Living God. Yet the King of Glory is arrayed not in the royal purple, but in the vesture of poverty; He arrives not in pomp and glory, but riding on a lowly donkey borrowed from a local villager. And though the gathered throngs shout “Hosanna” and hail Him as their king, nevertheless He knows all too well that in a few short days, those same crowds will cry out bitterly renouncing Him and demanding His crucifixion.

“Come and see.” Come and see not only the humility of Christ, but also the humility to which He calls each one of us. Come and see not only the suffering of Christ, but also the suffering which unavoidably awaits every single person who claims the name of “Christian.” Come and see not only the Cross of Christ, but also the crosses which we ourselves must take up for His sake. Come and see not only the love of Christ, but also the infinite, self-emptying, divine love which can utterly suffuse the lives even of such sinners as you and me — the love which alone can make us gods by grace. Come and see not only the resurrection of Christ, but also the resurrection which He has prepared for us and for all His children, even from “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).

“Come and see.” These few simple words are the only map we need to find the road to salvation and life eternal in the Lord Jesus Christ. So on this great and glorious feast day, throughout this Holy Week, and especially on the Paschal Day itself, let us resolve above all else to heed this call from Christ in His Holy Gospel, and let us become obedient to the exhortation of St. Paul to

lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and… run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Heb. 12:1-2)

For our Lord Himself has promised: “where I am, there shall also my servant be” (John 12:26). Amen.

Today is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son — one of the most beloved days of the entire Church year (especially by us monastics). It is easy to understand why it is so beloved. Today is the day of repentance par excellence, upon which the entire Gospel is founded: “Repent, for the Kingdom is at hand” (Matt. 4:17). And it is a day which helps us to understand repentance as it truly is: not as some dismal embrace of guilt, shame, and self-loathing, nor as some unpleasant but still necessary duty imposed upon us by a strict and legalistic deity, but rather as freedom from eternal bondage and misery, escape from the “far country” of a meaningless life (and an equally meaningless death), and above all, the unfathomable gift of our Heavenly Father’s unconditionally loving embrace — no matter who we are, no matter what we have done, and no matter how greatly we have squandered all that His love has given us before.

As Orthodox Christians, we likely know all these things in our minds. But on this Sunday, we must ask ourselves if they have truly penetrated into our hearts, and into our lives. We must ask ourselves if we look upon the upcoming season of Great Lent as that which it truly is: the opportunity to at long last come home. We must ask ourselves how we see the Father’s House: as the place of toil and drudgery which the Prodigal Son saw when he demanded his inheritance and fled to the far country, or as the place of abundance which he began again to desire after long experience of the utter emptiness of his own passions, or as the place of superabundant divine grace which he finally began to comprehend as the Father poured out upon him all of His love — despite all of his unworthiness.

But beyond these things, there is another lesson for us in today’s Gospel passage about the true meaning of repentance. It is a lesson which we likewise might understand on a rational level, but which — due perhaps in part to the deeply-ingrained individualism of the modern world — might nevertheless remain unlearned in the depths of our own hearts. And that lesson is the profoundly communal nature of repentance.

Often we might have the tendency to think of both our sins and our repentance as something fundamentally between us and God. And of course, in one sense this is true: the primary relationship in the Parable of the Prodigal Son is of course between the son and his Father. Yet we also cannot help but understand (at least when we consider it honestly) that our sins have a profound effect on those around us — even those sins which we commit in the “privacy” of our own hearts: as Christ said, “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already” (Matt. 5:28). And the same thing is true of our repentance: even if it seems to manifest itself only on an interior level, yet it cannot help but impact the lives of countless others. As St. Seraphim of Sarov said: “Acquire the Spirit of Peace, and a thousand souls around you will be saved.” How can the Spirit of Peace possibly be acquired, if not through repentance?

And as I said, today’s parable likewise contains within itself this great truth about repentance. For the parable does not end with the repentance of the Prodigal Son, nor even with his loving embrace by the Father. No, it ends with someone else: it ends with the elder son. Now, it might seem at first glance that the Prodigal Son’s repentance (or rather, its acceptance by the loving Father) was hardly something which benefited the elder son, who on the contrary was stirred up by it to wrath, indignation, self-pity, and resentment. Indeed, by the end of the parable it is the Prodigal Son who has entered into the ineffable joy of the Father’s House, while the elder son of his own will “would not go in” (Luke 15:28).

Yet let us listen closely to the parable, and understand that — even in such a state — the incomprehensible love of the Father remained just as unchanged toward the elder son in his pride as it had toward the prodigal son in his profligacy: “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine” (Luke 15:31). And in truth, we can even say that by the end of the parable the elder son was perhaps in a better state than he was at its beginning — thanks precisely to the repentance of his younger brother. Why so? Because it was not only the younger brother who discovered the true nature of the Father’s love when he returned from the far country — the elder brother discovered it too. And though he reacted to such love with anger, yet he was thereby given the opportunity to (perhaps for the very first time) encounter the poverty of his own heart, and to thereby understand that, despite all his years of apparently faithful service to the Father, he still remained a stranger to the depths of divine love.

The Holy Fathers tell us that the man who sees his sins is greater than the man who sees the angels. Likewise, they tell us that those who offend us are, in very truth, our greatest spiritual benefactors. This is because we cannot possibly repent of our sins until we see that they are there; and very often, we cannot see that they are there until our passions are stirred up by the offenses we take from others. We do not know the final fate of the elder son (or rather, the self-righteous hearers of the parable whom the elder son represents). We do not know whether he ultimately embraced his own repentance, set aside his anger and his pride, and entered into the eternal joy offered both to him and to all in the Father’s House. But we do know that he was given the opportunity — and that he was given that opportunity by nothing other than the repentance of his younger brother, the Prodigal Son.

How gloriously our God uses even our worst sins and mistakes to bring about healing — not only our own healing, but also that of those around us! How ineffable is the power of repentance, and how joyous are its saving fruits! Though we labor so briefly and offer so little, yet how richly does the Lord pour forth His grace and His love in return! Though the Prodigal squandered everything in the far country, though he did nothing at all to recompense the Father other than simply setting out upon the road back home, yet the Father killed for him the fatted calf, and put a robe on his back, shoes on his feet, and a ring on his finger. Moreover, He used that one small act of repentance to not only welcome the Prodigal Son back into His House, but also to thereby call the elder brother back home as well, who — under the guise of an external obedience — had long and secretly been wandering in his own “far country” of self-righteous pride and poverty of heart.

My brothers and sisters, by the grace of God our own meager repentance can likewise reach far beyond our own hearts and lives, co-working with the Father to bring salvation to “a thousand souls around us,” as St. Seraphim of Sarov said. Repentance is not something simply between us and God; if it is true repentance, it cannot do anything less than embrace all creation by active participation in the all-encompassing love of the Father.

I mentioned before the particular meaning of this feast for monastics. Of course, the monastic tonsure service itself begins with the beautiful hymn we heard sung during the canon at Vigil last night:

Make haste to open unto my Thy Fatherly embrace, for as the prodigal I have wasted all my life. In the never-failing wealth of Thy mercy, O Saviour, reject not mine heart in its poverty, for with compunction I cry to Thee: “O Father, I have sinned against heaven and before Thee.”

Likewise, the entire monastic life is nothing other than the living out of the mystery of this parable — which is to say, it is nothing other than an incarnation of the mystery of repentance. Therefore, the communal nature of repentance of which we have been speaking can also be discerned in the authentic monastic life. It is no accident that the monastic fathers have appointed the cenobitic rule of life to govern the formation of a monk: though we come to God alone, yet we find Him in brotherhood — as St. John the Theologian taught (cf. 1 John 4:20). And though the withdrawal of monastics into the wilderness (whether in a literal or a figurative sense) might appear selfish to those who do not understand its purpose, yet the multitudinous fruits born from the seeds of repentance sown in monasteries can in no way be denied. The vast reaches of the Russian land were brought to Christ in large part by the many monasteries founded in the wilderness, which drew to themselves countless men and women who were hungering and thirsting for God. The repentance of those monks and nuns was not in any way selfish, but on the contrary proved to be the foundation upon which the faith of the entire Russian nation was laid.

And truly, just as the Lord Himself promised (cf. Matt. 7:24-25), this foundation of repentance was able to endure even one of the greatest storms imaginable: the persecution of the Russian Church by the God-hating Bolsheviks, which slaughtered more Christians than any other in the entire history of the world. How did Christianity survive such a tremendous outpouring of demonic savagery and hate? After all, many believe that with the murder of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas, the prophecy of St. Paul was fulfilled: “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way” (2 Thess. 2:7). St. John Chrysostom taught that “he who now restrains” referred to power of the Roman Empire, which many likewise believe came to its final end when the Third Rome of Imperial Russia fell to the forces of revolution. But regardless of whether one believes this interpretation to be true, it cannot be denied that the resurrection of the Russian Church and nation was an extraordinary miracle, which hardly anyone expected. How was such a resurrection accomplished? By the grace of God, of course — but the grace of God unquestionably worked through the foundation of repentance and faithfulness laid down by the Holy New-Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, whom we also celebrate this day.

Many of these men were already giants of faith and sanctity by the time the Bolsheviks arose to make them martyrs. But others were simple sinners and prodigals, who for much of their lives had squandered God’s gifts of grace just as surely as had the Prodigal Son in today’s parable. I want to read a brief account of a few such men, which in my opinion is among the most moving stories in Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov)’s wonderful book Everyday Saints:

SOMEWHERE IN THE depths of Russia before the Revolution there was a monastery that had a bad reputation in the neighborhood. It was said that its monks were all idlers and drunkards. During the Civil War the Bolsheviks arrived in the town that was closest to the monastery. They gathered together its inhabitants in the market square, and then they dragged the monastery’s monks out in a convoy.

The commissar loudly yelled at the people as he pointed to those men in black: “Citizens! Townsfolk! You know these drunkards, gluttons, and idlers better than I do! Now their power has come to an end. But so that you will understand more fully how these vagabonds have fooled the workers and peasants for centuries, we will throw their cross and their Scriptures into the dust before them. Now, before your very eyes, you will see how each of them will stamp upon these tools of deceit and enslavement of the people! And then we will let them go, and let the four winds scatter them!”

The crowd roared. And as the people cheered, up walked the monastery’s abbot, a stout man with a meaty face and nose all red from drinking. And he said as he turned to his fellow monks: “Well, my brothers, we have lived like pigs, but let us at least die like Christians!”

And not a single one of those monks budged. That very day all their heads were chopped off by the sabers of the Bolsheviks.

My brothers and sisters, in this life we might never fully comprehend how much every single one of us owes to the repentance of such prodigal sons as these. Nevertheless, it is solely on account of the repentance of sinners that this world continues to exist at all. Truly, the grace of God works in mysterious ways.

So as we approach the gates of repentance which will be opened to us at the beginning of the Great Fast, let us always remember that we do not set out upon the path to the Kingdom of God on our own. Let us always keep in mind that our repentance cannot in any way be something private, individual, or self-centered. We are not called to repentance only for our own sakes, nor even only for God’s sake: we are each of us called to repent (if I may dare to use these words) “in behalf of all, and for all.”

May God help all of us to do this. May He help all of us to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (Heb. 12:1), so that the High-Priestly Prayer of Christ might truly find its fulfillment in every single one of our lives — which is to say, in all our lives together:

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me. John 17:21-23

Amen.

Christ is born!

Dear brothers and sisters, we have reached once again the celebration of the Nativity according to the Flesh of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. For us Orthodox Christians, it is of course one of the greatest feasts of the entire Church year. In our secular Western culture, it is one of the few Christian feasts which has survived at all (and for many Protestants, Christmas is often treated as far more important than Easter itself, which sadly has grown more and more neglected by them). This is all the more remarkable when one considers not only the utter obscurity in which this feast originated (“Thou wast born secretly in a cave,” as the Church sang yesterday), but also the many (and ofttimes violent) attempts to eradicate the celebration of Christ’s Nativity throughout history. Puritans in England, Pilgrims in America, Jacobins in France, Bolsheviks in Russia, and Maoists in China all made the celebration of Christmas illegal. Yet without exception, their efforts failed; even the all-consuming tides of modern secularism have thus far proved unable to sweep away our remembrance of this great and glorious day.

Why is that this particular feast has resisted such concerted efforts to destroy it? I think that mere cultural memory cannot entirely explain it; after all, Whitsun was once one of the three great festivals of the Christian year during medieval times, whereas today most Americans one meets on the street would likely be hard pressed to so much as identify the event it commemorates (even if one refers to it by the less British name of Pentecost). On the other hand, even the most spiritually apathetic atheist might have little trouble telling you that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Why?

The answer, it seems to me, is that despite all our carelessness, despite all our worldliness, despite all the demonic efforts throughout history to eradicate the remembrance of this day from among men, nevertheless there remains in all of us at least some small — but indelible — sense of the supreme and eternal significance of this day. Indeed, how could it possibly be otherwise? As St. Justin Popovic wrote:

God’s incarnation is the greatest upheaval and the most providential event, both on Earth and in Heaven, for the miracle of miracles has happened. If up until then the creation of the world from nothing was the greatest miracle, the incarnation of God in man has without a doubt surpassed it in its miraculousness. If at the creation of the world the words of God were clothed in matter, then at the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ God has clothed Himself in a body, in matter, in flesh. Therefore the incarnation of God became providential throughout the whole creation—for every individual, for every being, for every creature.

Listen carefully to what he said: “for every being, for every creature.” God not only clothed Himself in humanity; He also clothed Himself in matter. As St. John of Damascus would later write in his Dialectica: “since the divinity has been united to our nature, as a kind of life-giving and saving medicine, our nature has been glorified and its very elements changed into incorruption.” And we can see this great truth reflected in the fact that today’s feast has historically been so intimately connected with the Feast of Theophany, when the Incarnate Christ first revealed Himself to the people precisely by sanctifying the nature of water. Truly, as the Katavasion of the 9th Ode of the Great Canon says: “The birth of God makes all creation new.”

Thus, today the God-Man has become incarnate not for the sake of man alone, but also for the sake of the whole creation; the Second Adam has come to fulfill the holy obedience from which the First Adam fell, uniting in Himself all things in heaven and on earth, “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). St. Maximus the Confessor explains this great mystery in his 7th Ambiguum, stating that it is God’s good pleasure that

the creator of all things might be received as one, coming to reside through humanity in all beings proportionally, and that all things, separated from each other according to nature, might come to unity by converging around the one nature of man.

And this is why “the earnest expectation of [creation] waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God” (Rom. 8:19): because on that day, all creation will — according to its proper measure — participate through us in God.

My brothers and sisters, what a supremely lofty calling and what absolutely incomprehensible grace has been bestowed upon us this day by our all-compassionate God! Our salvation is so much more than merely an escape from punishment, or even from death itself. It is so much more, even, than to dwell in paradise for all eternity. Our salvation is nothing less than to participate in the divine life of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. Not only has He become incarnate on this day, but He also invited each of us sinners to share fully with Him in His incarnation, in this unparalleled theanthropic miracle which has transfigured all creation. How? Quite simply, by participation in the life of the Church. As St. Hilarion Troitsky writes: “The Church is a direct continuation of the Incarnation, as a building can be called the continuation of its foundation.”

And so we must here make our descent from the heights of heavenly mysteries to the simple practice of everyday Christian life — or rather, we must begin with the simple practice of everyday Christian life, in order to ascend thence to the heights of heaven. After all, these sublime truths and resplendent pearls of theology of which we have been speaking do not make a very satisfactory answer to my original question: why does the remembrance of Christmas still endure so strongly even in our unbelieving world?

To answer that question — and to make a beginning ourselves in the acquisition of the beautiful pearls of theology of which we have just spoken — we need simply call to mind the passage from the Gospel of Matthew which we have heard repeatedly read in church since yesterday morning:

Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. (Matt. 1:22-23)

“God with us.” This, my brothers and sisters, is the heart of Christmas, and of all Christianity. And this utterly profound yet exceedingly simple truth is something which every single one of us can understand — and which our world (despite its strongest efforts) cannot possibly forget: “God is with us, understand, O ye nations!”

On this day, God has entered into His creation and filled all things with Himself, so that wherever we might turn and whatever might befall us, God is with us. And so have the words of the Psalmist found their fulfillment on this day:

If I go up into heaven, Thou art there; if I go down into hades, Thou art present there.
If I take up my wings towards the dawn, and make mine abode in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there shall Thy hand guide me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.
And I said: Surely darkness will tread me down, and the night shall be turned into light in my delight.
For darkness will not be darkness with Thee, and night shall be bright as the day; as is the darkness thereof, even so shall the light thereof be.
For Thou has possessed my reins; O Lord, Thou hast holpen me from my mother’s womb.
I will confess Thee, for awesomely art Thou wondrous; marvellous are Thy works, and my soul knoweth it right well. (Psalm 138)

God is with us. God is with us, and — in the words of St. Basil the Great — “all things has He given unto us.” But of all the things He has given us, the most terrible without question is our freedom. God is with us — but we ourselves must decide whether we want to be with Him.

What kind of answer do the actions of our own lives make? All too often, it is an answer which we would be ashamed to hear spoken aloud by our lips. Yet on this day of all days, we can at least take heart that humankind has once given to God a fitting answer to His divine invitation:

What shall we offer Thee, O Christ,
Inasmuch as thou hast appeared on earth as a Man for our sake?
All creation, fashioned by Thee, doth offer Thee thanksgiving.
The angels offer hymnody, the heavens a star.
The magi offer gifts; the shepherds their wonder;
The earth a cave; the wilderness a manger;
And we - the Virgin Mother. (Sticheron for Vespers on the Eve of the Nativity of Christ)

Yet at the same time, as St. Philaret of Moscow writes:

Look at Her example, a soul striving for union with God, and see in the mirror of Her perfection your duty. The Lord is a jealous God. When He says to man with a voice of fatherly kindness: Son, give Me thy heart, His righteous jealousy is commanding, in a spiritual as well as a moral sense: Do not commit adultery. He Who gave us a heart is not satisfied with a larger or smaller portion of it: it must all belong to the Master of everything. He does not consider any kind of love to be worthy of Himself which is not based on love of Him. Every enjoyment which we passionately seek for ourselves, every thought directed toward creation, every distraction, is a departure from Him.

The Holy Fathers tell us that there is only one thing in the entire world which truly belongs to man, and therefore only this one thing which we are truly able to offer God: our freedom. Let us therefore resolve, on this holy day of the Nativity of Christ, to strive with all our might to offer Him this one gift in return for all that He Himself has given to us. God is with us; let us therefore never depart from Him to run after the vain and fleeting things of this life, but rather let us remain with Him at all times and in all things.

And to remain with Christ on Christmas Day means to remain with Him in lowliness, in silence, in humility, and in poverty. He was born in a cave and lay in a manger, far from the praise of men and completely bereft of all the good things of this life. Let us remember that it was only to poor and humble shepherds that the angels appeared, summoning them to come behold the face of Christ. Let us, therefore, strive to be like them, and to become obedient to the words of the Divine Liturgy which we will hear once again only a few short minutes from now: “Let us now lay aside all earthly cares, that we may receive the King of All, Who comes invisibly upborne by the angelic host. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

Let us be with God in silence. Let us be with Him in prayer. Let us be with Him in humility, and in mercy, and — above all — in self-emptying and self-sacrificial love. Let us seize — with gratitude and with longing — upon every opportunity for each of things which the all-wise providence of God offers us in our lives. Because in all of these things, He is offering us nothing less than Himself.

God is with us; let us, from this day forth, choose always to be with Him. Amen.

Christ is Born!

Today we celebrate the feast of the Holy Great-Martyr, Trophy-Bearer, and Wonderworker George. St. George is among the most beloved saints in the world — not only among the Orthodox, but also among the Catholics, and sometimes even among those who do not count themselves as Christians. Why is it that St. George stands out so strongly to so many people, even among the innumerable multitude of the saints and the heavenly hosts?

Of course, it is impossible to give a complete answer to such a question in mere words, especially in such a short time as I have to speak to you today. To truly understand the love of our Orthodox people for St. George, it is necessary to ourselves come to know and to love St. George — and ultimately, that process can only happen by entering into communion with St. George in our inner life of prayer. But to help us perhaps understand a little better who he is — even if only on a rational level — I want to read a brief passage from Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov)’s wonderful book, Everyday Saints, wherein he recounts a conversation he and his friends were having about the spiritual life:

Once a conversation started about whether there were any people in this world whom the Lord does not love. Everyone amiably hastened to give the correct and expected answer that of course “the Lord loves everyone.” But Father Raphael suddenly said: “No, that isn’t quite true. The Lord does not love cowards!”

This is a startling thing to hear, and perhaps it is not exactly true, because of course God does indeed love all of us despite our sins. Nevertheless, I think there is indeed something profoundly important about the point Fr. Raphael was trying to make, for as the Lord Himself said in the Holy Gospels: “whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father’s, and of the holy angels” (Luke 9:26).

And I think that perhaps this is a large part of the reason why the Lord Himself, as well as so many of His people, love St. George so profoundly: because of the greatness of his courage. Not only did he boldly and courageously confess Christ before the persecutor, but he did so completely voluntarily. He could have kept his faith to himself, resolving simply not to betray Christ if someone came to put him to the question. But no: St. George — although he was a wealthy man and a favorite of the emperor — immediately gave up everything which we consider good in this life, and went before the most powerful people in the world, ready to lay down his life in order to preach to them the Gospel. They asked him why he would want to throw away all the good things which he had, and the saint answered: “Nothing in this inconstant life can weaken my resolve to serve God.”

There are a few things about the courage of St. George which I would like to speak briefly about. I will begin by saying that there were two main ways in which his courage expressed itself. The first is the way in which we often think about the courage of the martyrs: in enduring torture and affliction. Without any question, the sufferings which St. George endured for Christ were absolutely incredible. But the saint was also tempted to deny Christ by exactly the opposite means: by the promise of earthly pleasure, and power, and praise. In fact, the Emperor Diocletian even offered to allow St. George to rule over the entire empire itself, second only to him — if only he would deny Christ, and sacrifice to the pagan gods.

So too, my dear brothers and sisters, are both types of courage required of each of us in our own Christian lives. We must be ready and willing not only to endure in a Christian manner the suffering and sorrow which are absolutely inevitable in this broken and sinful world, but we must also be ready to let go even of the good things which it contains — if those good things begin separate us from God. We must all have the courage of our faith: faith that in the end God will comfort every sorrow and heal every hurt, but also the faith there is absolutely no comparison between any sacrifice we could possibly make — any good thing we could possibly give up — and the incomprehensible blessings which God desires with all His heart to give to us in their place. For truly, “as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (I Cor. 2:9).

And this brings us to the final thing I wish to say about the courage of St. George: that his courage was ultimately nothing other than an expression of his love. Not only his love for Christ, but even his love for the persecutors of Christ, for whose sake St. George made his witness, freely giving up everything in his life so that those pagan tyrants might to come to faith in the Savior. When we allow ourselves to act in a cowardly manner concerning our faith, we are not only choosing to love this world more than Christ and more than the Kingdom of God, but we are also choosing to love ourselves more than the people around us. The Life of St. George tells us that even the wife of Diocletian was moved to the point of glorying Christ because of the witness which the saint made. If we, too, acted in a like manner, how many of even the most hardened hearts around us might not be moved to saving repentance, through the grace of the Most-Holy Spirit which would be allowed to work through us?

My brothers and sisters, it is a good thing the praise the saints with our lips, but it is a far better thing to imitate them with our lives. Of course, all of us sinners are very far from the sanctity of St. George. But on this holy feast day, let us all make a firm resolution to imitate just a little more closely his faith, his courage, and his love. May God help all of us to do this, through the prayers of the Holy Great-Martyr, Trophy-bearer, and Wonderworker George. Amen!

At first glance, the Gospel passage appointed for this Sunday appears to be about two unrelated events during the earthly ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ: the healing of two blind men, and the casting out of a demon from a dumb man. Yet the Church in Her wisdom has joined these two events together in order to draw out a deeper meaning hidden beneath the surface of today’s Gospel reading.

Both of these miracles are, of course, powerful manifestations of the presence of God and His grace. Although we ourselves have perhaps heard these stories so many times that they now seem almost prosaic, we would do well to stir up within ourselves the wonder of the multitudes who first witnessed these astonishing events, and who “marveled, saying, It was never so seen in Israel” (Matt. 9:33).

But perhaps we have the opposite difficulty: not taking the miracles of God for granted, but rather wondering why we do not seem to witness such miracles ourselves. Indeed, many Christians today are tempted by the thought: “Why does God these days so often seem to be silent? Why does He not speak, why does He not reveal Himself with miracles, signs, and wonders, as He did in the times of the Holy Scriptures, as He did in the lives of the saints? If only I could see such signs for myself, if only I could hear Him speak to me directly and openly, then I could really believe, then my faith could really come to life.” Such a thought can at times be very convincing. And it is especially seductive because it allows us to secretly believe that it is God — rather than we ourselves — who is to blame for the weakness of our faith.

But of course, this thought is really nonsense. It is nonsense that has been hammered into our heads all our lives: that truth is fundamentally something that we see with our eyes, something that can be measured and tested and proved. We have been taught to believe that belief without evidence is merely wishful thinking, a crutch of cowardly and ignorant men. Yet we see in today’s Gospel passage that evidence, in the final analysis, really has very little to do with it. The two blind men had no evidence and no proof — at best, all they had was hearsay. They had never seen a single miracle performed by Christ – indeed, not only had they never even seen Christ at all, but they were physically incapable of seeing Him to begin with! And, my dear brothers and sisters, we must understand that all of us are in truth just like these blind men. We do not possess the faculties to prove the truth to ourselves; only faith can allow us to see. We must always remember that the blind men’s eyes were opened because they believed; they did not believe because their eyes were opened. It was their faith that opened them to the evidence, not the evidence that opened them to faith.

This lesson is taught to us even more powerfully by the second event in today’s Gospel passage. A man dumb and possessed by a devil was brought to Christ, Who cast out the devil and opened the mouth of the man who had been mute. The multitudes marveled at this — but the Pharisees accused Christ of “[casting] out devils through the prince of the devils” (Matt. 9:34). The simple and unlearned multitudes glorified God, but those who styled themselves as wise and pious spewed out foolish and blasphemous drivel. Let us take heed to this: both were shown precisely the same evidence, both were witnesses to exactly the same event — and yet their actions revealed that they were living in two completely different worlds: the first in the world of God, and the second in the world of the devil.

Clearly, the evidence alone was not enough to determine how each one believed: both “theories” alike were able to give an account of the event which had just transpired before their very eyes. So what ultimately separated the believing multitudes from the stony-hearted Pharisees? What led some to see a glorious miracle, and others to dismiss it with the vilest of blasphemies? If the difference was not in the objective evidence, then the difference must rather have been hidden somewhere within each person’s heart.

I heard a story once, about a Protestant minister who came to another clergyman and told him that he was having a crisis of faith. This friend tried to help him, to reason with him, to give an answer to his spiritual doubts and perplexities. But shortly thereafter, he found out from the minister’s wife that the minister was having an affair with another woman. At that moment he realized that all his words to the minister had been totally in vain. The man’s crisis of faith was not rooted in theology; it was rooted in his unrepented sin.

The Holy Fathers teach us that a heart darkened by sin and blinded by passion is simply incapable of really seeing the truth. The Lord Himself says the same: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” And this is precisely why the evangelical commandments — and all the strictures of the ascetic life — are not arbitrary demands being made upon us. They are not artificial actions designed merely to somehow prove our love for God. No, the plain truth is that they are the medicines by which Christ acts to cure our illnesses. They are manifestations of the healing power of God that alone can give us spiritual sight. They cast out the demons who blind our eyes and bind our tongues. Quite simply, they allow us to behold the Lord Jesus Christ. As St. Isaac the Syrian says: “The commandments of God are greater than all the treasures of the world. And he who acquires the commandments finds God in them.”

And so if we do not choose to obey the commandments of Christ, if we do not choose to put our faith in Him regardless of whether we can see Him or not, then we wait in vain for evidence, and we likewise long for miracles in vain. The miracles have always been all around us. The only question is whether we are willing to open our eyes in faith, and see.

Let us emulate the blind men, and call out to the Lord for mercy. Let us imitate the multitudes, and give praise to God from hearts filled with gratitude and love. But if our hearts are hardened, and the eyes of our mind are darkened by doubt, then let us simply and immediately cry out with tears like the man in the Gospel: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). And there is absolutely no doubt that the Lord will hearken unto our cry.

My brothers and sisters, following the Great Feast of Pentecost we have spent the past three Sundays celebrating the saints of our Holy Church: first we kept the feast of All Saints who have shown forth throughout all the world, then afterward we honored our spiritual forefathers on the Sunday of All Saints of Russia, and finally last week we celebrated the beloved saints of our own American land. And today, the Holy Church continues this pattern of offering us a living example of the humility and faith and love that all of us as Christians are striving to make our own, through the grace of the All-Holy Spirit. Yet today, this example comes to us from a most unexpected source: not from the ranks of the clergy or the monastics, nor from those of the martyrs or the ascetics, but from the ranks of the armies of pagan Rome — even as those very armies were occupying and oppressing God’s own chosen nation.

Truly, as the Scriptures tell us: “the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). We should all meditate deeply on the Lord’s words as He marveled at this pagan Roman soldier in today’s Gospel: “Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel” (Matt. 8:10). Often we might be tempted to regard our outward status as Orthodox Christians — or even as monks or as priests — as evidence of some sort of spiritual superiority over those who seem to be less religious than us. But, my brothers and sisters, such an attitude is nothing but Phariseeism; if even a shadow of such a thought darkens our heart, then truly we stand in danger of everlasting condemnation, according to the word of Christ which we have just heard: “the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12).

On the contrary, we must always remember that every single pagan unbeliever we meet is potentially just like the centurion in today’s Gospel passage: needing only a single encounter with Christ for their faith to be awakened — a faith perhaps far stronger and more profound than that to which we ourselves have as yet attained. For truly this centurion’s faith was incredible, causing the Savior Himself to marvel at it. Even the disciples continued to be frequently overcome by doubt, though they had witnessed the divine power of the Lord Jesus Christ made manifest countless times already. Yet this centurion, who had never even met Christ before, immediately had a boundless and implacable faith that no miracle could possibly be beyond His power, and no sickness could possibly be beyond His cure — without even any need for His physical presence.

How was such firm and profound faith possible for a commander of the armies of pagan Rome? How did he attain to that which remained far out of the reach for even the most pious and devout among the children of Israel? The Scriptures tell us nothing of what brought this man to the shores of the Sea of Galilee that day two thousand years ago. They tell us nothing of the paths taken by his pagan heart before he fell down at the feet of the Savior and begged for his servant’s life. And truly, we do not need to know that about which the Scriptures have kept silent, for these few brief verses already tell us absolutely everything that we need to know. They tell us how God had begun to mysteriously prepare the centurion for the day when he would finally meet and place his faith in the Lord.

What was it about the centurion’s heart that made it possible for such “great faith” (Matt. 8:10) to dwell in him? Above all else, it was his obedience, his humility, and his love. It was precisely obedience that taught the centurion that he could have total faith in the power of the Son of God: “I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it” (Matt. 8:9). Yet unlike so many others, his authority did not puff the centurion up with pride: note how careful he was to say that he was a man “under authority,” rather than possessing authority. He knew and acknowledged that he was merely a steward of his office, and that others rendered obedience unto him not for his own sake, but for the sake of Caesar whom he served. And his astonishing humility ran even deeper: this commander of the glorious armies of Rome did not consider it beneath him to beg one of his own subjects — and a penniless preacher at that — to grant him his request. And what was this request? He was not begging anything for himself, nor even for his own wife or children or friends. No, he was begging for the life of his servant. Truly, there can be no explanation for a pagan Roman behaving in such a manner other than the sincerity and the profundity of his love.

Ultimately, it was his love that brought the centurion to Christ. It was his humility that enabled him to fall down before Him with a pure heart. And it was his obedience that taught him how to put his absolute faith in the mercy and the power of the Son of God.

And he did all of this as a pagan. How much more, then, ought we — who have been given the grace of the All-Holy Spirit, to “be filled with all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:19) — strive with all our might to live our lives with just such greatness of faith, founded on just such obedience and humility and love. May God grant us all to imitate the example of this centurion with our whole hearts, to walk — with patience and with hope — the path to faith taught to us in today’s Gospel passage, so that we might one day be accounted worthy to be numbered among those who will “sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 8:11). Amen.

Today is the Sunday of the Dread Judgment, on which we hear the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats read from the Holy Gospel. In just one short week we will enter once again through the gates of repentance, and begin once more the salvific struggle of the Great and Holy Fast. Fr. Seraphim (Rose) — of blessed memory — once said the following profound words:

Our Christianity is a religion which tells us about what we are going to be doing in eternal life. It is to prepare us for something eternal, not of this world. If we think only about this world, our horizon is very limited, and we don’t know what’s after death, where we came from, where we’re going, what’s the purpose of life. When we talk about the beginning of things, or the end of things, we find out what our whole life is about.

Genesis, Creation, and Early Man

It is precisely in this spirit that the Holy Church commands us, on this penultimate Sunday before Great Lent, to bring to mind and meditate upon the Last Judgment. This Dread Judgment will occur at the end of time itself, and at that fearful hour each of us will stand before Christ and be called to account not only for our thoughts and our deeds, but even for “every idle word” as He Himself has said (Matt. 12:36). Likewise, although we commonly call next Sunday “Forgiveness Sunday,” it is perhaps more properly called “The Sunday of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.” Therefore on these final two Sunday before Great Lent, the Holy Church leads us to meditate on the beginning and end of this world — so that we might truly “find out what our whole life is about,” as Fr. Seraphim (Rose) said: “something eternal, not of this world.” It is only by setting our eyes on Christ and on eternity that our coming Lenten struggles will have any meaning or purpose.

But perhaps it might seem to us that this particular Sunday — the Sunday of the Dread Judgment — is somewhat out of keeping with the three that have gone before. On Zacchaeus Sunday, we saw the mercy of Christ as He deigned to dine with one of the worst traitors and apostates in Israel. On the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, we saw the mercy of Christ as He forgave a lifetime of sins in exchange for one simple prayer. On the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, we saw the mercy of God as the Father joyfully embraced the same son who had wasted everything he had ever been given in his entire life. But today, on the Sunday of the Dread Judgment, we instead see Christ pronouncing the awful words: “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41). We might be tempted to wonder: where is the mercy of Christ? Where is the love of God?

If the Sunday of the Dread Judgment seems harsh and merciless and unloving to us — if it seems perhaps to even be speaking of some other God entirely — then it might be (at least in part) because we are misunderstanding the meaning of the word “judgment.” “God the Judge” is not — as we might often unconsciously assume — simply another way of saying “God the Accuser” or “God the Punisher” or “God the Condemner.” Far from it! A judge — quite simply, and above all else — is someone who speaks the truth. Therefore, the purpose of the Dread Judgment at the end of time itself will be for us to finally learn the truth about our own hearts — a truth that only God can possibly reveal.

Perhaps it seems to us that we already (more or less) know the truth about ourselves, and that this sort of judgment is therefore not such a great thing. But let us mark it well: in today’s Gospel reading, everyone who heard the judgment of God on their lives was surprised. The truth is that we all know far less about ourselves than we might think. St. Paul himself — who “was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (II Cor. 12:4) — said:

I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing by myself… He that judgeth me is the Lord. Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, Who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts.

I Cor. 4:4-5

Yet to leave all judgment unto God does not at all mean that we are therefore to be heedless toward our own souls. On the contrary! On today of all days, we must show the utmost care to obey the exhortation of the Apostle Peter: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (I Pet. 5:8). Remember that the Holy Fathers tell us that the man who sees his sins is greater than the man who sees the angels. And so on each and every day of our lives, we should fall down before God and beg Him to give us one of the greatest of His gifts: to give us a foretaste of the Dread Judgment, to show us our sins.

At the monastery, it is not an uncommon occurrence for the brethren to become discouraged, thinking that they are becoming worse as monastics instead of better. Of course there is nothing magical about entering a monastery, and it is indeed perfectly possible to grow spiritually sicker there instead of becoming more healthy. But oftentimes this is not what is actually happening. Instead, these brethren are simply starting to really see themselves for the first time, being no longer able to hide and distract themselves from the state of their own hearts by means of worldly occupations and diversions and cares. They think they are getting worse, but in fact they are being healed: because there can be no healing without repentance, and there can be no repentance until God helps us to see our own sins.

This is the great and holy gift which the Church is giving us on this Sunday — a Sunday that is therefore no less a revelation of the mercy of God than the three which came before. The Lord has told us everything in advance, calling out to us time and time again: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matt. 4:17). Therefore it is as Met. Tikhon (Shevkunov) wrote in his wonderful book Everyday Saints:

…the human soul after death, once it is separated from its body and presented to a new world, will no longer be able to blame someone else for not having been forewarned. It will not be possible to shout like a schoolchild: “We were never taught this! We were never assigned this!”

We were taught, and we were assigned this. And everything we needed to know was explained to us.

And so, as I said, this gift of divine knowledge — about this world and the world to come, about our own sinful hearts and the All-Merciful Christ our Savior — is given to us by the Holy Church on this Sunday. But it is not the only gift. I asked (rhetorically) before: “Where is the mercy of Christ? Where is the love of God?”

Over the past three Sundays, we have seen divine mercy and divine love shine forth in the person of Christ. But today — today, we see divine mercy and divine love shine forth in people. We see the fulfillment of the promise of theosis, deification, the mystical union of man with God. Let us listen again to the words of the Holy Gospel:

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me…. Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Matt. 25:34-36, 40

In this Gospel passage, we see Christ Himself in the mercy and love of the righteous, and we see Christ Himself in those to whom they show mercy and love; we see the eschatological fulfillment of the words of St. Paul: “Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11). For truly, at the end of all things there will be only one thing by which any of us will be judged: does Christ — with all of His mercy and all of His love — live in us (cf. Gal. 2:20), or not?

In this spirit, I will leave you with the following exhortation of St. Paul:

Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfectness. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him.

Col. 3:12-17

Through the prayers of our holy fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.

Today’s feast has many meanings, many aspects, and even many names. It is sometimes called the Meeting of the Lord, sometimes the Purification of the Virgin, sometimes the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, and finally — especially in the West — it is known as Candlemas: the Feast of the Light that shown upon St. Symeon, and which we commemorate by blessing candles on this day. This multiplicity of names and meanings reveals that today’s feast is situated at a crossroads between the Law and the Prophets, between the Old and the New Covenants of God with man. Today — for the first time in history — God Himself enters bodily into the Temple which man made for Him, carried in the arms of Her who is Herself the true Holy of Holies, the Tabernacle more spacious than the heavens. He enters not in a cloud of glory but in humble poverty, in meekness and lowliness fulfilling the Law which He Himself gave. The All-Holy Virgin enters to be purified, who alone among women is spotless and undefiled. The Righteous Symeon prophesies over Him who is both the giver and the fulfillment of all prophecies.

It is no accident that the Holy Church has ordained that this feast be celebrated very near the beginning of Great Lent, because this feast is also the first feast of the Resurrection. In this feast we are given a foretaste of the Lord’s Pascha, seeing — for the very first time — death no longer as an enemy to be feared, but rather as a doorway which opens unto the salvation of God, which was “prepared before the face of all people.” In this feast, the death of St. Symeon the God-Receiver has begun to be touched by the life of Christ. He lived on this earth for 360 years, miraculously preserved by the grace of God in order to behold the coming of the Anointed One; and though after meeting Christ he still descended into Sheol, the hymns of the Holy Church tell us that he preceded St. John the Forerunner in preaching the coming of salvation and life eternal to the souls imprisoned there.

This feast is also one especially monastic in its character. It is a Feast of the Lord, Whose life and words all monastics strive to imitate insofar as possible. It is a Feast of the Mother of God, the Heavenly Mother and Protectress of all monks and nuns. And it is a feast of the holy Elder Symeon and the Prophetess Anna, two saints who lived a life dedicated to prayer and fasting, continually abiding in the Temple and awaiting the coming of their Lord. But above all, for monastics this feast is the feast of the remembrance of death.

The remembrance of death — though it may seem morbid and joyless to those who love only the fleeting pleasures of this dying life — is shown today to be the only source of true joy, life, and happiness. The life of St. Symeon stands in such stark contrast to the modern world, which seeks hide and cover over — by every means possible — the looming reality of death. Those deluded by this world’s deceits imagine that long life is the highest possible good. We today are absolutely obsessed with this delusion and seek to prolong earthly life at any cost, inventing grotesque and humiliating medical techniques to add even a few days or weeks to a person’s life — days and weeks which are often filled with suffering and pain, unless numbed into oblivion by powerful narcotics.

St. Symeon lived on this earth for 360 years, and by the reasoning of our contemporaries such a lifespan is to be greatly envied. Yet what must it have actually been like for him? To see his family, his relatives, and his friends one by one grow old and die? To see his nation enslaved, his people humiliated; to see the slow decay of all those places which he had known and loved as a youth? To endure his own body as it grew ever more weak and feeble with each passing year? Truly, this vain and corruptible world holds no lasting pleasure or happiness. Man was indeed made for eternal life — but clearly he was not made for eternal life in this world.

Yet to recognize the vanity of this world and its pleasures is not enough. This knowledge is shared by the Hindus and Buddhists, and even by our contemporary existentialists and nihilists. St. Symeon’s remembrance of death was something far greater than the longing of Eastern mysticism to escape into oblivion, into a nothingness beyond the reach of all life’s suffering. St. Symeon’s remembrance of death was nothing other than an eager and joyful anticipation of the apocalypse — that is to say, the unveiling of Christ Himself in all His gladsome and glorious light.

For St. Symeon, for monastics, and for every Christian, the miracle of Christ’s Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection lies precisely in that He filled all things — even and especially death — with Himself. In the words of the Psalmist: “If I go up into heaven, Thou art there: if I descend into Hades, Thou art present there, if I take up my wings toward the dawn and make mine abode in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand guide me and Thy right hand shall hold me.” And so it turns out the prophecy that St. Symeon “should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ” (Luke 2:26) was in fact a double prophecy. It was a prophecy about St. Symeon, but it was also a prophecy about the life of every Christian: to see death and to behold Christ are now one and the same.

This prophecy ultimately led St. Symeon to depart this life in peace and gladsome joy — but only because he had lived all his life in the remembrance of the prophecy, and had shaped his entire life around it. By the time he met Christ, he had already died to everything transient and everything sinful — for St. Symeon, there was no longer anything left to live for except the light of Christ which finally shone on him in the Temple on this great and holy day. As it is written above the gates of a certain monastery: “If you die before you die, when you die, you shall not die.”

For although to see death and to behold Christ have now become one and the same, this truth is joyful only to those who love Christ; it is exceedingly bitter to those who do not. Resurrection will come at the last day to all men, but the Scriptures warn that only for some will it be a resurrection unto life, while for others it will be a resurrection unto damnation. And so we see once more why the Holy Church has placed this feast near to the beginning of the Great Fast. It is a feast of joy, life, light and resurrection… but it is a feast that can only be entered into through the gates of suffering, repentance, bright sorrow, and ultimately — death.

We all have a choice before us: will we willingly accept suffering and death for the sake of the love of God, and so behold those very things being transformed into joy and blessedness and life eternal? Or will we run and hide from suffering and death — only to find, at the end of all things, that we cannot run and hide any longer, and that having refused to meet Christ in them, we are left with suffering and death alone, forever stripped of Christ and of all meaning? To suffer and to die are inevitable. Our only choice is for what we will suffer, and to what we will die.

Through the prayers of the Holy Righteous Symeon the God-Receiver and the Holy Prophetess Anna, through the intercessions of the Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, and through the grace and mercy of the only Lover of Mankind, may we all be enlightened by the Gladsome Light of this holy feast, so that we may each make our choice wisely. Amen.

Today is one of the most glorious and awesome days of the entire Church year: the Theophany of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ. Today Christ — “born secretly in a cave” on the Nativity — now reveals Himself openly on the banks of the River Jordan. Not only does He reveal Himself, but for the first time in history the Holy Trinity itself “was made manifest,” as the troparion of today’s feast proclaims: “for the voice of the Father bore witness… and the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the certainty of the word.” In short, “the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations is made manifest” (Col. 1:26) on this great and luminous day.

But to whom, exactly, is this mystery made manifest? For indeed, when Christ humbled Himself under the hand of the Forerunner two thousand years ago, only a certain number of people were there to witness the self-revelation of the Trinity, while the vast majority of mankind remained totally unaware, still “in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Ps. 106:10). The divine self-revelation was not made to kings on their thrones, nor to the rich in their palaces, nor to priests in the Temple, nor to philosophers in their academies. On the contrary, as the troparion says: “To sinners and publicans has Thou revealed Thyself in the greatness of Thy mercy.” It was to ordinary peasants in the deserts of Judaea that the great mystery of the Trinity was first revealed. They were not chosen for their wisdom, nor their learning, nor their power, nor even for their righteousness. It seems to me that they were chosen instead for one simple reason: because they were willing to repent.

Indeed, it was for just such a purpose that St. John the Baptist was sent in advance of the coming of Christ, and of His self-revelation on this day: to call the people of God to repentance. Because without repentance, it is quite simply impossible to see God — even if He is standing right there in front of us, with the heavenly voice of His Father telling us out loud exactly Who He is. Indeed, Holy Scripture tells us that when the voice of God later spoke aloud again (just before the Crucifixion of Christ), only some standing there were able to understand, while others thought they heard the voice of an angel, and still others heard only the indistinct rumblings of thunder (cf. John 12:28-29). We cannot hear what we choose not to hear, and we cannot see that to which we willfully and stubbornly close our own eyes.

God calls out to all of us without exception, and offers freely to everyone the cleansing and illuminating waters of Holy Baptism which He Himself sanctified this day. But He forces no-one. He compels no-one. He gives to each and every one of us a choice: do we wish to behold Him, in all the fullness His divine glory… or do we wish instead to look away? Quite simply: are we willing to repent? Are we willing to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven which is now at hand (cf. Matt. 3:2)?

As Orthodox Christians, we know (though we often forget) that the true meaning of repentance (metanoia) is not simply to feel guilty, nor even to become virtuous. It means, rather, to turn our hearts toward God. Without this divine vision (theoria) of Christ, absolutely nothing else in our religious life has any meaning or worth whatsoever. As St. Seraphim of Sarov said, all of our Christian efforts

are the only means of acquiring the Holy Spirit of God. Mark my words, only good deeds done for Christ's sake brings us the fruits of the Holy Spirit. All that is not done for Christ's sake, even though it be good, brings neither reward in the future life nor the grace of God in this life.

Of course, as St. Seraphim affirmed our own cooperation with God’s grace remains truly “indispensable.” This is what we have just heard in the Epistle lesson appointed for this feast:

…the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; Who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

Titus 2:11-13

Why is it that we must “[deny] ungodliness and worldly lusts” and “live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world”? So that God will finally be able to stand to look at us? No: so that we will finally be able to look at Him, and behold “that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.”

Today God has appeared in all His ineffable glory. And though our eyes were blinded by sin and thus incapable of perceiving His divine and transcendent radiance, in His humility and loving-kindness He deigned to be baptized in the River Jordan, sanctifying the waters that now enlighten us with the grace of the Most-Holy Spirit. Only one question remains: are we willing to receive the gift?

And make no mistake: it is a gift that costs everything, the “pearl of great price” for which we must sell all that we have and all that we are (cf. Matt. 13:45-56). As St. Paul says: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death? Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4).

If we have caught even the briefest glimpse of this glory and this newness of life, then — so long as we keep it always before our eyes — every tribulation and suffering and sacrifice will, in that light, be transfigured into nothing less than boundless and ineffable joy — first in this temporal life and even more so in the life of the age to come. As St. Paul says: “I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18). And as St. James says likewise: "My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations” (Jas. 1:2). These are no vain or idle words; rather, they are divine truth, as experienced and born witness to by all the hosts of martyrs and saints.

But if we fall (as we so often do) into the darkness of forgetfulness, then — in the emptiness of life apart from the grace of God — our sufferings will be mere suffering, devoid of meaning and impossible to bear. If our yoke is not easy and our burden is not light (cf. Matt. 11:30), then it is a sure and certain sign that somehow we have forgotten Christ, and are looking at the world through the darkness of our own human perception rather than the light of divine grace. “Wherefore,” like St. Peter, “I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth” (2 Pet. 1:12). And so must all of us do, both for ourselves and for one another, every single day of our lives.

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, let us take all care to neither squander nor forget the joyous and divine illumination which Christ is pouring out upon us all today on the Feast of Lights. Just as we carry home the holy water of Theophany, so too let us carry the remembrance of divine grace with us wheresoever we might go in this life, looking at everything and everyone we encounter in the light of Christ’s mercy and humility and love. Let us rejoice always and in all things — whether bitter or sweet — “speaking to [ourselves] in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:19-20), so that our hearts will always remain united with the God Who has revealed Himself to us all on this bright and glorious day. “For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light” (Eph. 5:8).

Through the prayers of our holy fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.

My brothers and sisters, today is the Second Sunday before Nativity, the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers of Christ. On this day, we commemorate the righteous ones of the Old Testament who preceded the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ — especially the Patriarch Abraham, who received from God Himself the promise that “in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed My voice” (Gen. 22:18, emphasis added). We Christians often remember the first half of that verse — “in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” — but how often do we remember the obedience of Abraham that allowed God to give such a promise to him in the first place? Truly, God desires to bless each and every one of us without exception — more abundantly than we can possibly imagine. But all too often, we ourselves despise and resist and run away from the unfathomable heavenly gifts which God offers unconditionally to us all.

This is the tragic reality of which Christ warns us in today’s Gospel parable which we have just heard. God invites all men to the great supper He has prepared — that is to say, the Mystical Supper which we are even now celebrating, and (God willing) will celebrate yet more perfectly in the life of the age to come. But so many of those whom God has called choose not come to the feast, but prefer rather “to make excuse” (Luke 14:18), being totally occupied with the pleasures of the flesh or the cares and possession of this world. So many do not imitate the example of the Righteous Abraham, who despite all his wealth did not hesitate to obey God’s command: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee” (Gen 12:1). So many follow instead the example of Esau, despising their birthright as those made in the image and likeness of God, and selling their heavenly inheritance in exchange for a mere mess of pottage (cf. Gen. 25:29-34).

So it was with many of the Jews in the time of Christ — but so too it remains with many of us Christians. Therefore the Holy Church offers us this parable on the Second Sunday before Nativity, so that before the Feast each of us might examine honestly the manner of life which we are leading, and the kind of treasure which we are laying up within our hearts (cf. Matt. 6:21). All of us have received an invitation to the Feast. The Lord God will refuse entrance to absolutely no one — indeed, on the contrary He has sent Christ specifically to “compel [all] to come in” (Luke 14:23) — even “the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind” (Luke 14:21), which is to say all those scarred by any manner of sin. The terrifying truth is that there is one thing, and one thing only, that can possibly keep us from entering into the unending joy this Feast: our own unwillingness to go in, our own free choice to go somewhere else instead — like Judas, to “go to [our] own place” (Acts 1:25).

All our lives on this earth have been given to us for this one purpose: to decide whether we want to be with God for all eternity, or whether we would really prefer for Him to simply leave us alone. Perhaps it seems to us impossible that we would ever, like the Gadarenes (cf. Luke 8:26-39), ask God to go away. But, my brothers and sisters, we must all ask ourselves: how many times a day do we, too, “[begin] to make excuse” (Luke 14:18), offering to God (as well as to ourselves) various justifications for the fact that all sorts of other things so often seem more necessary and important to us than being with Him? To put it another way: do we often find ourselves looking for every opportunity to lay earthly things aside and spend more time in prayer? Or do we often find ourselves looking for every excuse to lay prayer aside, and spend more time immersed in the cares and pleasures of this world? Thank God, we have been given all our lives to repent, to learn at long last to make the right decision when we hear His divine call. But, my brothers and sisters, this does not mean we do not have to make the decision until the end of our life finally arrives. No, we make this decision constantly, every minute of every hour of every day: do we want to be with God, or not? In each and every moment, we accept or refuse God’s invitation to His Heavenly Banquet.

It was not for nothing that Christ soon after said: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” (Luke 18:24). And make no mistake: all of us standing here today are astonishingly rich according to the standards of Christ’s day (not even excepting those of us who have taken vows of poverty). So for all of us, the allure of this world — with all its innumerable pleasures and riches — is a siren song from which it is exceedingly difficult (perhaps even impossible) to escape. But let us take heart, for most assuredly “with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26).

For proof of that, we need look no further than the obedience and faith of Abraham which we commemorate this day. Despite all his riches — and despite the fact that he had never even glimpsed the promises of God from far off — he not only forsook his earthly home, but was even ready to lay down the life of his own beloved son Isaac for the sake of the Lord God. Indeed, it was precisely after this supreme act of faith that God was able to make him the promise I quoted earlier: “in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed My voice” (Gen. 22:18). Abraham held absolutely nothing back, but offered everything and everyone in his life unstintingly to God.

And herein lies a great mystery: by so doing, Abraham lost absolutely nothing; on the contrary, he gained everything, both in this life and in the life of the age to come. Abraham left his home in Ur and gained the Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey. Abraham offered up his son Isaac, and gained not only Isaac but the very Son of God Himself: the Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, in Abraham we see prefigured the great promise of Christ:

Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My sake, and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.

Mark 10:29-10

So often we think of a sacrifice simply as something that we lose. And because of the weakness of our faith and the blindness of the eyes of our heart, we fear to give up the things of this world that are so precious to us, since as yet “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9). So instead we cling foolishly to the trifles and trinkets of this life, because they are all that we have ever known.

But the true meaning of the word “sacrifice” (etymologically) is not to give something up, but rather to make that thing holy. In this sense, Abraham did truly sacrifice Isaac to God that day on Mount Moriah. In sparing Isaac’s life, God foreshadowed the Resurrection that followed the Mystical Sacrifice of His own beloved Son Jesus Christ, and revealed the great truth that no sacrifice we make to God is ever lost to us, but rather is given back to us by Him — transfigured into what it was always truly meant to be.

My brothers and sisters, in our hearts all of us hunger and thirst insatiably to taste of the Mystical Supper to which the Lord God calls us. Therefore let us ponder well on today’s Gospel parable, confessing honestly and repenting wholeheartedly of all the excuses we have fallen into making for our sinful and foolish desire to avoid the Feast. Let us remind ourselves — over and over again, every minute of every hour of every day — that nothing and no-one in this world can possibly compare with the eternal joy of which we will one day partake at “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9) — and of which we are even now about to receive a foretaste. And as we take these last few days to prepare to celebrate the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, let us firmly resolve — with God’s help — to become wholly obedient to the call of the Church which we will again hear only a few short minutes from now:

Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim, and chant the thrice-holy hymn unto the life-creating Trinity, now lay aside all earthly care, that we may receive the King of all, Who cometh invisibly upborne in triumph by the ranks of angels: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!

Thy nativity, O Virgin Theotokos, hath proclaimed joy to all the world; for from thee hath shone forth Christ our God, the Sun of Righteousness, Who, having annulled the curse, hath given His blessing, and having abolished death, hath granted us life everlasting.

My brothers and sisters, today’s feast is the turning point of all human history. Absolutely everything that came before — from the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden up until this great and holy day — had one purpose, and one purpose only: to bring the Most Holy Mother of God into the world. St. John Damascene tells us: “It is with justice and truth that we call holy Mary the Theotokos; for this name embraces the whole mystery of the Economy of salvation.”

Truly, the “whole mystery of… salvation” today begins to be revealed. Every promise that God ever made — from Adam to Noah, from Abraham to David, from the patriarchs to the prophets — now finally begins to be fulfilled, in the person of the Most Holy Theotokos. St. Andrew of Crete declares that She is the “clear fulfillment of the whole of prophecy, of the truth of Scriptures inspired by God, the living and most pure book of God and the Word in which, without voice or writing, the Writer Himself, God and Word, is everyday read.”

Today the Mother of God is born to Joachim and Anna, who — for all their virtue and righteousness — before were barren. And their barrenness was in truth a microcosm of the barren world itself. For what kind of world was it into which the Theotokos today is born? It was a world of sin and selfishness, greed and ingratitude, lust and impurity, hatred and anger, scorn and contempt, arrogance and pride. It was a world in which even the Israel of God — chosen by divine providence, taught by prophetic revelation, protected and inspired by countless wonders and signs — fell over and over again into apostasy and idolatry, even going so far as to “[sacrifice] their sons and their daughters unto demons” (Ps. 106:37). And even the great Prophet-King David, a man after God’s own heart (cf. Acts 13:22), nevertheless was an adulterer and a murderer — and the ancestor of the Mother of God.

Because it is precisely in the midst of the worst of all our sins that God Himself chooses to act. Apart from God, our best virtues will remain forever barren — but with God, even the greatest of sinners can still bear fruit. Nothing proves this more than the birth of the Mother of God: from the barren and withered tree of humanity, He today brings forth someone so pure, so good, and so holy that even a single glimpse of Her can cause the hardest of hearts to break. All the beauty in all is world is mere dust and ashes when set against that of the Most Pure Mother of God. Although She was formed of the same weak and passionate flesh as you and me, yet She stands now already resurrected and transfigured in the life of the age to come, immortal and incorruptible, "filled with all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:19), before whom all the demons tremble and flee.

St. Dionysius the Areopagite, writing to the Apostle Paul, bears witness of his encounter with the spiritual majesty of the Queen of Heaven: “I witness by God, that besides the very God Himself, there is nothing else filled with such divine power and grace. No one can fully comprehend what I saw… when I was brought before the countenance of the Most Holy Virgin, I experienced an inexpressible sensation. Before me gleamed a sort of divine radiance which transfixed my spirit. I perceived the fragrance of indescribable aromas and was filled with such delight that my very body became faint, and my spirit could hardly endure these signs and marks of eternal majesty and heavenly power. The grace from Her overwhelmed my heart and shook my very spirit. If I did not have in mind your instruction, I should have mistaken Her for the very God. It is impossible to stand before greater blessedness than this which I beheld.”

As astonishing as his words are, yet even more astonishing is the great truth that each and every one of us sinners was created by God to attain nothing less than this same glory and blessedness. We, too, are called by Him to become like Her: “coming forth as the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array” (Song. 6:10). And on the great and terrible day when Christ comes in His Kingdom, all the children of God will partake — in some measure — of the same indescribable holiness and grace that already shines so brilliantly in the Mother of God.

If any doubt my words, consider those of the Savior Himself when the woman in the crowd cried out in today’s Gospel passage: “Blessed is the womb that bare Thee.” He answered her: “Yea indeed, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” And if He said in another place: “He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward” (Matt. 10:41), then what rewards of grace and glory will He not bestow on us who receive in fitting honor His own Most Pure Mother?

So on this day of Her birth, let all of us look to Her with hope and run to Her with faith and love. Let us never cease from entreating Her never to allow us, Her sinful children, to perish, but rather that where She is now, we too might all one day be. Through Her intercessions may “we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

Through the prayers of the Theotokos, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen!

In today’s Gospel reading, we heard the account of Lord’s disciples as they sailed across the Sea of Galilee immediately after the feeding of the five thousand. Christ Himself was not with them in the ship, since He had remained behind, wishing to withdraw alone to a mountain to pray. During the night, the sea began to stirred up by a ferocious storm. As the disciples’ ship was being tossed to and fro by the waves, suddenly in the dead of night they saw Jesus walking on the water. Although they had just witnessed so great a miracle as the feeding of the five thousand, nevertheless they still assumed that no living man could possibly be walking on water in the midst of the stormy sea — “and they cried out for fear” (Matt. 14:26), thinking they were seeing some sort of ghost or demon. But Jesus immediately spoke to comfort them, assuring them that it was He and that there was not any cause to be afraid.

St. Peter — always the most zealous of the disciples — then made an extremely bold reply: “Lord, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Thee on the water” (Matt. 14:28). And Christ — always so patient and so condescending with us sinners — answered: “Come” (Matt. 14:29). And St. Peter too began to walk on the water, even amidst all the tumult of those stormy waves.

But then St. Peter made a terrible mistake: he took his eyes off Christ. He began to look around. He began to look at the roaring winds and the crashing waves. He began to think of the terrible danger surrounding him on all sides. He began to realize about the utter impossibility of what he was doing. And as he did so, he began to sink into the depths of the sea.

My brothers and sisters, each one of us ought to take this Gospel story closely to heart! It reveals to us a terrible but extremely important truth: that something so seemingly insignificant as our attention can be the difference between finding salvation from even the most terrible dangers one the one hand, and perishing totally on the other. As long as St. Peter fixed his attention on Christ, he was able to do the impossible. But as soon as his attention became distracted from Christ, he nearly lost his very life itself.

We should also be brought to great spiritual sobriety by the fact that even St. Peter — the Chief of the Apostles himself — could literally be standing right in front of the incarnate God-Man Jesus Christ as He was performing mighty miracles, and yet somehow still become distracted and preoccupied with vain and worldly thoughts. What, then, of us? How much more must we then take heed to ourselves, and with how much more vigilance and care must we then struggle to keep the eyes of our hearts fixed upon Christ!

And truly, we ourselves are not at all strangers to the roaring winds and crashing waves of the storm of this temporal life. We live in what many now term “the attention economy.” We are surrounded on all sides by the most powerful corporations and the most advanced technology in the history of the world, all cleverly preying on our psyches to keep our attention constantly fixed on the desires and cares of this world. From morning till night, we are assaulted by advertisements and app notifications, status updates and message requests. We are bombarded constantly by the news, with its headlines telling us “of wars and rumours of wars” (Matt. 24:6), of the most recent economic developments, the latest celebrity scandals, or the promises and prevarications of our politicians. This is all on top of our own personal cares and concerns: the bills coming due, the future of our careers, the lives of our children, the problems in our marriages. In short, the entire world is screaming out to us for our attention — sometimes so loudly that we can hardly even hear ourselves think. But despite the world’s unshakeable insistence, the question nevertheless remains: are all these multitudes of cares and concerns really as important as we might think?

Our abbot, Fr. Seraphim, once told me a story from the time he was a novice. At that time in his monastery there was an elderly monk. Some of the fathers noticed that this monk appeared to be getting lost as he walked around the monastery, and so Fr. Seraphim was given the obedience to take him to the neurologist to be examined for dementia. When the monk arrived, they began to go through the standard battery of questions for neurological patients. “Sir, do you know what day it is?” The monk immediately answered — but gave the Old Calendar date, thirteen days behind the secular calendar! “Are you quite sure about that?” the doctor asked. “Oh yes, absolutely!” replied the monk. “Well, do you know who the President of the United States is?” The monk said: “I have no idea!” Finally — and this was during the time of the First Gulf War — the doctor asked what the monk thought about the current conflict in the Middle East. “We’re in a war??” exclaimed the monk in surprise. So in the eyes of the world, the obvious conclusion was that the monk had completely lost his mind. But of course, this was not true at all: he was simply pious. His attention was simply fixed firmly on “the one thing needful” — on Christ, on the Church, and on the state of his own soul.

And, my brothers and sisters, we must all ask ourselves a very serious question: what exactly did that monk lose by his single-minded devotion to Christ God? I believe the answer is clear: absolutely nothing at all. The follow-up question then becomes obvious: what exactly would we ourselves lose if we, too, began to practice the simple-hearted piety of this monk? I believe the answer is just as clear: absolutely nothing at all. On the contrary, we will have gained the “pearl of great price,” for which it is worth selling the entire world.

Perhaps you might be thinking: “That might be all well and good for you monks, but I live in the world, and I cannot afford the luxury of such ignorance.” Well, I’m certainly not trying to tell you to abandon all your duties and shirk all of your responsibilities. What I am suggesting is that each of you acquire the habit of asking yourselves: “Are all these things really so important? Is it really necessary for me to spend so much time reading the news, scrolling through social media, worrying about the future and all the multitude of problems about which I can do nothing at all?” After all, it was not to monks but to all Christians that the Lord said: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matt. 6:34). In fact, what I am suggesting is eminently practical: stop spending time on things that do not have any effect at all on your life at this very moment — and which therefore only serve to keep your mind and heart separated from Christ.

St. Isaac the Syrian writes:

The man… whose meditation is always upon God drives away the demons from himself and uproots the seed of their wickedness. The heart of the man who oversees his soul at all times is made joyous by revelations. He who gathers within himself the vision of his understanding beholds therein the Radiance of the Father. The man who despises every distraction beholds his Master within his heart.

Homily 15

And later he writes:

The man of many concerns can never be meek and peaceful, because the necessary demands of his affairs, in which he wears himself out, compel him to be involuntarily and unwillingly disturbed, and completely disperse his calm and stillness, but without distractions the devil has no means of entering the soul.

Homily 19

In the eyes of the world, what more pressing concern could St. Peter possibly have had than the fact that he was standing at night in the middle of the sea, surrounded by terrible winds and threatening waves, with absolutely nothing but water under his feet? But it was not his circumstances that almost caused St. Peter to drown: on the contrary, it was his own distraction, his own fear, and his own forgetfulness of God. The Holy Fathers assure us that exactly the same thing is true for each of us as well. There is no calamity that can possibly do us any harm at all, as long as the eyes of our hearts remain fixed firmly on the Lord Jesus Christ.

And truly, He is standing before each and every one of us just as surely as He was standing before St. Peter in today’s Gospel story. He is ready to work magnificent and incomprehensible miracles for each one of us just as surely as He was for St. Peter that night on the Sea of Galilee. No matter what storms and waves, no matter what fears or dangers are threatening to engulf us in our own lives, all we need do is fix our eyes on Christ and call out in simplicity of heart like St. Peter: "Lord, save me” (Matt. 14:30).

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in His throne. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.

Revelations 3:20-22

Through the prayers of our holy fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, the day on which the glory of God is revealed to us sinners in the person of the God-man Jesus Christ. Today on Mount Tabor, He Who opened the eyes of the blind now opens the noetic eyes of the apostles — hitherto blinded by sin — and, in the words of the festal troparion, “[reveals His] glory to [His] disciples as far as they could bear it.” And — as long as we ourselves are willing — He will without any doubt reveal that very same glory even to us sinners as well.

Of course, today on Mount Tabor was not by any means the first time that God revealed to us His pre-eternal glory. On the contrary, such glory was made manifest from the very moment of the creation of the world, as the Psalms clearly witness: “the heavens declare the glory of God.” Moses and Elias, who appear today on Mount Tabor conversing with Christ, had both conversed with God beforehand on another mountain, and afterward even the reflection of divine glory that shone on Moses’ face was more than the Israelites could bear to look upon.

Yet the glory of God revealed today is fundamentally different from such past revelations, and indeed far surpasses anything that came before. How so? St. Gregory Palamas writes:

Even the face of Moses was illumined by his association with God. Do you not know that Moses was transfigured when he went up the mountain, and there beheld the Glory of God? But he (Moses) did not effect this, but rather he underwent a transfiguration. However, our Lord Jesus Christ possessed that Light Himself.

Today we no longer see the glory of God only insofar as it can be mediated through created things, but rather we see the Uncreated Light shining forth from the face of the Giver of Light Himself. Before, even Moses himself was not able to see such glory in its fullness, as it is written:

And the Lord said… it shall come to pass, while My glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with My hand while I pass by: And I will take away Mine hand, and thou shalt see My back parts: but My face shall not be seen.

Exodus 33:21-23

Yet today “God hath appeared in the flesh” (Troparion for St. John the Forerunner), and “the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God” (Eph. 3:9) is revealed to us sinners, shining in transcendent glory on Mount Tabor in the face of the Lord Jesus Christ.

But what mystery is it that has now been revealed? What is the nature of the glory that before was hidden even from the angels (cf. I Pet. 1:12) and is today unveiled before both prophets and apostles, before both the living and the dead? St. Paul gives the answer to all who seek to understand true nature of the glory of God: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14).

It is no coincidence that the Transfiguration occurred immediately after the Lord first told His disciples of His Passion: “From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day” (Matt. 16:21). It is no accident that during the Transfiguration itself Christ spoke with Moses and Elias precisely “of His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31). And it is no mere chance that this Feast is celebrated during the Dormition Fast, which begins with the Procession of the Cross, and ends with the death of Her whom every Christian (and especially every monastic) desires above all to emulate.

The glory of God is none other than the glory of the Cross.

How easy it is to overlook, or forget, or ignore this great truth! How easy it is to imagine that the Cross is but a doorway through which we must pass in order to come to divine glory. But when did Christ say: "The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified” (John 12:23)? At the hour of His Resurrection, or His Ascension, or His great and terrible Second Coming? No: He said it at the hour He went to the Cross. And what icon do we Orthodox name “The King of Glory”? The icon of the Resurrection, or the Ascension, or of Christ sitting enthroned beside His Father in Heaven? No: it is the icon wherein He hangs naked upon the Cross.

Why is this? Why do all the Scriptures and all the Fathers, all our iconography and all our hymns, associate the glory of God so strongly with the crucified Christ? Quite simply because the Cross — in the words of Fr. Thomas Hopko of blessed memory — is “the ultimate revelation of God as love.” If God is love, then the glory of God must needs be the glory of His love. And as Christ Himself said: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

If I am not too bold, perhaps this is part of the reason Christ commanded His disciples in today’s Gospel: "Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen again from the dead” (Matt. 17:9). Perhaps this is also part of the reason Scripture tells us that St. Peter did not know what he was saying when asked to remain there on Mount Tabor with Christ and Moses and Elias. The glory revealed today on Mount Tabor cannot in any way be separated from the Cross of Christ. It cannot possibly be understood apart from the Cross of Christ. And above all, it cannot be obtained except by embracing the Cross of Christ.

And truly, the glory with which Christ shone on Mount Tabor is the very same glory with which He desires each one of us to shine as well. Indeed, it was for this very purpose that He came to earth, took on our nature, suffered on the Cross, and was raised again on the third day. Today in His Transfiguration Christ reveals not only Who He truly is, but also who we ourselves are called to be: “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), "heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together” (Rom. 8:17; emphasis added).

The Cross — whether the Cross that our Savior carried Himself, or the one that He has given us to carry — is not merely a test to be passed, a trial to be endured, or an obstacle to be overcome before we reach our destination and receive our heavenly reward. The Cross is itself our destination, and our exceeding great reward. Because the Cross is the self-revelation of God Himself; it is the love of God made manifest. And Paradise itself is nothing other than that love — and any “paradise” we might find apart from the Cross is nothing but a mirage, a fraud, a trap, and a dead end.

To quote again from Fr. Thomas Hopko:

And so, once again, if we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation, and… service, we have learned to beware and to be wary of all contentment, consolation, and comfort before and without co-crucifixion in love with Christ. We have learned that, though we can know about God through formal theological education and classroom learning, we can only come to know God by taking up our daily crosses with patient endurance in love with Jesus and for Him.

Listen to the hymns of our Church, and listen to the lives of the saints: the martyrs found the greatest joy of their lives precisely in their death, because it was there — and there alone — that they at long last became completely united with the Lord Jesus Christ, and partakers in truth of His divine and transcendent love. It is as St. Sophrony once said: "It is impossible to live as a Christian; you can only die as a Christian," and as our Lord Himself has told us: “whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:25).

This great mystery is the key to our whole lives as Christians. And it is the only key that in turn will open to us that other great mystery of which Christ spoke only a few brief moments later — the mystery which is now revealed to us so gloriously today: “Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom” (Matt. 16:28).

“There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death.” These words of our Savior are not only for Peter, James, and John, but also for each and every one of us standing here today. If we become willing to truly lay down our lives, if we find the courage and the faith to truly take up our Cross and follow Him, then — just like the apostles on Mount Tabor — Christ will open the noetic eyes of our heart, and all of our suffering and self-emptying will be transfigured by the transcendent glory of God, and in very truth we will “see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” The mystery of this feast is that the fullness of the glory of God can be found nowhere else on earth, except on the Cross.

But ultimately, this mystery cannot be explained, or understood, or comprehended: it can only be partaken of. The Cross will always appear to be only pain and suffering and death until we finally ascend it. Only then will our eyes be opened, and only then will we see Christ transfigured in glory, "His face…. [shining] as the sun, and His raiment… white as the light” (Matt. 17:2). Only then will we ourselves also be transfigured and resurrected, partakers of all His grace, and shining with the fullness of His own glorious and Uncreated Light.

May He make us worthy of His Cross. May He make us worthy of His death. May He make us worthy of His glory, and of His life unending and everlasting.

“O Christ God… let Thine everlasting light shine upon us sinners through the prayers of the Theotokos. O Giver of Light, glory to Thee!”

Troparion of the Transfiguration

Amen.

Today we commemorate the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, one of the most famous and beloved icons of the Theotokos in the Russian Church. In this icon, the Queen of Heaven above all manifests herself as the Protectress of the Russian Land. Time and time again, the Mother of God of Kazan has delivered Holy Russia out of the hands of its enemies, repelling the Polish invasion of 1612, the Swedish invasion of 1709, and — most magnificently — Napoleon’s invasion in 1812.

But most astonishing of all is the fact that the Mother of God of Kazan has proved herself the Protectress not only of Holy Russia, but even of God-hating Soviet Russia as well. During the Second World War at the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet troops prayed in front of the Kazan Icon before going into battle, ultimately inflicting upon the Nazis their single greatest defeat in history. When Hitler’s forces had advanced to within 10 miles of Moscow itself, the Kazan Icon of the Theotokos turned the Nazis back. When the Germans assaulted Königsberg, priests carried the Kazan Icon at the forefront of the Russian counterattack; Nazi prisoners of war later said that their entire army saw the Mother of God in the sky as their weapons miraculously refused to fire. During the Siege of Leningrad, Stalin himself ordered a military plane to fly the Kazan Icon several times around the city; Leningrad never fell.

Truly this is a great mystery. The Russian nation had not only abandoned the Orthodox Faith, but had even unleashed upon it the most frenzied and demonic persecution that the world has ever seen. The Russians were once again crucifying Christ in the person of His saints, countless thousands upon thousands of times. Yet at the hour of their greatest need, these very same God-hating Soviets could not help but turn again to the Most Holy Theotokos — and the Mother of God heard the prayers even of the very same men who were crucifying her Son. The apostate seminarian Joseph Stalin, his hands soaked in far more Christian blood than had flowed in all the days of pagan Rome, stretched out these blood-drenched hands to the Theotokos — and She placed into those very same hands the victor's palm.

What exactly was taking place in Stalin’s heart when he gave his astonishing order to place those besieged cities under the protection of the Mother of God? Perhaps it was an expression of a profound and ineradicable Christianity hidden in the depths of the Russian soul. Perhaps it was only an act of political cynicism, or even of final hopeless desperation. Ultimately, it is not given to us to know what was in Stalin’s heart. But what we do know — beyond any shadow of a doubt — is the profound and ineradicable mercy and compassion that the Mother of God has in Her heart even for such a person as Joseph Stalin… and which She has in Her heart even for such people as you and me.

Because, my brothers and sisters, the history of Russia is also the history of each of our own hearts. We all — like the Great Prince Vladimir and his people — were once freely granted the grace of Holy Baptism, even though we had nothing to offer God in return except a multitude of cruel and carnal passions. Like Russia, we too have been given by God so many inexpressible riches of beauty, goodness, truth, and joy — riches which can be found nowhere else on earth except in our Holy Orthodox Faith. We too have weathered many spiritual storms, and have endured countless seasons of sorrow and suffering and pain — and we too have been delivered out of them all, through the grace of God and the prayers of His Most Pure Mother.

But like Russia, we too so often go astray. We too so often forget that first, grace-filled glimpse of heavenly beauty which once lifted our hearts above all the vain things of this earth. We too so often begin to prefer again those former things, returning like a dog to his vomit (cf. Prov. 26:11), and after having put our hand to the plow prove ourselves utterly unfit for the Kingdom of God (cf. Luke 9:62).

Yet this is not the worst of it. Mere worldliness is not what unleashed the demonic forces of Bolshevism upon the world, or their God-hating persecution upon the Church. No, the essence of the Bolshevik madness was not so much the rejection of the Kingdom of Heaven, but rather the attempt to replicate the Kingdom of Heaven here and now on earth: to become gods without God, to make a Paradise for ourselves apart from Him. The Bolsheviks even tried to prove they could make their own atheistic saints, preserving and publicly displaying Lenin’s corpse in a sacrilegious imitation of the incorrupt relics of the saints.

And how often do we ourselves, like Soviet Russia, also try to make our own hollow little imitation of God’s Kingdom? Our intentions are almost certainly good and noble: to live a virtuous life, to root out our passions, to make the world a better place, even to love our neighbor. Of course, it is easy to forget that many of the Bolsheviks also had similar good intentions. And — perhaps without even realizing it — how often do we, like them, try to live out our good intentions under our own power, using our own strength, and from our own will? It comes down to this: how much of our Christian life is truly dedicated to the Lord Jesus Christ… and how much if it is simply some sort of self-help program?

My brothers and sisters, we must always remember the words of St. Seraphim of Sarov to Motovilov:

Mark my words, only good deeds done for Christ’s sake bring us the fruits of the Holy Spirit. All that is not done for Christ’s sake, even though it be good, brings neither reward in the future life nor the grace of God in this life.

Dostoevsky once put it even more starkly: “Without Christ the Russian is trash; with Christ he is great.” And these words apply with equal force to all of us as well. Christ offers each one of us the opportunity to become just as holy as St. Seraphim. But apart from Christ, each one of us can quite easily become just as sinful as Stalin — who, after all, once upon a time wore a cassock just like us.

After the century of horrors brought about by the Bolshevik regime, there are many who now say that Holy Russia no longer exists. Some even say that it never really existed at all. And likewise, when we ourselves come to face to face with who we really are, when we are forced to confront at least some portion of our own ugliness and selfishness and sin, it can sometimes be easy to wonder whether Christ is really anywhere inside of our hearts at all.

But brothers and sisters, when these times come upon us, let us always remember the Mother of God of Kazan. Let us remember that even when there was less of Holy Russia than there had ever been in the Russian heart, when there was more bloodshed and horror and demonic oppression covering all the face of the Russian land than had ever before been seen in the entire history of the world, that in that very hour the supreme leader of those demonic forces stretched out his sinful hands to the Mother of God. Even if he did so halfheartedly. Even if he didn't really mean it at all. And the Mother of God answered his prayers, and delivered his people from their enemies. This truly is a great mystery.

And so, my brothers and sisters, even if we too have forsaken our first love (cf. Rev. 2:4), even if we too have fallen into any manner of apostasy or wickedness or worldliness or sin, let us never despair. Rather, let us also stretch out our sinful hands to the Kazan Mother of God, crying out to Her with humble faith and fervent love in the beautiful words of the troparion of this feast:

O fervent intercessor, Mother of the Lord Most High, thou dost pray to thy Son Christ our God and savest all who seek thy protection. O Sovereign Lady and Queen, help and defend all of us who in trouble and trials, in pain and burdened with sins, stand in thy presence before thine icon, and who pray with compunction, contrition, and tears and with unfailing hope in thee.

As long as we do not cease to do so, then no matter who we are and no matter how great our sins, She will by no means turn us away.

+Through the prayers of the Theokotos, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.

Christ is risen!

My brothers and sisters, what a blessed and glorious thing is the gift of light! At the beginning of the creation of the world, the very first words spoken by the Lord God were precisely: “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3). It is above all through the gift of light that we perceive the world around us, beholding the infinite beauty and grandeur of God’s creation. Even more than this, it is through the gift of light that we see one another, know one another, and commune with one another, as we behold one other face to face. How barren would our lives become if the light of this world were suddenly snuffed out… and how much emptier by far would our lives have been, had we never known that light at all!

Just such an unspeakable tragedy was the lot of the man in today’s Gospel, the man born blind, the man whom the Holy Church commands us to commemorate each year on this sixth Sunday of Pascha. For him the world was darkness, and had never been anything but darkness; for him, it had always been as it first was in the beginning, before God spoke light into existence: “the earth was without form, and void.” How lonely and how sorrowful must his whole life have been, to live isolated in such vast emptiness, hearing all around him the disembodied voices of men, listening to their words (but only barely comprehending) as they spoke casually and unthinkingly of wonders about which he could not even so much as dream.

But there is more than one kind of blindness. And despite the unending horror in which this man had suffered throughout all the days of his life, nevertheless it turns out that his own form of blindness was, in fact, less grievous than that of many others in today’s Gospel story.

Let us begin with the disciples themselves:

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

John 9:1-5

At the beginning of the Gospel of John, the Beloved Disciple declares that “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). Yet the disciples in today’s Gospel passage, though already followers of the Lord Christ, had not yet had their eyes opened to all the fullness of His grace and truth. Their spiritual vision was still tragically shortsighted: when they encountered the man born blind, they could understand his fate only as an act of divine retribution for sin. In other words, they themselves proved to be blind: unable to perceive the lofty wisdom of the providence of God, or the inexpressible depths of His divine loving-kindness. They were unable to see the great truth that suffering is not at all a sign that the Lord has rejected or abandoned us, but rather that He is preparing the way for “the works of God [to] be made manifest in [us].”

For what, indeed, are the “works of God”? The very same which Christ Himself both taught and showed us, all throughout His life on this earth: “This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12-13). The works of God are always and only the works of self-sacrificing and self-emptying love — and on this broken and sinful earth, such works can only be accomplished by those whose hearts have learned how to suffer.

And indeed, we see straightway in today’s Gospel passage the blessed fruits of this man’s lifelong suffering. Like the Righteous Job before him, the man born blind was not in any way embittered against the Lord on account of the unfathomable torments he had innocently endured; on the contrary, he patiently proclaimed the righteousness of God, even in the face of the mockery and persecution of the Pharisees. Nor yet did he murmur against them when they unjustly and mercilessly cast him out of the synagogue, and therefore out of all the society of the Jews — including even his own family. And as soon as Christ offered Him the opportunity to know and believe on the Son of God, he leapt at the chance, and at once fell down before Him in gratitude and heartfelt worship.

See the blessed spiritual vision of this man who was born blind! See the incredible fruits born from his patient endurance of suffering! See how this man, who had never read so much as a single word of the divine scriptures, was nevertheless vouchsafed to see God Himself face to face, while the scribes and the Pharisees — for all their wisdom and their learning — looked God in the eye, and could only call Him a demoniac and a sinner.

Sadly, it is no coincidence that the wisest and most learned men in the Gospels were precisely those whose hearts were more blind than any. Immediately after today’s Gospel passage, the Lord said:

For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind. And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words, and said unto him, Are we blind also? Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.

John 9:39-41

Truly, how terrible is such blindness: the blindness which convinces itself that it is, in fact, the most perfect sight. How much such blindness there is among the learned scientists and scholars of the modern age, who have enough knowledge and enough information to routinely perform “miracles” the likes of which the world has never seen, yet who have not enough wisdom to understand even the first thing about the true miracles of life — and who even dare to deride such wisdom and such miracles as nothing more than foolishness.

But, my brothers and sisters, here we must be exceedingly careful. Without any doubt, pagan Rome was just as blind as pagan modernity — yet it was by no means the Romans for whom Christ reserved His harshest rebukes (in point of fact, He barely mentioned them at all). Yet how many times, and with how much vehemence, did He denounce the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and the scribes! It was not those blinded by earthly knowledge whose souls He declared to be in the gravest danger, but those blinded by their own supposed spiritual knowledge.

And today, my dear brothers and sisters, Christ’s divine warnings ought to ring out loudest of all in your ears and in mine: in the ears of all Orthodox Christians, and especially in the ears of us monks and us priests. For truly, “unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required” (Luke 12:48). It is to us that all the riches of Orthodoxy have been given; it is to us that the gates of Heaven have been thrown open wide. But are we, in fact, actually choosing to walk through those gates? Are we truly availing ourselves of such infinite treasuries of grace? Or do we pay mere lip services to these truths and treasures, acknowledging and claiming them for our own outwardly, yet in our heart of hearts forsaking them each day in favor of the cares and desires of this vain and transitory life? Or worse yet: do we take up the spiritual treasures we have been given, only to use them to bludgeon one another in the head, through our judgment and condemnation and pride? If so, then truly we are hypocrites indeed, and find ourselves in a state far more unenviable even that that of the Pharisees: for though we have seen with our eyes and confess with our lips the risen Lord Christ, yet we have not seen fit to give Him the highest place in our hearts. And what form of blindness could possibly be worse than this?

But even so, the mercy and the healing grace of God are never far from any of us. The waters of repentance are always close at hand to wash away even our most grievous sins, just as Christ used the waters of Siloam to wash away an entire lifetime of blindness in today’s Gospel story. And truly, today’s Gospel assures us beyond any doubt that there is no form of blindness which is any obstacle at all to seeing God: in the end, only our own stubborn refusal can possibly prevent Him from opening our eyes to all the fullness of His divine glory.

So let none of us by any means despair. Rather, let us humbly acknowledge all our past blindness and error and sin, and let us then press forward, entrusting ourselves — with sincere repentance and heartfelt faith — to the infinite mercies of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, for truly: “In Him [is] life; and the life [is] the light of men” (John 1:4). And let us call out to Him with our whole hearts in the words of the kontakion of today’s feast: “Having the eyes of my soul blinded, I come to Thee, O Christ, like the man blind from birth, and with repentance I cry to Thee: Thou art the bright Light of those in darkness.”

Christ is risen!

My brothers and sisters, today we have already reached the final Sunday of Great Lent. In only a few short days, we will once again see Christ resurrecting Lazarus the Four Days Dead; we will once again follow Him as He makes His Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; we will once again become witnesses to the great and fearsome events of Holy Week; and finally, we will once again share together in the incomparable joy and exultation of Pascha night. But today, on this last Sunday of the Fast, the Holy Church sets before our eyes that which is the spiritual crown of the entire Lenten season: the life of our Holy Mother Mary of Egypt.

Since Holy Scripture tells us that the Lord God “declares the end from the beginning” (cf. Isaiah 46:10), perhaps it is likewise necessary for us to understand the cycle of Lenten Sundays from the beginning before we can truly comprehend their end on this Sunday of St. Mary. Of course, there are a multitude of themes and countless layers of meaning contained in the Sunday commemorations of Great Lent, and time would fail us to do more than merely scratch the surface. And so today I wish to focus simply on one of many such themes: the theme of divine truth.

For centuries, our world has taught us to look for truth within ourselves. Descartes — often called the father of modern philosophy — insisted on accepting only the truth he himself could prove to his own satisfaction, using his own rational mind. Such radical skepticism has become a defining characteristic of the modern world. But of course, such a dry and barren worldview cannot in any way satisfy the human heart, and so it was not long before opposing philosophies began also to arise; for instance, Romanticism in Europe and Transcendentalism in America urged their followers to rely not on reason, but rather upon intuition, emotionalism, and subjective experience in seeking out the truth. But regardless of whether we ourselves are drawn more toward scholarly rationalism or personal intuition, either way the message of the modern world remains clear: in the words of Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things.”

Although few today are familiar with the thought of Descartes, Spinoza, Shelley, or Emerson, nevertheless the influence of their ideas on the modern world — and therefore on each and every one of us — has been incredibly profound. And though their worldviews fundamentally contradict one another, yet both in equal measure work to cultivate within our hearts that supremely pernicious attitude Fr. Seraphim (Rose) often described as “knowing better.” To whatever extent we think we “know better” — to whatever extent we put our trust in our own thoughts, feelings, intuitions, or reasonings — to that same extent we cut ourselves off from “the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).

This is the message of the first Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday we call “the Triumph of Orthodoxy.” On this Sunday we anathematize those impious souls who dared subject divine truth to their own proud and obstinate minds, while we bless the memory of those righteous ones who clung with humility and steadfast love to “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). On the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the Church reminds us quite simply that Jesus Christ is Himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6) — and that besides Him there is no other. Therefore if we ourselves desire to know the truth, we must first lay aside all earthly wisdom as well as our own vain imaginings, and turn instead with humility of heart to Jesus, the Son of God, “Who [is] the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person” (Heb. 1:3)

On the second Sunday of Great Lent — the Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas — the Church testifies to us that this same “light of the knowledge of the glory of God” is revealed to us in very truth “in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). We Orthodox have been given to know with absolute certainty — through the unfailing witness of the saints — that God has opened to us sinners His own divine life itself. We have been given to know that God became incarnate not only to forgive us our sins, and not merely to reveal to us divine truth from a distance (as mediated by our rational minds), but above all in order to make us by grace what He Himself is by nature (cf. St. Athanasius of Alexandria, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, et al.). And of course, scholastic understanding alone is in no way sufficient to bring us to "the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13) — no, such a glorious and incomprehensible gift can only be given by the Mysteries of the Church, yoked together with the inner life of prayer and repentance.

And though deification is indeed the free gift of God, yet it is a gift (to borrow the words of one of the poets) “costing not less than everything.” This is the truth revealed to us on the third Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of the Cross: that Christ did not ascend the Cross instead of us, but rather so that He could be with us in all things: even in suffering, and even in death. Therefore let us never give in to the seductive desire to somehow escape the Cross; rather, let us take up the Cross with eagerness and irrepressible joy, knowing that in this world it is only on the Cross that we can truly and completely be with our Lord. After all, He Himself has told us over and over again: “whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:27).

This may seem to us an exceedingly hard saying; but in truth, it is not so. Rather, it is as that most spiritual of all poets, St. Ephraim the Syrian, once wrote: “Let us patiently suffer hardship, in order to avoid the hardship of empty suffering.” Because despite all the false promises of the modern world — despite even its many wonders of science and medicine and technology — nevertheless it is absolutely certain that our lives in this fallen world will always and inescapably remain full of suffering and pain and death. In fact, the modern world proves to us beyond any doubt that the more we try to insulate ourselves from external suffering, the more our inward suffering inexorably increases — eventually becoming all but impossible to bear. No, my brothers and sisters, the profound words of St. Ephraim remind us of the great truth that the choice we face is by no means whether or not to suffer, but rather whether or not our suffering will have any meaning. So let us take our inspiration from the Church’s Lenten hymnody concerning the holy martyrs: “…they said to one another, ‘Even if we do not die today, yet someday we shall surely die… Let us turn necessity into an act of generous love… and let us purchase life with death.’” For indeed, the truth is that only by dying can we at long last begin to live. As Christ said: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (John 12:24-25).

Yet all this by no means contradicts the great truth that Jesus Christ came into this world to free us from suffering, or the truth that all suffering is ultimately the result of our fall into sin. And so it is precisely our Heavenly Physician’s art of healing us from our suffering that the Church celebrates on the fourth Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday dedicated to perhaps the most profound psychologist who ever lived: St. John Climacus. His book, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, has an all but unmatched ability to reveal to us the truth about our own minds and hearts, and about the many passions which so insidiously infect and afflict them. Yet St. John’s teachings have the power not only to reveal the truth about our inmost selves, but also to bring divine healing to even the most grievous spiritual sicknesses from which we suffer. For truly, there is no depth of sin and depravity from which the grace of God is not able to deliver us — no matter how far gone we might be.

And this brings us to today: the Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt. She is the most powerful example in history of God’s incredible power to transform even the most wretched of sinners into nothing less than “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), into “the temple of the living God” (2 Cor. 6:16). She is the manifestation of the truth of all of God’s promises, and the living fruit of all the spiritual seeds we ourselves have been seeking to sow during Great Lent. Having once again heard her absolutely amazing life read in church just a few days ago, each of us should be left pondering one supremely important question: how can we become like her?

Indeed, this is the central question of Great Lent itself: having been made the beneficiaries of such a superabundant spiritual inheritance, how are we to make all these infinite treasures of grace and divine truth our own? Seeing that God has given us so much, what is it that He asks from us in return? In short: what is the reason we are not yet saints?

Because surely we cannot possibly make the excuse that God Himself has not yet granted us the necessary grace. If we are not yet convinced of this, all we need do is look again at the life of St. Mary of Egypt. She grew up in utter debauchery, as isolated as anyone can be from the grace-filled life of the Church; so completely had she cut herself off from God that she was physically unable even to walk across the threshold of a church. And even after her repentance she partook but once of Holy Communion, and from then on until the very day she died she had no access whatsoever to churches or to monasteries, to the Holy Mysteries or the divine Scriptures, to the Church’s prayers and hymns and written teachings, to a spiritual father, or even to so much as a single friend or fellow-struggler. In short, she spent her entire Christian life completely deprived of the countless blessings and helps and spiritual aids which we ourselves scorn and take for granted every single day. Yet she is a saint — and we are not.

So what was it that she had, and we do not? Well, quite simply, she had what that other St. Mary likewise had: “the one thing needful,” the simple willingness to give herself entirely to God.

This is truly the only thing that God wants from us, as is written already in the Old Testament: “My son, give me thine heart” (Prov. 23:26). There is nothing more demanded of us than this, and nothing more is required than this for us to become “the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:16-17). If we give God this one thing, the only thing that we truly have to give — our freedom — then He will in turn give us all things in heaven and on earth, and infinitely more besides: He will fill us with Himself.

And the life of St. Mary proves to us beyond all doubt that none of our sins, none of our passions, and none of our circumstances can in any way stop this from happening. The only thing that can possibly prevent God from making us into saints is our own unwillingness to let Him do so.

Just yesterday we too, like St. Mary, stood together before the icon of the Mother of God, calling out to Her with our whole hearts through the beautiful Akathist Hymn. And just as that one moment of prayer was enough to transform St. Mary’s entire life (both in this world and in the next), so too our brief time of prayer before the Mother of God is already more than enough to transfigure our own lives also — if only we ourselves do not forsake Her, but rather steadfastly imitate St. Mary of Egypt who said:

…always I turned to the eyes of my mind to my Protectress, asking Her to extend help to one who was sinking fast in the waves of the desert. I always had her as my Helper and the Accepter of my repentance. And thus I lived for seventeen years amid constant dangers. Since then even until now the Mother of God helps me in everything and leads me as it were by the hand.

But let us have no illusions. Despite the unmatched sincerity of her repentance, nevertheless — as we just heard — St. Mary still had to struggle for seventeen long years with the constant unspeakable temptations which inevitably came upon her as a result of her past sinful and passionate life. And so too it will be with us. Because — as we all know but so often forget — repentance is not something accomplished in a single moment, but rather continuously, throughout the entire remainder of our life. And though the only thing required of us is indeed the offering up of our own free will, nevertheless that “one needful thing” is undoubtedly the hardest thing that any of us will ever do.

Yet St. Mary also proves to us that we never need do it alone. Even if we find ourselves utterly forsaken by all earthly companionship and aid, yet we will always have with us our Protectress: the All-Holy Mother of God. And though we might fall backward into sin ten thousand times each day, nevertheless the gates of repentance remain always open to us, and the grace of God stands constantly ready to make even the worst of sinners into the greatest of saints.

So let us be of steadfast courage and unwavering hope as we complete this final week of the Fast. Let us place ourselves always under the protection of our Heavenly Queen, offering up to God — with broken hearts and humble spirits — our shattered and misshapen will, with firm faith that one day soon He will resurrect our souls deadened by sin, just as surely as He will raise up Lazarus the Four Days Dead only a few short days from now. And let each one of us strive to make our own the sincere and total repentance of St. Mary of Egypt, which in very truth is the only thing God needs to make us all into gods by grace.

+Through the intercessions of the Theotokos and the prayers of our venerable mother Mary of Egypt, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen!

Christianity is a religion of sacrifice. On this day, we commemorate one of the greatest sacrifices ever made in the history of our holy faith — a sacrifice which echoes the Patriarch Abraham’s incredible sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac, and which prefigures God the Father’s even more awesome sacrifice of His only-begotten son: our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. In fact, the sacrifice we are celebrating today is so great that the two holy saints who made it — the Holy and Righteous Ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna — are the only two saints besides the Most-Holy Mother of God herself whose intercessions are invoked at each and every great dismissal in the divine services of our Holy Orthodox Church.

We know from Holy Tradition that Sts. Joachim and Anna — despite their great righteousness and God-pleasing lives — were for fifty long years deprived of what everyone at the time knew to be the supreme sign of God’s blessing, favor, and acceptance: they had no children. Finally, after five entire decades had shown them to be bereft of divine approval, the High Priest even turned St. Joachim away when he came to Jerusalem to offer his sacrifice to the Lord. And so, seemingly spurned by God Himself as well as rejected by their own people, they departed from the Holy City in shame — and St. Joachim even fled into the wilderness rather than returning to his home.

But of course, the Lord never forsakes His faithful ones. Despite all appearances — despite what seemed so certain and so obvious to everyone involved — the wise and loving providence of God was in fact arranging all things in order to transform the suffering of His servants into a joy beyond any comprehension or compare. Though He waited fifty long years to do so, when the time that He alone foresaw to be best finally arrived, He at long last gave to Sts. Joachim and Anna the great desire of their hearts: He gave to them a daughter.

And not just any daughter — He gave to them Mary herself, the Most-Holy Mother of God, she who is “more honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim.” He gave to them the New Eve, the one and only human being full of enough purity and humility and obedience and grace to become the Unwedded Bride of God Himself, the Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the entire Christian race.

How did Sts. Joachim and Anna respond to such an overwhelming gift of the grace of God? With gratitude, of course… but with a gratitude so far beyond what would even occur to any of us that we can only bow down before such gratitude with wonder. Because as soon as God gave to them such an intensely beloved daughter, for whom they had pined away for fifty long years, they immediately gave her back to God. They did not even hold on to her childhood for themselves, nor did they spare any thought for who might care for them in their old age. No: on this great day which the Church commands us to celebrate as one of the Twelve Great Feasts of the entire year, they parted forever from their little child Mary, and watched her young feet as they danced away from them up the steps into the temple of the Lord God.

So the question we must all ask ourselves, my dear brothers and sisters, is precisely this: when Sts. Joachim and Anna gave to God that which was dearest to them in the whole world, did they lose their precious daughter by doing so? Or did they in fact gain not only their daughter (who became what she was truly meant to be), but also the Kingdom of Heaven itself, and even the divine life of the Holy Trinity besides? Because on this day the Mother of God entered into the Temple, in order to one day herself become the living Temple by which God Himself clothed Himself in our flesh, overthrew the dominion of death, lifted up our fallen nature to the very throne of God, made the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve into the brothers and sisters of Christ Himself, and transformed us wretched sinners into nothing less than gods by grace.

Truly, it was no idle saying when the Lord told His disciples:

…every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.

Matt. 19:29

Our Savior explains to us here the great mystery of sacrifice: any gift that we offer to our God — including and especially our very life itself — is by no means lost to us. Instead, divine grace transforms and transfigures it — not only into its own truest and highest form, but also into a means for us to enter into mystical communion with God Himself. For as Christ also said: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:25).

So often we think of sacrifice in terms of the beasts slain of old, their blood poured out in the temple in expiation for the peoples’ sins. And so we have come to conceive of sacrifice in exceedingly harsh and legalistic terms: as a penalty that must be exacted, or a price that must be paid in order to appease the wrath of an angry and vengeful deity.

But such an understanding overlooks the plain and obvious truth: even in the Old Testament, the essence of sacrifice was not the loss of our earthly good things, but rather our sharing of those goods with the God Who gave them. After the people made their offerings to God — after their offerings were sacrificed, sanctified, literally “made holy” — then God gave those same gifts back to His people as a meal to be partaken of together with Him. The sacrifices of the Old Testament were not about a petty God who selfishly demanded that something or someone must be put to death, but rather a supremely merciful God Who desired to share in His peoples’ life — not matter how poor and lowly and wretched that life might have become.

And so too it is with us. Last night we witnessed our brother, the newly-tonsured Monk Moses, make the most complete sacrifice to God that a human being can make in this life. Undoubtedly he has made an enormous offering to the Lord, giving up family, and freedom, and all the many possessions and pleasures which this world has to offer. But again, each of us must take this opportunity to ask ourselves: what has Fr. Moses lost by so doing? As long as he made (and continues to make) such an offering unstintingly, with his whole heart, the only possible answer can be: absolutely nothing at all.

He has forsaken an earthly family, but gained a heavenly family. Even here on earth, he has gained a brotherhood knit together by ties far closer and deeper and more meaningful than any merely earthly tie could ever possibly be — because our love for one another is nothing other than the love of Christ Himself. He has forsaken earthly pleasures and possessions — all of which will, without any doubt, have long since crumbled to dust even before Fr. Moses one day leaves this vale of tears. In return, the treasuries of Heaven itself have now been thrown open to him, and he hears the voice of the Father calling out to him in the Gospel: “Son… all that I have is thine” (Luke 15:31). Above all else, Fr. Moses has sacrificed his freedom to Christ… but so long as his freedom was merely his own, the best that he could possibly do was to say with St. Paul: “the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice” (Rom. 7:19). Because any freedom apart from Christ is in fact only the cruelest of slaveries; in the words of one modern writer, it is merely “the freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.” But now Fr. Moses hears the words of our Savior: “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).

Truly, God has bestowed a vast multitude of precious and incomprehensible gifts on the entire race of man. And the highest thing that we can do — truly, the only good thing that any of us can possibly do — is simply to give back the gift. And once we have done so, we find that God Himself also gives back the gift, in an endless cycle of love and humility and sacrifice that begins in this life and continues throughout all eternity.

This is without any doubt a great mystery. And like all mysteries, it cannot ever really be explained — only entered into. But those of us who, like our beloved Fr. Moses, have made a beginning in our attempt to enter into this mystery, have a great and solemn obligation — not only to God, and not only to ourselves, but also to the entire world. It is up to us to make the true joy and meaning and wonder of this great mystery manifest to all those around us. Such a mystery is not only incomprehensible to the mind of mortal men, but is in fact becoming ever more anathema to the modern world with each passing day. And so if we ourselves do not truly enter into the mystery of sacrifice, if we do not truly give our hearts to Christ, then Christ will not be able to give Himself to us as He so ardently desires to do — and therefore the world around us might not have the chance to meet Christ, just as the world two thousand years ago might not have had the chance to meet Christ had it not been for the sacrifice that Sts. Joachim and Anna made in the temple of God on this day.

So let us all pray to these holy saints — and even more to the Most-Holy Mother of God Herself — that God will help both Fr. Moses and each and every one of us to deeply embrace this mystery, to offer a pure and blameless sacrifice of our hearts and our whole lives to the Lord God, and so to enter truly into the mystery of union, and communion, and incomprehensible divine love which is the heart of all true sacrifice, and the mystical purpose for which we ought all to enter with the Theotokos into the Temple of God on this day. Amen!

The Gospel reading for this Sunday — the story of the widow of Nain — is very brief. Yet, like all of Holy Scripture, it contains many layers of meaning, each of them true, none of them superseding nor contradicting one another, but all blending together into a chorus of divine truth, containing absolutely everything that we need to know about the Kingdom of God, and about our life on this sinful earth.

Christ, the Giver of Life, comes to the gates of the city of Nain, and there He meets a funeral procession. The Lord comes down from Heaven to our broken world, and immediately and above all He meets us in the midst of profound sorrow: the pain of death itself. He comes upon a corpse — and that not of one gray-haired and full of years, but rather of a young man, a youth whose life was tragically cut short before it had even really begun. And He meets also a mother, totally alone, with no husband and no child except the young man lying dead on the funeral bier. In the person of such a widow, Christ in truth meets humanity as a whole: its hope for the future now lying dead and decaying, about to be cast once more into the cold earth from whence it was taken so many centuries ago in Eden, in a Paradise that it can no longer remember, nor even see any reason to believe exists.

The Holy Fathers tell us that the widow in today’s Gospel is the soul, cut off from her husband: the Word of God. The son of the widow is the mind, slain by sin and being carried out from the city which is the Heavenly Jerusalem, the land of all the living. The bier is the body which has become our tomb, living already in death before our death.

There are many spiritual lessons here, many important truths which the Holy Spirit has spoken to us by the mouth of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke. First of all, let us consider today the weeping of the widow.

St. Isaac the Syrian, when asked what work a monk should occupy himself with when secluded in his cell, replied that there is only one task that can possibly occupy a monk who is truly seeking his salvation: to weep constantly for his soul, slain by sin. To look honestly at ourselves — to not only acknowledge theoretically, but to truly and vividly see and weep over all the sin, death and corruption within us — is the chief task in life not only for the monk, but for every Christian. But just as Adam and Eve hid their nakedness in the Garden with fig leaves, just they hid from the voice and the footsteps of God, so also we — their sons and daughters — have occupied ourselves constantly with nothing else than hiding from the truth about ourselves by any means possible, from that moment on.

Truly, the world today is overflowing with all manner of ways to hide our nakedness, our spiritual death. We can distract ourselves with constant entertainments, with our careers, with social media feeds or the latest sports standings, with romance and sex, with drugs or fine dining. We can remake ourselves — in any image of our own choosing — through clothing and makeup, through exercise or diet pills, through cosmetic surgery or carefully curated Facebook profiles. We can choose our tastes, our opinions, our politics — even (so they say) our gender. And we Orthodox Christians can also, if we are not careful, even end up hiding behind the mask of our very piety itself: we can define ourselves by our prayer rule, our fasting regimen, our impeccable church attendance, or our strict observance of even the most obscure church canons. In short, we have been given every tool at the devil’s disposal to help us avoid ever having to really come to know our true selves. And in this we are all too eager to do the devil’s work — because we know that we will not like what we see. Nobody wants to look deeply into their own heart when they know the ugliness and death that lies within.

Yet our Savior has told us: “blessed are they that mourn.” Not because the Lord wants us to be downcast, guilt-ridden and tormented, but because only those who mourn can be comforted. Only those who know the truth about themselves are capable of being changed. Had the widow of Nain stayed at home and drowned her sorrow in a bottle, or fled to a distant land in search of a geographical cure, she would never have met her Lord; and it was only because she stood next to the bier weeping that she received her son restored again to life. Because the Gospel tells us that Christ performed this — the first resurrection of His earthly ministry — precisely because He “saw her, [and] had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not” (Luke 7:13).

And this is perhaps the most important point in today’s Gospel story: the Lord did not raise the young boy for his own sake. He did not resurrect him so that he could live a full and happy life in this world, taste of its varied pleasures and delights, marry a beautiful wife and raise a family, achieve a successful career, and finally enjoy a peaceful retirement before going the way of all flesh.

No. The Lord raised the young boy for the sake of his mother.

And this is not some sort of incidental, negligible detail in the Gospel story. All throughout His earthly ministry, the Lord was constantly working miracles, healings, and resurrections — and even forgiving sins — not for the sake of the specific person involved, but for the sake of those who loved them. We see it again and again — with the centurion and his servant, with the ruler of the synagogue and his daughter, with the paralytic who was borne of four, and finally with the resurrection of Lazarus the Four Days Dead for the sakes of Mary and Martha.

So let us always remember that for us too, our resurrection — both bodily and spiritual — is not given to us for our own sake, but for the sake of those around us: those who love us, those who pray for us, and even for the sake of those who hate us and do us wrong. Above all, our resurrection is given to us for the sake of our own mother, the Holy Church of Christ, so that we can truly become Her faithful children. For the Fathers also tell us that the young boy, who sat up and spoke after the Lord raised him in today’s Gospel, symbolizes the Christian who speaks instruction and edification to those around him after his return from spiritual death. For some of us, this might indeed take the form of words. But for each and every Christian, such instruction and edification can and must be manifest first of all in our deeds, in our way of life, and above all in the love that we have for one another — the love by which the Lord said all men will know that we are His disciples (cf. John 13:35), the Love of God which is itself our resurrection.

May the Lord God grant to all of us this love — the same divine and deifying love which our Savior became incarnate and was crucified and rose again in glory in order to give to us sinners, the very same love which is shared between the Lord Jesus Christ Himself and His Father Who is without beginning and His all-holy and good and life-creating Spirit, to Whom be all glory, honor and worship, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

My brothers and sisters, we stand together today in the presence of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross of Christ! The Holy Church commands us to display the Cross not on the Feast of the Exaltation alone, but also during the entirety of the afterfeast — for truly, as St. Isaac the Syrian writes, “the Cross is the door to mysteries,” and it is not possible for us to comprehend such mysteries in a brief amount of time. So let us take advantage of this opportunity which the Holy Church is giving us, and as we gaze upon the saving wood of the Cross, let us pray that the Holy Spirit will reveal to us at least some small portion of the heavenly mysteries which it contains.

In the shadow of the Cross, nothing in all of life is as it once seemed. In the presence of the Cross, all worldly pride and all earthly wisdom are seen to be only shame and folly. Since the dawn of time, since the Garden of Eden, mortal man sought for immortality but could not find it — and now, the Immortal One has deliberately chosen to clothe Himself in flesh, precisely in order to suffer a shameful death. Throughout all human history, men sought to win glory and renown by taking up arms and slaying their enemies — and now, the Son of God and King of Glory comes meekly as a lamb to the slaughter, not in order to slay His enemies but to be slain by them, out of love for them, in order to make them into gods.

Let us cast our minds back to Great and Holy Week, to those final days when Christ “stedfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51) in order to ascend the Cross, and let us listen with fresh ears and open hearts to the words of the Savior! He has just been feasted as one who, before many witnesses, resurrected a stinking corpse. He has just been greeted triumphally by the multitudes as a conquering king, as one who is about to finally drive out the foreign oppressors, and restore once again to its rightful place the shattered and shamed Kingdom of Israel. Even some from among the Gentiles are approaching the disciples, begging to be allowed to come and see this great prophet of God. And the Lord Himself now declares that “the hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified” (John 12:23).

But — although they had already been forewarned, again and again — with what confusion and consternation must the disciples have heard the words that Christ then speaks concerning the hour of His glory:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be. Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.

John 12: 24-27

On the road to the Holy City, just before the Triumphal Entry, the disciples had been quarreling over which of them would sit next to Christ when He arrived at the hour of His glory. Now that hour has come, and now Christ invites “any man” to be with Him where He is — and yet the disciples all scatter and flee, to the very last man. Christ’s hour of glory has now come — yet His soul is troubled, and He speaks of His death.

Because as it turns out, the Cross itself is the glory, the “divine glory of Christ,” as the Holy Church exultantly sings on this Feast of the Exaltation. And as St. Paul himself says:

God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.

Galatians 6:14

My brothers and sisters, how often do we comfort ourselves with the thought that Christ came to this earth in order to grant us resurrection — and of course this is true! But let us not forget that as He went to the Cross, Christ had already proved through Lazarus that He could grant resurrection to whomsoever He willed. Let us recall that some among the prophets, too, had raised the dead. And let us above all remember that our death itself was originally granted to us by God in His mercy after the Fall, as St. Gregory the Theologian teaches:

Here too [man] makes a gain, namely death and the cutting off of sin, in order that evil may not be immortal. Thus, his punishment is changed into a mercy, for it is in mercy, I am persuaded, that God inflicts punishment.

Oration 45 (On Easter)

After all, if Christ came simply to resurrect our bodies, what need was there for Him to die also? No, it is clear that bodily resurrection alone is not enough for our salvation — though it is indeed both necessary and wondrous, and I do not at all mean to belittle the miracle. But the fact remains that there was far more at work in the great task Christ came to accomplish:

Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.

John 12:31-32

Christ came to free us from this world, to destroy the dominion of the devil, and to unite fallen mankind to Himself. As the prophesies foretold, Christ came to bring an end to tyranny and to usher in His Kingdom. But as He said to Pilate:

My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight… but now is my kingdom not from hence.

John 18:36

At the beginning of Great and Holy Week, all the people were in expectation that He would bring about an earthly kingdom. But their hopes were dashed, and in bitter disappointment they began to cry out: “Crucify Him, crucify Him!” and begged for Barabbas in His place, “who for a certain sedition made in the city… was cast into prison” (Luke 23:19). Christ was not the sort of Messiah they wanted, and so they begged Pilate for another, for one they thought would meet their own expectations and give them the desires of their own hearts.

And what of us, dear brothers and sisters? How many of us, in our heart of hearts, really want another sort of Christ, one who only asks that we be nice to each other, and who promises in return that we will all get to go to a nice happy place after we die? How many of us (perhaps unconsciously) imagine that the Kingdom of Heaven is a place where we will all live forever with all the many delightful things which we are fond of in this life, a place exactly like this world only without all the unpleasantness, a place where we will finally have everything just the way we like?

If this is what we believe, if this is the substance of our hope, then we are not Christians. And when we come face to face with the real Christ, we too will beg in vain for some Barabbas instead — for a Christ who will only give us what we want.

No, Christ did not come simply in order to let us live forever (after all, the poor and wretched souls in Gehenna will live forever too!). He did not come simply to tell us to be nice people. He did not come simply to tell us that all our suffering will soon go away.

It was not such false and empty pleasantries that Christ came to bring — no, He came to bring us “a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

He came to bring us the Cross.

And make no mistake — this greatest of all possible gifts is no mere passive spectacle. Yes, God has freely given us the Kingdom, and “the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God; and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” But let us attend to what the Apostle immediate afterward says!

…if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

Romans 8:17-18

In the eyes of this world, there is no greater evil than suffering. There is no greater tragedy, no greater injustice, no greater enemy than suffering. And quite simply, my dear brothers and sisters, it is precisely for this reason that the world cannot bear Christ, and cannot bear Christianity — so let us beware of any so-called Christ and any so-called Christianity with which the world can possibly be at peace!

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

I Corinthians 1:18

The Cross cannot be anything but folly to this world and to those who love it, to those who look for nothing beyond its borders. Even for believers, it is and will always be an exceedingly “hard saying.” As Fr. Seraphim (Rose) once wrote:

Let us not, who would be Christians, expect anything else from [the world] than to be crucified. For to be Christian is to be crucified, in this time and in any time since Christ came for the first time. His life is the example — and warning — to us all. We must be crucified personally, mystically; for through crucifixion is the only path to resurrection. If we would rise with Christ, we must first be humbled with Him — even to the ultimate humiliation, being devoured and spit forth by the uncomprehending world…

No wonder, then, that it is hard to be a Christian — it is not hard, it is impossible. No one can knowingly accept a way of life which, the more truly it is lived, leads the more surely to one’s own destruction. And that is why we constantly rebel, try to make life easier, try to be half-Christian, try to make the best of both worlds. We must ultimately choose — our felicity lies in one world or the other, not in both.

God give us the strength to pursue the path to crucifixion; there is no other way to be a Christian.

Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works

Why, we might ask? Why must we also suffer, why must we also be crucified? Did not Christ come to do for us what we could not do for ourselves?

Of course this is true. But though He came to do it for us, He did not come to do it instead of us: He came to do it with us.

And this indeed is the crux of the matter: the Cross is the one place on this earth where we can truly meet Christ, where we can truly be with Christ, where we can truly unite ourselves with Christ. For it was on the Cross that He “being found in fashion as a man… humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death” (Philippians 2:8). And this humility and this obedience were shown forth precisely on the Cross for no other reason than His surpassing and overwhelming love, as St. Isaac the Syrian writes:

But the sum of all is that God the Lord surrendered His own Son to death on the Cross for the fervent love of creation. ‘For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son over to death for its sake.’ This was not, however, because He could not have redeemed us in another way, but so that His surpassing love, manifested hereby, might be a teacher unto us. And by the death of His only-begotten Son He made us near to Himself. Yea, if He had had anything more precious, He would have given it to us, so that by it our race might be His own. Because of His great love for us it was not His pleasure to do violence to our freedom (although He is able to do so), but He chose that we should draw near to Him by the love of our understanding.

Nowhere else on earth can love be found with so much purity and power and grace as on the Cross of Christ. And therefore there is nowhere else on this earth for us to so truly meet Him, and to so wholly unite ourselves with Him, as on the Cross. There is nowhere else on this earth for us to so entirely become filled — as Christ was — with overflowing and self-emptying love.

Salvation is indeed the free gift of God. But it is a freedom, as one of the poets once wrote, “costing not less than everything.” It is as our Lord Himself said: “So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33).

But this is no mere arbitrary demand, no harsh and capricious penalty, no grievous cause for sorrow and despair. Yes, there is a price to be paid. But even the price itself is part of the gift. As the great Leader of the Apostles St. Peter writes:

Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin; that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God… Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when His glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.

I Peter 4:1-2,12-13

Just as “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13), so too there is no greater joy than to become a partaker in such divine and transcendent love. Let us never forget that it was “for the joy that was set before Him [that Christ] endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2).

Therefore, as we gaze one final time upon the Precious and Life-giving Cross as it is exalted in all the churches of the world for us to see, let us with eagerness and joy make our own the words of the Apostle:

Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’

John 11:16

And likewise those of St. Paul in the Epistle lesson appointed for this Sunday:

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

Galations 2:20

And as the Holy Church Herself sings:

As the Lord went to His voluntary Passion, He said to His apostles on the way: ‘Behold! We go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man shall be betrayed — as it is written of Him.’ Come, therefore, and let us also journey with Him, purified in mind. Let us be crucified with Him and, for His sake, die to the pleasures of this life, so that we may also live with Him and hear Him say: ‘No longer do I ascend to earthly Jerusalem to suffer. But I ascend to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God. And I shall raise you up to the Jerusalem on high in the Kingdom of Heaven.’

Sticheron for Great and Holy Monday

Amen!

Today is the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God, the “summer Pascha,” one of the greatest of all the Great Feasts, and a day of surpassing spiritual consolation and joy. It is called the “summer Pascha” not only because of the height of its glory and the radiant splendor of its joy, but also precisely because on this day, all the divine promises of Pascha have now been fulfilled — not only in the theanthropic person of Christ, but also in the quintessentially human person of Mary, the Mother of God. Today the Queen of Heaven proves to us — beyond any shadow of doubt — that death has truly been put to death, that heaven has truly been opened to the whole human race, and that Christ our God has truly come to make even us lowly sinners into nothing less than “partakers of the divine nature” (2. Pet. 1:4), destined to come — just as she has — “unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Today, all the gifts and promises of Christ shine forth in the person of His Mother, as a pledge and a foretaste of the day on which they shall shine forth in us all.

Just as Jesus Christ is the perfect revelation of the uncreated God, “being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person” (Heb. 1:3), so too (if it is not too bold to say) the Mother of God is the perfect revelation of our created humanity — of all that God has created our humanity to be, and of all that His grace has given our humanity to become. The Mother of God reveals to us darkened sinners the true beauty and glory and joy of a human life that has been given wholly and unstintingly to her Son.

My brothers and sisters, how greatly do all of us stand in need of such a revelation from the Mother of God! Because how often do we tend to look upon Christ’s divine commandments with some degree of resentment, or with fear, or even with an overwhelming sense of loss? How often do we feel — at least on some subconscious level — that God is perhaps even trying to rob us of something precious by forbidding the very things which we believe will bring us happiness, the very things which some deep part of us looks upon as life itself?

And yet as we stand today in the presence of the Mother of God lying in the Tomb before us — as we gaze upon her face, so full of divine peace — can any of us really imagine that her immaculate and sinless life, her life of perfect obedience and renunciation and faith, was missing anything? Is it not rather our own sinful lives that are suddenly shown to be hollow and shabby, next to the incomparable beauty and richness of her grace? When we stand before the Tomb of the Mother of God, then — and only then — are our lives revealed as they truly are.

But it is not only our lives that are revealed truly in the light of the Mother of God: it is also our deaths. And we must make no mistake: although today is without doubt a day of great gladness and rejoicing, yet it is not on this account any less a summons to freely embrace our own death. This great and holy day is both festival and funeral, and to celebrate the one without honoring the other is simply to cheat ourselves of the divine inheritance our Mother has given everything to bequeath us. Because the Most Holy Mother of God’s whole life was nothing less than one continuous and uninterrupted martyrdom, one lifelong offering up of herself on the altar of her most-beloved Son and God. Our great abbess the Theotokos exemplifies more than any other the truth sometimes written over the gates of holy monasteries: “If you die before you die, when you die you shall not die.”

The great secret of the Mother of God’s entire grace-filled life was revealed to us in the Epistle lesson we have all just heard: “being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross” (Phil. 2:8). Because what else was the Mother of God’s entire life, if not precisely the incarnating of the divine life of her Son? And so just as He “became obedient unto death,“ even so did she likewise become “obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.”

My brothers and sisters, if we do not believe that the Cross belongs just as much to the Mother of God as to Christ — if we do not believe that it belongs just as much to us as to Christ — then we are simply fooling ourselves. Christ did not come merely to put on a performance, or to show Himself to us as some spectacle meant for our passive consumption. No: He came so that we might become participants and communicants in every single element of His divine life — including and especially His death. Then, and only then, will the resurrection of Christ — and the resurrection of the Most Holy Mother of God which we celebrate on this great and glorious day — become our own resurrection as well. St. Paul explained all of this just after the conclusion of the Epistle lesson we heard today:

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ… that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. (Phil. 3:78,10-11)

So this is the message which the Mother of God brings to us on this, her greatest feast-day: do not flee from obedience. Do not flee from death. Do not cling to the fleeting pleasures and riches of this swiftly-passing life; God is not trying to rob you of anything, but rather to fill you with treasures beyond any human comprehension, and joy beyond all compare. Be “made conformable unto His death,” and so “attain unto the resurrection of the dead.”

It takes great faith to be able to truly “lay aside all earthly care,” as the Divine Liturgy will shortly summon us all to do: faith such as we darkened sinners — if we are honest with ourselves — can perhaps scarcely begin to muster. But that is why God has given us His Mother. We do not need to understand it on our own. We do not need to do it on our own. We only need the obedience and the humility to flee constantly to the loving arms of our Mother: because so long as we cling steadfastly to her, she will by no means fail to bring each and every one of us with her to our heavenly home.

And so, as we gaze upon her holy face in the icon before us — filled even in the moment of her death with all the peace and power of the resurrection of her Son — let each of us resolve to make both her life and her death our own, crying out with all our hearts: “In giving birth thou didst preserve thy virginity. In thy Dormition thou didst not forsake the world, O Theotokos. Thou wast translated unto life, since thou art the Mother of Life; and by thy supplications dost thou deliver our souls from death.” Amen!