Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh -On the Prayer before Communion

 In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

 

Every time we come to Communion we say to the Lord that we come to Him Who is the Saviour of sinners, but we also state that we consider ourselves as the greatest of all. How much truth is there in such a statement when we make it? Or how can we make such a statement? Is it true? Can we truly say that we do consider ourselves the worst of all sinners? John of Kronstadt in his "Diary" makes a point which I believe is very important; he says that he also asks himself this very question, and he can answer it in all honesty, because, he says, if others had been given so much love, so much grace, so much Divine revelation as was given to him, they would have borne fruit which he proved unable to bear.
 

And so, this is a way in which we can ask ourselves questions when we come up to Communion, and say the words of the prayer before Communion. Is it simply that we repeat them because they are written in the books? Or is it that we are aware - but aware of what? Aware of being sinners? Yes, we all are aware of being sinners, more or less; but are we aware of how much we have received from God and how little fruit we have borne? It is only if we see vividly, clearly, the contrast between all that was possible, indeed - all that IS possible, and all that we are, that we can honestly say such words.
 

Let us reflect on them, because we cannot speak words of courtesy, words of empty politeness to God when we pray. What we say must be true, and we must make of every prayer a test of the truth of our conscience and of our lives.
 

Let us take this with us until we receive Communion again, so that one day, perhaps not at our next Communion, but after a long life of searching, of praying, of passing judgement on ourselves, we can say truly, "God, o God! How much you have given me, and how little fruit I have borne! If anyone had been given what you gave me, he would already be a Saint of God". Amen.

 * All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh-On Prayer and Life

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

It is a joy to have the opportunity of bearing witness to something that strikes me and touches my heart, to something that impresses us, at times in a lightning flash, for only a moment or permanently, in the context and situations of our lives. The witness I bear is to the things our eyes have seen, our hands have touched, our ears have grasped; it is a witness to those things that have enlightened our understanding, deepened our hearts, directed our will and affected our very bodies, making them more obedient to grace.

I have to speak about prayer and action, but I should particularly like to talk to you about prayer, or rather about the aspect of that complex situation which is both prayer and action, and is constantly revealed in effective thinking, in a life grounded in the deepest possible reflection and a truly lucid understanding of the situations in which we live.

I. THE LINK BETWEEN PRAYER AND ACTION

First, I would like to say a few words on the relation that exists, not in general terms but somewhat distinctly, between life and prayer, approaching this question from a hitherto unexplored angle. All too often the life we lead attests against the prayer we offer, and it is only when we have managed to harmonize the terms of our prayer with our way of life that our prayer acquires the strength, the splendour and the efficacy which we expect it to yield.

All too often we address the Lord hoping that he will do what we ought to do in his name and in his service. All too often our prayers are elegant, well-prepared discourses, grown stale moreover with the passing of centuries, which we offer to the Lord from day to day, as if it sufficed to repeat to him from year to year, with a cold heart and a dull mind, ardent words that were born in the desert and the wilderness, in the greatest of human sufferings, in the most intense situations that history has ever known.

We reiterate prayers bearing the names of the great spiritual leaders, and we believe that God listens to them, that he takes account of their content, whereas the only thing that matters to the Lord is the heart of the person addressing him, the will straining to do his will.

The Whole Human Person: Body, Spirit and Soul

by Metropolitan  Anthony  of  Sourozh

I am going to speak about the human person as a whole, and I want to introduce my talk by making some important remarks. We have been using the phrase 'human person' because nowadays to say 'man' is offensive to the ears of many, and we do not have in English a word that would correspond to the Greek 'anthropos' or the Russian 'chelovek'. So we take it that in a given case the word 'person' means the human being considered as a whole, although there are a number of important distinctions to note.

Vladimir Lossky in particular, as well as other theologians, insists on the fact that there is an important difference between the words 'person' and 'individual' in theological usage. The individual, as the word indicates, is the last term of division. One can speak of mankind, one can speak of nations, one can speak of races, of families, and then what is left is a unit, because if one were to go on dividing it, it would no longer be a living person, but a corpse and a departed soul.

So the individual is the result of fragmentation. We are all individuals to the extent to which we are alienated one from another, separated from God, and broken up within ourselves. We are not a whole, either as humanity or as individual persons, and this we must take into account when we think of ourselves, as well as when we think of the Church and mankind in general. We cannot have an optimistic vision of the Church without remembering that the Church is also a fragmented body. In each of us the mind, the heart, the body, the passions, our elan to God, do not all concur to form one powerful stream of life and of spiritual life in particular.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh -ON SUNDAY OF THE MAN BORN BLIND

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

At the end of today's reading, words stand that we pass by very often. The blind man says to Christ, "And who is the Son of God?" and Christ answers, "You have seen Him and He is speaking to you".

For us, the first words are so natural; the first event of our life, the first event of a meeting is that we see a person, but what was this wonder of this man who had never seen anything in the world and who, touched by the life-giving hand of Christ, of a sudden saw! And the first person he saw was his Lord and his God, Christ, the Son of Man.

I remember a Romanian writer telling us in his biography what definitive, what profound impression the face of the first man he remembers made. He remembers himself as a child, and over him - the inexpressibly beautiful face of his father who was a priest, looking at him, with all human love, with all the tenderness, and all the depth of a human gaze. And he says that this was a first vision for him in the icon which a human face can be when it is lit from inside by love and by understanding, by depth and by eternity, a vision of God. Here this man saw God in the features of Him who was God and who had become the Son of Man.

I would like to attract your attention also to something different. On another occasion we read the story of a paralytic healed by Christ; and the Church, singing the praises of God on that occasion says, "As this man found no one to show mercy on him, the Son of Mary, God Himself, stooped down and met his need". Because this man had not found another man to show mercy, to show compassion, to show concern, God has come down to him. Now we live in another time, we live in the time with God truly having become man in our midst, and more than this: He has made us to be living members of His body, an incarnate, concrete presence of His Incarnation, the temples of the Spirit, the place of the Presence. Now any man who is in need should at the same time find in each of us a man stirred to compassion, taught mercy and understanding by God become Man, and at the same time, simultaneously, meeting with us, he should be able to see the love of God in our eyes and to perceive the active, imaginative, creative action of divine charity in our words and in our deeds.

Since Christ has come into the world, the time of man has come; but not of man as severed from God, separated from Him, alien to Him, but a wonderful time when in man, in those who have discovered Christ, who have believed in Him, who have become one with Him - those men to whom God has entrusted the care of His world - people can both receive divine and human mercy and see human compassion, human love, human joy.

Is not this a great call, is not that something which should make us capable of great things? The time of God and the time of man is one, not only in the incarnate Son of God, but in this mysterious incarnate presence which each of us represents, the presence of God in the flesh, in human compassion, in human love, and this is an earnest claim and a challenge which the Gospel presents us with. Are we to one another and to those further afield that kind of humanity? New humanity, new creatures, new men with the newness of a renewed life, the life of God. This is what we are called to be.

Let us then reflect on it, make a decision, make a move and become an icon, a vision of God, not only in the shining of love in our eyes, not only in the words we speak, but also in every action and deed, so that the time of man should have become the day of the Son of Man, the day of the Lord. Amen.

CHRIST IS RISEN! HE IS RISEN INDEED!

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh-At the heart of the storm

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

I should like to begin with the words of Saint Paul. He tells us that we all who have heard the life-giving, the creative word of God are building our lives on a sure foundation, not only on the teaching of Christ, but on His presence, both invisible, and communicable in the Sacraments. This is a sure foundation of all life — ours, and that of the whole creation. But what do we build on this foundation? Some, the heroes of the spirit, the Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Saints that cannot be shaken even by the storms of the History. Others have build of gold and silver that rust cannot destroy, that rust cannot spoil.

But do we belong to these? Or are we not rather those who are building on the foundation of Christ Who is a column and a pillar of truth and of life — are we not building of wood and of straw? As long as we live, as long as a storm doesn’t come, both wood and straw seem to be so secure; but then, comes a hurricane, then fire comes — and what is left of it? And it is not only physical fire and physical hurricanes that destroy: History is made of fire, a fire of judgement; and remember the words that the judgement of God begins within His Church, and this Judgement is the judgement by fire. And History is like a storm...

What is left then — is it there any hope for us? There is! Because Paul who has given us a very stern warning lest we lightmindedly built on a Foundation which is Holy something which is unholy, unworthy of this foundation, he tells us, Yes, your works may go up in flames, but you may stay... And why? How can we? Aren't we judged simply by the final reckoning on our life, on what we have built? Perhaps today's Gospel can give us some vision of what may happen.

The Apostles left Christ to cross the sea of Genesareth. The weather was good, the sea was calm, they hoped for a safe crossing. And then the wind came down, and the storm abated, and the waves rose, and they felt that the little skiff in which they were crossing the Lake had become a possible grave for them, a cold, watery grave. They fought as they could; but they could do nothing against the raging sea and the furious wind.

And at that moment they saw Christ walking on the sea, walking on the waters, at the very heart of the storm, in the eye of the hurricane. And they cried out in horror because they thought, This could be nothing but a ghost — God could not be in the midst of the storm, a storm that spelt death to them, destruction. If God was there, there should be peace, stillness, safety for themselves... And yet, God was at the heart of the storm, as He is at the heart of all the historical storm which rages all around us and tosses us about, and frightens us so much, and brings us to the brink of death.

And they cried in terror. And then, they heard a voice; a voice that unmistakably that of Christ: It is I! — don't be afraid!

And a degree of peace came upon them; and Peter turned to Christ, and said, If it is Thou — let me come to You on the waves!.. And Christ said, ‘Come! Enter into the storm, don’t try to escape it, don’t look for safety in this small, frail skiff that can be broken to pieces by the waves, drowned — don't count on that! Walk into the storm, walk on the raging waves!..

And as long as Peter was looking at nothing but Christ, to be with Him wherever Christ found Himself, he could walk. But he became aware of himself; at that moment he became aware of the storm, he was aware of the fact that he could die in a moment, helpless, drowned. And terror seized him, and he cried to Christ again, ‘Lord, save me !’— and the Lord stretched out His hand.

In another passage of the Gospel we are told, ‘And at that moment they discovered that they were all near the shore’ — they were at the end of the journey, while terror made them think that they were in the power of death...

Isn't that something which we can learn, each of us, from the circumstances of life? Let us ask ourselves whether on the unshakeable foundation of Christ we are building of stone, of gold, of silver — or only of perishable things? Let us ask ourselves whether it is with Christ, with God that we want to be in the midst of the storm, at the heart of the storm, fearless, because there is the place where He is — or whether we look for salvation in the little boat that is being drowned.

Let us reflect on this; and let us walk again into life with new hope, with a new sense of responsibility, but with the certainty that all things are possible unto us in the power of Christ Who sustains us. Amen.

* All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh -On Sunday of Orthodoxy

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

We are keeping today, as every year at the end of the first week of Lent, the Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. And every year we must give thought to what is meant, not only as a historical event, but also in our personal lives. First of all we must remember that the Triumph of Orthodoxy is not the Triumph of the Orthodox over other people. It is the Triumph of the Truth Divine in the hearts of those who belong to the Orthodox Church and who proclaim the Truth revealed by God in its integrity and directness.

Today we must thank God with all our hearts that He has revealed Himself to us, that He has dispelled darkness in the minds and hearts of thousands and thousands of people, that He who is the Truth has shared the knowledge of the perfect Truth Divine with us.

The occasion of this feast was the recognition of the legitimacy of venerating icons. By doing this we proclaim that God - invisible, ineffable, the God whom we cannot comprehend, has truly become man, that God has taken flesh, that He has lived in our midst full of humility, of simplicity, but of glory also. And proclaiming this we venerate the icons not as idols, but as a declaration of the Truth of the Incarnation.

By doing this we must not forget that it is not the icons of wood and of paint, but God who reveals Himself in the world. Each of us, all men, were created in the image of God. We are all living icons, and this lays upon us a great responsibility because an icon may be defaced, an icon may be turned into a caricature and into a blasphemy. And we must think of ourselves and ask ourselves: are we worthy, are we capable of being called "icons", images of God? A western writer has said that meeting a Christian, those who surround him should see him as a vision, a revelation of something they have never perceived before, that the difference between a non-Christian and a Christian is as great, as radical, as striking, as the difference there is between a statue and a living person. A statue may be beautiful, but it is made of stone or of wood, and it is dead. A human being may not at first appear as possessed of such a beauty, but those who meet him should be able, as those who venerate an icon - blessed, consecrated by the Church - should see in him the shining of the presence of the Holy Spirit, see God revealing Himself in the humble form of a human being.

As long as we are not capable of being such a vision to those who surround us, we fail in our duty, we do not proclaim the Triumph of Orthodoxy through our life, we give a lie to what we proclaim. And therefore each of us, and all of us collectively, bear every responsibility for the fact that the world meeting Christians by the million is not converted by the vision of God's presence in their midst, carried indeed in earthen vessels, but glorious, saintly, transfiguring the world.

What is true about us, simply, personally, is as true about our churches. Our churches were called by Christ as a family, a community of Christians to be a body of people who are united with one another by total love, by sacrificial love, a love that is God's love to us. The Church was called, and is still called, to be a body of people whose characteristic is to be the incarnate love of God. Alas, in all our churches what we see is not the miracle of love divine.

From the very beginning, alas, the Church was built according to the images of the State - hierarchical, strict, formal. In this we have failed - to be truly what the early, first community of Christians were. Tertullian writing in defence of the Christians said to the Emperor of Rome: "When people meet us they are arrested and say: 'How these people love one another!'" We are not collectively a body of people about whom one could say this. And we must learn to recreate what God has willed for us, what has once existed: to recreate communities, churches, parishes, dioceses, patriarchates, the whole church, in such a way that the whole of life, the reality of life should be that of love. Alas, we have not learned this yet.

And so, when we keep the feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy we must remember that God has conquered, that we are proclaiming the truth, God's own Truth, Himself incarnate and revealed, and there is a great responsibility for all of us collectively and singly in this world, that we must not give the lie to what we proclaim by the way in which we live. A western theologian has said that we may proclaim the whole truth of Orthodoxy and at the same time deface it, give it the lie by the way in which we live, showing with our life that all these were words, but not reality. We must repent of this, we must change, we must become such that people meeting us should see God's truth, God's light, God's love in us individually and collectively. As long as we have not done this we have not taken part in the Triumph of Orthodoxy. God has triumphed, but He has put us in charge of making his triumph the triumph of life for the whole world.

Therefore, let us learn to live according to the Gospel which is the Truth and the Life, not only individually but collectively, and build societies of Christians that are a revelation of it, so that the world looking at us may say: "Let us re-shape our institutions, re-shape our relationships, renew all that has gone or remains old and become a new society in which the Law of God, the Life of God can prosper and triumph. Amen.

All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Metropolitan Anthony Sourozh-On Sunday of the Last Judgement

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

More than once does the Gospel give us a warning on the way in which we shall be judged and on the way in which we can save ourselves from condemnation. There is a passage of the Gospel in which the Lord says: It is not everyone who will have called Me 'Lord, Lord' who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. There will be such who will come to Me and say, Have we not broken bread in the precincts of Thy Temple? Have we not prayed, have we not sung Thy glory? And I shall say to them: Go away from me doers of iniquity.

So, it is not by outward signs of piety that we shall find salvation. The Gospel which we read on the Day of the Publican and the Pharisee already tells us something about this. The pharisee had been faithful in everything outwardly, but inwardly he had remained cold and dead to the only thing that matters - loving. He might have said to the Lord: But have I not prayed so often in Thy Temple? He would have heard the words which I quoted a moment ago, and he might have remembered also a passage from the Old Testament that says that the prayer of one who does not forgive his brother is abomination before the face of the Lord.

And so we are confronted to-day with the Gospel of the Last Judgement. A day will come, and it may not be after we die, it may be at a moment when we are suddenly illumined, when light comes into our mind, that we will ask ourselves: Where is salvation? Can I hope for anything at all? We have had the first answer to this question in the person of the publican. He could pride himself on nothing, nothing at all. He was a traitor to his nation, he was greedy, he was unworthy of his people, of the Testament that was the rule of the nation. And yet, he realized that he was totally, utterly, hopelessly unworthy, and he stood, not daring even to enter the Temple, because the Temple was the place where the Lord lives, a place as holy as God's presence makes it; and he beat his breast saying: Forgive me; I am a sinner. That is a first step towards forgiveness, towards a healing of our life and soul.

To-day we are confronted with something else. It is not strict adherence to forms of life; it is not piety, the kind of piety which one can put in inverted commas; it is not praying if we pray unworthily, that saves us. The Lord at the Last Judgement, as it appears clearly from this passage of the Gospel, will ask us nothing about the tenets of our faith, or about the way in which we have tried outwardly to please Him. He will ask us: Have you been human, or inhuman? When you saw someone who was hungry, did your heart turn to him in compassion and did you give him food? When you saw someone homeless, did you think of a way of providing a roof and a little warmth and safety for him? When we were told that someone, perhaps someone we knew, had disgraced himself and been put into prison, did we overcome the shame of being his or her friend, and go to visit him? When we saw someone to whom we could give the surplus of what we have, the unnecessary coat, the unnecessary object which we possessed - did we turn and do that? That is all the Lord is asking concerning the Last Judgement.

As I said before, His only question is: have you been human in the simplest way in which any pagan can be human? Anyone can be human who has a heart that can respond. If you have, then the doors are open for you to enter into the Kingdom and to become by communion with God, not sacramental communion, but a deeper communion even than the Sacrament, become one with Him and grow into being the Temple of the Spirit, the Body of Christ, a place of His incarnate presence.

But if we have been inhuman, how can we think of being divine? How can we think of being partakers of the Divine Nature, of being like Christ, possessed of the Holy Spirit, alive for eternity? None of these can be true. And today, we are confronted with the Judgement, with this clarity, this sharpness and His mercy. Because God is merciful; He warns us in time. It takes one moment to change one's life. It is one moment that is needed, not years, so that the oldest of us can in one moment see the ugliness, the horror, the emptiness, the evil of our lives, and turn to God with a cry, crying for mercy. And the youngest can learn now that it is time, step by step, to be simply human. If we are human, then we become the friends of God, because to be a Christian means to choose Christ for one's friend. And you know what friendship means; it means solidarity, it means loyalty, it means faithfulness, it means being at one in soul, in heart, in action with the one who is our friend. This is the choice we all have made, seemingly, and forgotten so often.

So to-day we are confronted with this Gospel of the Judgement. But we can do something now to face it. After the Service, at the doors, there will be a collection for "Crisis". "Crisis" is an organization which looks after those who are homeless and have to live on the streets, who depend on the passer-by to have a chance to eat, who depend on the mercy of people. Well, face today's reading of the Gospel. Face it not only emotionally but in fact, and when you are confronted with a plate at the doors of the Church, give, give generously, give with your whole heart, give as you would wish to be given if you were in the street, unprotected, alone, hoping beyond hope, or having lost all hope in human charity.

We have got a few moments to do a thing which is infinitely simple. Let us do it, and may God's blessing be upon anyone who will have done something, not just a little, but as much as possible, to enable another person to stay alive, to breathe, not to collapse.

* All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Metropolitan Anthony Sourozh-THE PUBLICAN AND THE PHARISEE

 

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

How short, and how well known is today's parable, and yet, how intense its message, how challenging.

Intense it is in its very words. Two men come into the church of God, into a sacred realm which in a world that is lost to God belongs to Him unreservedly, into His Divine Realm. And one of the men walks boldly into it, takes a stand before God. The other one comes, and doesn't even dare cross the threshold: he is a sinner, and the Realm is holy, like the space around the Burning Bush in the desert which Moses could not enter without having unshod his feet, otherwise than in adoration and the fear of God.

And how different the words spoken! Apparently the Pharisee praises God, he gives Him glory - but for what? Because He has made a man like him, a man so holy, so worthy of Him, of God; a man who not only keeps all the commandments of the Law, but goes beyond of what God Himself has commanded and can expect of man. Indeed, he stands before God praising Him, that he, the Pharisee, is so wonderful that he is God's own glory, the shining, the revelation of God’s holiness.

The Publican does not even dare enter into the holy Realm of God.

And the parable is clear: the man who came and stood brokenhearted, ashamed of himself, knowing that he is unworthy of entering this sacred space goes back home forgiven, loved, indeed: accompanied by God Himself Who came into the world to save sinners and Who stands by everyone who needs Him, who recognises his need for salvation.

The Pharisee goes home, but he goes home less forgiven; his relationship with God is not the same; he is at the center, God is peripheric to him; he is at the heart of things, God is subservient to him. It does not mean that what he did was worthless; it simply means that as far as he is concerned, it has born no fruit of holiness in himself. The deeds were good, but they were spoiled, poisoned by pride, by self-assertion; the beauty of what he did was totally marred because it was addressed neither to God nor to his neighbour; it was turned in on himself. And we are told that this pride has despoiled this man, has taken away from him the fruits of his good works, the fruit of his outward faithfulness to the law of God, that only humility could have given him and his action full meaning, that only humility could have made his actions into life, into the waters of life gushing into eternity.

But then, the question stands before us: how can we learn anything about humility if that is the absolute condition to be not like the barren fig tree, but fruitful, to be rich harvest and from whom people can be fed?

I do not think that we can move from pride, vanity into humility in a single unless something so tragic happens to us that we see ourselves, we discover ourselves completely bereft of everything that supported our sinful, destructive, barren condition. But there is one thing which we can do: however much we think that we are possessed of gifts of all sorts of heart and mind, of body and soul, however fruitful our action may be, we can remember the words of Saint Paul: O, man! What have you got which was not given you?!.. And indeed, he echoes at this point what Christ said in the first Beatitude, the Beatitude that opens the door to all other Beatitudes, the Beatitude which is the beginning of understanding: Blessed are the poor in spirit... Blessed are those who know, not only with their intellect - but at least with their intellect! - that they are nothing, and they possess nothing which is not a gift of God.

We were called into being out of naught, without our participation: our very existence is a gift! We were given life which we could not create, call out of ourselves. We have been given the knowledge of the existence of God, and indeed, a deeper, more intimate knowledge of God - all that is gift! And then, all that we are is a gift of God: our body, our heart, our mind, our soul - what power have we got over them when God does no longer sustain them? The greatest intelligence can of a sudden be swallowed into darkness by a stroke; there are moments when we are confronted with a need that requires all our sympathy, all our love - and we discover that our hearts are of stone and of ice... We want to do good - and we cannot; and Saint Paul knew it already when he said: The good which I love, I don't do, and the wrong which I hate I do continuously... And our body depends on so many things!

And what of our relationships, of the friendship which is given us, the love which sustains us, the comradeship - everything that we are and which we possess is a gift: what is the next move: isn't it gratitude? Can’t we turn to God not as a pharisee, priding ourselves of what we are and forgetting that all that is HIS, but turning to God and saying: O, God! All that is a gift from You! all that beauty, intelligence, a sensitive heart, all the circumstances of life are a gift! Indeed, all those circumstances, even those which frighten us are a gift because God says to us: I trust you enough to send you into the darkness to bring light! I send you into corruption to be the salt that stops corruption! I send you where there is no hope to bring hope, where there is no joy to bring joy, no love to bring love... and one could go on, on, on, seeing that when we are send into the darkness it is to be God's presence and God's life, and that means that He trusts us - He trusts us, He believes in us, He hopes for us everything: isn't that enough to be grateful?

But gratitude is not just a cold word of thanks; gratitude means that we wish to make Him see that all that was not given in vain, that He did not become man, lived, died in vain; gratitude means a life that could give joy to God: this is a challenge of this particular parable.

Yes, the ideal would be for us to be humble - but what is humility? Who of us knows, and if someone knows, who can communicate it to everyone who doesn’t know? But gratitude we all know; we know small ways and small aspects of it! Let us reflect on it, and, let us in an act of gratitude recognise that we have no right to be in God’s own realm - and He lets us in! We have no right to commune to Him either in prayer, or in sacrament - and He calls us to commune with Him! We have no right to be His children, to be brothers and sisters of Christ, to be the dwelling place of the Spirit - and He grants it all in an act of love!

Let each of us reflect and ask himself: in what way can he or she be so grateful in such a way that God could rejoice that He has not given in vain, been in vain, lived and died in vain, that we have received the message. And if we grow in a true depth of gratitude, at the depth of gratitude we will knock down, adore the Lord, and learn what humility is not abasement, but adoration, the awareness that He is all we possess, all that we are, and that we are open to Him like the earth, the rich earth is open to the plough, to the sowing, to the seed, to the sunshine, to the rain, to everything in order to bring fruit. Amen!

* All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh-CHRIST, TRUE AND PERFECT MAN

The Incarnation, the fact that God became Man, is a revelation both of God and of Man. In order to understand, therefore, how fully man is revealed through the Incarnation, one must rediscover how fully God is revealed. The gods of antiquity, of philosophical discourse, were always images of the greatness of man or of the greatness which man could perceive or imagine in a superhuman being. What no religion, no philosophy, ever dared present was a god who becomes man, suffers and empties himself of his splendour in order to become fully and completely accessible to us. In the Incarnation we discover that our God, the Holy One of Israel, the Creator of the world, the Beauty that surpasses all beauty, the Truth and the only Reality of the world, - that this God chooses, in an act of love, so to identify himself with the destinies of mankind, so to take upon himself total and ultimate responsibility for his creative act, that all the beauty of the world is called forth, while at the same time he gives the world the freedom that destroys and distorts this beauty. This God who chooses to become frail, vulnerable, defenceless and contemptible in the eyes of all those who believe only in strength, in power and in visible temporal victory - such a god a devout, believing man could not have invented. To conceive of a god in such terms would have been blasphemy. And yet. God reveals himself as such: vulnerable, defenceless, frail and contemptible. This is the folly of the Cross of which St Paul speaks. And the folly is not only ours; it is the folly of God as well. A certain number of mystics speak of divine Love as being folly, because to offer love to creatures like us, who may be incapable of responding, who may reject it and trample it underfoot as the swine trample the pearl of great price in the parable, is folly. But then, as St Paul says, the folly of God is wiser than the wisdom of men. If we are to speak of the revelation of man in all his splendour through Christ, we must realise that this can only be accomplished by a God who accepts to become defenceless. Angelus Silesius, the German mystic, says: 'I am as great as God; he is as small as I'. We need to think about what this means. On the other hand, as I have said, the Incarnation is also a revelation of the greatness of man. It is a revelation of the fact that man was created by God in such a way that, not only in spirit, but also in soul and in body, he can be not only spirit-bearing, but God-bearing, He can not only see God face to face, be a friend to God, stand in the deepest possible relation of obedience and communion, but can also, in the daring and inspiring words of St Peter, become a partaker of the divine nature, can become, even while remaining man, what God is in his nature, just as God, being God by nature, becomes man by participation. The union is equally complete - and glorious - in both cases. The Incarnation is not only a revelation of man in his greatness, in his divine potential, it is also a revelation in new terms of the potential of the created physical world. For if the divinity of Christ could unite itself to the body of the Incarnation, it means that the material body of the Incarnation was capable of such unity with God himself - not with the Divine as a notion, not with the Divine as simply a grace of God bestowed upon us - that, with God, it can be truly divinised. If this is true for the body of Christ, then it is true for all the material reality of this world. It means that the words of St Paul, when he says that a day will come when God shall be 'all in all,' must be taken in the most realistic sense. God, the divine Presence, will pervade all things created - all humanity, and all the created world. The world will then become the glorious vesture of God, the body of God, the Incarnation of a God who will always be beyond his world, but who will become immanent to everything in this world, to all he has created. In the sacraments we already have a vision of this very act. When we say that this bread and this wine become the Body and Blood of Christ we see, in eschatological terms, what bread and wine, and all matter represented by them, are called to be: the Body of Christ and the Blood of Christ. Thus the Incarnation gives us not only a historical image of a relationship between God the Saviour and us. It gives us a vast panorama, a vision of what the whole world is called to be in God: 'I in them and thou in me. I in thee, Father, and they in me.' Saint Paul says, our life is already 'hid with Christ in God'. When we think of the Incarnation and of Christ the Man, we must be careful not to fall into the heresy of dividing the Godhead from humanity, of looking at them separately instead of seeing them in their oneness. This oneness was beautifully expressed by St Maximus the Confessor, who says that the union between the humanity and divinity of Christ is like the union of fire and iron that takes place when you plunge a sword of iron into a furnace until it glows with fire. 'Fire and iron,' he says, 'are united now in an indistinguishable way. You can no longer separate the one from the other.' This is the dogma of Chalcedon. Their unity is such that, to use St Maximus' own words, 'one can now burn with iron and cut with fire'. The image of fire and a created object leads us straight into the biblical imagery of God as fire, straight to the God who reveals himself in the burning bush. Father Lev Gillet writes that the fire of God burns only what is evil and does not feed itself on what it sets aflame. It transforms it into a flaming bush without reducing it to ashes. This is what happens in the Incarnation. God, the divine Fire, comes upon a human being, and it is this human entity which is made into a plenitude of Being, without any change in its nature. This takes place in exactly the same way as the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the wine becomes the Blood of Christ in the liturgy. They still remain themselves, because God does not annihilate his creature in the process in order to make it into something else, something essentially different. Incidentally, part of the temptation which the devil offered to Christ was just this. 'You have created stones,' he said, 'now undo your act of creation and make them into bread. You have created bread and wine, undo your act of creation, annihilate their very reality to make them something different'. No. God makes things different by raising them to an eschatological state. In the first prayer of the Canon of the Liturgy we say: 'Thou didst not cease to do all things, until thou hadst brought us up to heaven and bestowed on us thy Kingdom which is to come.' Logically this is absurd. How can we participate now in something which is ahead of us? And yet, this is eschatological reality: things final and decisive are already here, because God has come into the world, and because the world is no longer a world that stands face to face with God. It is a world in which God is immanent, even while he remains the transcendent God. And this is the God in whom we believe. At the end of the ninth chapter of the Book of Job, in verse 33, Job describes his despairing conflict with God and says: 'Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both'. There was indeed no one who could take a step that would bring him between the two conflicting parties, between God Almighty and man in his frailty - and simultaneously in his purity of intention and, therefore, in his righteousness. There was no one who could be the equal of both, who could step into the conflict, put his hand on the Lord's shoulder and on man's shoulder, not to divide them, but to bring together what was severed. This is achieved in the Incarnation. In the Incarnation this conflict between God and man becomes a confrontation within one Person, a Person who is simultaneously, and equally, both man and God. In that Person there is a unity which is God and man, the hypostasis of Christ, in which all that is human is confronted with all that is God's so that the conflict is resolved from within by the inner tragedy and victory of the unity between these two. From within the perspective of the Incarnation one can see what the word intercession really signifies. The word intercede means 'take a step' that brings one to the heart of a conflict. That is what Christ does. But at the same time he unites, he brings all the conflict within himself and resolves it there. And this is why, having resolved it within himself, he can resolve it for the whole world, for men, for history and for the cosmos. This way of resolving the conflict involves both the two natures and the two wills. There can be no resolving of this conflict, if Christ is not truly God and truly man in all aspects except sin. But neither can this conflict be resolved unless Christ - the hypostasis - possesses two wills. If the will of God overpowers the will of man, harmony is not restored. If the will of man remains forever independent of the will of God and in a state of confrontation with it, there is again no harmony. It is only because there is in Christ all that is man, including the freedom of man, and all that is God, including the freedom of God, the greatness, the humility, the surrender and kenosis of God, that victory can be won. Two natures are united, and a new Adam is born. Why? When Adam was created he was not created as an individual, as part of an already existing multiplicity of human beings. He was in himself the total humanity of that moment. But at the moment he was not an individual, but a person. There was no dividedness, no fragmentation, no sin, no evil in him. He is completely whole, with the wholeness of innocence, and of saintliness. He knows God, and is known by God, in terms of communion, of knowledge 'face to face', of vision and contemplation. In the Incarnation, Christ is not simply an individual among other individuals. In the language of St John's Gospel, he is born not of the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of the will of God. He is a new creation, his humanity is part of the created world. He is new because though he has ancestry, his ancestry does not sum up the whole of his ascent towards existence. He possesses an ancestry which is given him. We see this in the genealogy of Christ, which moves step by step through the centuries of Hebrew history. But God is his Father. Christ has a dual ancestry that somehow sums up all of us. There is an openness into eternity, the absolute and the divine. He is unique because he is totally man, possessed of the human flesh he has received from the Virgin. But he is also the Son of God, as St Luke's gospel teaches us: 'The Holy Spirit shall overshadow thee, so that the Holy One who shall be born of thee shall be called and be - in reality - the Son of God.' It is in this context that we must think with deep reverence of the Mother of God and of her virginity, her ascent to holiness, and the Incarnation. In the Incarnation she became the unwedded bride, the bride who has known no man, the bride of the Most High, the bride of God. She represents in her own virginal person - which means she is totally open to God, totally surrendered and given - the whole of creation in its striving and longing and groaning for unity. That striving falls short of realisation for all of us, but is fulfilled in her. As the bride of the Lamb she is Creation; in that sense, she is wedded to the living God. There can be no thought of a human marriage, because it would be a mystical adultery. She is the wife, the bride of God and she can be the wife, the bride, of no man. Having become the dwelling place of the incarnate God, it is unthinkable that she should afterwards turn away into the ordinariness of life. It is even more unthinkable that Joseph, knowing of the Incarnation, should be able to treat her otherwise than as the sacred vessel of the Incarnation, an object of reverence and veneration. In the Incarnation and at the Nativity we can see that God, in Christ, delivers himself to mankind in the total defencelessness of a child. He gives himself. We can do with him whatever we choose. These words were used in the Gospel with reference to St John the Baptist, but they also apply here. We see what divine Love, and, ultimately, what perfect human love must be: a total gift of self, defenceless, totally vulnerable, and calling forth a response. This is essential, because we will be measured in our human dignity, in our human ability to understand God and commune with him by the way in which we can relate to a vulnerable and defenceless God. Christ says at the Last Supper: 'No one takes my life from me. I give it freely'. The Book of Revelation speaks of the Lamb of God slain before all ages. The sacrifice of the Son is intrinsic to the mystery of divine Love as addressed to the created world. The Son of God is the prototype of man. We are created in his image. Our ideal presence is already there in the Trinity. This image is projected into history and finds its place in history, when the time is ripe. The words of Christ at the Last Supper are important because they indicate that this is not a unilateral act by God, but the co-operation of God and man in the salvation of the world. There is a passage in the works of Charles Williams in which, speaking of the Incarnation, he says that it took place when a maiden of Israel proved capable of pronouncing the Holy Name with all her might, with all her heart, with all her will and all her flesh. Then the Word became flesh. This is co-operation between man and the created world on the one hand, and God on the other. In the child of Bethlehem, we see God delivering his Son into our hands. It is a moment when the Lamb of God is truly a defenceless and vulnerable lamb. It is a moment when we can see God sacrificing his Son for the salvation of the world. He sends him forth to death. We have an image of this in Abraham and Isaac. But in the case of Isaac, God provided a ram. In the case of his only-begotten Son, he did not provide a substitute. The Son had to die for the salvation of the world. There is a great deal one could say about the imagery of sacrifice and the innocent victim in the Old Testament. It is always the blameless, the most perfect victim which must be offered in sacrifice, - in order to prepare Israel for the ultimate sacrifice of the Son of God. But this should also make us understand that evil, hatred, all evil human passions, always result in the death and suffering of the innocent. One person drinks and drives, and another is killed on the road. There is also a corollary to this in the moment when Christ is brought to the temple by his Mother and Joseph. We must realise that this is the next step in the fulfillment of the Law. In Exodus, after the flight from Egypt, the Lord says to Moses that the people of Israel must bring forth the first-born male child of every marriage as an offering to Him. This implies a blood-offering in ransom for the first-born of Egypt who had to die that Israel might be freed. As in the story of Abraham and Isaac, however, the Lord allows a substitute. But when the Lord Jesus Christ is brought by his Mother to the temple, God takes possession of him, waits until the right time and accepts him as the blood-offering, as the ultimate sacrifice. This is what we must remember when we bring children for churching. This is what 'churching' signifies; every child is brought into the temple on the very same terms as Christ: to become God's own. By our will to be his, the child is surrendered unto life and unto death. Now I will turn to the significance, in this context, of the baptism of Christ. Earlier Bishop George spoke of the 'gradual perfecting' of the human nature of Christ. There is a certain ambiguity in this expression. What I believe he meant to say is not that there were originally stages of imperfection that were corrected afterwards, but that by the fact that Christ was born truly man, at every stage of his development in childhood and youth, he was adequate to that age and to that stage. And whenever a new faculty - whether of intelligence, of sensitivity, or of will - unfolded in him in the process of his maturing on the human level, this faculty was taken up by the Divinity and integrated into his total perfection, the divine-human harmony that is the incarnate Son of God. At every step he was perfect in the total and perfect union of his humanity and his Divinity. There was never a moment when he was less perfect, or imperfect, and then grew into perfection, though one can speak of a movement in which his humanity entered ever more fully the vocation which the God in him called him to fulfil. We find this in the Baptism of Christ. At that moment he comes to the Jordan, a man of thirty - and all the Fathers teach us that he had attained his full and perfect human maturity. At that moment, he, the man, Jesus Christ (cf. St Paul), with his free will, in the fullness of his humanity, chooses to fulfil his vocation. Here again there are the two wills, but at that moment the two wills are fulfilled in one harmony, which is the divine Will, to which the human will not only acquiesces, but with which the human will identifies gloriously, joyfully and sacrificially. At the moment when Christ came to the banks of Jordan, St John the Baptist did not know why he should baptise him. He saw in him the Lamb of God, the One who was pure, holy and without stain. What significance could baptism have? That every kind of sinner had come to the banks of Jordan, had immersed himself in its waters, had cleansed himself of evil and sin, and that these waters had become heavy with the sin of man, with the deadliness of sin, so that when the Lord Jesus Christ was plunged into them as wool is plunged into a dye, he came out with the sin of man imprinted on him. In the myth of Hercules and his combat with the centaur, the centaur is a being which is half-human and half-horse, that is, bestiality united to humanity. In a sense, this is our condition. We are all centaurs. We have all our glorious humanity in us, and yet we allow it to be defiled. In his combat with this monstrous being - and, in a sense, we are all monstrous, as contrasted with the surpassing beauty of Christ - Hercules wounds the centaur. In order to avenge himself, the centaur drenches his tunic in his own blood and sends it to Hercules, who puts it on. It clings to his flesh and burns him cruelly, yet he cannot take it off. Eventually he tears it away - with his flesh and with his life. This is an image which one could aptly use for what happens to Christ when he takes upon himself our humanity, our humanity which is like the centaur's tunic, drenched with murderous, lethal blood. Then he comes up out of Jordan, ready for the victory, and upon his humanity there comes the Holy Spirit of God in the form of a dove, the Spirit that fills him with power, not only in his divinity, for his humanity also is now fulfilled to total perfection. This will be revealed to us later, at the Transfiguration, when it is not the divinity of God that shines through in spite of the humanity. At that moment we see his humanity transfigured with Divinity and shining in all its glory. But this situation, this vision is incommunicable. The Apostles could see it, but they could not take part in it. It is only in the Resurrection, when all separatedness will be overcome, that the victory of Christ, his risen and transfigured humanity, will be capable of becoming ours . In the context of the humanity of Christ all the temptations offer a double challenge. The first challenge is this: 'You are filled with power. There is no limit to your power. The Spirit is not only upon .you, but within you. God is in you. Why can you not do anything you choose, if you are the Son of God?" In challenging Christ to prove that he is God the devil in effect says: 'You have created a world. Make it different for your own convenience. This world belongs to me, I will give you everything, provided you become one of my subjects. You are God. You are all powerful. You are filled with the Spirit. Show it. Throw yourself down from the pinnacle, that everyone may see and recognise you'. This is the temptation to power which would undo totally the kenosis , the emptying of self, the very act of the Incarnation. It would make the incarnate Son of God into a fallen god, and nothing else. Later Christ was tempted again. Satan reappeared while he was on the way to Caesaria Philippi, after he was recognised as the Son of God by Peter. Christ then began to tell his disciples about his Passion, but Peter turned to Him and said: 'Be merciful to yourself'. This was temptation to weakness. 'You cannot do it. Are you not flesh and blood? Have pity on yourself'. And he said the same words to Peter as he had said to Satan: 'Get thee behind me. Thou thinkest the things of the earth, and not the things of God'. So there are two temptations: power and weakness are equally tempting, and equally dangerous, for him and for us. We must strike the wonderful balance of faith that allows the power of God to be made manifest in weakness. As St Paul says: 'All things are possible for me in the sustaining power of Christ.' For me, 'and yet it is Christ's power, not mine'. At this point Christ becomes 'The Man of the Seventh Day'. At the end of Creation, the Lord rested on the Sabbath, the seventh day. What happened? It is a moment when, having fulfilled all his creative work, he handed it over to man to bring to perfection. St Maximus the Confessor tells us that man was created in such a way that he was at one not only with all the material and psychic world, but also with the spiritual world of the angels and of God himself. Being at the very centre, capable of communing with the one and the other, man could unite both, and so lead the whole of creation unto that perfection which is expressed by St Paul as 'God being all in all'. Man was put in charge of creation, but he betrayed it into the hands of Satan. So Christ becomes the New Adam, the One who takes upon himself to be the Leader, the head of the created world, to lead it to its vocation. This is why so many of the miracles of Christ are performed on the Sabbath. It is the Day of Man. It is the day when God rested from his works and said: 'Now it is for man to bring to perfection what had been made perfect, and to restore to wholeness what has been fragmented and broken and destroyed.' Christ did not perform miracles on the Sabbath in order to challenge the pharisees and the scribes. These miracles were acts by which he asserted himself as the New Adam who takes upon himself and fulfills the vocation of man. By accepting to be the New Adam he takes upon himself the complex destiny of being Perfect Man, and therefore has an absolute horror and revulsion against all sin, all evil, all impurity. And yet he accepts to be clothed in our fallen nature, with all its frailty, though without sin. He is crucified by the frailty of fallen man, because he is himself free. As St Maximus the Confessor says: 'In the Incarnation Christ becomes immortal, because it is impossible to conceive of humanity united inseparably to Divinity, and remaining mortal. Yet he takes upon himself everything, including mortality'. And he also takes upon himself the very condition of mortality - the loss of God - in order to be totally at one with us. So as God he is Love crucified. As man, he is the Perfect Man, crucified by the imperfection of the world which he has accepted to bear in the form of his flesh. Thus he finds himself in history with a dual solidarity. He is totally, unreservedly and ultimately at one with God. But at the same time he is as ultimately and as absolutely, by choice and by the desire of love, at one with the fallen world. The result is that, while he is of both, he is rejected by both. Because he is God's own, he is rejected by man; he must die 'outside the walls'. He cannot even be killed in Jerusalem. He cannot be killed, like the prophets, in the temple or within the precincts of the temple. He must be rejected from the very city of men. Because he has made himself one with man and has accepted the final predicament of man, the loss of God in Adam, he has to die alone, without God. That is what Archimandrite Sophrony once called 'a metaphysical swoon', a moment when, in his humanity, in his dying, he lost the sense of being at one with the Father. 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' This is not the recitation of a prophetic psalm. One does not recite psalms when one is dying on the Cross. One cries out, 'Lord, have mercy'. One cries without words. But one does not recite a psalm for the edification of those standing around. The loss of God is a real event. Christ cannot die, otherwise than by losing God. This is the tragedy of the Cross. This is the inconceivable greatness of divine Love. He is not only vulnerable at that moment. He is undone. In his address Bishop George defined death as extinction. I do not believe this to be true. In the Old Testament, death is an atrocious, appalling moment when body and soul are severed from one another. The soul of each one of us who has lost God on earth, through the sin of our first parents and our own, descends into sheol; into the pit, the place where God is not. The body, which was the only way in which we could communicate with God - by our cry to him, by longing, by hope, by desire, is undone in corruption. It is the utter separatedness of the living human soul from God which is the tragedy of death and sheol in the Old Testament. This is what is signified by the icon of the Harrowing of Hell, or by the words 'he descended into hell' of the Apostles Creed. Soul and body are torn apart. But Divinity does not abandon either his body or his soul. The body of Christ lies incorruptible, because it is inseparably united with Divinity. The soul of Christ descends into hell, as the prayer says, in the splendour of his Godhead. And then the place where God was not, the place of his utter and radical absence, is filled with the divine Presence. This explains the words of the psalm: 'Where shall I flee from before thy face? In heaven is thy dwelling, in hell thou art also'. This, then, is the victory. This is what happens on Good Friday when, at the end of Matins, we already sing of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is not simply the resurrection of the body of Christ. It is victory over death, over sin, over Satan. Hell is emptied and laid waste. And Christ rests in the tomb, like God on the Seventh Day. The victory is won. Not only the victory of creation that opened the tragic history of mankind, but the ultimate victory. On Saturday we sing the Resurrection because body and soul are now united. Christ appears to us victorious. Separation is undone by the Cross and by the descent into hell. Separation can no longer hold Christ, either in the tomb or in hell. The Resurrection is the inevitable glorious result of this victory. Then comes the Ascension, when we see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Glory. We see where we ourselves belong; and we can say, with St Paul, that our life is 'hid with Christ in God'. 

Sourozh. 1983. N.14. P. 1-13

Metropolitan Anthony Sourozh-A Sermon on Gratitude

 

Metropolitan Anthony Sourozh
SERMON ON GRATITUDE
17 December 1989

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Ten lepers came to the Lord; ten men who were ritually unclean and therefore, ritually rejected by their community, unable to attend the common worship of the Temple, unable to come near the habitations of men; and unclean also in the eyes of men because their sickness could be transmitted to others: others could become impure, others could be sick unto death.

They came to Christ and stood afar off because they knew that they had no right to come near, to touch Him as had done the woman who had an issue of blood and who had been healed. From afar off they cried for mercy, and the Lord healed them; He sent them to the priests in order to be ritually cleansed. Ten of them went, and nine never came back. One of them, discovering on his way that he was healed, let go of every other concern but his gratitude to Him that had restored him to wholeness. He came back and thanked the Lord, and the Gospel tells us that this man was a Samaritan, a man who was outside of the Hebrew community, a man who had no rights within the people of Israel, a man who was not only a stranger, but a reject.

Why is it - and Christ Himself asks the question - why is it that nine of them never thought of returning? Because they felt that now that they were clean they were restored to the wholeness of the people of Israel; they needed nothing more, they had everything. The Samaritan knew that he had been cleansed, healed, made whole without having any right to this love of God and this act of Christ.

Isn't it true that gratitude springs up in our hearts more powerfully, more gloriously when what we receive is undeserved, when it is a miracle of divine and human love? When we think that we deserve something and receive it, we receive it as our due; so did the nine Jews. But the Samaritan knew he had no right to the mercy of God, no right to this miracle of healing, and his heart was filled with gratitude.

Does this not apply to us? Indeed, it does! Indeed it does so sadly, because all of us do feel that we have a right: a right to human concern, to human love, a right to everything which the earth and human relationships can give, ultimately, a right for God's care and love for us. And therefore, when we receive a gift we are superficially grateful, we say a perfunctory 'thank you'; but it does not transform our relationship, either to God or to those who have been merciful to us. We receive it as our due, and we are grateful to those who were instrumental in conveying to us what 'naturally' we had a right to have.

The first Beatitude speaks to us in that respect very clearly: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God......Who are the poor in spirit? It is not those who are simply poor; poverty does not call out the great virtues simply by itself; the poor in spirit are those who in their heart and mind, in their whole self, know that they possess nothing which is not a gift, and deserve nothing of what gratuitously is given to us. Let us reflect one moment on this.

We did not come into being of our own volition; God brought us into being, and not by command, by an act of power. He brought us into being by an act of love, He loved us into existence. By doing this, He says to us: I love you! Without you, the world which I have created would be incomplete in my eyes; but also, I have faith in you that you will not betray my trust. I put my hope in all the good there is in you; My love will never falter, My faith and hope in you will remain unshaken - respond to them! The wonder is that however little we believe in God, God believes in us. Is not this a marvel, a wonder? And we exist only because of this faith of God in us, because of this hope and love He has vested in us.

And if we think further we have not only existence - we are alive, alive with the breath of God that makes us akin to Him, capable of knowing Him! And again, He has revealed Himself to us in so many ways, but ultimately in the Incarnation: God Himself has become man for us to see how much we are loved, and how great we are in His eyes, and indeed how great we are potentially in our humanity; we can all become by communion to Christ the sons and daughters of the Living God, partakers of the Divine nature. And to achieve this Christ has given us His life, His teaching, His death, the forgiveness He gave to those who crucified Him: Forgive them, Father, they don't know what they are doing! This applies to us also, all the time, day in, day out, of His Resurrection, and the manifestation of our human glory by His sitting at the right hand of God, Saint John Chrysostom says, If you want to know how great man is, look up to the throne of God - you will see Man enthroned at the right hand of glory!

Is not that enough for us to be grateful, to be grateful before any other particular gift is bestowed: the love of our closest, and of other people that care, the security of life, food, air, health! But we all take this for granted; we are not poor in spirit - we take it as our due; why should we be grateful that we are given what is our right? Why shouldn't God give us all that is His obligation to give. This is our attitude, we don't formulate it so crudely, but we live by it!

The Samaritan did not; he had no right to share anything that was the right of Israel - and he was given it! And his gratitude was aflame, aglow! Can we not learn something from him? And also, can we not realise how wonderful it would be if out of gratitude we lived in such a way as to give God joy, the joy of knowing that He has not created us in vain, that He does not believe in us in vain, that He has not put His trust in us in vain, that His love has been received, is now incarnate, not only in emotion, but in action! Saint Paul says, It is a greater joy to give than to receive; is that our attitude? If we are truly grateful for the gifts which are ours - how generously, how joyfully we would give to everyone around us in an act of love which would be our sharing in the love of God... And if we realised that all we have, in body, in soul, in circumstances of life, even in the tragedies of life, comes because God has sent us into the world as His messengers to bring divine presence at a cost, if necessary, of our lives - how grateful we would be, and how we would live in order that God should look at us, each of us, and say, Here is a disciple of Mine who has understood, and who lives accordingly!

Let us reflect on this; let us learn to live out of gratitude, out of the joy of being loved, out of our communion with God, but knowing that it is an act of gratuitous generosity, that we have no rights - and yet we possess all things. Saint Paul said that: I have nothing, and I possess all things. Each of us could be such a rich person in our utter poverty, rich with all the love and power and richness of God.

Let us reflect, and let us give God, in an act of gratitude not only spoken, not only dimly felt, but lived in every action of our life: let us give Him joy, and the certainty that He has not created us in vain, not lived and died for us in vain, that we are truly disciples who have understood and who want to live His Gospel. Amen.

* All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of  Sourozh

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh "Carry one another's burdens"

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans XV: l-7
July 14, 1991

How beautiful and seemingly simple are the last words of to-day's Epistle: 'Carry one another's burdens, and so you will fulfill the Law of Christ'. But how much they claim from us! Linking it with Christ means that we must be prepared to carry the burden of each person, of everyone, whether it is a friend or a foe, whether the burden seems to be great and honourable, or whether it is humiliating to us as it is defiling to the other person.

Christ became man and took upon Himself all the weight not only of our creaturely condition, but of the condition of the fallen world. He took upon Himself the weight, the crushing weight of the lives of everyone who came to Him; not only of the sick and the needy, not only of those who were clean and persecuted, but of those who were wallowing in filth, those who were evil, as it seemed to others, at the very core of their being. But through the darkness that blinded people He saw the light at the core, He saw that the divine image was imprinted at the very heart of every person, and it was to this image He addressed Himself; it was this life eternal that was dormant in each that He awoke through a touch, through a word, by His presence.

And so, when we hear the words of Paul that we should carry one another's burdens, it is against this background of Christ's readiness never to reject anyone, never to see in anyone a person for whom there was no hope left, that we must turn to our neighbour. When the burdens we have to carry are noble and tragic it seems to us easy to do so; it is easy to be full of compassion, of sympathy for the persecuted, to be full of sympathy and compassion for those who are in desperate material need, for those who are in agony of mind, who suffer in all possible ways. It is easy to have a moment of compassion for those who are sick in body; but how difficult it is to have a steady sense of compassion for those who are sick for a very long time and who claim our attention week after week, year after year, at times for decades. And even more so for people who are mentally disturbed and who need our attention still more, who need us to stand by them, carry them indeed on our shoulders; how many of us are capable of this?

But there is another way in which we have to carry one another's burdens; the examples which I gave were burdens that afflicted others and burdens we were only to share, and to share for moments. It is only for a few hours that we visit the sick; it is only for a short while that we carry the burdens of those who are in agony of mind and in distress, because having been with them, stood by them, expressed all the genuine concern which was ours, we will walk out and put down this burden while the other will continue to carry it.

How much more difficult it is when the burden is laid upon ourselves, and this burden is not one that ennobles us in our own eyes or in the eyes of others, but is simply pure ugly suffering and distress: the dislike of others for us, the hatred of others, slander and calumny, and the various many, many ways in which our neighbour can make our lives almost unbearable. How difficult it is then to think of them not just as the cause of all that destroys our lives, but as people who are blind, who are unaware of what they are doing. We pray in the litanies by saying that we ask God to be merciful to those who hate and wrong us, who devise and do evil against us!

How often it is that people devise nothing, mean nothing, but are totally thoughtless. At that moment how difficult it becomes to see this person as someone whom we must take upon ourselves, with all the consequences of it and bring this person before God; to bring before God ugliness, meanness, thoughtlessness, unintentional cruelty - bring it before God and say: 'Forgive, Lord! They do not know what they are doing'… These words that are so beautiful and so inspiring. Carry one another's burdens aid so you will have fulfilled the Law of Christ, claim from us a generosity, a steadiness and courage and a likeness to Christ which is far beyond what we are prepared to offer most of the time to most of the people, even to the people whom we love, whose burdens we are prepared to carry for a moment and then leave the burden on them.

Let us reflect on every person who is of our acquaintance, beginning with the closest ones, who have claims on us, or who burden us by their very existence, or the way they behave. And then, let us look farther and learn to accept the burden and carry it as Christ did - up to death upon the Cross. Amen.

* All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh-On The Nativity of the Mother of God

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

I should like to say a few words about the greatness of this feast. When a man surveys this world in which we live, which is so vast, seemingly boundless, and looks at himself in it, he feels very small and insignificant. And if he adds to this the hardness and coldness of men, he may sometimes feel extremely vulnerable, helpless and unprotected both before people and before the terrifying vastness of the world.

Yet at the same time if a man looks at himself not in relation to his surroundings, but goes deep into himself, he will there discover such an expanse, such depths, that the whole created world is too small to fill it. Man sees the beauty of the world — and the vision does not completely satisfy him; he learns an enormous amount about God's creation — and the knowledge does not fill him to the brim. Neither human joy nor even human sorrow can completely fill a man, because in him is a depth that exceeds everything created; because God made man so vast, so deep, so limitless in his spiritual being, that nothing in the world can finally satisfy him except God Himself.

Today's feast of the Mother of God demonstrates this fact with particular beauty and splendour. She so believed in God, She gave herself to Him with such a pure mind and pure heart, with an unwavering will, with the purity of Her virginity and life such that She was granted to say the Name of God perfectly, with such love that the Word became flesh and God was made man in Her.

Through this we are shown that not only is the soul, the inner being and spirit of man, so created by God that it can contain the mystery of a meeting with the living God, but that even the body is so made that in an unfathomable way it can be united with the living God. Indeed, according to St. Peter we are called to become partakers of the divine nature; according to St. Paul our vocation is to become temples of the Holy Spirit. The whole of the New Testament teaches us that we are the Body, the living tremulous Body of Christ, through baptism and through Holy Communion. How wonderful this is, and therefore with what reverence must we regard not only our immortal soul, but this body of ours which is called to rise again, to enter the Kingdom of God and be glorified, like the body of Christ.

In the XI century St. Simeon the New Theologian wrote one day when he had returned to his humble cell after receiving Holy Communion, words to this effect, "I look upon this corruptible body, upon this frail flesh, and I tremble, because by partaking of the Holy Mysteries it has been permeated by God, it has been united with Christ, it is overflowing with the Holy Spirit... these powerless hands have become the hands of God, this body has become a body that God has taken possession of."

Consider what has been given us not only by our faith, but by the sacraments of the Church. The immersion in the blessed waters of Baptism makes us particles, living members of Christ's Body, the Anointing with Holy Chrism is not only the visible seal of the Holy Spirit, but makes us the temples in which He dwells. When the bread and wine which are offered by our faith and love to God are consecrated, they become incomprehensibly and mysteriously the Body and Blood of Christ, and this created matter partakes of Christ and imparts to us, who are incapable of soaring to God in spirit, the divinity of Christ, which saves and transfigures us in soul and body.

This feast of Nativity of the Mother of God is the time when we remember the birth of the One who for the sake of us all, for the whole human race, was able to show such faith, to surrender so absolutely to God, that He could become Man through Her, and bring us these manifold, unfathomable gifts. Glory to Her humility, glory to Her faith, glory to Her love, glory to God Who was incarnate and to the Virgin Mother of God, the worthy vessel of the incarnation of the Son of God, Christ our God! Amen.

Met.Anthony of Sourozh-ON THE PRAYER OF INTERCESSION

Prayer is an immense subject. It embraces and sustains the whole of Christian life. It is both the intimate relationship which each one of us has with our God and that which the Church has with him as the whole body of Christ. To deal with the subject as a whole seems to me impossible, and I should like just to say here something about the prayer of intercession. It is at the very heart of the Christian life. Christ is the supreme intercessor. And what is the Church, in each one of its members and in its totality but an extension in time and space, through the course of the ages and in a world which is gradually being won for him — an extension of the real presence of Christ, incarnate in those who are its members, and also, the presence of the Holy Spirit in those who, singly and together make up the temple of the Spirit?

God at the heart of the world's suffering

And yet the problem raised by the subject of intercession, as by so many kinds of prayer, is a serious problem for modern man: is it still possible for modern man to pray? Is the God to whom we turn in prayer a God who bears any sort of relation to the sufferings of the world? Is he simply a God who hears us, who sympathizes with us but who is still far away; or is he, rather, a God who is at the heart of things? May I remind you of a passage in the Book of Daniel, in the third chapter, which tells the story of the three young men whom King Nebuchudnezzar condemns to death by fire; bound hand and foot they are thrown into the furnace and the king comes to see their ordeal. And then he turns to his counselors and ministers and asks them with an amazement that is yet full of reverent awe: 'Were there not three men thrown in chains into the furnace? How is it then that I now see four men walking freely in the midst of the flames, and one of them looks like a son of the gods?'

...In the furnace... in the storm

This is the God to whom we can address our prayer of intercession, this God who voluntarily enters the fiery furnace, who sets free those who are there, who goes into the very depths of torment and lets himself be scorched by the flames, the God of whom we say in the Apostles' Creed that he descended into hell, who calls us too to descend right into the depths of the human hell, to the depths of suffering, of anguish, doubt, hatred to go down in the peace of Christ and to bring to that place where there is nothing but anguish and horror, the life-giving, transforming presence of the Living God.

We know the famous incident of the storm described in the Gospel according to St Mark, 4. 35-41. Elsewhere a passage well known to you (Matt. 14. 22-32) describes another storm in the course of which Peter, seeing Christ walking on the water amidst all the unleashed fury of the winds and waves, and desiring nothing but to be with his Lord and master, asks that he too may be enabled to walk over the water to join him. Both these storms give us a picture of the way in which so many men and women of our time see God's relation to the suffering and anguish of mankind, but they also reveal to us the truth of the matter. In the former passage, we see the apostles in the grip of the storm. Waves pour into their frail boat, death is waiting to devour them. They are fighting for their lives, and meanwhile their saviour – Christ – is calmly asleep with his head on a pillow! As they turn to him it is not to ask him piously for help — they show no sign of the faith they would confess if their heart were undivided, in the clear understanding of his divinity and his omnipotence — they are indignant: 'Are you going to let us die?' They might have added: 'If you can't do anything to help us at least be with us in our agony, at least die with us and share our horror in the face of death!' Is not this how millions of men and women see God in the situation? The world in its torment, its fear, its anguish, contending with death, sickness, hunger, despair — and a God who is asleep! — his head resting comfortably on a cushion while his creatures face their death agony? And the other account, the one that shows us St Peter walking on the water, is that not also a picture of the way in which modern man so often thinks of the place, the role, the activity of God? Caught again in a Squall the apostles are struggling for survival, the storm has overwhelmed them, reduced them to sheer terror and doubt, they are held in the clutch of fear; they know that death is just waiting to snatch them in an instant, that there is nothing between it and them but a few flimsy planks, and suddenly, walking on the water, amid this uproar of the elements, they see Christ. But they don't turn to him with their last cry, their last shred of hope, they think they are seeing a ghost: how could it be anything else? How could there be any place for Christ in this elemental chaos? Isn't he the key to all harmony, the centre around whom peace is restored, love reigns, harmony prevails? It cannot be he who is in the midst of the storm, it must be a monstrous apparition, a lie, a slander against God! And yet, it is he, it is he, at the heart of the storm. He is not at the lakeside calling his disciples to a safe harbour. He is at the heart of the chaos, because the Lord who is the Lord of peace, the Lord of life is also the Lord of death. All power is his, he is in command and he is king. No, it is not a ghost, it is Christ. And it is at the very heart of the storm that we find him, at that point where all forms of violence are in collision, where all the forces of death meet in a terrible equipoise that is able to crush everything beneath them: he is at the heart of death itself.

The man to whom Job calls

Having added these images to the one I referred to earlier in Daniel, I would like to add one more. Do you remember the Book of Job, the man upon whom every possible pain and calamity falls one after another, the man who is righteous and yet who is afflicted with all the punishments due to the sinner, to the man who has lost God, who no longer deserves to be called a man? At the end of the ninth chapter of his book we find a passage, which is striking for the sobriety of the anguish it reveals. Job, having come to the end of his strength cries out: 'Where is the man who will stand between me and my judge, who will put his hand on his shoulder and on mine? Where is there such a man?' In his prophetic vision, the vision of a man who can no longer be satisfied with an arbitrary conception of God, who is reaching out for a God of truth, a God of justice, a God of love, he is waiting for the man who will unite him with his judge. That gesture with which the expected man will put his hands on God's shoulder and on his shoulder is a gesture which unites. He is not waiting for someone to come and find a way to a compromise between himself and God, someone who will patch up a temporary peace, bring about an armistice, that is not what he is looking for, he could get all that by submitting like a slave. But Job's heart is that of a son, what he is waiting for is a reconciliation, a new situation which will create an utterly and completely new relationship between himself and God, in which there will be no place for arbitrary conceptions, and where truth will reign in the utmost fullness of its meaning. It was Christ for whom he was waiting! It was Christ who was to come and stand between God and man, who was to stretch out his hands on the Cross and join man and God together again in a bond of unity which will hold forever.

Intercession, the Act of Incarnate God

When we think of Intercession we so often think in mean and paltry terms. I don't want to speak flippantly, but when we pray for the needs of the world, don't we all too often have the air of reminding God of his sins of omission? Don't we seem to be saying to God: 'Lord, haven't you noticed that this person is in agony and someone else dying of hunger, that one land is being devastated by war and another groaning under a foreign yoke?' Don't we seem to be reminding God of what he ought to be doing if he would only follow our excellent advice. That is not intercession, nor is God's response simply a matter of obedience to the orders we give him in our prayer. We shall come back presently to God's response, but let us now ask ourselves what intercession is, if it is not this appeal to God to do what he ought to do and is not doing.

The term 'intercession' does not denote first and foremost a prayer; it denotes an action; to intercede is to take a step which brings us to the heart of a situation, which brings us to the point where all conflicts meet head-on, where the impact of this collision is at its most violent. Intercession begins with an involvement, an involvement that is definitive, permanent, complete, unlimited, unconditional. The interceding Christ is not the praying Christ, it is the Christ who is the Word of God made flesh, it is the Son of God who becomes the son of man; there is every evidence that he prays, but his act of intercession is first of all an act and not a word. The Son of God becomes the son of man, the Word is made flesh, there is a unique person in whom God and man meet, in whom the breach between God and man is healed, harmony is restored: man and God are united forever in the perfect obedience of the man Jesus Christ of which St Paul speaks, in the perfect, sacrificial self-giving of the Word made flesh. There is in him, as it were, a concentration of the whole conflict, of all that separates man and God, and in him, this conflict, this separation, is brought to an end.

But just how far does this solidarity between man and Christ, between Christ and God extend? What are its depth and its breadth? It is essential for us to understand this because we are called to be what Christ was, we are the body of Christ, broken for the sin of the world, we are the presence of Christ in a world which still needs salvation, which is still separated from God and divided in itself. I have used the word solidarity advisedly: it is a word of current usage, it denotes a relation with which we are quite familiar: the idea of solidarity with each other is easy for us to grasp clearly. Christ chose that two-fold solidarity which leads him to the Cross. He chose to be man in the truest and fullest sense of the word, to be a stranger to our humanity in nothing except his freedom from sin, but to belong to it utterly, because he takes upon himself the sins of the world.

Jesus at Jordan — Jesus in hell

One of the images which I find most striking, perhaps because of its inherent tragedy, is the baptism of Christ. Around St John are gathered all those who are defiled, mortally wounded by sin, they repent and ask for mercy, they want to be purified and cleansed and they plunge into the waters of Jordan and these waters wash away their sins: they come out again pure and clean, they can begin a new life. And Christ — the only one who is without sin — he too comes to be baptized. He too plunges into these waters, heavy and turbid with human mortality, human sin, human atheism, with all the evil on earth, he immerses himself in this element of death, and emerges again weighed down with the burden of this evil, this sin, this death. Baptism, which meant liberation for those who came in penitence to St John, means for him the beginning of his Passion. He is now laden with the death of others: by nature immortal, he will die a death like ours. When we think of what Christ has in common with us, we note in the Gospel certain characteristics which make him truly human: he is hungry, thirsty and tired; he has moments of depression; he weeps for Lazarus, he is angry with the merchants in the Temple, and many other things. It seems to us, finally, that he has this in common with us, that he dies as we do, and yet, it is perhaps here, in this death of his, that there is the most profound difference between him and us.

St Maximus the Confessor, in the sixth century, reflecting on the Incarnation, the passion and the death of Christ says: 'If it is true, as Scripture teaches, and as God proclaims through his prophets and apostles, that death is the fruit of sin, that man dies from the loss of God, that man dies from being no longer grafted on the source of life, then Christ, from the moment of his conception is alive and immortal. He cannot be at the same time the Living God and mortal man; even his humanity, penetrated with divinity, is beyond death, because it is united with God forever. How then does he come to die? By this act, willed and freely accepted, of solidarity with sinful man, he immerses himself in our death, he clothes himself with it, he is going to die of it. And to that end he shares all that belongs to our human destiny, not only hunger and thirst and weariness and anguish, but something more besides: have you ever given the attention of your whole heart, your whole power of feeling, to the cry which he utters from the height of the cross: 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' If it is true that one dies from the absence of God, from the loss of God, then it is there that he accepts a solidarity — ultimate, agonising, appalling — with us: he undertakes to share with us the only tragedy that is final and ultimate, the loss of God which is our death. And in his death, he is torn apart. His soul, dazzling with the light of the divinity, and his body, united forever with his divinity, are separated, torn from each other; the body of Christ rests incorruptible in the tomb because it is penetrated by the presence of God, and the soul of Christ; like the soul of every man, descends into hell as we proclaim in the Apostles' Creed.

There is no longer any place where God is not

But what then is hell? Oh how different it is from the hell of Dante, from all those images that we find of the Christian hell, the place of torment! The hell of the Old Testament is something infinitely more terrible; the sheol of the Old Testament is the place of the radical absence of God, it is the place where God is not and never shall be, and it is to that place that every human soul descends, not only the souls of sinners but also those of the just, because before Christ there is no bridge between the eternity of God and the death of man. Christ, sharing our destiny, having lost God and being dead because of it, descends to the place where every human soul that has lost God descends, and there is set the very mystery of our redemption. He descends into this hell which awaits him, this hell which he has overcome on earth at every moment and which now awaits its victim, which now knows that it is going to possess him and overcome him for ever; and suddenly this hell finds itself full of the splendor of the divinity, of the eternal and uncreated light of the Living God. It is by his death that he has conquered hell and death: there is no longer a place where God is not and to which man will be banished. Now, for the Christian, to die is to fall asleep in the Lord. Death in its utmost atrocity, as irremediable separation from God, does not exist, and that is why we sing in the Orthodox Church and why we all believe, with the joy and exultation of faith, that the death of Christ has destroyed death; not this falling asleep in the Lord, but the definitive death of separation.

The act to which Christ calls us

That is the measure of the solidarity of Christ with men: his solidarity with God was total and it was on that account that the city of men rejected him. It is because of this, because he wished to be faithful to the end, to be one with God to the end, that the city of men could only do him to death outside the walls of Jerusalem. Rejected by men, abandoned by God, yet united in solidarity with both at the cost of his life — that is the solidarity of Christ and that is the solidarity to which he calls us. It is his incarnation, his absolute solidarity with God and with man, which is the act of intercession on which a prayer of intercession is grafted, a prayer which is true because it is under-girded by the act, a prayer which is true because it expresses an act accomplished, not simply an appeal to the generosity or mercy of God, but an appeal to God under-girded by an act which cannot be forgotten or rejected by the Father who so loved the world that he gave his only Son to die for its salvation.

We are called to be in the world what Christ was. Remember the words he spoke and the mission he gave to his disciples on the evening of his resurrection: 'As my Father has sent me so I send you'. And these words, which sometimes sound like a song of victory or a-trumpet blast to those of us who live in a strong world and who are apt to turn with rather ill-considered charity towards a world which is weaker, these words which send out missionaries supported by all the power of the country from which they come, these words sounded more like a knell when Christ uttered them. On Good Friday Christ was dead on the cross, on Sunday he says to them: 'I send you into the world as my Father has sent me'. The image is clear: as sheep into the midst of wolves — to give your life, to shed your blood, in order that others can believe in the love of God and be re-born in the hope of this love, and can be joined to this body of Christ which is destined, as long as the world lasts, as long as there is one sinner in the world, to crucifixion. Christ in the glory of his Father, seated at the right hand of the Father, bears in his hands and feet and side, the marks of the Passion.

When we think of those who are caught up and held in the Redemption of Christ, those who are incorporated in him, whose destiny he shared and still shares, we see that no one can be foreign or external to the mystery of Christ. He lived, a man of the Old Testament among men of the Old Testament, faithful to the law, faithful to sacrifice, faithful to all that was of divine ordinance in the house of Israel, but he has shared also, and in a way that none of us can measure, experience or know, the major tragedy of millions of men and women of our time: a loss of God so radical that one dies of it. There is no atheist in the world who has ever measured the depth of the absence of God as the Son of God made man measured it on the cross when he cried to his Father: 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' The atheist does not know him, he rejects and denies him, and yet his experience as an atheist is a drop in the ocean of this loss of God which Christ knew.

Communion, commitment to the cross

The whole world and everyone in it are less than that which Christ knew of man and shared with man; having known all he can bring all back to his Father. But did he not say that he had given us an example in order that we may follow him, are we not also called to share, not only in such knowledge as the apostles had of him, but in the very life of Christ? When we receive communion in the Holy Eucharist, do we not pledge ourselves to share his human destiny as we ask to share his eternal destiny? To receive Communion surely implies the request for fellowship of life; is it not with the whole Christ that we are to enter into communion? Or shall we have the audacity to say: 'Lord, the Cross for you, the glory for me! You are dead, Lord, and I do not wish to share your cross, but I do wish to share your eternal life'.

Remember the passage in the gospel when James and John came to the Lord and asked to sit on the right hand and on the left of his throne in the day of his glory. Christ had just been speaking to them about his coming Passion; he had described it with a number of tragic details, and had concluded by saying: 'And on the third day the son of man will rise again'. And here were these two disciples who had only heard the promise of victory! They had forgotten, they had not even noticed the price of this victory. Christ had said that the son of man would be delivered into the hands of men, that he would suffer all that is revealed to us in the Passion; they never noticed that, they were only looking for his victory and for what they themselves would be able to gain by it. But Christ turns to them and says: 'Are you ready to be baptised with my baptism?' — in modern terms, (the word baptism in Greek means a total immersion) —'Are you ready to be plunged into the horror in which I am going to be plunged, are you ready to drink the cup that I am going to drink?' They reply: 'Yes, Lord', and what does he promise them? He promises that it will be given to them to be plunged into the same horror, the same death-agony as his, for the salvation of the world, to drink to the dregs the cup that he also is going to drink. He himself is faithful, there is no need for him to promise fidelity to us, we are sure of it, the question concerns our own fidelity: 'Are you ready to be faithful to the friendship that you declare, to the love that you profess for me, to the point of sharing everything? ' And whoever of us comes to the holy table to break the bread and share the Lord's cup must be ready to share not only the splendor of his eternity but also the whole of his earthly destiny, and for what? for the salvation of the world, that others may be saved, because others will only believe in this salvation if they see the divine love shining through the disciples of Christ; they will only believe in it if they see it really crucified, given and victorious: 'Father, forgive them, they know not what they do'.

In the sixth chapter of the Book of Isaiah, we see the prophet brought face to face with a vision of God, and God looking over the whole world in need of salvation, cries: 'Whom shall I send?', and Isaiah rises and says: 'Here am I, Lord, send me'. Hundreds of years later, the archangel Gabriel stands before the Virgin of Israel and tells her that the time has come for the one Job was waiting for to enter into the history of the world, in order to be living intercession, to be the intercessor par excellence. And the Virgin replies: 'Here I am, I am the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to his will'. Shall we not reply, in our turn, in the same way? Dare we be content to present God with requests for the good of others? Shall we not hear the Lord saying to us: 'Whom shall I send?' and shall we not reply: 'Here I am, Lord, send me?'.

To take upon ourselves the cross of forgiveness

Intercession begins with this act of involvement, it continues by fidelity; to be baptised with the baptism of Christ, to drink his cup, is not simply one moment of communion: it is a definitive communion, a fellowship of life accepted forever. So many examples are a proof of this and the victory of God by love and charity is so obvious when it shows itself! I will give one or two examples. Immediately after the war a German newspaper published a deeply moving document: the copy of a prayer found in a concentration camp, written on a torn scrap of wrapping paper. Briefly this was the essence of the prayer: 'Lord, when you come to judge the quick and the dead, remember not only the men of good will but those of evil will. But in that day let it not be their violence and cruelty that you remember, but those fruits of forgiveness, of companionship, of greatness of soul that we have borne because of the sufferings that they inflicted on us, and let these fruits be their pardon!' Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.

A man I knew returned, having, also spent several years in a concentration camp. I met him in a street in Paris and asked him: 'What have you brought back from the camp?' 'Anguish', he replied. '"Why, have you lost your faith?' I said. 'No', he answered 'but you see, while I was in the camp, the object of violence, of ill-treatment, of cruelty, expecting a violent death at every moment, I could say: Father, forgive then, and I was sure that God must forgive them because I had the right to ask His forgiveness, for I was the innocent victim of their violence. Now I am free and perhaps they have not understood, they are still in their hatred and folly. And when I ask God for their salvation anguish seizes me: What proof can I bring to God to show that my prayer is sincere? I no longer suffer'. Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,— a prayer under-girded by an act.

We are not all in such extreme situations as those I have described, but all of us, at every moment, can take upon ourselves the cross of forgiveness. In all our human relationships, at every moment, our heart shrinks and we withdraw from our neighbour because he has wounded us, offended us, forgotten us, rejected us. We are free to open ourselves and to offer ourselves. At the very moment that we are innocent victims, we receive from God that power which is properly divine, of pardoning in his name. And the pardon does not begin at the moment when the suffering ceases, and little by little is forgotten. Pardon begins at the moment when the victim of injustice or violence turns to the aggressor and says: 'I accept you as you are, I accept you as a danger of death, I accept you as a projection of hatred, and I take you up as Christ took up his cross, the instrument of suffering and death, and I will carry you to the end!' It is there that forgiveness begins and that our intercession begins, and in the easy situations in which almost all of us live, we can carry it out from hour to hour in refusing hatred, in refusing to be offended, in refusing to be humiliated, in refusing to be rejected, in saying; 'Whatever you do, I accept you', and then we can raise to God a prayer of intercession. And sometimes this prayer of intercession can be like that of the holy Virgin at Cana.

Opening a door to Christ

The only thing she said, and which in the event was decisive, was not that she recalled to Christ the need and hope of those who were surrounding him, it was the moment when, in an act of perfect faith, without limits, she turned to the servants and said: 'Whatever he says, do it'. She created the conditions of the kingdom of God by her act of faith which brought into that act of faith those who were still on the fringes in comparison with the perfect faith that was hers, and because she was able to believe, God was free to act. And that also is something we can do, we are all free to do it, we are all in a condition to do it. Each of us can be the one who, in a situation of tension, in a tempest, in a squall, in a confrontation, conscious of being able to do nothing, takes his stand in prayer and says: 'Lord, come! May your presence bring peace, give us that peace which the world cannot give, bless those who hate each other, give them the peace which can conquer all hatred.' Our role is to open a door to Christ; wherever there is a Christian, wherever there is a Christian community, God can be present: Christ and the Spirit, the humble frail, vulnerable All-Mightiness of this God who willed to become one of us in order that we might grow to the measure of his divinity.

Such is the Intercession that we can offer, we Christians, we modern men. An intercession which is first of all and primarily a commitment, a commitment that is total, without reserve, definitive and forever, in a solidarity that nothing will be able to break, neither the cross, nor death, nor the hatred of men, nor the loss of God. And it is an intercession that we can offer without fear of being misunderstood by a God who knows the whole mystery of commitment, of solidarity, of the anguish on the Mount of Olives, of the dereliction of the cross and of the descent into the depths of hell. Such a God as this – we can not only believe in him, we can not only hope in him, we can respect him: he is worthy of our respect, he is a God to whom we can address our prayer of intercession because he has lived the involvement of intercession far more than any one of us; we live it through sympathy but he lived it out in life and death. He has overcome and in his resurrection he witnesses to the victory which is God's and which is also ours, because the victory of God is our salvation. Amen.



* Sourozh. 1980 N.1. P. 22-33