1 Corinthians 8:8-9:2; Matthew
25:31-46
In
case you have somehow not noticed, Great Lent begins a week from tomorrow. On this Sunday of the Last Judgment, the
Church reminds us that the point of the upcoming season of repentance is not the
keeping of religious rules or the performance of any form of piety as an end in
itself. Our vocation in Lent is,
instead, to open our souls to the healing mercy of the Lord so that we may enter
more fully into His victory over sin and death at Pascha. The ultimate test of whether we will do so
this Lent is not simply a matter of how strictly we fast, how many services we
attend, or how much money we give to the poor. It is, instead, whether we will unite
ourselves to Christ such that His love permeates every dimension of our
character to the point that we treat our neighbors as He treats us. At a deep level, that is what repentance is
all about. As today’s gospel lesson reveals, every encounter with those who
bear God’s image is an encounter with Christ that anticipates our ultimate
judgment, which will reveal whether we have become living icons of His healing
and restoration of the human person.
As
we begin the last week before Great Lent, the Savior teaches us that how we
relate to our neighbors, especially those we are inclined to overlook,
disregard, and even despise due to their weakness and suffering, is the great
test of our souls. How we treat the hungry and thirsty, the
stranger and the naked, the sick and the prisoner, manifests whether we are gaining
the spiritual health to love as Christ has loved us. How we relate to our suffering and
inconvenient neighbors, whoever they are, is how we relate to our Lord. We must not rest content with a culturally
accommodated faith that congratulates us for being concerned almost exclusively
with the wellbeing of our family, friends, and others with whom we identify for
some reason. We are Gentile Christians, strangers
and foreigners to the heritage of Israel who have now been grafted in by grace
and become heirs to the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham through faith in
the Savior. We will condemn only
ourselves if we refuse to share the undeserved lovingkindness that we have
received with the strangers and foreigners of our day, including those we may
be tempted to view as our enemies. We
will repudiate the love of our Lord and show that we want no part in His
salvation if we persist in finding excuses to justify our neglect of anyone who
experiences the bodily sufferings of those with whom Christ identified Himself as
“the least of these.”
Whether
in Lent or any other time of the year, we must reject the temptation of trying
to impress God by doing good deeds of any kind.
Instead of serving our pride by obsessively trying to justify ourselves
through religious legalism, our calling is humbly to take the small and
imperfect steps that we currently have the strength to take in conveying His
selfless love to other people. The point
is not to measure ourselves according to an impersonal standard of perfection,
but to grow in conforming our character to His as we serve those who need our
help. Doing so is an essential dimension
of being able to say truthfully, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
(Gal. 2:20)
On
this last day for consuming meat until Pascha, we must also resist the
temptation to obsess about whether we will be able to follow all the Church’s canons
about fasting in Lent. Such canons are
guidelines that we embrace for the healing of our souls with the guidance of a
spiritual father. They are not objective
impersonal laws from a book that everyone must obey in the same way. Today we read St. Paul’s teaching that the key
issue in the question of whether to eat meat that had been sacrificed in pagan temples
in first-century Corinth was how doing so impacted others, for “food
will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better
off if we do. Only take care, lest this liberty of yours somehow become a
stumbling block to the weak.” To cause
another to fall back into paganism would be to “sin against Christ.” His words show that what is truly at stake in
fasting is not a mere change in diet or the fulfillment of a law for its own
sake, but learning to relate to food in ways that help us acquire the spiritual
strength to love and serve our neighbors.
By abstaining from the richest and most satisfying dishes to the best of
our ability, we gain strength to reorient our desires from self-gratification
toward blessing others. Eating a humble
diet frees up resources to give to the needy in whom we encounter Christ. Lenten foods should be simple and keep well
for future meals, thus freeing up time and energy for prayer, spiritual
reading, and serving our neighbors. Even
the smallest steps in fasting can help us gain a measure of freedom from
slavery to our passions as we learn that we really can live without satisfying
every desire for pleasure. Especially if we are new to this practice, it
is important to begin with the very small steps that we can actually take in a
spiritually healthy way. Trying to do more than we really can do at this point
in our journey is invariably counterproductive and discouraging. As people with responsibilities in our
families, at work, at school, and in relation to our needy neighbors, we must not
deprive ourselves of nourishment to the point that we lack the energy necessary
to act as good stewards of our talents every day.
The spiritual
discipline of fasting is simply a tool for shifting the focus away from
ourselves and toward the Lord and our brothers and sisters in whom we encounter
Him each day. If we distort fasting into
a private religious accomplishment to prove how holy we are to ourselves or
anyone else, we would do better not to fast at all. That is the vain effort of trying to serve
ourselves instead of God and those who bear His image and likeness. In Lent, our focus must be set squarely on
Christ and His living icons, not on us.
The fundamental calling of the Christian life is to become like our
Lord, Who offered Himself up for the salvation of the world purely out of
love. If we are truly in communion with
Him, then we too must offer up ourselves for our neighbors. And as He taught in
the parable of the Good Samaritan, there are no limits on what it means to be a
neighbor to anyone who is in need, regardless of nationality, religion, or
anything else.
The particular form of our
self-offering will vary according to the needs of the people we encounter and
our gifts, callings, and life circumstances.
Discerning how to live faithfully is not a matter of cold-blooded
rational calculation or meeting objective standards, but of being so conformed
to Christ that we become a “living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1) such that the
Savior’s healing of fallen humanity becomes present, active, and effective in
us. Instead of defining ourselves over
against one another in an endless cycle of competition and grievance in a
pathetic effort to distract ourselves from the inevitability of the grave, we
must grow as persons in communion with Christ and all those who bear His image
and likeness. His eternal life will
truly become ours as we unite ourselves more fully to His great Self-Offering
on the Cross for the salvation of the world. The more we acquire the character of those
liberated from slavery to the fear of death, the greater our freedom will be
from the passions that blind us from seeing and serving Christ in every
neighbor.
Whenever
we encounter the Lord in a suffering person who needs our care, there is
inevitably a kind of judgment that reveals who we truly are. That is the case
when we see His living icons suffering today as the victims of natural
disasters, wars, and other catastrophes around the world. It is the case when
those who bear His image are sick, lonely, hungry, imprisoned, or in any other
circumstance in which they need our friendship, care, and support. Since we are not yet those who respond
generously to everyone without a second thought, we must mindfully struggle
against our self-centeredness and indifference to the sufferings of others. In order to do that, we must not shut the
eyes of our souls to the brilliant light of Christ when the darkness within us
becomes all the more apparent. We must
respond to what every judgment of our souls reveals by taking the steps we can
to open and offer our hearts to Christ more fully so that we will become more
beautiful living icons of His restoration and fulfillment of the human person
in the divine image and likeness. In
order to do that, we must persistently refuse to fuel our passions with
self-indulgence as we fast as best we can and humble ourselves while calling
out for the Lord’s healing mercy from the depths of our hearts.
Be
prepared this Lent. Fasting is a
wonderful teacher of humility, for it is such a hard struggle for most of us to
disappoint our stomachs and tastebuds even in very small ways. Serving our
suffering neighbors is also a wonderful teacher of humility, for most of us are
experts in coming up with excuses for disregarding them. When these disciplines reveal our weakness,
we must not despair, but instead call on the mercy of the Lord from the depths
of our hearts and then take the next small steps that we have the strength to
take on the blessed path to the Kingdom.
If we will do so throughout the
remaining time of our life and persist in returning to the path whenever we
stray from it, then we will have good hope of being among those quite surprised
to hear at the Last Judgment, “’Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit
the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’” Like the people on His right hand in the
parable, that will not be because we have calculated rationally how to earn a
prize or met some objective legal standard.
Instead, it will be because the self-emptying love and gracious mercy of
Christ have permeated our souls and become constitutive of our character. Every day of Lent, and every day of our
lives, let us live accordingly, for “‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one
of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’”
