Homily for the Sunday of the Last Judgment (Meat Fare) in the Orthodox Church

 

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.’”  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homily for the Presentation (Meeting) of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple in the Orthodox Church

 

 Hebrews 7:7-17; Luke 2:22-40

Today we celebrate a great feast of the Church that speaks directly to the spiritual challenges that we all face on a daily basis.  For today we celebrate the Presentation of Christ, forty days after His birth, in the Temple in Jerusalem.  The Theotokos and St. Joseph bring the young Savior there in compliance with the Old Testament law, making the offering of a poor family, a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.  By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the old man St. Simeon proclaims that this Child is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.”  The aged prophetess St. Anna also recognizes Him as the fulfillment of God’s promises.

            Our epistle reading from Hebrews reminds us that the One brought into the Temple this day is the Great High Priest Who offers Himself on the Cross and destroys the power of sin and death through His glorious resurrection.  Christ does so in order that we may enter into the Heavenly Temple and participate by grace in the eternal communion of the Holy Trinity.  The priesthood and sacrifices of the Old Testament foreshadowed Christ’s fulfillment of them.   The Savior’s offering and priesthood are eternal, for He intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father. There is no question, then, that the Christian life is not about achieving any earthly goal on its own terms but about entering into the blessedness of the Heavenly Kingdom, both as a present reality and a future hope.   

            Every day of our lives, in all that we think, say, and do, we have the opportunity to join ourselves more fully to Christ as the Great High Priest.  He will bless and heal every dimension of who we are in this world as we offer ourselves to Him in holiness.  He offered Himself fully, without reservation of any kind, and the only limits to His restoration of our souls, even in the world as we know it, are those that we stubbornly insist upon maintaining.  Christ calls us to present ourselves to Him fully, without reservation of any kind, as we enter into the Heavenly Temple through communion with Him.  All that we must leave behind is what cannot be blessed for our salvation, what cannot be united to the Savior in holiness.  In other words, all that we must leave behind are our sins.

We have surely all accepted lies of one kind or another about who we really are.  It is so easy to define ourselves by our disordered desires, by sins we fall into time and time again, or by worldly categories that simply inflame our passions and serve only earthly kingdoms of one kind or another.  It is so tempting to think that whatever wins the praise of others, gratifies some desire, or does not call us into question must somehow be right.  Instead of trying to make a false god in our own image, Christ calls us to embrace the hard truth that we will become more truly ourselves by becoming more like Him.  He offered up Himself to the point of death on the Cross in order to conquer the power of death, the wages of sin.  The more we offer ourselves to Him by dying to the power of sin in our lives through ongoing repentance, the more we will become our true selves in His image and likeness.     

            We must not limit our celebration of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple merely to remembrance of an event long ago, for we commemorate the feasts of the Church by entering into the eternal reality we celebrate in them.  We cannot truly celebrate this feast without uniting ourselves more fully to the Lamb of God Who is also our Great High Priest.  Our celebration must extend beyond this service to how we live each day, especially in offering ourselves more fully to Him for greater participation even now in the life of the Kingdom of heaven.  As with just about anything else, doing so is a process, a journey of reorienting our lives to God that does not find completion in an instant.

            The Theotokos prepared to become the Living Temple of the Lord in a unique way by literally growing up in the Temple in Jerusalem.  By devoting herself to prayer and purity for years, she gained the spiritual clarity to say “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” in response to the shocking message of the Archangel Gabriel that she was to become the Virgin Mother of the Savior.  Saint Joseph initially did not want to accept the inconvenient calling to become the guardian of the teenage Mary, but his many decades of faithfulness gave him the strength to accept this unusual vocation in old age, and even to risk his life in leading the family as refugees to Egypt in order to escape the murderous plot of Herod. 

            When the Theotokos and Saint Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the temple forty days after His birth, Saint Simeon recognized Christ and proclaimed “Lord, now lettest thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to Thy people Israel.”  Simeon was an old and righteous man, and the Holy Spirit had revealed to him that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah.  He certainly had not acquired the spiritual strength to do so by accident, but through a long life of faith and faithfulness.  The same is true of the elderly prophetess Anna, a widow in her eighties who “did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.”

            Those who brought the young Savior to the Temple in obedience to the Old Testament law and those who recognized Him there were all people who had offered their lives to God time and time again.  They were of different sexes, ages, and backgrounds, which shows that it is not the outward circumstances of our lives that determines where we stand before the Lord.  All may enter into the Heavenly Temple through Our Great High Priest, for in Him such differences become spiritually unimportant.  What is crucial is that we open ourselves to become more fully who we are in Him as those who bear the divine image and likeness.

            The struggle to do so is never ending.  Surely, the journeys of the Theotokos and Saints Joseph, Simeon, and Anna did not go as any of them had expected.  They all faced challenges and sorrows.  As Simeon said to the Theotokos, “a sword will pierce through your own soul also,” for she would see her Son rejected and crucified.  Of course, the particulars of our challenges are different from those of these great saints, but we must use them in the same way.  Namely, we must embrace them as opportunities to offer even the weakest and most painful dimensions of our lives to Christ for healing and transformation.  That does not mean that all our problems will go away or that we will always feel as though we are making progress, but that they present the greatest opportunities we have for entering more fully into the Heavenly Temple through our Great High Priest.

When we unite ourselves to Him as best we can as we struggle against temptation and wrestle with our passions, we will come to know both our own weakness and His gracious strength more fully.  By doing so, we will gain the spiritual clarity to reject superficial distortions of Christianity focused on emotion, worldly success of any kind, or the condemnation and hatred of any person or group.  Since He is “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to Thy people Israel,” His salvation not limited in any way by the idolatrous divisions that we find so appealing in defining ourselves over against neighbors who are living icons of God. Our Savior has triumphed through His Cross and empty tomb due to His unfathomable love for all who bear the divine image and likeness. Every time that we offer ourselves to Him in obedience, we enter more fully into His great victory over sin and death.  Let us celebrate His presentation today by using all our struggles for our salvation as we unite ourselves in holiness to our Great High Priest.