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In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
This is the Sunday of the Last Judgement. A day will come when all of us
will stand before God, each person bringing his own harvest and, as the
Book of Revelation tells us, every kingdom, every nation bringing its
glory and also its shame.
On that day the time for faith will be over, because faith is certainty
about things unseen, and on that day, in the blinding glory of God, we
will see; we will see Him as He sees us, we will know Him as He knows
us. And the time for hope will be over, because hope is expectation, and
on that day all things will have been fulfilled; it will be the eighth
day, the last day, the last day of time, the last day of becoming; it
will be the first day of eternity.
And on that threshold we shall stand; what are we going to bring? What
will be the fruit of a whole life, of each of us singly, of all of us in
our togetherness? Not as a crowd of individuals unrelated to each other,
but as a living body of people who have all, all been baptised into
Christ, into unity, into oneness, who are all called by the power of the
Holy Spirit to be the only-begotten son of God in the Only-begotten Son
of God - what are we going to bring then? The only thing that can
survive, faith and hope being of the past, will be love.
And this is what today's parable speaks about; not so much of the
terror, the horror that may seize each of us, freeze the heart within us
or, like a fire, burn us at that moment; it speaks of that confrontation
when we shall see that the whole meaning of life is love, and ask
ourselves: is there any within me? Have I borne any fruits of love? And
the parable speaks of that.. It does not say that we shall be
acknowledged because we said to ourselves or others that we believe in
God, because we described ourselves as disciples of Christ. As He
Himself said, on that day He will tell us that those who have not lived
up to the Gospel, been His disciples in all truth, will not be
recognised by Him. But we may well say, Have we not prayed in Thy
churches? Indeed, have we not worked miracles in Thy name? - And He will
answer, Go away, workers of iniquity!
But what is then our hope? This parable speaks of it so clearly, in a
word that may be summed up as, "If you have been human - then you are of
the Kingdom. If you have not been human - you are not". It is not
questions of faith which Christ is asking; He is asking whether there
was compassion in our hearts, whether we could see suffering around us
and respond - or not. And if we have responded, we are His own.
But there is something almost more wonderful in this parable; it is not
addressed only to the Christian, to the disciple, to the believer,
because when He says to those who have been filled with compassion,
filled with love, "You have done all these things: you have fed the
hungry, you have given shelter to the homeless, you have visited the
sick, you have not been ashamed of recognising as your brother the one
who was in prison", and so forth, all those people will say, "But when
did we see You in these people?" And Christ will say to us, "What you
have done to one of My brethren, you have done to Me".
Isn't it wonderful to think that love bridges all gaps, that love can
survive all trials; that being human does not mean seeing in my brother
an image of God, seeing in my brother God's beloved for who He gave His
life; it is enough for us to see in our neighbour one who needs
compassion: a human being, nothing more - and then, we have done the
right thing.
Today we remember the judgement, and it is also the beginning of our
fast. From today onwards, Orthodox Christians abstain from meat. Has it
any meaning apart from the ascetic, the disciplinary? Yes, it has, I
think. There is a frightening passage in the ninth chapter of Genesis.
After the flood, when mankind has become even weaker than before, less
rooted in God, more tragically alone,
more tragically dependent upon the created because it has lost communion
with the uncreated, God says to Noah and his people, "From now on all
living creatures are delivered unto you as food; they will be your meat,
and you will be their terror...'' That is the relationship which human
sin, the loss of God in our lives, has established between us and all
the created world, but particularly, in a particularly painful,
monstrous way with the animal world. And our abstention from meat in the
time of Lent is our act of recognition; it is also - oh, to such a small
extent! - an act of reparation. We are the terror of the created world,
we are those who destroy it, we are those who mar and pollute it, yet we
are called originally to be its guide into eternity, into God's glory,
into the perfect beauty which God has intended for it. We were called to
make of this world of ours God's own world, God's own Kingdom - in the
sense that it is His family, the place where He lives among His
creatures, and where the creatures of God can rejoice in Him and in one
another.
Let us therefore, to the extent to which we are faithful to the call of
the Church, remember that apart from being an act by which we try to
free ourselves from slavery to the material world, our fasting is an act
of recognition of our sin against the world and, however small, a real
attempt to make reparation for it, bring a testimony that we understand,
that we are heartbroken, and that even if we cannot live otherwise, we
live with a pain and a shame, and turn to God and to the world, which we
treat so atrociously, with a broken and contrite heart. Amen. |
