On Following Our Lord Jesus Christ (Part 1)
“If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me” (Jn 12:26), said the Lord. Every Christian, by the vows pronounced at holy baptism, has taken upon himself the obligation to be a slave and servant of the Lord Jesus Christ: every Christian without exception must follow the Lord Jesus Christ.
Having called Himself the Shepherd of the sheep, the Lord said that “the sheep hear the voice” of this Shepherd, “and the sheep follow Him, because they know His voice” (Jn 10:3–4). The voice of Christ is His teaching; the voice of Christ is the Gospel; the walking in Christ’s footsteps along the way of earthly pilgrimage is an activity wholly directed according to His commandments.
To follow Christ, one must know His voice. Study the Gospel, and you will be able to follow Christ in your life.
Whoever, having been born according to the flesh, enters into “new birth” (Tit 3:5) through holy baptism, and preserves the state bestowed by baptism through a life lived according to the Gospel, shall “be saved”. He shall “enter” the God-pleasing arena of earthly life through spiritual birth, and shall “go out” of that arena through a blessed death, and in eternity shall “find pasture” (Jn 10:9)—eternal, most abundant, most sweet, and spiritual.
“If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also. And if anyone serves Me, My Father will honor him” (Jn 12:26). Where was the Lord when He spoke these words? In His humanity, united with His Divinity, He was in the midst of human beings, on earth, in the valley of their exile and sufferings, while abiding in His Divinity also where He had been from the beginningless beginning. “The Word was with God” (Jn 1:1) and in God. This Word announced concerning Himself: “the Father is in Me, and I in Him” (Jn 10:38). There the follower of Christ also attains: “whoever confesses” with lips, heart, and deeds, “that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God” (1Jn 4:15).
“If anyone serves Me, My Father will honor him: to the one who overcomes” the world and sin, who follows Me in earthly life, “I will grant” in eternal life “to sit with Me on My throne, as I also overcame, and sat down with My Father on His throne” (Rev 3:21).
Renunciation of the world precedes the following after Christ. The second has no place in the soul if the first has not been accomplished within it beforehand. “Whoever desires”, said the Lord, “to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his soul will lose it; but whoever loses his soul for My sake and the Gospel’s will save it” (Mk 8:34–35). “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own soul also, he cannot be My disciple. And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple” (Lk 14:26–27).
Many approach the Lord—few resolve to follow Him. Many read the Gospel, finding delight and rapture in the height and holiness of its teaching—few resolve to direct their conduct by the rules that the Gospel prescribes. The Lord, to all who approach Him and desire to be united with Him, declares: “If anyone comes to Me” and does not renounce the world and himself, “he cannot be My disciple”.
“This is a hard saying”—even those who outwardly appeared to be His followers and were counted as His disciples said this of the Saviour’s teaching—“who can listen to it?” (Jn 6:60). So does carnal reasoning judge the word of God from its own wretched disposition. The word of God is “life” (Jn 6:63)—eternal life, essential life. By this word is slain “carnal reasoning” (Rom 8:6), which is born of eternal death and sustains eternal death in human beings. For those who are being destroyed by carnal reasoning and who willingly choose to perish by it, the word of God “is foolishness”. But it “is the power of God to those who are being saved” (1 Cor 1:18).
Sin has become so deeply our own through the fall that all the properties and all the movements of the soul are saturated with it. The rejection of sin, which has become kindred to the soul, has become the rejection of the soul itself. Such a rejection of the soul is necessary for the soul’s salvation. The rejection of human nature, defiled by sin, is necessary in order to receive human nature renewed by Christ. One empties a vessel of all its food when that food has been poisoned; the vessel is carefully washed clean, and only then is food placed in it that is fit to be used. Food that has been poisoned by venom is rightly called venom itself.
To follow Christ, we must first renounce our own reason and our own will. Both the reason and the will of fallen human nature are entirely corrupted by sin; they can never be reconciled with the reason and will of God. He who renounces his own reason becomes capable of receiving the reason of God; he who renounces the fulfillment of his own will becomes capable of fulfilling the will of God.
To follow Christ, “let us take up our cross”. The taking up of one’s cross is the name given to willing, reverent submission to the judgment of God in all the sorrows that are sent and permitted by Divine Providence. Murmuring and indignation at sorrows and afflictions is a renunciation of the cross. Only one who has “taken up his cross” can follow Christ: one who is submissive to the will of God and who humbly acknowledges himself deserving of judgment, condemnation, and punishment.
The Lord, who has commanded us to practice self-denial, to renounce the world, and to bear our cross, gives us the strength to fulfil His commandment. One who has resolved to fulfil this commandment and strives to do so immediately perceives its necessity. The teaching that seemed harsh from a superficial and mistaken perspective rooted in carnal reasoning proves to be the most reasonable, most filled with goodness: it calls the perishing back to salvation, the slain to life, and those buried in hell to heaven.
Those who do not resolve to practice voluntary self-denial and renunciation of the world are compelled to do both by force. When pitiless, irresistible death arrives, they part with everything to which they were attached; their self-denial extends even to casting off the very body and leaving it on the earth as food for worms and decay.
Self-love and attachment to the temporal and vain are fruits of self-deception, of blindness, of the soul’s death. Self-love is a perverted love of oneself—a love that is foolish and ruinous. The self-loving person, attached to the vain and transient, to sinful pleasures, is an enemy to himself. He is a self-murderer: thinking to love and indulge himself, he in truth hates and destroys himself, killing himself with eternal death.
Let us take stock of ourselves—we who are distracted, bewildered, deceived by vanity! Let us come to our senses—we who are intoxicated with vanity, deprived by it of right self-perception! Let us examine the testimonies that are constantly being enacted before our eyes. What is being accomplished before us will inevitably be accomplished over us as well.
He who devoted his whole life to acquiring honors—did he take them with him into eternity? Did he not leave behind his resounding titles, his decorations, all the splendor with which he had surrounded himself? Did he not enter eternity as nothing more than a man, with his deeds and the qualities acquired during his earthly life?
He who devoted his life to acquiring wealth—who amassed great quantities of money, acquired vast tracts of land as his possession, established various institutions yielding abundant income, lived in palaces gleaming with gold and marble, rode in magnificent carriages and on fine horses—did he take any of this into eternity? No! He left it all on earth, content for his final bodily need with the smallest plot of ground, which all the dead alike require and which satisfies them all alike.
He who spent his earthly life in fleshly amusements and pleasures, who passed his time with friends in games and diversions, who feasted at sumptuous tables—is at last removed by sheer necessity from his accustomed way of life. The time of old age and infirmity arrives, and after it the hour of the soul’s separation from the body. Then one understands—too late—that service to whims and passions is self-deception, that a life lived for the flesh and for sin is a life without meaning.
The striving after earthly advancement—how strange, how monstrous it is! It seeks with a frenzy. Scarcely has it found something than what is found loses its value, and the seeking is renewed with fresh force. It is never content with what is present: it lives only for the future, it thirsts only for what it does not have. The objects of desire lure the seeker’s heart with the illusion and hope of satisfaction; deceived, perpetually deceived, he chases after them throughout the whole arena of earthly life, until unexpected death snatches him away. How and by what can one explain this seeking, which deals with all people like a heartless betrayer, yet holds sway over all, carrying everyone away? — There is implanted in our souls a striving toward infinite goods. But we have fallen, and the heart, blinded by the fall, seeks in time and on earth what exists in eternity and in heaven.
The fate that has overtaken my fathers and brothers will overtake me as well. They have died: I too shall die. I shall leave my cell, leaving in it my books and my garments and my writing table, at which I have spent many hours; I shall leave all that I needed or thought I needed during earthly life. My body will be carried out of these cells in which I dwell as if in an anteroom to another life and another land; my body will be carried out and committed to the earth, which served as the beginning for the human body. The very same fate will overtake you as well, brothers, who read these lines. You too will die: you will leave all that is earthly on earth; you will enter eternity as souls alone.
The soul of a person acquires qualities corresponding to its activity. Just as objects are reflected in a mirror placed before them, so the soul is stamped with impressions corresponding to its occupations and deeds, corresponding to its surroundings. In an insensible mirror the images disappear when the objects are removed from before it; in a rational soul the impressions remain. They can be effaced and replaced by others, but this requires both effort and time. The impressions that constitute the soul’s possession at the hour of its death remain its possession forever, serving as the pledge of either its eternal blessedness or its eternal misery.
“You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt 6:24), said the Saviour to fallen human beings, laying bare before them the condition into which they have been brought by the fall—as a physician discloses to a patient the condition into which illness has brought him, a condition the patient himself cannot comprehend. Because of our soul’s disorder, timely self-denial and renunciation of the world are necessary for our salvation. “No one can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other” (Mt 6:24).
Experience constantly confirms the truth of that view of the moral infirmity of human beings which the all-holy Physician expressed in the words we have cited—words spoken with decisive clarity: the satisfaction of vain and sinful desires is always followed by being swept away by them; being swept away is followed by captivity and death to all things spiritual. Those who permitted themselves to follow their own desires and carnal reasoning were swept away by them and made subject to them; they forgot God and eternity, wasted their earthly life in vain, and perished with eternal perdition.
It is impossible to fulfil one’s own will and the will of God at the same time: the fulfilment of the former defiles the fulfilment of the latter and renders it unacceptable. Thus fragrant, precious myrrh loses its worth from the slightest admixture of foulness. Only then, God declares through the great Prophet, “shall you eat the good of the land”, when you willingly “obey Me. But if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (Is 1:19–20).
It is impossible to obtain the mind of God while remaining in carnal reasoning. “Carnal reasoning”, said the Apostle, “is death… Carnal reasoning is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be” (Rom 8:6–7). What is carnal reasoning? It is a cast of mind that arose from the condition into which the fall brought human beings—directing them to act on earth as though they would remain there forever, magnifying all that is corruptible and temporal, belittling God and everything pertaining to the pleasing of God, and robbing human beings of their salvation.
Let us renounce our souls, by the testament of the Saviour, in order to gain our souls! Let us voluntarily renounce the corrupt condition into which they were brought by their voluntary renunciation of God, in order to receive from God the holy condition of human nature renewed by God made man! Our own will—and the will of the demons, to which our will became subject and with which it has merged—let us replace with the will of God, declared to us in the Gospel; carnal reasoning, common to fallen spirits and fallen human beings alike, let us replace with the mind of God that shines forth from the Gospel.
Let us renounce our possessions, so as to acquire the capacity to follow our Lord Jesus Christ! The renunciation of possessions is accomplished on the basis of a right understanding of them. The right understanding of material property is provided by the Gospel (Lk 16:1–31); and once it is provided, the human mind cannot but acknowledge its full rightness. Earthly property is not our own, as those who have never thought about this matter mistakenly suppose: if it were, it would always be, and would remain forever, our own. It passes from hand to hand, and thereby testifies of itself that it is given only for a time. The property belongs to God; a human being is only a temporary steward of it. A faithful steward carries out precisely the will of the one who entrusted the administration to him. And we, in managing the material goods entrusted to us for a time, let us endeavor to manage them according to the will of God. Let us not use them as a means of satisfying our whims and passions, as a means of our eternal ruin; let us use them for the benefit of humanity, which is in such great need and suffers so greatly—let us use them as a means of our own salvation. Those who seek Christian perfection wholly abandon earthly possessions (Mt 19:16–30); those who desire salvation must give what alms they are able (Lk 11:41), and refrain from the abuse of wealth.
Let us renounce love of glory and love of honors! Let us not pursue distinctions and rank, employing for their acquisition unlawful and degrading means—means entailing the trampling of God’s law, conscience, and the good of our neighbors. Such means are most commonly employed by seekers of earthly greatness in their pursuit of it. One infected and carried away by vainglory, that insatiable seeker of human praise, is incapable of faith in Christ: “How can you believe”, Christ said to the ambitious men of His own day, “who receive honor from one another, and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God?” (Jn 5:44). If Divine Providence has granted us earthly might and power, let us become through them benefactors of humanity. Let us reject the vile poison so dangerous to the human spirit—the foolish and contemptible egotism that transforms those infected by it into beasts and demons, making such people scourges of humanity and evil-doers to themselves.
Let us love the will of God above all things; let us prefer it to everything; let us hate with a devout and God-pleasing hatred all that is contrary to it. When our nature, corrupted by sin, rises up against the evangelical teaching, let us express our hatred of that nature by rejecting its desires and demands. The more decisive the expression of hatred, the more decisive will be the victory over sin and over the nature in which sin has dominion; and the more rapid and lasting will be our spiritual progress.
When those who are close to us by the flesh attempt to draw us away from following the will of God, let us show them the holy hatred that lambs show toward wolves—lambs who do not transform themselves into wolves and do not defend themselves from wolves with teeth.[1] Holy hatred toward one’s neighbors consists in remaining faithful to God, in refusing to consent to the sinful will of other people—even if those people are one’s closest relatives—in magnanimously enduring the offenses they inflict, in praying for their salvation; but in no wise consists in slander or in actions akin to slander, through which the hatred of fallen nature—a hatred that is contrary to God—finds expression.
“Do not think”, said the Saviour, “that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Mt 10:34–35). “I have come”—Saint John of the Ladder explains these words of the Lord—“to set apart” those who love God from those who love the world; the carnal from the spiritual; those who love glory from those who are humble-minded: “God is pleased by division and separation, when it is accomplished for love of Him.”[2]
The Prophet called the earth the place of his “sojourning” (Ps 118:54), and called himself a sojourner and stranger upon it: “I am a stranger with You”, he said in his prayer to God, “and a pilgrim, as all my fathers were” (Ps 38:13). An evident, palpable truth! A truth forgotten by human beings despite its very evidence! I am a “pilgrim” on earth: I entered it by birth; I shall depart by death. I am a “sojourner” on earth: I was removed to it from paradise, where I had defiled and disfigured myself by sin. I shall be removed from the earth as well, from this temporary exile in which my God has placed me so that I might come to my senses, be cleansed from sinfulness, and become once more capable of dwelling in paradise. For stubborn and final incorrigibility I must be cast down forever into the prisons of hell. I am a “stranger” on earth: my pilgrimage begins at the cradle and ends at the grave; I journey through the stages of life from childhood to old age, I journey through varied circumstances and conditions of earthly existence. I am a “sojourner and stranger, as all my fathers were”. My fathers were sojourners and strangers on earth: having entered it by birth, they departed from its face by death. There were no exceptions: no human being remained on earth forever. I too shall go. I am already beginning my departure, diminishing in strength, submitting to old age. I shall go, I shall go from here, by the immutable law and mighty ordinance of my Creator and God.
Let us be persuaded that we are strangers on earth. Only from this persuasion can we make faultless reckoning and disposal of our earthly life; only from this persuasion can we give it the right direction, and employ it for the acquisition of blessed eternity rather than for empty and vain things, rather than for our own destruction. Our fall has blinded and continues to blind us! And we are compelled, by force, to persuade ourselves over a long period of time of the most evident truths, truths that by their very clarity stand in no need of persuasion.
When a traveler stops along his way at an inn, he pays no particular attention to that inn. Why should he, when he has taken shelter there for the briefest of times? He contents himself with what is strictly necessary; he is careful not to spend the money he will need for the continuation of his journey and for his maintenance in that great city to which he is traveling; he endures deficiencies and inconveniences with fortitude, knowing that they are the common lot of all who travel, and that undisturbed repose awaits him at the destination toward which he presses on. He does not attach his heart to any object in the inn, however attractive that object may appear. He does not lose time on extraneous occupations: he needs it for the completion of his arduous journey. He is continually absorbed in thought about the magnificent royal capital to which he is bound, about the considerable obstacles that must be overcome, about the means that might ease the journey, about the ambushes of brigands that lie in wait along the road, about the unhappy fate of those who did not manage to make that journey safely, and about the most blessed lot of those who completed it with the desired success. Having stayed the necessary time at the inn, he thanks the innkeeper for the hospitality shown him and, departing, forgets about the inn or remembers it only in passing, because his heart was cool toward it.
Let us acquire such a relation to the earth as well. Let us not squander foolishly the faculties of soul and body; let us not sacrifice them to vanity and corruption. Let us guard against attachment to the temporal and material, lest it prevent us from acquiring the eternal and heavenly. Let us guard against satisfying our insatiable and unappeasable whims, the gratification of which develops our fallen state and brings it to terrible dimensions. Let us guard against excess, contenting ourselves with only what is truly necessary. Let us direct all our attention to the life beyond the grave that awaits us, a life that has no end. Let us come to know God, who has commanded us to know Him and who grants this knowledge through His word and His grace. Let us become united to God during the course of earthly life. He has opened to us the most intimate union with Himself, and has appointed the span of earthly life as the time allotted for the accomplishment of this greatest of all works. There is no other time besides the time determined by earthly life in which this wondrous union can be accomplished: if it is not accomplished during this time, it will never be accomplished. Let us acquire the friendship of the heavenly citizens—the holy Angels and the saints who have departed this life—that they might receive us “into everlasting habitations” (Lk 16:9). Let us acquire knowledge of the fallen spirits—those fierce and cunning enemies of the human race—so as to avoid their snares and the prospect of dwelling with them in the flames of hell. Let the word of God be a lamp to our feet on the path of life (Ps 118:105). Let us glorify and give thanks to God for the abundant blessings with which our temporary refuge—the earth—is filled in satisfaction of our needs. With purity of mind let us penetrate the meaning of these blessings: they are faint images of eternal blessings. Eternal blessings are represented by them so faintly and inadequately as objects are represented by the shadows they cast. In granting us earthly blessings, God speaks to us in a hidden way: “O human beings! Your temporary refuge is furnished with manifold, innumerable blessings that captivate and delight both eye and heart, satisfying your needs to overflowing: conclude from this what blessings furnish your eternal dwelling. Understand the infinite, incomprehensible goodness of God toward you; and having honored earthly blessings with devout understanding and contemplation of them, do not act senselessly: do not enslave yourselves to them or destroy yourselves by them. Using them as much as is needed and proper, strive with all your might to acquire the blessings of heaven.”
Let us remove from ourselves all false teachings and the life lived according to them: the sheep of Christ “do not follow a stranger’s” voice, “but flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers” (Jn 10:5). Let us become thoroughly acquainted with the voice of Christ, so that we may recognize it at once when we hear it and follow His bidding at once. Having acquired in our spirit a sympathy for this voice, we shall acquire in our spirit an estrangement from the stranger’s voice, which is uttered by carnal reasoning in its manifold sounds. The moment we hear a stranger’s voice—let us flee, let us flee from it, after the manner of Christ’s sheep, who save themselves from a stranger’s voice by flight: by resolute inattention to it. Even to give it attention is dangerous: behind attention comes delusion, and behind delusion comes ruin. The fall of our first parents began with the first mother’s attention to the stranger’s voice.