An Instruction for the Sunday of All Saints, the First After Pentecost: The Mark of God’s Chosen

“Therefore, whoever acknowledges Me before men, I will also acknowledge him before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven” (Mt 10:32-33). Thus spoke the Lord to His disciples, who then stood before His face; thus spoke the all-seeing Lord, who beholds the distant future as the present, spoke to all without exception of His disciples in all times and lands; spoke this to you, standing here in His temple, who have enrolled yourselves in the number of His disciples through holy Baptism. Just as lightning swiftly travels from one edge of heaven to another, losing nothing of its radiance, so the determination of the Lord reached us through eighteen centuries, proclaimed to us today in the Gospel in all its force and clarity. The disciples of the Lord are not merely those who are named after His name as Christians, not merely those who have taken upon themselves the vows of service to Him: disciples are those who truly confess Him as their Lord, acknowledge Him as the all-powerful Master over them and eternal King, following His teaching as the teaching of the Lord, fulfilling His commandments as the commandments of the Lord. Confession must be accomplished by mind, heart, word, deed, and entire life. Shame, timidity, wavering are intolerable in confession. Confession requires decisive self-denial. It must be solemn. It must be made, as it were, on an open stage before all humanity, before holy angels and fallen angels, before the eyes of earth and heaven. “We have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men” (1 Cor 4:9), said about himself and the other holy apostles the holy Apostle Paul. The Apostles were not ashamed nor afraid to confess the God-man who was executed with shameful execution, condemned by ecclesiastical and civil judgment, were not ashamed nor afraid to confess Him before ecclesiastical and civil judgment, before the powerful and wise of the earth, before tyrants and torturers, in the face of torture and death, in the face of violent execution. Such confession of the Lord was brought to the Lord by the holy martyrs, who watered all the expanse of the earth with their blood, who made all the earth resound with the holy testimony of true knowledge and worship of God. The Lord was confessed through invisible martyrdom and constant self-denial throughout their entire lives by the venerable monks: they served as the bond of earth with heaven, of angels with men, belonging to heaven during their sojourn on earth, having entered during their time on earth into communion with angels and into their ranks. The Lord was confessed through contempt for and trampling of the ways of the world by those saints of God who labored in the midst of the world, to whom with such justice may be applied the words of the Gospel: “they are in the world, and are not of the world” (Jn 17:11, 16). Confession of the Lord, accompanied by decisive and complete renunciation of the world and of oneself, was the mark of all saints.

Whoever during his earthly pilgrimage confesses the Lord with the confession commanded by the Lord, whoever proves by his life that he truly confesses the Lord as his Lord and God, him the Lord will confess as His disciple, His intimate; the Lord will confess him not only before the universe, but before God the Father. The confession by God the Son of a person before God the Father is the introduction of that person into the closest union with God (Jn 14:20).

God-established, well-pleasing confession of God by a person is the sign of that person’s election by God. Inclusion in the number of the elect is the fruit of good human will.

Weak, ambiguous confession is not accepted, is rejected as useless, as unworthy of God. It is not enough to confess in the secret of the soul—confession by word is necessary. It is not enough to confess by word—confession by deeds and life is necessary. “Whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation,” “the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels” (Mk 8:38). One must not only confess the Lord, not only acknowledge His divinity and dominion—one must confess His teaching, one must confess His commandments. The commandments are confessed by their fulfillment. Their fulfillment, contrary to customs accepted in human society, is a confession of the Lord and His words before men. Human society is called sinful and adulterous because it, for the most part, has turned aside to a life of sin, has betrayed and exchanged love for God for love of sin. The customs that prevail in the world, having the force of a law higher than all laws, are opposed to and hostile to a life well-pleasing to God. A life well-pleasing to God is the object of hatred and mockery for the proud world. To avoid the hatred of the world, its persecution and arrows, a weak heart, unstrengthened by faith, inclines toward people-pleasing, departs from the teaching of the Lord, excludes itself from the number of the elect.

The Lord strengthens His disciples in faithfulness to Himself and His teaching, strengthens them with an awesome word, an awesome determination, proclaimed at an opportune time. “Therefore, whoever acknowledges Me before men, I will also acknowledge him before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven”.

Dependence on human society is weaker than dependence on family. It is easier to resist the demands of society than to resist the demands of family. Natural law supports family demands and, when these demands accord with God’s law, God’s law itself supports them. A servant of Christ is often placed in a difficult position by conflicting demands, not knowing which of them he should regard as well-pleasing to God. The Lord, who foresaw this difficulty, resolves it with complete satisfaction. He supplemented the words quoted above with the following: “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Mt 10:37). “Whoever prefers to My will the will of parents or any blood relatives, whoever prefers their way of thinking and understanding to My teaching, whoever prefers pleasing them to pleasing Me—is not worthy of Me.”

Difficulties and obstacles to the confession of Christ that work upon a Christian from without matter little in comparison with the difficulties and obstacles that he finds within himself. Sin, dwelling in the mind, heart, and body, is directly opposed to the confession of Christ, the confession accomplished through the fulfillment of His commandments; sin stubbornly resists this fulfillment. Natural goodness itself, corrupted by sin, complicates confession, striving to inject into this confession, to mingle with it, a confession of the merits of fallen nature. By such mingling the confession of Christ is destroyed, an incomplete fall is attributed to fallen nature, and the significance is taken away from Christ—the significance which, as all-perfect, permits no admixture and requires the recognition that nature is decisively corrupted by the fall.

One can flee from human society, from relatives—but where can one flee from oneself? Where can one hide from one’s own nature? How can one be freed from it? For liberation from enslavement to fallen nature the Lord commands the crucifixion of nature, that is, the rejection of its reasoning and its will, the nailing of the actions of the mind and the desires of the heart to the commandments of the Gospel. In this way “those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal 5:24): they crucified the carnal way of thinking and the will of fallen nature, on which are based and founded the sinful desires of soul and body, sinful life. In this way the world is crucified to the apostle, and the apostle to the world (Gal 6:14). For the granting of strength and ability for such crucifixion the holy David prayed to God: “pierce my flesh with reverence for You” (Ps 118:120)—my carnal way of thinking and my will, that they might remain in inactivity! “Fix Your word in Your servant through Your reverence” (Ps 118:38), that I might unswervingly be guided in my visible and invisible activity solely by Your word. Whoever mortifies his fallen nature with the sword of Christ’s teaching—“whoever loses his life for My sake and the Gospel,” said the Lord, “will save it” (Mt 10:39; Mk 8:35). On the contrary, whoever acts according to the judgments and desires of fallen nature, wrongly regarding them as good, “will lose his life. Whoever does not take his cross” and does not take upon himself the yoke of My commandments “and follow Me” in self-denial, but will follow himself, “is not worthy of Me” (Mt 10:38-39).

The holy Church, intending to explain in the most satisfactory manner the fate of God’s elect in time and in eternity, appointed that today there be read, after the terrible, impartial, decisive determination we have heard issued from the mouth of God, the Lord’s reply to the question of the holy Apostle Peter. “Then Peter answered and said to Him, ‘See, we have left all things and followed You. What then will we have?’” (Mt 19:27). The Lord promised special honor to the twelve apostles. Since the God-man is the unique eternal King of Israel—that is, the King of all Christians, this spiritual Israel which is to be composed of all the peoples of the earth and to populate the promised land of heaven—the apostles of the God-man, through whose mediation all peoples are brought into submission to the God-man, naturally became leaders and judges of this new Israel, this eternal, heavenly people. Having declared to the apostles their significance in the restoration of humanity (Mt 19:28), the Lord continued: “And anyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields, for My sake and for the sake of the Gospel, will receive a hundredfold now in this time—houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mk 10:29-30; Mt 19:29). Earthly life is called an exile. It is exile because mankind has been cast down to the earth and subjected to suffering and wandering upon it for the transgression of God’s commandment. It is a place and time of exile for the followers of Christ because the prince of this world rules in it, because the dominion of sin, hostile to the followers of Christ and pursuing them with unrelenting, hardened persecution, prevails in it. They are subjected to varied torment from sin both within themselves and from without: with furious malice and incredible cunning the fallen spirits hungry for their destruction work against them; the majority of mankind works against them, having voluntarily enslaved themselves to fallen spirits and serving as blind, wretched instruments for them; their own passions and attachments work against them.

And in this temporal exile the followers of Christ receive a hundredfold in comparison with what they have abandoned for Christ and for His teaching. They tangibly receive the grace of the All-Holy Spirit. Before the consolation furnished by divine grace, all the joys, all the pleasures of the world are insignificant; before spiritual wealth, before spiritual glory, all the riches of the world, all its glory are insignificant; sinful and carnal pleasures appear to the saints of God as repulsive defilements, filled with mortal bitterness; the position of the famous and rich of the world is like a whitewashed tomb, gleaming on the outside, within filled with corruption and stench—qualities inseparable from every corpse. A soul struck by eternal death—separation from Christ—should rightly be called a corpse.

All earthly goods and advantages leave a person, remain on the earth when the person, by the inevitable and inexorable law of death, leaves the earth and passes irrevocably into eternity. Divine grace follows a different order: it accompanies into the afterlife one who has acquired it here. Scarcely does a person cast off, as shackles, the body, when grace, as though hitherto constrained by the flesh, develops broadly and majestically. It serves as a pledge and testimony for God’s chosen one. When he stands before the judgment that awaits each person after his death, and presents his testimony and his pledge, then, in accordance with them, as their logical consequence, there are provided for him in heaven spiritual, eternal, ineffable, and unlimited riches, magnificence, and enjoyment. “In the age to come” he will “inherit eternal life” (Mt 19:29; Mk 10:30), said the Lord, a life so exceedingly abundant and excellent that carnal man, judging the unknown by the known, cannot form any conception of it through his own reasoning. May it be granted to us, through faithful confession of the Lord, to inherit this life, prepared for all of us by the incomprehensible, boundless mercy of the Lord who redeemed us by Himself. Amen.

(Gal 5:4) (Gal 2:16, 21); Discourse on Salvation. See Ascetic Endeavors, part 2.