Are We Christians?

A Sermon for the Sunday of Orthodoxy

Here is truly an Israelite, in whom there is no deceit (Jn 1:47)

Our Lord Jesus Christ spoke these words, just quoted, about a certain Israelite, an inhabitant of the town of Cana in Galilee, Nathanael, when the latter, on the advice of his acquaintance Philip, was going to meet Jesus Christ in order to make certain whether it was indeed He who was the Messiah promised to Israel. Philip said to Nathanael: We have found Him of whom Moses in the Law and the prophets wrote—Jesus, the son of Joseph, from Nazareth. But Nathanael said to him: Can anything good possibly come out of Nazareth? Philip says to him: Go and see for yourself. Jesus, seeing Nathanael coming to Him, says of him: Here, truly, is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. Nathanael says to Him: How do You know me? – Jesus said to him in reply: Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you—that is, I knew all your thoughts, your faith, your expectations of the Messiah, your future ministry. The Lord, the Knower of hearts, evidently touched the most living chord of Nathanael’s heart, his most intimate thought, his cherished desire and longing, showing him before his very eyes His divine omniscience; and so Nathanael was caught into faith in Christ. He exclaims: Rabbi! You are the Son of God, You are the King of Israel – and afterwards he becomes His disciple under the name of Bartholomew—that is, one of the twelve[1].

But why is it this Sunday, called the Sunday of Orthodoxy, that the Church has appointed this Gospel to be read, in which the Lord’s conversation with Nathanael is recounted? – Because in the Lord’s words to Nathanael there is shown the character of the true, or Orthodox, Christian, and, in general, the character of the true Orthodox Church of Christ. Here, truly, is an Israelite – the Lord said of Nathanael, in whom there is no deceit; that is, here is a man who thinks, reasons, believes, hopes, speaks, and acts rightly and directly and firmly—since Nathanael straightforwardly, at once, came to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and afterwards never wavered in faith and hope, and never changed his thoughts concerning His divine Person. Should not the true Christian be just such a person; should not the whole God-established society of Orthodox Christians be just such; should not the Orthodox Church be just such, as indeed it is? What lofty praise for Nathanael from Him who searches hearts and inward parts, in the words: here, truly, is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit! What lofty praise for that Christian of whom the Lord said: here is a true Christian in whom there is no deceit; and for that Church of which the Lord says: here is a Church in which there is no deceit, or the vain imaginings of men—that is, one that is wholly true in all its teaching, in its Mysteries, in its divine services, in its governance, and in its whole order. And such, precisely, are all our holy saints; such is the whole Orthodox Church from its beginning to the present day, as the impartial history of the Church bears witness, and as God Himself bears witness by the various signs and wonders wrought in the Church. It is, according to the apostle, the pillar and mainstay of the truth[2]; it is the glorious Church, having no stain and no wrinkle and nothing of that sort[3].

And by what bloody struggles, by what warfare against the enemies of truth, by what deaths—and how many deaths—of the zealots for purity, for holiness, and for the Orthodoxy of the faith and of the Church, has the Orthodoxy of our faith, our guide to eternal life, been won for you and me, my brethren! Just as rivers of blood were shed by our forefathers—Russian warriors and commanders who fought against pagans, against Muslims, and against Christians alien to the Orthodox Church—for the preservation and integrity of our fatherland and of our Orthodox faith within it, so for the preservation of the Orthodox faith rivers of apostolic, prophetic, and martyric blood were shed; many sufferings were endured by the venerable fathers and by other champions of the faith.

But what about us, the children of the Orthodox Church? Do we keep this most precious inheritance—the Orthodox faith? Do we follow its teaching, its commandments, its canons, its statutes, its counsels? Do we love to offer worship to God, the fruit of lips confessing His name[4]? Do we renew ourselves by it, are we sanctified by it every day, do we correct ourselves, do we attain that perfection which the saints attained? Do we make progress in love for God and for our neighbor; do we treasure our faith; do we count it as the greatest mercy of God, as the greatest and foremost good of our life—that we have the happiness of belonging to the Orthodox Church, which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic? What shall we answer to these questions, if we wish to answer according to our conscience? To our shame we must confess that in many, many Orthodox Christians there is not only no Orthodox faith in their heart and in their life—there is not even any on their lips, and it has altogether evaporated in them, or else has turned into complete indifference toward any faith whatsoever: Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, Mohammedan, even pagan. We hear from many that one can please God in any faith—that is, as though every faith is pleasing to God, and as though falsehood and truth, right and wrong, are matters of indifference to God. This is how far the ignorance of their own faith has gone among many—the ignorance of the spirit and of the history of their Church, their estrangement from its life and from its divine services—this is how dimmed has become their understanding of Orthodoxy, of non-Orthodoxy, and of other confessions!

The chronicle of current events recounts a case in which somewhere in Russia, at an examination of students, an official called the story of the offering of Isaac as a sacrifice absurd. This is darkness, chaos, deadly ignorance! A Christian, as a member of the Church, ought to know his faith and strive to live according to his faith, to be saved by his own faith—because the enemies of our salvation do not slumber and seek our destruction at every hour—and he must not cast aside his faith as though it were some specialty of only certain people, or a useless toy suited only to childhood, or the possession of, supposedly, only the uneducated rabble. To those who dream in this way, it would not hurt to remember the venerable antiquity of our faith, contemporary with the beginning of the human race, and its direct origin from God, and the fact that in this faith people of every kind, rank, estate, and sex have lived and been saved: glorious kings and wise philosophers, lawgivers and the greatest orators, noble and simple, rich and poor, male and female, the beauty and glory of mankind.

It is also fitting to say this to the glory of the Orthodox faith: that no religion apart from the Orthodox faith can lead a person to moral perfection, or to holiness and complete well-pleasing to God—which the history of the Church shows, together with the incorrupt, wonderworking remains of the holy saints of God and the marvelous struggles of the saints of the Orthodox Church, by which they pleased God completely, being even during their lifetime clairvoyant and workers of wonders. So it must be by sound reason: only a perfect faith can lead to perfection, with all its divine powers, with all the spiritual armor of God against the passionate flesh, the world, and the devil. If now many, even Orthodox Christians, live worse than Muslims and pagans, so that the head of the Muslims in Russia publicly, for all to hear, recently proclaimed in Petersburg his praise of his coreligionists because among them there are no such impious men as there are among Christians, those who plot against the lives of tsars—then such a truly impious life of Christians must by no means, of course, be charged against the Orthodox faith, which is unshakable in its principles of truth and holiness, both by the promise of the Savior Himself and by the testimony of history. Such people, though they have gone out from us, were not ours in essence, but only in name.

Yes, my brethren, it is only the Orthodox faith that cleanses and sanctifies human nature defiled by sin and renews it when corrupted, especially through the Mysteries of Baptism, Repentance, and Communion; it enlightens what has been darkened; it heals what has been wounded by sins; it warms what has frozen over; it makes what reeks of the passions fragrant through the grace of the Holy Spirit; it brings what has grown dead back to life; it reunites with God those who have cast themselves off from Him and makes His own those alienated from Him; it strengthens the enfeebled; it recovers the image of the disfigured and adorns them; it restores the fallen; it makes the enslaved free; it fills the hostile with love, as with the apostle Paul and many others; it fills the blasphemous with unceasing praise of God; it fills the despairing with hope; it consoles the despondent; it delivers the guilty from condemnation and punishment in gehenna; it brings peace to the troubled; it strengthens the fainting; it expands the constricted; it enriches the unrighteous with righteousness; it makes the cunning guileless; the evil – good; it corrects the perverted; it makes the greedy self-controlled; the lustful chaste; the stingy generous; it grants wisdom to the foolish; it makes the earthbound heavenly; it refines the coarse; it makes the fleshly spiritual; it makes the lover of possessions a lover of God; the self-loving – selfless and a lover of all; the demon-like – God-like, and – O wonder! – divine!

These are the wonders that the Orthodox faith works in a human being! Do you want to be convinced of this? Read the history of the lives of the saints and the history of the Church – and you will see all these wonders with your own eyes in the lives of the saints. You will see wolves become lambs, and fornicators and harlots become the righteous and those equal to the angels; you will see money-lovers become merciful, pleasure-lovers become self-controlled, and people of power and of earthly grandeur and luxury you will see in the humble garb of a monk. There indeed were true Christians; there were angels in the flesh; citizens of heaven on earth and – at the same time – faithful servants of their earthly fatherland, as were the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste commemorated today! This is what our Orthodox faith can do with those people who keep it sincerely and follow its guidance! Why, then, does it not work such a saving change in us? – From our little faith or unbelief, from frivolity, from the corruption and impenitence of the heart; from the passions that have grown strong in us and taken hold of us, from withdrawing from the Church, from the fact that many are not at all imbued with the spirit and life of the Church, while many hold to it only weakly – and more formally, insincerely. From that same cause there have sprung up among us (or perhaps been reborn) all the social vices of our day: murders, suicides, assassinations of tsars, arson, theft of public property, immoderate luxury, licentiousness, profligacy, the pursuit of every kind of sensual pleasure.

For us to be true Orthodox Christians, we must first of all have a living, constant communion with the Orthodox Church – that is, participation in her prayers, teaching, and Mysteries; we must diligently study our faith and be imbued with its spirit and live by it, be guided by its rules, commandments, and statutes; and, chief of all, we must restore in ourselves, by true and deep repentance, the image of a true Orthodox Christian after the pattern of the saints of old and of modern times – or, better, after the image of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who says: I gave you an image, that just as I have done, you also should do[5], so that the Lord may say of us too, as He once said of Nathanael: See, truly a new Israelite, in whom there is no guile. Amen.