Discourse on Receiving the Holy Mysteries

“From here you will see heaven opened” (Jn 1:51)

Both myself and many of you, beloved brothers and sisters, I congratulate on the unspeakable mercy of God, on the spiritual renewal received through the effort of fasting, prayer, abstinence, and repentance, and especially through receiving the most pure and life-giving Mysteries of the Body and Blood of the Lord. And in this short time we have been able to know in ourselves the benefit of fasting and prayer, not to mention the benefit of fasting, confession, and Communion; if, of course, we have sincerely taken advantage of this time for our salvation and sincerely fulfilled the conditions of fasting; if we refrained from excess in food and drink, prayed sincerely, humbled ourselves before God and our neighbors, showed mercy, came to know many of our wrongdoings and lawlessness and grieved greatly over them, having taken firm resolve not to do them again, and, finally, confessed them sincerely and received absolution and forgiveness of them, and were deemed worthy to taste the life-giving Food. But have all of us received real benefit from the past week? Have our hearts become closer to God, to the Most Pure Mother of Life, to the Church, to our Holy Guardian Angel and to God’s Saints; have we sincerely come to love righteousness and virtue, and have we come to hate all wrongdoing and lawlessness; do we love God and our neighbors more sincerely; do we feel greater spiritual kinship with one another, as members of one body of Christ, as members of Christ, because “there is one bread” of the mystery, “and many of us are one body: for we all partake of the one bread” (1Cor 10:17)? Do we feel in our hearts that the currents of lawlessness do not flow toward our soul with such boldness and violence as before fasting and Communion, and have they considerably lessened in us, and have we become cleaner, freer, more peaceful, more dispassionate, kinder, more tender-hearted, more inclined to all that is good and useful? Has greed for fleshly pleasures and gain diminished in us? Have we become gentler, more patient, more forbearing toward our neighbors? Have we begun to look more often at heaven, at our true and eternal homeland, and with less attachment turn our gaze to all that is earthly, as temporary, fleeting, transitory? For see how many people from our midst have been taken by death in a short time, and death constantly carries away its victims. If this is so, if we have become better and wiser, then I congratulate myself and you again on God’s great mercy, and at the same time pray that the Lord will strengthen this good disposition and heart’s attitude in me and in you; but let no evil thought deceive any of us, that now, thank God, we have cast off the burden of sins and can again live as we did and sin as we did before, for who, we would say, is without sin! True, brothers and sisters, no one is without sin, but to live as we did and sin as we did before after renewal through repentance and Communion is not right, not fitting, not befitting a Christian. The Holy Church through the spiritual father gives such instruction to every penitent: “From all these sins henceforth you must guard yourself, for you are being baptized with a second baptism, according to the mystery of Christianity, and you must make a good beginning, with God’s help, and moreover, do not mock at the same thing, returning to it, lest you make yourself a laughingstock to people, for these things are not fitting for Christians: may God help you to live honorably, rightly, and reverently by His grace” (Rite of Confession). This is what the Church teaches the repentant. And sound reason also teaches us; for who, having washed himself, would wish again deliberately to soil himself? Only a “swine,” having washed itself, again “goes to wallow in the mud;” only a “dog” is accustomed to “return to its own vomit” (2Pet 2:22). “Behold, you are well: sin no more, lest something worse befall you” (Jn 5:14), says the Lord to the healed paralytic. And something very bad might happen to us too if we neglect virtue after repentance; then God’s grace will leave us for our inattentiveness and neglect of ourselves. Repentance and Communion opens heaven to us and the heavenly kingdom, for the Lord says, “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life—and abides in Me, and I in him” (Jn 6:54,56).

How then could we not treasure the gift we have received—eternal life and the abiding of Christ in us, and our abiding in Him! Heaven has been opened to us through repentance and Communion according to Scripture: “From here you will see heaven opened” (Jn 1:51)—what wonderful mercy! By our sins it had been shut, as with the strongest locks and bars, but by repentance it has been opened—let us take advantage of this mercy of God while it is not shut again for us: for God knows whether it will be opened again for us when we once more shut it by deliberate sins. For many it has been shut forever. The foolish virgins knocked at the locked doors, saying: “Lord! Lord! open for us”, and they were told: “Amen I say to you, I do not know you;” and we are all told: “Watch therefore, for you do not know the day nor the hour when the Son of Man will come” (Mt 25:11-13). Amen.