Word III. April 16, 1907

On Monday, April 16, Archpriest John Ilyich Sergiev celebrated the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts in the Ioannovsky women’s monastery that he had founded, with the participation of the monastery clergy. The monastery’s great church was filled with worshippers who had gathered to pray at the service of the deeply venerated pastor and to receive his blessing for a worthy keeping of the holy days of Holy Week, each of which has from of old been called great. And truly, these days are great by reason of the extraordinary events that took place within them. Therefore Holy Church, on the first of these days, makes our hearing ring with a special call, addressing it to us in the person of the Lord Himself: “The Lord, as He goes to His voluntary passion, spoke to the Apostles on the way: See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man is betrayed, as it is written of Him. Let us also come with purified thoughts to accompany Him and be co-crucified with Him, and for His sake be dead to the passions of this life, that with Him we may also come to life, and hear Him crying out: I am now going up no more to the earthly Jerusalem to suffer, but to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God, and I will exalt you with Myself to the Jerusalem on high, to the kingdom of heaven” (Sticheron for Great Monday).

We have set down here this sacred hymn, because it contains lofty exhortations that Christians, in these great days, should put to death their worldly passions and cleanse their minds of them; for just as eyes filled with dust cannot see clearly even the greatest and most distinct objects, so with a mind filled with impure thoughts about earthly goods it is impossible to contemplate the divine majesty of Christ’s sufferings. Further in this hymn is heard a call for us to be united in spirit, in faith and love, with the Lord, and with a watchful mind to follow our Savior, heeding His words, sharing His feelings, and by earnest prayer, constant sobriety, and strict abstinence to make His saving sufferings our own. In view of the edifying content of this stikhera, batushka sang it several times in a particularly moving melody, and then the other stikhera as well.

The Gospel of this day (Mt 24) speaks of the Savior’s second, dread coming. On this theme, at the end of the Liturgy, batushka delivered a word, the substance of which we relate here briefly.

— The Lord speaks in the Gospel of His future glorious and dread coming to judge the human race; and He points out also the signs of the nearness of this coming: ruinous wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, the cooling of love in many people through the multiplying of iniquity, and such fearsome calamities that no flesh would be saved, but for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened. The Lord still spares the world for the sake of His elect, whom He knows; though we already see clearly, in the life of our own time, the fulfillment of many signs of the nearness of the dread judgment. In these last times men have grown so corrupt that they have lost all shame and conscience; every kind of lawlessness is in plain sight of all: envy, hatred, slander, blasphemy, pride, every kind of intemperance, robbery, murder—all bearing witness to the cooling of Christian love. Men do not acknowledge that they are accountable for their sins, do not acknowledge the soul made in the image and likeness of God, and have become dead in spirit—a corpse reeking of every sin. And where the corpse is, there the eagles will gather,—says the Savior (Mt 24:28). What are these eagles? They are the demons, and also the people who carry out their evil will and lead these little ones into every kind of crime and vice. All who are dead in spirit inevitably become the prey of the devil and his angels.

Therefore all must be sober, must watch, that we may always be ready for the Dread Judgment, lest the great day of the Lord find us dead in spirit. And in these days Holy Church rouses us from the sleep of sin with this exalted call: «Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching; but unworthy again is he whom He shall find slothful. Watch, therefore, O my soul, be not weighed down with sleep, lest you be given over to death and be shut out of the Kingdom; but rouse yourself, crying: holy, holy, holy art Thou, O God; through the Mother of God have mercy on us.» Amen.