A Word for the 25th Sunday After Pentecost

«What shall I do to inherit eternal life?» (Lk 10:25)

This is the question a certain lawyer put to the Savior, one who desired eternal blessedness. And the Lord asked him: «what is written in the law? What is your reading of it?» He answered: «you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself». The Savior said to him: «you have answered rightly; do this and you will live». This means: love God and your neighbor, and you will enter into eternal life.

How little the Lord God requires of a person for the obtaining of eternal life, and how little disposed a person is to keep the commandment of God! Does He require much of him, when He commands him to love his own Creator and Benefactor with a pure, wholehearted love, and his neighbor as himself? What labor is it to love a father? What labor to love one’s brothers? And yet even this small thing we do not fulfill. What, then, is the reason for such strange, unnatural conduct on our part? Why do we love so little, so feebly, so coldly, so inactively, Him who first loved us (1Jn 4:19), who, loving us, does us good every hour, every minute, every instant? Why do our own deeds so strongly convict us of love for the world and its vanity, and so little, sometimes not at all, testify to our love for God? Because there is little faith in us, in God and in the endless life to come, extremely little consciousness and feeling of God’s boundless love for us and of His countless, ceaseless benefits toward us—from the blinding of our own heart’s eyes by our own sins, and from the fact that we do not strive, by prayer, by hearing and reading the Word of God, to acquire faith. See what people were capable of, who had a living faith in God and in the life to come; how strong was their love for God! «Who shall separate us from the love of God?», says one preacher of the Gospel, «shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: for Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord» (Rom 8:35-39). Nothing could separate the Apostle from love for God; but the world has either entirely separated us from it, or often separates us from it. And why do we not love our neighbors as ourselves? Again, from little faith or unbelief, which allows self-love and other passions to grow strong within us: faith drives passion away from itself. If I believe that my neighbor is a rational creature of the same Creator as I am, if I acknowledge him as a brother in Christ, as the Savior Himself says: «you are all brothers» (Mt 23:8)—a member of the one body of the Church and a fellow heir of the eternal kingdom—then what will I not do for him, as for my own in Christ, if, moreover, I love Christ above all things? Will I not share with him, for my Lord’s sake, food and clothing; will I not give him good advice, will I not admonish him, if he sometimes lives, even with reason, as though without reason; will I not comfort him, if he is consumed by grief; will I not forgive him, if he has offended me? For, after all, I am in every way the same as he is: what may happen to him could happen to me too; will I not do for him, and other works of mercy, when need requires it and my own means allow? If I do not love my neighbor, this is a sure sign that I do not love God either: «for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen», says the holy Apostle John the Theologian, «how can he love God, whom he has not seen?» (1Jn 4:20). And if we love neither God nor our neighbors, then for what are we to be given eternal life? What are we to do in it? Eternal life is the kingdom of love: because the Lord God Himself is love; «God is love» (1Jn 4:16). It is then, and only then, desirable for us, when we love God, and, in Him, our neighbors too: for to love God and those whom He commands us to love is our own blessedness. But without love for Him, it would be hard for us even in paradise, if it were even possible to be there without love—just as here, on earth, it is hard to be in the presence of a person we do not love, but only fear. It would be an unbearable punishment from God for a person who does not love God, if He were to leave him in His own presence; a thousand times more bearable for him would it be to withdraw from the face of God, and, groaning, to mourn his own senselessness, his own ingratitude, his own lack of love for God his Benefactor, far from Him, in the eternal darkness of hell. There, at least, the very darkness, to which he has grown more accustomed than to the light, will bring him some relief in his sufferings. «What fellowship has light with darkness?» (2Cor 6:14) «The wicked man shall not dwell with God, nor shall the lawless remain before His eyes» (Ps 5:5-6). Because Christian love is so necessary for the inheriting of eternal life, the Savior especially commands us to love one another: «a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another» (Jn 13:34-35). The Apostles of Jesus Christ likewise bequeathed love to us: «this is the commandment», says the holy Apostle John the Theologian, «that we love one another» (1Jn 3:11). The Apostle Paul says: «hold fast to love» (1Cor 14:1); and elsewhere: «let all that you do be done in love» (1Cor 16:14). And by what does love show itself? «Love», he says likewise, «suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things; love never fails» (1Cor 13:4-8). Let us measure the degree of our own love by these words of the Apostle. Suppose you are merciful. This is good. But are you not proud? Love knows no pride. Do you not envy? Are you not easily provoked? Do you bear unpleasantness, sorrows in life? Do you believe everything that is said in Holy Scripture and taught by the Church? Do you not fall away from God in time of trouble? Love never fails. Let us watch over ourselves diligently, and make progress, more and more, in love, with God’s help. Then we will surely be there where peace and love reign forever—that is, in the kingdom of heaven. «He who abides in love abides in God, and God in him. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love» (1Jn 4:16,7-8). Amen.

Antiphon, Tone 4.