A Talk for the Third Sunday After Pentecost, I

The lamp of the body is the eye. So then, if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness (Mt 6:22-23).

First of all I thank the Lord, that He has called me, through His faithful servant, the high-ranking governor of this first-throned capital of Russia, to serve the Divine Liturgy in this cozy, comely temple, where he is accustomed always to pour out his soul before God in prayer; for, not having celebrated the bloodless sacrifice for five days now, and not having partaken of the Divine food, I have felt within myself a want of the grace of God. What I desired, I have received. The Liturgy has been celebrated; the Divine food has been prepared; I have been found worthy to taste of the Mystical Supper. Glory to You, O Lord, for Your favor to me. Now I make bold to say a few words, for the edification and spiritual benefit of myself and of all who stand here, on the occasion of today’s Gospel reading, in which the Divine Teacher and Author of our faith, the Lord Jesus Christ, speaks of the darkening of the eyes of our heart by worldly passions and sinful inclinations, and of the unnatural duality in our soul, engendered by our own excessive and untimely cares and concerns for the things of this life, often empty and worthless—a duality that sets up, for a man, strong barriers, unconquerable by himself without the special help of God, to the fulfillment of those works of righteousness and holiness for which he was created in the beginning—a duality that overturns the order of life appointed us by God. In closing today’s Gospel the Lord proclaims to us: seek first of all God’s Kingdom and His righteousness, and all this — that is, earthly goods: food, clothing, and the rest — will be added to you (Mt 6:33)—that is, shall be given as it were as an addition, without our own special cares and concerns.

The Lord proclaims: the lamp of the body is the eye. So then, if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So then, if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness? (Mt 6:22-23). Here is a parable, a comparison. The Lord likens our soul, or our life with its deeds, to the human body, and the mind and the heart to the eye. What the eye is to the body, the mind or the heart is to our soul. If the mind and the heart are enlightened, cleansed, made strong in faith, hope, and love, in goodness, then the whole soul, the whole life of a man, shines with the light of knowledge, faith, uprightness, and good deeds; but if our eye, that is, the mind and the heart, is bad and cunning—that is, if the mind and the heart are not enlightened, not formed, not cleansed of superstitions, prejudices, passions, are not free from weak faith, unbelief, and religious ignorance—then the whole soul and the whole life of that man will be bad and dark, full of stumbling, error, passions, and disfigurement. Confirmation of this evident truth may be seen always and everywhere. By what, then, is the eye of our heart darkened? It is darkened by self-love, self-conceit, and pride; by love of pleasure, indulgence of the flesh, and love of gain; by lying and injustice; by love of material things—in general, by an excessive love for this earthly life, with a forgetfulness of eternity; by favoritism and hypocrisy, ill-will and envy; by trust in one’s own reason, or in scholarly inquiries in the field of religion, to which a higher significance is given than to the revelation of God; by despondency, faintheartedness, despair, sloth and idleness, intemperance, drunkenness, and every kind of sin.

No one can serve two masters, says the Lord: for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon (Mt 6:24)—that is, God and riches; God and the world with its corrupted customs. This is a law eternal, unalterable, unchangeable. Our soul is by nature divine and immortal; its greatness is immeasurable; a single human soul, taken by itself, is worth more than the whole visible world, material and passing as it is; the salvation of our soul was bought at a boundless price—the blood and death of the Son of God; and it ought to serve wholly, in faith and love, God our Redeemer, and not the adulterous and sinful world, not perishable, swiftly passing riches, which not infrequently open the way to every worldly pleasure and vice; not the ruler of this world, the devil, in whose hands the riches of this world are often a dangerous trap for man’s ruin. You cannot serve God and mammon: why? Because our soul, as spirit, is simple, foreign to every complexity or duality, as our Lord God is simple; and it cannot be double without perverting its own nature: duality is the greatest falsehood of life; whoever is double destroys himself. A man whose soul is double is trusted by no one, as soon as it is known that he is double, and not one and whole; on the contrary, holy simplicity and uprightness in a man are respected by all honest and well-meaning people. Therefore I say to you, the Lord continues: do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? (Mt 6:25). Man, in the blindness of his mind, is so carried away by the cares and concerns of this life that he has set his immortal soul and its spiritual needs below his corruptible and perishing body and its needs: he values food more than his own soul, and values the clothing that covers the body—a body created by the Creator with such wisdom—above the body itself. If the Lord has given us a body and implanted in its nature certain needs, then, of course, He will not deprive us of what the body needs, and will give us everything in abundance, if only we ourselves do not pervert God’s order, and care, first of all, for the fulfillment of our high calling, and not for the pleasures of the flesh and the satisfaction of our own vanity. Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; and your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they? (Mt 6:26). The Lord points us to His own Providence over these carefree creatures, not, of course, that we should have no care at all for lower things, but in order to show us His own watchful and special, extraordinary Providence for man: if God has given man something incomparably greater—has given us His whole Self, even as food and drink, His own Divine Body and His own Blood—how, then, will He not give us the lesser, the trifling thing—bodily food and drink!

And which of you, by worrying, can add one cubit to his stature? (Mt 6:27). As absurd as it would be for any one of us to worry about increasing his own physical height, even by a single cubit, so no less absurd and pitiable are our unceasing cares for the body alone, for which the Lord has created and provides everything needful in abundance. And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I say to you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? (Mt 6:28-30). Here the Lord points to the beautiful, but perishable, flowers of the field, as an example to us, that we might not care too much for perishable clothing, for the perishable adornment of our own perishable body, but might care instead for the imperishable adornment of our imperishable souls with faith and good deeds, with meekness, righteousness, love; and that we might remember that there is prepared for us an imperishable, incomparable, eternal beauty and glory in the heavens—a beauty and glory before which every earthly beauty and glory is as nothing: for the Lord will clothe us in His own glory, and the righteous will shine forth like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father (Mt 13:43).

In concluding the Gospel, the Lord says: so then, do not be anxious, and do not say: what are we to eat? or what to drink? or in what to dress ourselves? because the pagans seek all this, and because your Heavenly Father knows that you are in need of all this (Mt 6:31-32). It belongs to pagans, not to Christians, to care only for earthly needs and pleasures. Christians are called to an eternal, imperishable life; but the pagans are darkened in their understanding, and what has been revealed to us has not been revealed to them; they do not know the all-loving heavenly Father, and His Only-Begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit; they do not know the most sweet and faithful promises of God, given to us, and therefore act thus, in a darkened mind. Seek, then, first of all, God’s Kingdom and His righteousness, says the Lord, and all this will be added to you (Mt 6:33). This, then, is what we must seek first of all, must strive for with all our strength: that the Lord might reign in our hearts with His own eternal righteousness, that He might govern our thoughts, our desires, our intentions, our actions, our whole life.

The voice of our Divine Teacher has fallen silent; I too will bring my own feeble word to a close. Amen.