Orthodox Truth

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And it came to pass in the days of Achaz the son of Joatham, the son of Ozias, king of Juda, there came up Rasim king of Aram, and Phakee son of Romelias, king of Israel, against Jerusalem to war against it, but they could not take it. 2 And a message was brought to the house of David, saying, Aram has conspired with Ephraim. And his soul was amazed, and the soul of his people, as in a wood a tree is moved by the wind. 3 And the Lord said to Esaias, Go forth to meet Achaz, thou, and thy son Jasub who is left, to the pool of the upper way of the fuller’s field. 4 And thou shalt say to him, Take care to be quiet, and fear not, neither let thy soul be disheartened because of these two smoking firebrands: for when my fierce anger is over, I will heal again. 5 And as for the son of Aram, and the son of Romelias, forasmuch as they have devised an evil counsel, saying, 6 We will go up against Judea, and having conferred with them we will turn them away to our side, and we will make the son of Tabeel king of it; 7 thus saith the Lord of hosts, This counsel shall not abide, nor come to pass. 8 But the head of Aram is Damascus, and the head of Damascus, Rasim; and yet within sixty and five years the kingdom of Ephraim shall cease from being a people. 9 And the head of Ephraim is Somoron, and the head of Somoron the son of Romelias: but if ye believe not, neither will ye at all understand. 10 And the Lord again spoke to Achaz, saying, 11 Ask for thyself a sign of the Lord thy God, in the depth or in the height. 12 And Achaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord. 13 And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; is it a little thing for you to contend with men? and how do ye contend against the Lord? 14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Emmanuel. 

Here is the best-known and most explicit Old Testament prophecy of the Incarnation of God the Word:  “…behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Emmanuel.”  When the fullness of time had come, neither an angel nor an ambassador came to save us, but the Lord Himself, Emmanuel, whose name being interpreted means “God with us.”  

Long before the time of Esaias, however, Moses had mystically learned of this in his encounter with God at the burning bush.   St. Gregory of Nyssa says the following: 

It seems to me that Moses already knew about this mystery by means of the light by which God appeared to him when he saw the bush burning without being consumed (Exodus 3:2).  For Moses said, “I wish to go up closer and observe this great vision (Ex. 3:3). I believe that the term “go up closer” does not mean motion in space but drawing near in time.  What was prefigured at that time in the flame of the bush was openly manifested in the mystery of the Virgin, once a period of time had passed.  Just as on the mountain the bush burned but was not consumed, so the Virgin gave birth to the light and was not corrupted.   Nor should you consider comparing the Virgin to a bush to be inappropriate, for the bush prefigures the God-bearing body of the Virgin. – St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Birth of Christ 

Neither Moses nor Esaias – nor Gregory of Nyssa for that matter – were what people today would call academic theologians.  They had wisdom, because they feared the Lord.  They had faith in Who He is, and they had hope in His promises. Advancing from Faith in His Truth to Hope in His Goodness, finally they came to that true knowledge of God which is the union of the mind with the ultimate Beauty, Who is Love.   

So Faith comes first.  The Lord Himself makes this plain in today’s reading, through the mouth of Esaias.   He tells King Achaz that the king does not understand the prophetic revelation because he does not believe:   “…but if ye believe not, neither will ye at all understand (v.9) .”  

Blessed Augustine of Hippo explains this relationship between faith and understanding thus: 

The sacred and hidden mysteries of the kingdom of God require people first to believe so they become people who understand.  Faith, you see, is a step toward understanding; understanding is the well-deserved reward of faith.  The prophet says this plainly enough to all those who impatiently put the cart before the horse by looking for understanding and ignoring the need for faith.  He states, “…but if ye believe not, neither will ye at all understand (Esaias 7:9.)” Faith too, of course, has a kind of light of its own in the Scriptures: in the readings from the prophets, from the the gospel, from the apostle.  I mean, all those texts that are chanted to us at the appropriate time are lights in a dark place, to keep us going until the day.  The apostle Peter says, “We have the prophetic word, to which you do well to pay attention, as to a light in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts (II Peter 1:19). – Sermon 126

St. Peter understands that his flock often perceive that their lives in this world are in “a dark place,” and of course we often feel that way too.   What he and St. Augustine offer as a cure for this is that we hasten to the Church and hear, at the appropriate time, that is, according to the Church’s liturgical calendar, the sacred prophecies of the Old and New Testaments, which throw light into our darkness and give us the strength we need to persevere, until “…the day dawns and the morning star rises” in our hearts.  The light of spiritual understanding does come if we keep struggling in faith and hearing God’s word with an open heart; we know that, for we periodically experience it, and no one can tell us that it does not happen.  And we know that this is not delusory, because it is the most solid, stabilizing, consistent, and joy-giving interior experience we ever have. Each of us can say to himself, “I am certainly not a a Moses or an Esaias or a Gregory of Nyssa, but the Lord in His greatness does reach down to my lowliness and enlighten my darkness, whenever I take off the sandals of my self-sufficiency and vain knowledge, and fall down before the Burning Bush with faith and the fear of God.”  

Panagia herself exercised this active faith that is prior to knowledge, regarding the very prophecy we read today.  She had read it too, and she believed.  When the great archangel came to tell her that she was to enact its fulfillment, she did not for one moment doubt the prophecy.  Her question to St. Gabriel was simply out of a desire to grow in understanding; as one thirsting to grow ever  in divine knowledge, she wanted to know more about the details.  Here is what St. Ambrose says about it:  

When Mary asked the angel, “How shall this be? (Luke 1:3-4),” she was not doubting what the angel said; she wanted to know how it would come about.  How much more measured is her response than the words of the priest Zechariah.  She asked, “How shall this be?” [Zacharias, by contrast, asked] “How shall I know this? (Luke 1:18).” She responds to what is to happen; he remains doubtful of the news. He shows that he does not believe by saying that he does not know, and seeks to find someone else as warrant; she declares that she is ready to do what she is called for and does not doubt that it will take place.  She asks only how it will happen when she says, “How shall this be since I have no husband?”  Such a marvelous and unheard-of birth needed to be announced so that she could believe it.  For a virgin to give birth is a sign of a divine mystery, not a human affair.  Further, Mary had read the words, “Receive a sign: Behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son (Esaias 7:14).” Therefore she believed that the prophecy would come true, but how it would happen she would not have read, for how it would be fulfilled had not been revealed even to so great a prophet. – Commentary on Luke 2:15 

When we struggle with weakness of faith, let us not then obey the suicidal impulse to pitch our feeble minds into the swirling cesspool of human curiosity and vain reasonings.  Let us instead kneel before the icon of the Most Holy Virgin, read her Akathist Hymn, and cry out to her in the words of the archangel.   This pleases her greatly, and her all-powerful intercession will invincibly incline the will of her divine Son, the Daystar of God, to send His light into our hearts. 

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And it came to pass in the year in which king Ozias died, that I saw the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne, and the house was full of his glory. 2 And seraphs stood round about him: each one had six wings: and with two they covered their face, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 And one cried to the other, and they said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.  4 And the lintel shook at the voice they uttered, and the house was filled with smoke. 5 And I said, Woe is me, for I am pricked to the heart; for being a man, and having unclean lips, I dwell in the midst of a people having unclean lips; and I have seen with mine eyes the King, the Lord of hosts. 6 And there was sent to me one of the seraphs, and he had in his hand a coal, which he had taken off the altar with the tongs: 7 and he touched my mouth, and said, Behold, this has touched thy lips, and will take away thine iniquities, and will purge off thy sins. 8 And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go to this people? And I said, behold, I am here, send me. And he said, Go, and say to this people, 9 Ye shall hear indeed, but ye shall not understand; and ye shall see indeed, but ye shall not perceive. 10 For the heart of this people has become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them. 11 And I said, How long, O Lord? And he said, Until cities be deserted by reason of their not being inhabited, and the houses by reason of there being no men, and the land shall be left desolate. 12 And after this God shall remove the men far off, and they that are left upon the land shall be multiplied. 

This vision of Esaias is among the best known passages of the Old Testament, and the Holy Fathers have commented copiously upon it.  The Holy Spirit is teaching us many lessons here, but let us hearken at least to these four:  

The true God is the Holy Trinity.  

We men are graciously granted the privilege to worship this Holy Trinity as do the angels in heaven.  

We derogate from this high calling by misusing the gift of speech, and 

That which the angels feared to touch – the burning coal of the divine presence – we touch and receive into ourselves, in Holy Communion.   

You have probably read this passage before, perhaps many times.  Have you ever wondered why the acclamation of the seraphim in the form of a multiple predicate adjective is triple but the subject and the verb of this periodic sentence are in the singular (“Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord [not “are the lords”] of Sabaoth”)? St. Ambrose certainly did notice this, and here is what he says:  

What is the meaning of the threefold utterance of the word Holy? If it is repeated three times, why is it one act of praise? Is not Holy repeated three times because the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in holiness?  The seraphim spoke the name, not once, lest the Son be excluded, not twice, lest the Spirit should be overlooked, not four times lest something created be included.  Furthermore, to show that the Trinity is one God, after the threefold Holy is spoken, they add the singular, the Lord God of hosts (6:3). Therefore the Father is holy, the Son is holy, and also the Spirit of God is holy; the Trinity is adored, but does not adore, it is praised, but it does not praise. As for me, I believe as the seraphim believed, and adore God as did all the principalities and powers. – St. Ambrose of Milan, On Faith 2.107 

Thus every time we recite or chant the Trisagion Hymn in our prayers at home or at the Liturgy of the Catechumens, and every time we chant the Sanctus of the Anaphora at the Liturgy of the Faithful, we are thereby professing to believe in the Holy Trinity as also the angels in heaven believe, and we are granted an angelic status by being allowed to worship the Holy Trinity in the same way that the angels also worship. 

Realizing the greatness of this privilege, both to believe in the True God as He wishes to be believed in, and to worship Him as He desires to be worshipped, should we not at the same time be struck, as Esaias was, with our woeful unfitness for receiving so great a gift? Do we not also have unclean lips, and do we not also live among a people of unclean lips?   Here is what St. Gregory the Dialogist says about it:  

Purity of heart and simplicity are most precious in the sight of Almighty God, who is fully pure and simple in nature.  Set apart from the ways of the world, the servants of God are strangers to its vain talk and thus avoid disturbing and soiling their minds in idle conversation. …We are drawn downwards by mingling in continual conversation with people of the world.  It is with good reason that Isaiah, after seeing the Lord, the King of hosts, accuses himself of this very fault.  In a spirit of repentance he says, “Woe is me, because…I am a man of unclean lips.”  And why are his lips unclean?  Because, as he explains immediately, “I dwell in the midst of a people that has unclean lips.”  Grieving that his own lips are unclean, he shows us that he contracted this defilement by living among a people that had unclean lips. 

To take part in the talk of worldly people without defiling our own heart is all but impossible. If we permit ourselves to discuss their affairs with them, we grow accustomed to a manner of speech unbecoming to us, and end up clinging to it with pleasure and are no longer entirely willing to leave it.  We enter upon the conversation reluctantly, as a kind of condescension, but we find ourselves carried along from idle words to harmful ones, from trivial faults to serious guilt, with the result that our lips are more defiled with foolish words, and our prayers further and further removed from God’s hearing…Why should we be surprised, then, if God is so slow to hear our petitions when we on our part are slow to hear God’s command or pay no attention whatever to it? – Dialogues, 3.15.  

How, then, can we participate in society without being tempted constantly to sins of the tongue? In short, we cannot.   Therefore, we must arm ourselves daily against the temptation, resolving each morning, before the duties of the day begin, to take preventive countermeasures.   These should include anticipating the kinds of conversations we may have later in the day just begun, which ones will truly be required and which ones will not, and avoid those that are avoidable, especially if we know from experience that they will likely lead to sin.   Another measure to take is constant recourse to the Jesus Prayer throughout the day.   Along with the Jesus Prayer, we can also frequently repeat the words of the psalm: “Set, O Lord, a watch before my mouth and a door of enclosure round about my lips.”  Another saving practice is to remind ourselves daily that we have the duties of justice and charity towards everyone we meet, for God providentially sends into our path precisely those whom He intends, for our salvation and for theirs.   Before I open my mouth, I should pray, “O Lord, may I edify – and not tempt – my neighbor this day both by what I say and by what I refrain from saying.”  

These same human lips that praise God with the angelic song also open to receive God Himself in Holy Communion.    Such a consoling yet fearful thought, kept in mind at all times, should certainly move us to keep our lips pure.    The fiery seraph, that lofty and pure intelligence, could not touch the burning coal that cleansed the lips of the prophet, needing instead to hold it with tongs.  Yet the Christian priest, a mere sinful man, holds the Body of God Himself in his hands, and the lowly Christian takes into his entire being, in all of its infinite and essentially unbearable reality, that which the great prophet could merely touch with his lips, and that only in type and figure, in the form of the burning coal.  

The seraph could not touch the coal of fire with his

Fingers, and the coal merely touched Isaiah’s mouth; 

The seraph did not hold it, Isaiah did not consume it, 

But our Lord has allowed us to do both. 

– St. Ephraim the Syrian, Hymn on Faith 10.10

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Thus saith the Lord: But the Lord of hosts shall be exalted in judgement, and the holy God shall be glorified in righteousness. 17And they that were spoiled shall be fed as bulls, and lambs shall feed on the waste places of them that are taken away. 18 Woe to them that draw sins to them as with a long rope, and iniquities as with a thong of the heifer’s yoke: 19 who say, Let him speedily hasten what he will do, that we may see it: and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel come, that we may know it. 20 Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil; who make darkness light, and light darkness; who make bitter sweet, and sweet bitter. 21 Woe to them that are wise in their own conceit, and knowing in their own sight. 22 Woe to the strong ones of you that drink wine, and the mighty ones that mingle strong drink: 23 who justify the ungodly for rewards, and take away the righteousness of the righteous. 24 Therefore as stubble shall be burnt by a coal of fire, and shall be consumed by a violent flame, their root shall be as chaff, and their flower shall go up as dust: for they rejected the law of the Lord of hosts, and insulted the word of the Holy One of Israel. 25 Therefore the Lord of hosts was greatly angered against his people, and he reached forth his hand upon them, and smote them: and the mountains were troubled, and their carcasses were as dung in the midst of the way: yet for all this his anger has not been turned away, but his hand is yet raised. 

We are surrounded today by those who call good evil and evil good – neighbors, colleagues at work, our own relatives, even, sad to say, people who call themselves Orthodox Christians, even bishops and priests.   They believe in sacrificing infants to the demon of fornication and calling it “women’s rights.”  They believe in mutilating children and calling it “transgender rights.”   They believe in the most gross and unnatural sins of the flesh as legitimate expressions of conjugal affection on par with the chaste acts of a marriage bed sanctified by the blessing of God and ordered towards the procreation of children.  They embark upon the Promethean insanity of altering the human genome and they call it medicine.  All of this is beyond immorality; it is demonic lunacy.  Those who believe in such things and practice such things are not simply wicked. They are trapped in a make-believe mental world of meaninglessness and despair; they live at a spiritual level at which the concepts of “good” and “evil” do not even exist.   Their minds being utterly destroyed, their wills have nowhere to go.  Thus the “enlightened” society of 2023.   

At this point, then, the range of human expedients available to us to survive as free and moral human beings – much less Orthodox Christians – is narrow, and, more than ever, it is obvious that only God can save us.  The Good News is that He wants to save us: His will for our salvation is infinitely greater than our own.  What lesson can we take from today’s reading to help us do something  – that is, to cooperate actively with His gracious election and His all-powerful will that is directed entirely to our eternal happiness?  

The first thing to remember is that our minds too are easily led astray; when we look at the benighted folk described above, our first thought should be, “There but for the grace of God go I.”   Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to treasure his years in the Gulag for the spiritual insight he gained there:  it was there that he learned the great truth, that the line between good and evil is drawn primarily not between political parties or armies or governments, but right down the middle of the heart of every man.   If we really want to oppose evil, we have to understand what it is, and that means we have to know ourselves.  The precondition for self-knowledge is humility, and we can strive successfully to humble our wills only if we begin by humbling our minds.  Calling good evil and evil good comes about because of a prior mistake which our prophet today accuses as well:  “Woe to unto them that are wise in their own conceit, and knowing in their own sight!” 

Among the life-changing passages in that bedrock spiritual classic all of us should read and cherish, Unseen Warfare, here is one we would do well to memorize and repeat to ourselves daily

…pride of will, being visible to the mind, can sometimes be easily cured by forcing it to submit to the yoke of what is good. But when the mind is firmly grounded in the self-relying thought that its own judgments are better than all others, who can cure it in the end? Can it ever obey anyone, if it feels certain that the judgments of others are not as good as its own? When this eye of the soul—the mind—with whose help man could see and correct pride of will, is itself blinded by pride and remains uncured, who will cure the will? Then everything within is so disorganised that there is neither place nor person for applying a healing poultice. This is why you must hasten to oppose this pernicious pride of mind, before it penetrates into the marrow of your bones. Resist it, curb the quickness of your mind and humbly subject your opinion to the opinions of others. Be a fool for the love of God, if you wish to be wiser than Solomon: ‘If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise’ (I Cor, iii. 18). – Unseen Warfare, chapter nine. 

No doubt we all agree with this, but how do we do it?  We know that all virtue is a mean between extremes:  How do we acquire this saving distrust of our own opinions without falling into the opposite extreme of so great a distrust of self that we give up our convictions and fail in our resolutions, because of the opinions of others?  On the one hand, we don’t want to be the tiresome know-it-all that the prophet decries above, wise in our own conceits.  On the other hand, each of us, according to his own station in life, must firmly and courageously make moral and practical choices to fulfill his responsibilities without the incubus of a foolish self doubt ever riding his back and vitiating an active life that should by rights consist of a well-directed, unremitting, and intransigent combat against the visible and invisible enemies of our salvation. 

Here are a few words of advice:  

1.   Learn to distinguish between revealed and natural truth on the one hand, and practical applications of truth, prudential decisions, on the other hand.   Never give up your Faith and never give up fundamental commonsense insights into the nature of reality. When you must make spiritual and moral choices in the practical sphere, ask the Lord for a saving humility about your own capacity for judgment and for His divine inspiration to make good choices.  Ask Him also for the supernatural grace of true Christian courage, which paradoxically always reveals itself as genuine by its combination with meekness, to carry out your resolves. This is a divine grace, and as such it is not within the capacity of fallen nature.   But we are Christians, we can ask for it with a good hope of getting it, and God wants to give it to us. 

2.  If you do not have a wise counselor or counselors in your life, pray earnestly and repeatedly until God sends you one or more, and sends you the insight to realize that “Yes, these are the ones.”  When you find them, don’t let them go.  Usually the consensus of a few wise counselors will steer us right. That doesn’t mean to hand over to them your will and your mind: that’s not spiritual discipleship; that’s just mindless slavery.   It means to defer to their judgment in most cases, unless your conscience screams “No!”   

3.  Remember the words of the wise Ss. Barsanuphius and John:  When faced with important choices, “Pray three times and do as your heart inclines.”   But once you make a firm resolve, don’t look back.  

4.  Never think that you have already learned all you need to know about Orthodoxy or about life.  Constantly immerse yourself in some kind of spiritual study as well as fruitful practical studies.    “Exceedingly spacious are Thy commandments,” as we read in the psalm.  That is, truth is inexhaustible. Not only the infinite perfections of God, but even the truths found in His creation, are the study not only of a lifetime, but of eternity.   Always consider yourself a learner not a teacher. 

5.  When you find that your thoughts have been mistaken, and that by being corrected you have acquired some new and genuine wisdom, rejoice.  You have now become more of a grownup (much less a Christian!).  What freedom, to be absolutely unattached to the idea that I am right all the time!   

Let us close today by reading carefully this passage from our Holy Father Gregory the Great, the Dialogist, Pope of Rome:  

Consider how holy men have a remarkable ability to keep before their inner eyes what they do not know in order to safeguard the virtue of humility.   On the one hand they consider their weakness, and on the other they do not allow their hearts to be puffed up just because they have done something good. Knowledge is a virtue, but humility is its guardian.  

One’s mind, then, should be modest about everything it knows, lest the winds of pride blow away what the virtue of knowledge has gathered in.  When you do something good, always call to mind the evils you have done.   If you keep your faults in mind, your heart will never be heedlessly happy because of its good works…Let everyone strive to be great in the practice of virtue, but nevertheless let each one know that to a certain extent he is in fact nothing.   If not, one will attribute greatness to oneself and lose whatever good one has done.  This is why the prophet warned: Woe to you who are wise in your own eyes, and prudent in your own sight (Esaias 5:21).   And Paul: “Do not be prudent in your own sight (Romans 12:16).”   And because of his pride, it was said against Saul, “When you were little in your own eyes, I made you head of the tribes of Israel (I Kings 15:17).”  It is as if he had been told, “When you considered yourself little, I made you greater than the rest; but when you thought of yourself as great, I considered you little.” –  Homilies on the Gospels 7.4 

May we always consider ourselves little before God and man, and pray to be made great in the inner man, in the humility of wisdom.   Thereby shall we dispose ourselves to be taught what is truly good and truly evil, and to act with a God-pleasing resolve on the wisdom we shall have undeservedly received from the right hand of the Most High, unto our salvation.  

Holy Prophet Esaias, Holy Apostle Paul, Holy Father Gregory, and All Ye God-inspired Teachers of the Old and New Testaments, pray to God for us! 

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Thus saith the Lord: 7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Juda his beloved plant: I expected it to bring forth judgement, and it brought forth iniquity; and not righteousness, but a cry. 8 Woe to them that join house to house, and add field to field, that they may take away something of their neighbor’s: will ye dwell alone upon the land? 9 For these things have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts: for though many houses should be built, many and fair houses shall be desolate, and there shall be no inhabitants in them. 10 For where ten yoke of oxen plough the land shall yield one jar-full, and he that sows six homers shall produce three measures. 11 Woe to them that rise up in the morning, and follow strong drink; who wait at it till evening: for the wine shall inflame them. 12 For they drink wine with harp, and psaltery, and drums, and pipes: but they regard not the works of the Lord, and consider not the works of his hands. 13 Therefore my people have been taken captive, because they know not the Lord: and there has been a multitude of dead bodies, because of hunger and of thirst for water. 14 Therefore hell has enlarged its desire and opened its mouth without ceasing: and her glorious and great, and her rich and her pestilent men shall go down into it. 15 And the mean man shall be brought low, and the great man shall be disgraced, and the lofty eyes shall be brought low. 16 But the Lord of hosts shall be exalted in judgement, and the holy God shall be glorified in righteousness. 

The first verse of today’s reading (chapter five, verse seven) is the last verse of yesterday’s reading, whose second half consists of the song of the vineyard, the Lord’s poetic accusation of His wayward people as a vineyard that has borne thorns instead of grapes, an image He will employ again, centuries later, not in a song but in a parable, when He comes in the Flesh. At that time, the leaders of the Old Testament Church will hear the same indictment of their own perfidy, this time not through the mouth of the prophet but from the mouth of God Himself standing as a man before them.  (See Matthew 21, Mark 12, and Luke 20). 

The song of the vineyard ends at verse seven, but today with verse eight the Lord continues his accusation with a list of the people’s specific crimes, not in metaphor but in fact:  The rich are greedy and expand their land holdings at the expense of the poor, they are addicted to drunkenness and mindless entertainments, and they they “know not the Lord” – i.e., they neglect the study of God’s revelation in His great works and words, as revealed through Moses and the prophets.   

The Lord inflicts punishments that are apposite to the crimes being punished:  Greedy abuse of the soil will bring about infertility and famine.   Spiritual enslavement to the base passions will bring about physical enslavement to a conquering foe.   Ignorance of God’s Word will bring the sinners down into hell.  

Maniacal greed, degrading addictions, and spiritual ignorance resulting, respectively, in ecological disaster, social catastrophe, and ultimate damnation: It sounds familiar, doesn’t it?   The same bad news has repeated itself throughout the generations, whenever man defies the divine will made known either in natural or direct revelation, and worships his passions instead of the true God.  But since the coming of God in the Flesh, there is Good News:  We can repent and be saved by the grace of Christ, which enables us to keep God’s holy commandments and avoid the dreadful consequences that come of bearing spiritual thorns instead of the fruits of righteousness.  

Our true interpreters of the Gospel, the Holy Fathers, give us practical instructions on how to cooperate with the Lord’s gracious gift.   St. Ambrose of Milan, for example, offers this advice when we are dissatisfied with our material security, like the people in today’s reading who think they never have enough and have to keep piling up their wealth:  Contemplate God’s beautiful creation and be grateful that He has bestowed all this on you.  All of creation is your house, and, moreover, the Church is your house.  You are already rich.    Here’s what he says:  

Because your soul is a priceless thing, poor man, be on your guard.  The soul is everlasting, although the flesh is mortal.  Although you may lack money, you are not therefore devoid of grace.  Although your house is not commodious, your possessions are not scattered.  The sky is open, and the expanse of the world is free.  The elements have been granted to all for their common use.  Rich and poor alike enjoy the splendid ornaments of the universe. 

Are the paneled ceilings decked with gold in the homes of the very wealthy more beautiful than the face of the heavens decorated with glistening stars? Are the estates of the rich more extensive than the surface of the world?  Hence it was said to those who join house to house and estate to estate: “Shall you alone dwell in the midst of the earth?” [Esaias 5:8] You have actually a larger house, you man of low estate – a house wherein your call is heard and heeded…The house of God is common to rich and to poor. – The Six Days of Creation, 6.8.52 

St. John Chrysostom has an admonitory word for today’s fanatics who believe that they can lead outrageously sinful lives yet somehow through technology make creation bend to their will and create a permanent paradise on earth.   The same people do not believe in the Great Flood recorded in Genesis, and therefore they do not learn their lesson.   

There are many instances in which the land suffers because of people’s sins.  Why are you surprised if the people’s sin makes the land infertile and unfruitful when we caused it to be corrupt in the first place?…See Noah, for example.  When humanity had become utterly perverse, turmoil ensued everywhere.  Everything – the seeds, plants, all types of animals, the land, the sea, the air, the mountains, the valleys, the hills, the cities, the ramparts, the houses and the towers – everything was covered by the flood.  – Commentary on Esaias, 5.4

St. Caesarius of Arles, commenting on the words of Esaias that we read today, that the people are led away captive because of their lack of knowledge of the Lord, applies this explicitly to the eternal destiny of those who fail to study Holy Scripture: 

What do servants think of themselves when they dare to despise the Lord’s precepts, not even condescending to reread the letters of invitation whereby he asks them to the blessedness of his kingdom?  If any one of us sends a letter to a subordinate, and he in turn not only fails to do what is commanded but even refuses to read over his orders, that person deserves to receive punishment, not pardon;  imprisonment, not freedom.   Similarly, one who refuses to read the sacred writings that have been transmitted from the eternal country should fear that he perhaps will not receive eternal rewards and even not escape endless punishments.  So dangerous it is for us not to read the divine precepts that the prophet mournfully exclaims, “Therefore is my people led away captive because they had not knowledge…(Esaias 5: 13).”  Doubtless, if a person fails to seek God in this world through the sacred lessons, God will refuse to recognize him in eternal bliss.  – Sermon 7 

Today, this beautiful Lenten day, is the day of salvation. Let us heed the words of our wise and loving Holy Fathers: Contemplating the beauties of God’s creation, let us with joy labor for a modest sufficiency of the world’s goods while sharing with others.   Let us heed the lesson of the Great Flood and live in chaste humility and sobriety.   And let us flee the fate of the ignorant, as we daily partake of the feast of the Word of God in Scripture and all the grace-filled writings of Holy Tradition, so that we may one day partake of the eternal Banquet in His kingdom.   

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Thus saith the Lord: And in that day God shall shine gloriously in counsel on the earth, to exalt and glorify the remnant of Israel. 3 And it shall be, that the remnant left in Sion, and the remnant left in Jerusalem, even all that are appointed to life in Jerusalem, shall be called holy. 4 For the Lord shall wash away the filth of the sons and daughters of Sion, and shall purge out the blood from the midst of them, with the spirit of judgement, and the spirit of burning. 5 And he shall come, and it shall be with regard to every place of mount Sion, yea, all the region round about it shall a cloud overshadow by day, and there shall be as it were the smoke and light of fire burning by night: and upon all the glory shall be a defence. 6 And it shall be for a shadow from the heat, and as a shelter and a hiding place from inclemency of weather and from rain. 

5:1 Now I will sing to my beloved a song of my beloved concerning my vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard on a high hill in a fertile place. 2 And I made a hedge round it, and dug a trench, and planted a choice vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and dug a place for the wine-vat in it: and I waited for it to bring forth grapes, and it brought forth thorns. 3 And now, ye dwellers in Jerusalem, and every man of Juda, judge between me and my vineyard. 4 What shall I do any more to my vineyard, that I have not done to it? Whereas I expected it to bring forth grapes, but it has brought forth thorns. 5 And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it shall be for a spoil; and I will pull down its walls, and it shall be left to be trodden down. 6 And I will forsake my vineyard; and it shall not be pruned, nor dug, and thorns shall come up upon it as on barren land; and I will command the clouds to rain no rain upon it. 7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Juda his beloved plant: I expected it to bring forth judgement, and it brought forth iniquity; and not righteousness, but a cry. 

Today’s reading begins with nearly the whole of chapter four, one of the consoling passages in which the Lord promises to forgive and to save the holy remnant who will have remained faithful to Him.  St. Irenaeus of Lyons, with all the Fathers, sees the fulfillment of this prophecy in the economy of the Incarnate Word:  

In the “last days” (Heb. 1:1), “when the fulness of time of liberty had arrived (Gal. 4:4),” The Word Himself in His own person washed away the filth of the daughters of Sion (Esaias 4:4) by washing His disciples’ feet with His own hands (John 13:5). This is the end to which the human race was destined, namely, to become inheritors of God.  As in the beginning we were all brought into bondage by the actions of our first parents and made subject to death, so in these last days through the person of the Last Man all who were His disciples from the beginning, being cleansed and washed from those things that pertain to death, come to share the life of God.   For the One Who washed the feet of His disciples sanctified and made pure the entire body.” – Against Heresies, 4.22.1

Great Lent, as we know, is the time given us to prepare for the great annual commemoration of the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  We pray that by the time we arrive at Great and Holy Week, our minds and hearts will be disposed so as to know clearly and feel deeply the meaning of every word we shall hear spoken by the Lord and every action we shall see performed by the Lord, as they are recorded and portrayed in the unforgettable Gospel account we shall hear read aloud in Church that week.  Among these actions the washing of the feet holds great significance, both as a moral exhortation to humility and service to our brethren, and as a prophecy in action foretelling the Good News of our redemption by the washing not of our feet only but of our entire being – in the water of Baptism that was to flow from the pierced side of the crucified Savior.  

When St. Irenaeus call Christ “the Last Man,”  he is echoing the words of St. Paul in I Corinthians 15: 45:  “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a life-giving spirit.”   There are only two Adams:  the First Adam our forefather, and the Second Adam, Our Lord Jesus Christ.   Since there are only two, Our Lord being the second, He is also the last.  But, of course, the word “last” (the Greek eschatos) in this instance means far more than simply the final item in a series.  Our Lord is the “Last Man” in that He fulfills all that men were meant to be:  He is the ultimate revelation – not simply by His words, but by His Person, by Who and What He is – He is the final word not only about Who God is, but also about what a man is supposed to be.  Our Lord is also the Last Man in that His coming to earth is really the end of history.   Yes, two thousand years have elapsed since He ascended from us and promised to return in glory, but these years are not a mere dreary chronology of human folly, as the secular historian usually paints it, but rather a joyful and dynamic betwixt and between period breathing already the breath of eternity,  a short wait for the final revelation and fulfillment of something that has already been revealed and fulfilled.  We need not worry about the outcome of the Great Story of which we are inescapably characters in the tale.   The final chapter has already been written, and the good guys are going to win, in fact have won already.  Our hearts can, at last, be at rest – as long as they rest at last in the Last Man, Our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Studying the texts of the Holy Week services would form an excellent Lenten exercise.   Most of us already own a Holy Week service book, and those who do not can easily obtain one. As you read these inspired words carefully, you will discover throughout that Week this threefold character of the Paschal Mystery we have referred to today:  There will be moral exhortations for the Christians to imitate the Lord’s voluntary humiliation by humbling themselves and living lives of sacrifice for others, there will be the obvious and central story of the Passion and Resurrection,  and there will also be frequent references to the Lord’s Coming at the End, when He shall return not in humiliation as at His First Coming, but in glory, to judge the living and the dead.   

This study would provide a God-pleasing way to spend our leisure time during Great Lent! 

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Thus saith the Lord: For the eyes of the Lord are high, but man is low; and the haughtiness of men shall be brought low, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. 12 For the day of the Lord of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and haughty, and upon every one that is high and towering, and they shall be brought down; 13 and upon every cedar of Libanus, of them that are high and towering, and upon every oak of Basan, 14 and upon every high mountain, and upon every high hill, 15 and upon every high tower, and upon every high wall, 16 and upon every ship of the sea, and upon every display of fine ships. 17 And every man shall be brought low, and the pride of men shall fall: and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. 18 And they shall hide all idols made with hands, 19 having carried them into the caves, and into the clefts of the rocks, and into the caverns of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and by reason of the glory of his might, when he shall arise to strike terribly the earth. 20 For in that day a man shall cast forth his silver and gold abominations, which they made in order to worship vanities and bats; 21 to enter into the caverns of the solid rock, and into the clefts of the rocks, for fear of the Lord, and by reason of the glory of his might, when he shall arise to strike terribly the earth. 

Here Esaias prophesies that the Lord will destroy all idolatry in “the day of the Lord” “when He shall arise to strike terribly the earth.”  In other words, God Himself is going to put an end to idolatry through afflicting sinful society so greatly that the arrogance of men will be destroyed when they suffer an overwhelming terror and devastation resulting from God’s punishment.  This prophecy has historical, Christological, and eschatological fulfillments.  

There are historical fulfillments, because we see in history that God has indeed frequently destroyed man’s arrogance through dreadful disasters, the Flood of Noah and the incineration of Sodom and Gomorrah being the archetypal examples; in the time of the Old Testament prophets like Esaias, they experienced “the day of the Lord” every time God struck them down with social catastrophes like military defeats and famine.  The “day of the Lord” also contains a Christological meaning, because at the First Coming of Christ and His rejection by the Jews,  the Lord sent the Romans to destroy their nation and punish terribly their idolatrous worship of themselves. And “the day of the Lord” will, finally, be the Second Coming of Christ, when He shall destroy the power of Satan once and for all, and cast him and his followers into the lake of fire.  

The historical and Christological “days of the Lord” had a therapeutic as well as a retributive purpose:  God did these things not only to punish man, but also to inspire him to repent.  At the last “day of the Lord,” however, God’s judgment will be final, for “there is no repentance in hell.” 

In our daily lives, we experience “the day of the Lord” when afflictions willed or allowed by God humble us.  The pain we suffer startles us; it wakes up, and the grace of repentance given at that moment enables us to see what we had not seen before, that we had made an idol out of some created thing like money or bodily health or the esteem of other men.  It is not that these things are evils in themselves.  They are in fact things essentially good, for we need material resources and health to perform our duties to family and to society, and the health of human society requires that a due measure of honor and esteem be rendered to those to whom honor and esteem are due, both according to the station and to the merits of the men involved.  But these are only secondary goods, instruments of virtue not virtue in themselves.   It is so easy to mistake the secondary for the primary, and therefore we sometimes need a startling – and, yes, painful – reminder not to make this mistake. We think that we depend on God, but so often is it not the case that we are actually depending on the good things He gives us?  Sometimes He takes them away, so as to remind us, “My grace is enough for thee.”  

Let us, then, recognize these “days of the Lord” when they befall us, and give glory to Him who suffered so greatly for us, by accepting with patience the little sufferings He sends into our lives, for our salvation. 

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Thus saith the Lord: And many nations shall go and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will tell us his way, and we will walk in it: for out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem. 4 And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plow-shares, and their spears into sickles: and nation shall not take up sword against nation, neither shall they learn to war any more. 5 And now, O house of Jacob, come, and let us walk in the light of the Lord. 6 For he has forsaken his people the house of Israel, because their land is filled as at the beginning with divinations, as the land of the Philistines, and many strange children were born to them. 7 For their land is filled with silver and gold, and there was no number of their treasures; their land also is filled with horses, and there was no number of chariots. 8 And the land is filled with abominations, even the works of their hands; and they have worshipped the works which their fingers made. 9 And the mean man bowed down, and the great man was humbled: and I will not pardon them. 10 Now therefore enter ye into the rocks, and hide yourselves in the earth, for fear of the Lord, and by reason of the glory of his might, when he shall arise to strike terribly the earth. 11 For the eyes of the Lord are high, but man is low; and the haughtiness of men shall be brought low, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. 

St. Cyril of Alexandria contrasts the nobility of man’s first created nature with the degradation of man’s nature when he commits idolatry:  

The God of all honored man by creating him by hand.  He did not create man as he did all other creatures by means of a word, as when he said, “Let there be a firmament (Gen. 1:6),” and it was so.  Instead, as Moses says, he took dust from the earth and fashioned man from it (Gen. 2:7). Man was made in the “image and likeness of God (Gen. 1: 28),” and he was appointed the ruler of everything on the earth (Gen. 1:28). Man was further honored with the presence of the Spirit of Life, for “he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2:7).  But, as it says in Scripture, “Man in his arrogance does not understand (Ps. 48:22).” He began to worship graven images, as the prophet put it: They bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made.  So man is humbled, and men are brought low (Esaias 2: 8-9). Such arrogance dishonors God and demeans human nature. For one is certainly able to perceive the Creator by analogy from the beauty of the things he has created. “His invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20.)”  – St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Esaias, PG 70:16D-17A, 17C-20A

The one word “idolatry” encapsulates both the root of man’s original fall into sin and all of its ramifications.  Adam fell because he accepted the primordial lie that he should worship himself rather than God, though he was really giving worship to the tempter. Either way – whether by worshipping his ego or worshipping the devil – fallen man unredeemed by grace worships the creature rather than the Creator, separates himself from the Source of life, and hands himself over to sin, the devil, death, and hell.  This worship of the ego or of demons, however,  does not usually manifest itself obviously as such.  More often it takes the form of worshipping some created thing outside of ourselves, either directly in the form of the ritual idolatry of paganism or indirectly in sinful attachment to worldly goods and enslavement to our passions.  All of these various excessive attachments, bad habits, and addictions are ramifications of our First Parents’ primordial transfer of the worship of their hearts from their Creator to the creation.  

So all of these problems began when our First Parents accepted a lie as truth, which is delusion. The Fathers tell us that all sin, even now, begins with accepting as truth a logismos, that is, a misleading thoughtplanted in the mind either by the demons, by our fallen nature, or by the fallen world around us.  Though, as St. Paul states in the passage quoted by St. Cyril, even fallen man can discern the existence of a single Creator and the basic moral law from simply observing the creation, he is still fundamentally powerless to resist the constant flow of logismoi that invade the mind every moment, until he enters the path of faith, baptism, and the liturgical, mysteriological, ascetical, saving and sanctifying life of the Church. 

What is really difficult to accept is that even after we have believed the faith, been baptized, and started a regular life of daily prayer, confession, Holy Communion, and the struggle to cleanse the passions and to love God and neighbor, the thoughts that we think are good may still  be misleading – either partially or entirely false.   We know that the theological and moral dogmas of the Church, the main messages of Scripture and Tradition,  are absolutely true and trustworthy.  No problem there!  But we have to apply these truths to the events and people in our lives, and, what is even harder, we have to apply these truths to understanding ourselves. Therein lies the rub.  What we lack is that virtue called by the Fathers the “governing virtue”:  discernment. And we are not alone:  even men renowned for holiness of life have fallen before the end, because they lacked discernment; they accepted false thoughts about God or the creation or other people or themselves. 

There are three powerful weapons against accepting false thoughts, and we need to use all three:  The most essential of the three is, of course, frequent reception of Holy Communion after conscientious preparation. But to bear fruit in us, the reception of Holy Communion should be accompanied by two other practices:  One is frequent revelation of our thoughts in confession, not only the obviously sinful ones such as impure, angry or anxious thoughts, but also those troubling or enticing thoughts that seem to be pious but which cause unease, gloominess, excessive trust or excessive distrust in one’s own judgment, thoughts that pose as accurate assessments of one’s spiritual state, and seemingly pious thoughts that arouse an unusual level of attraction or excitement.   The third weapon is continual prayer using a short formula, which most often takes the form of the Jesus Prayer:  “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”  Continual prayer is not the same as continuous prayer.  Continuous prayer is an advanced spiritual state available normally to those living in seclusion or to the elderly who have laid aside  earthly responsibilities.  But continual prayer – that is, very frequent prayer that becomes our “default” state of mind, though interrupted, albeit frequently, by distractions – can be practiced by all Orthodox Christians who ask the Lord for this grace and who apply themselves to the practice conscientiously.  

When undertaken in the spirit of humility and repentance, strictly for the sake of our salvation, with no expectation of any high spiritual attainments, the simple practice of the Jesus Prayer  becomes a strong bulwark against accepting false thoughts, thus enabling us to attain some level of discernment, the governing virtue, and thereby to escape the idolatry that arises when we accept the lie as the truth.    Let us take this true thought to heart, and strive as best we can, God helping us. 

Every Christian must always remember that he should unite with the Lord our Savior with all his being, letting Him come to dwell in his mind and in his heart; and the surest way to achieve such a union with the Lord, next to Communion of His Flesh and Blood, is the inner Jesus Prayer.  Is the Jesus Prayer obligatory for laymen too, and not only for monks?  Indeed it is obligatory, for, as we said, every Christian should be united with the Lord in his heart, and the best means to achieve such a union is precisely the Jesus Prayer. – Justin (Polyansky), Bishop of Ryazan, quoted in The Art of Prayer by Hegumen Chariton of Valaam, p. 88 

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The Lenten Readings from Esaias 

Introduction 

Upon approaching the Prophet Esaias and the prophetic books in general, one easily sympathizes  with the Blessed Augustine of Hippo when he first attempted to understand Esaias in the early days of his conversion:  

Ambrose [St. Ambrose of Milan, Augustine’s mentor] told me to read the prophet Isaiah, I think, because more clearly than others he foretold the Gospel and the calling of the Gentiles.  But I did not understand the first passage of the book, and thought the whole would be equally obscure.  So I set it aside to be resumed when I had more practice in the Lord’s style of language.  – Confessions 9.5.1

We have to admit that few of us Orthodox Christians spend time with the Old Testament in general, and that we find the prophets in particular to be hard going. When we do try to read them, we often have the same reaction that St. Augustine had when he first opened Esaias, and we are tempted to give it up.   During and since his time, however, the Lord has providentially raised up for us a glorious band of Holy Fathers to enlighten the meaning of the Scriptures for us, and if we turn to them for help, we shall not be disappointed.  They were much at ease with the “Lord’s style of language” because they had acquired the mind of Christ, and therefore what was obscure to unbelievers or to Christian neophytes like the young Augustine – and like us – was clear to them.  

As we begin Great Lent, we turn to Esaias, whose book is read each Lenten weekday at the Sixth Hour, as a kind of substitute for readings from the Holy Gospel, which have now been mostly suspended, along with the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, except for Saturdays and Sundays.  The book of Esaias contains a more complete body of prophecies of the Incarnation and Passion of our Savior than those of the other prophets, and thus it provides a kind of Pre-Gospel in poetic figures, a veiled yet powerful and pointed announcement of the Good News of salvation which is to be unveiled as a concrete and historical reality with the coming of the Savior Who fulfills the prophet’s words.  According to St. Isidore of Seville, 

Among the prophets Isaiah is certainly most revered because he narrated all the deeds of Christ in order and most fully, and he published in his own book very many clear testimonies of what was revealed to him by the Lord in the spirit of prophecy.  – Isaiah’s Testimony Concerning Christ the Lord, PLS 4:1822-37

St. Isidore goes on to list the specific prophecies of Esaias that foretell in detail the chief works of the economy of the Incarnate Word –    

That Christ was born from the stock of David:  11:1-5 

That Christ was born of a Virgin without intercourse with a man: 7:10-14, 45:8 

That God was made flesh and became a man: 9:6-7 

That Christ the Lord did wonders and marvelous deeds: 35: 5-6, 61:1

That Christ suffered and that He was hanged on the wood of the Cross: 63:1-3, 9:6, 52:13

That He died, and that He died not for His own sins but for ours: 53:6-8 

That Christ rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven: 33:10, 52:13 

That, after the Ascension of Christ, the gift of the Holy Spirit would be poured forth upon the Apostles and the Faithful: 44:3-4, 32:15, 59:19-20, 30:28

That Christ would send the Apostles to bear witness to the Gentiles of His resurrection: 66:18-19

That the Lord would give the Gospel to the faithful as a New Law: 41:27, 2:3-4 

That God would give the faithful the grace of Baptism for the remission of their sins: 12: 3-4, 55:1 

That the Gentiles would be converted to belief in Christ: 2:2-3, 65:1, 66:20-21

Thus by hearing Esaias with faith during Great Lent, we prepare our hearts to receive the grace of the death and resurrection of Christ which we shall commemorate once again during the Great Week of His Passion and the Radiant Feast of Feasts, Holy Pascha. 

In addition to foretelling the coming of Christ, Esaias also preached repentance to the people of the Old Testament Church living in his own time.   His convicting and compelling words should convict and compel us also:  convict us of our sins and compel us to repentance.   As repentance is the chief – in a sense the only – work of Great Lent, we should then welcome Esaias as a most useful companion for our annual pilgrimage to Pascha in this holy season.  

Let us then not fear to open this holy book and to acquire a taste for “the Lord’s style of language.” By the great grace available to us during this holy season, and with the help of the Holy Fathers, what we may find bitter at first shall become most sweet.   

34th Week of the Epistles – Wednesday

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Today’s reading from the book of the Apostolos is II Peter 3: 1 – 18.   

This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance: That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour: Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness,  Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless. And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.  Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own steadfastness. But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen. 

St. Peter quotes those who scoff at the prospect of the Lord’s Second Coming as saying,
“Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”    This attitude, that “all things continue as they were,” has acquired a label in modern times, thanks to evolutionary geologists like Charles Lyell.  It is called “uniformitarianism.”   Uniformitarianism is not a proven fact; it is a cosmological assumption that affects epistemology.   That is, it is an assumption about the universe that affects what we claim to be able to know about it.  This assumption says that all the natural processes we know today have always been the same going back indefinitely in time and always will be the same going forward in time.  They never have been and never will be different.  Everyone observes, however, that the natural processes we see today could never produce what we see around us.  “Not a problem,” say the Uniformitarians.  “You see, the changes are moving ever so slowly, and so we cannot see them, but the changes really, really are taking place; you simply have to believe in them.”   Of course this incomprehensibly slow slowness necessitates an incomprehensibly ancient age for the known world,  an age so great as to be unreal and meaningless  to a normal human mind not warped by the contemporary educational system.   And it is not empirically demonstrable: it is, rather, a mystical dogma for professors with PhDs who don’t want to lose their tenure or their funding or their friends.    The fact that it is also manifestly ridiculous does not occur to them.  

The creation of the universe is so great a miracle that only God could work it, and it is so great a mystery that, apart from revelation, only God would know what happened.   God, however, did reveal it to us, through the Prophet Moses, in the Book of Genesis, which is, in fact, real history about real events and real people, whether our modernist theologians like it or not.     Most of them, one fears,  are going to go on not liking it till they die, because of the vanity of their minds and their preference for honor from men over honor from God.  Afterwards, however, they will no doubt be apprised of their mistake.    

The same modernist theologians usually – and logically – also find it distasteful to believe in the literal Second Coming of Christ.   If they are Orthodox (in name), they know that they cannot get away with denying it altogether.  They are simply allergic to it: they prefer not to talk about the Second Coming and the Dread Judgment, or to paint them in such vague and mystifying images as to castrate the stark immediacy and fearfulness of the thing, to rob it of any power to motivate the actions of men.  St. Theophan the Recluse, in his comments on today’s reading, calls our attention to the ultimate consequences of this queer and fastidious hesitation, this embarrassed reticence:

The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night (II Pet. 3:10). A thief in the night sneaks up when he is not expected. So will the day of the Lord also come when it is not expected. But when He that cometh is not expected, no preparations are made for meeting Him. Lest we allow such negligence, the Lord commanded: Watch: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come (Matt. 24:42). Meanwhile, what are we doing? Are we watching? Are we waiting? We must confess that we are not. Some at least await death, but scarcely anyone awaits the day of the Lord. And it is as if they are right. Our fathers and forefathers waited, but the day did not come. Since we do not see anything, why should we think that it will come in our days? Thus, we do not think; and do not wait. It will not be a wonder, if with such a disposition as ours, the day of the Lord falls upon us like a thief. We shall be like the inhabitants of a city which the head of the province promised to visit in the near future. They waited for him an hour, waited another, waited a day and then said, “I suppose he’s not coming,” and went home. But as soon as they departed and gave themselves over to sleep—he appeared. It will be the same with us—whether we are waiting or not, the day of the Lord will come, and it will come without warning. For the Lord said: Heaven and earth shall pass away: but My words shall not pass away (Mark 13:31). But is it not better to wait, lest we be caught by surprise? For we will not get off without paying. – Thoughts for Each Day of the Year, pp. 40-41

 “…we will not get off without paying.”   Let us pray the price now, not then.   Now, in this life, the Lord’s yoke is easy and His burden is light.  The yoke for our wills is to obey God’s holy commandments. The yoke for our minds is to believe God’s revelation about the world and everything in it, as taught by Scripture and Tradition. To believe, no less than to obey, is required for those who wish to be saved.   Let us humble ourselves and simply believe.

Amen.  Come, Lord Jesus.  

You can listen to an audio recording of this essay at https://www.spreaker.com/user/youngfaithradio/osc73

Thanks and Request for Donations

Heartfelt thanks to our benefactors!   May the Lord bless you and your family in 2023.  I have not become free of PayPal, because we cannot get GabPay to work.  If anyone can help with a tutorial on GabPay, or introduce me to a method other than PayPal that is not too hard to use, I would appreciate it.   Those who would like to give a gift in the old fashioned way and send a check need only write to me at [email protected], and I’ll give you my real-world address.   My parish is small, and though they are self-sacrificing, generous, and supportive according to their size, they cannot provide a full-time income for a family today.   The kindness of our benefactors enables me to 1. write in my spare time,  and 2. to do unremunerative mission work in addition to my parish work, instead of working at a secular job. 

It is not only, or primarily, financial support, of course, that keeps us going.  Man does not live by bread alone. I know that the prayers of many uphold our work, and I also deeply appreciate the notes of encouragement I receive from readers and listeners.  I also want to make clear that I do not think I am entitled to anyone’s support:  I give, and others give freely in return.  Priests should never be “salaried” in the strict sense, though they should certainly be supported.  In fact, none of those who practice the artes inutiles – the clergy, intellectuals, and artists – are really wage-earners. They give, and in return they receive honoraria from those who benefit from their labors.  That’s how it works. 

  The Apostle writes, “Owe no man anything, but to love one another.”   All is gift.  

Other Offerings 

I ask forgiveness (again!) for the long hiatus since the last Survival Course talk.  But please believe that I am not completely idle.  Perhaps some of our Orthodox Survival Course audience is not familiar with the other offerings on my Spreaker channel.  Go to https://www.spreaker.com/user/youngfaithradio  in order to see them.     Our latest projects are a “show” with recordings of my sermons and a “show” with recordings of a class we have begun on the Divine Liturgy.   Earlier projects include sermons on childrearing, sermons on the Creed, and commentaries on the readings from the Book of Genesis and the Book of Proverbs that we read at Vespers during Great Lent.  I have also recorded many of the posts from my blog at https://orthodoxtruth.org/,  which usually consist of commentaries on the daily Gospel readings of the Orthodox calendar.   The Spreaker show linked to the blog is called by the same name as the blog, “Orthodox Truth.” 

Introduction –   

In our last talk, we asked the question,  “How does the Church’s teaching to obey the civil authorities apply to us today?”   Let’s summarize the main points of our response:   

1. The Orthodox Church does not teach anarchism.   Because of the Ancestral Sin, man needs to be ruled by a Godly authority with sufficient coercive power to chastise evil and protect the good.  Otherwise, society would descend into the chaos of unbridled criminality. 

2. An earthly authority is Godly, and therefore legitimate, to the extent that its laws, both in their conception and their execution, accord with the divine law – both revealed and natural – and also accord with the historical tradition of those human laws that express, or at least do not conflict with, the divine law.  To the extent that an earthly authority’s laws are conceived and executed in disobedience to the divine law and to the tradition of good human laws, that authority loses its legitimacy. 

3. Obedience is not owed to illegitimate authority, and, in fact, one may be obliged to      oppose such an authority in various ways, beginning with a Godly disobedience to un- Godly commands. 

4. In our time, the historically national governments are in the process of being subsumed into a one world government, a form of government explicitly forbidden by God, and therefore possessing no legitimacy and thus no divinely ordained claim to obedience. To the extent that a national government no longer acts in the interests of its nation but rather subjects itself to rule by an internationalist cabal that is not actually a government but a criminal gang, it is not Godly but Satanic and therefore it must be opposed by Christians in a Godly disobedience to its ungodly commands.   To the extent that governments at the lower levels – in the United States, for example, at the state, county, and municipal levels – also attempt to enforce the Satanic agenda of the internationalist anti-government, they must also be opposed and disobeyed.  

We ended our last talk with a question:  “To what extent has our national government been subsumed by the Antichrist, criminal One-World anti-government?”   Today we shall address that question.  After we address that question, we shall ask the logically consequent question: “What must be the duty of Orthodox pastors towards their flock in this situation?”  

It’s Not a Conspiracy, Because It’s Not a Secret 

We do not need to peruse obscure websites by so-called conspiracy theorists to obtain a preponderance of evidence that we are now living under a form of worldwide governance based on an explicitly anti-Christian ideology.   We need only to read a few books from the 20th century to understand the plans of those in charge, and then examine what they have in fact accomplished to achieve their plans by this point in the 21st century, by consulting the public and official sources from the agencies, public and private, that are carrying out the plans of the worldwide elite.    

To understand the type of society that the world elite is creating, one may start with three books:   Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), 1984 by George Orwell (1949), and Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley (1963).  The first two are novels; the third is a combination of recent history and a blueprint for a world government.    None of these three authors can be tossed aside as marginalized and alienated nobodies who fantasize about imaginary conspiracies.  The first two books have been part of the standard reading list for high school students since at least the 1950s.   The third was written by a Georgetown professor who was a personal mentor to many powerful men in the Establishment, including a former President of the United States, Bill Clinton.   (By referring to Mr. Clinton, I do not mean to imply that only – or even primarily – Democrats have advanced the New World Order.  It is certainly a bi-partisan affair!)

Huxley and Orwell (Eric Blair) did not write their novels as an exercise in storytelling unrelated to real life.  Both authors said openly and repeatedly that they were depicting a form of society that was rapidly coming into being in their own time. Huxley made this abundantly clear in a collection of essays called Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958.  Neither author saw himself as a fantasy or science fiction writer predicting a distant future; they were social critics holding up a mirror to their contemporaries, describing forms of society that were already in the early stages of formation.  Both men were in a position to know what was going on:  Orwell as an insider in the socialist movement and, pre-eminently, Huxley, as a member of a family that was extraordinarily influential among the British intelligentsia in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Both Orwell and Huxley created dystopias:  visions of a society in which human life is debased almost to the point of being sub-human, of being unrecognizable as a human life.  Orwell’s vision of hell on earth is based on the Stalinist U.S.S.R., in which the tiny elite that rules the society enforces conformity by means of a violent security apparatus using torture, imprisonment, and executions.  The rulers of Huxley’s dark world, by contrast,  do not need to torture, imprison, or kill anyone:  they keep the masses under control through universal drug use, constant entertainment, and recreational sex unrelated to marriage or procreation.   But both of these societies – if they can be called that – have several things in common:  

1.  The entire world is ruled by a single tiny elite.   In 1984 the elite project an illusion of three mega-states – Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia – but this is only for the purpose of agitating the masses through the constant threat of warfare among the rival states, using war propaganda to enforce loyalty to the authorities.  In reality, there is a one world government. 

2.  There is no traditional or local culture.  There is only single, uniform monoculture of purely material pursuits at a very low level, the same everywhere. 

3. There are no families, or, at least, in 1984 the family is a meaningless shell of its former self.  In Brave New World, Huxley takes this further:  Human beings are produced in laboratories, and marriage and family are considered abominations that have been abolished.      

4.  The masses have no interests higher than day to day material pleasures of the lowest type.   In 1984 it is beer, football, and watching the news about the current war that is supposedly going on.  In Brave New World, it is drugs, sex, and movies.  There is no genuine intellectual or artistic endeavor, much less spiritual life. 

5.  There are no loyalties other than to the world state.  All intermediate structures – Church, nationality, local community, family – have been stripped away.  

All of this should be familiar to us in 2023, not as pure fantasy but as accomplished goals or goals on the fast track to being accomplished. 

Carroll Quigley’s  book is not a novel.  It is a serious academic work, indeed a magisterial study that describes the history of the world from 1890 to 1960 as the history of the progressive movement towards the one world state.  In contrast to Orwell and Huxley, who projected ambivalence in their attitudes to their imaginary societies – Huxley, especially, never made it clear whether he was for or against the Brave New World – Quigley was an open and assertive proponent of world government.   And he was certainly an Insider.  Here is how he is described on the page on Amazon where the book is sold:  “Carroll Quigley (1910-1977) was a highly respected professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He was an instructor at Princeton and Harvard; a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the House Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration; and the U.S. Navy.”   

Orwell and Huxley, then, describe the dystopia that was already in formation in their lifetimes, but imaginatively,  in its future aspect as an accomplished fact.   Quigley, on the other hand, as a social scientist, is writing a non-fiction book to describe and promote the actual means that were and are being used to create the future society.  They should be familiar to all of us by now:  A single banking system, consolidating government and private business into one monopolistic entity,  brainwashing of the masses through media technology and education, eradicating traditional national, local, and family loyalties, destroying religion and morality, etc. 

These three books are just a start, but all three have the advantage of both introducing and summarizing what we are describing.   There is a vast literature about all this out there, of course – much of which pre-dates the Internet, and is perfectly rational academic and artistic literature written by respected academics, essayists, novelists, and poets.  Our purpose today is not to go into all of it.   The study of just one aspect of this vast movement of history could occupy all of one’s time, and that’s not how most of us should be occupying our time.   For example, you could spend a professional lifetime studying the ubiquitous brainwashing techniques that every large institutional structure now uses to make people ignorant and to de-activate rationality and free will, or how the elite worked through the Frankfurt School to destroy sexual morality and the family, or the history of the centralized banking system, or the looming threats of trans humanism and artificial intelligence.   If there are scholars among us who want to tackle any of these projects in service to the Orthodox Church, to describe them and warn us about them from the Orthodox point of view:  God bless you and prosper your efforts!   Our purpose today, however, is to see the big picture.  This big picture is perfectly clear for anyone who is willing to see it, who does not want to delude himself for the sake of the psychological comfort that comes with de-activating one’s moral will in the face of evil.    

If one might be tempted to believe that what Huxley, Orwell, and Quigley are describing are fantasies, or at least only a blueprint for world government that has remained theoretical for the most part, he need only examine the public and official literature of well-known internationalist organizations such as the United Nations with its myriad umbrella agencies, the publicly available information about non-governmental organizations such as the Council for Foreign Relations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Soros Open Society Foundation, peer-reviewed academic histories of the world banking system, and so forth, and then follow up with studying the history of American congressional legislation, executive policy, judicial proceedings, and bureaucratic behavior from the period of World War I to the present, to understand clearly that the goals of the former have been steadily achieved by the actions of the latter.  Our formerly national government has degenerated from a genuine constitutional authority deserving respect and loyalty into a hostile and alien managerial interface between the real government – the international elite – and the American people.  There have been starts and stops, but the overall trajectory is clear.  American national sovereignty has by now been effectively surrendered to an internationalist elite that controls the direction of the information media, finance, education, medicine, scientific research, social policy, and foreign policy, including the use of the military.   It is an all-encompassing program, and it aims at what is today called full-spectrum dominance in every aspect of life and at every stratum of society.   This is no longer a secret, and therefore it is no longer a conspiracy.  It is happening – to a great extent has already happened – before our eyes.  

If anyone cares to refute this conclusion, let him make an argument.  But simply to dismiss those who come to this conclusion as “conspiracy theorists” is not an argument.  The use of such an ad hominem betrays the speaker as one not having an argument for his position. 

So Where Do We Go From Here? 

If the conclusions we drew above are true, or even half-way true, we have a grave situation on our hands, and we have to deal with it.   The Church has to deal with it, because the Church is where we go to find out how to deal with the big questions in life.  The Church, in the persons of Her divinely appointed hierarchy and clergy, has a threefold responsibility in this regard – a prophetic, teaching, and pastoral responsibility – to Her children, as well as to the world at large.   

Her prophetic mission is to do what real prophets have always done, usually in the face of great opposition and at great personal cost: to tell people the truth about the way things are and call them to acknowledge this reality and apply the Gospel to the reality, to repent and to believe in the Gospel, not in the abstract, but in relation to their lives as they really are, which includes their relationship to the world around them.   

The Church has a primary and secondary teaching mission:  Her primary teaching mission is to preach the divinely revealed truths found directly in Scripture and Holy Tradition and indirectly in natural revelation, and she also has the secondary – but obligatory and essential! –  teaching mission to exercise a decisive influence on all areas of human endeavor – including political, economic, educational, scientific, and medical  endeavors – according to revealed truth both natural and supernatural, which forms the only reliable and God-pleasing epistemological foundation for genuine learning. 

Her pastoral mission includes giving guidance to her faithful children who are facing moral choices in all areas of their lives:  not only in the internal arena of the individual’s struggle with the passions and the acquisition of personal virtue, but also in the external arena of the believing Christian’s relationship to his family, local community, and the world at large.  This includes the task of exerting a decisive Orthodox influence on personal choices involving domestic concerns such as marriage, family, and childrearing, as well as choices involving the family’s relationship to society in all of its aspects:  economic, educational, political, scientific, medical, etc. 

Why do pastors hesitate in the face of these responsibilities and wish to confine their teaching strictly to historical dogmatic questions, personal asceticism, and the Church’s internal sacramental and liturgical activities?   Here are three answers I can think of, none of which involves a moral judgment of these men who shrink from their prophetic office, but which rather involve matters of typical human limitations or a simple lack of understanding: 

1. Priests Are Not Interested in These Things: There is the obvious answer that no one likes getting out of his comfort zone:  priests usually don’t spend their time reading Carroll Quigley about the New World Order or learning enough constitutional law to conclude that the Center for Disease Control is not a constitutionally legitimate body due the Scripturally commanded obedience to the divinely appointed ruler.  At the moment, for example, I’m not reading about any of these things.  My current reading list is a hagiography of the Elder Leonid of Optina, the writings of St. John Cassian on chastity, the Catechism of St. Peter Mogila, and the commentary on the Divine Liturgy by Nicholas Cabasilas.   For a priest, that’s not extraordinary; it’s totally normal.  That’s the kind of thing that priests are interested in.  It’s our clerical comfort zone; it is both our professional area of expertise and our primary amateur interest, our hobby.  Not amateur in the popular sense, but in the original and higher sense of doing that which we truly love.   We love saints and prayer and the typicon; we don’t love reading Carroll Quigley.  As they say, “I get it.”  If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t spend time on Carroll Quigley either.  But we need to know the world our parishioners live in, and teach them how to live in it, if we are to go beyond Orthodoxy as a hobby to Orthodoxy as life itself.   That’s the rub.  

2. Fragmentation and Obsession:  The “Ask the Experts” Delusion Another answer is that priests, as men, are just as much a product of their societies as are the laity they care for, and therefore they unconsciously imbibe the delusions that their society believes.    One delusion of contemporary society that we all imbibe from our early school years is that real knowledge is a matter for experts, a matter of specialization.   The tinier the details someone has studied, and the more disconnected these details are from a greater philosophical – much less theological – understanding, the greater is his knowledge, and the more we must respect his opinion!    Richard Weaver, in his incomparable Ideas Have Consequences, describes this delusion in the chapter entitled “Fragmentation and Obsession.”  How many times during the recent Covid crisis were we priests told to shut up, because we were not physicians or scientists?   Yet one does not have to have to have a Ph.D. or M.D. in order to read the abstracts of papers or listen to good lectures by genuine experts – such as the world-class experts in virology, epidemiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, and statistics who have in fact disagreed with the official Covid narrative from the beginning, and as we write are are growing in number as time goes on – and thereby get the big picture about what is really going on.   One has only to have some common sense, and to be a conscientious and careful reader or listener who ignores the heavily funded, mendacious establishment propaganda and looks for serious evidence and serious arguments for scientific claims.  For those responsible for giving moral advice or setting social policy, not being an expert often helps, because experts have been forced to confine themselves to such a narrow range of interests that they cannot see the big picture:  that is, they are not able to understand, much less articulate where their limited findings and limited understanding fit into the greater picture of man’s moral and social responsibilities.    This latter realm is precisely that of generalists – of priests, statesmen, poets, philosophers, and men of letters – not men who spend their lives with test tubes, microscopes, and mathematical modeling, or within the narrow confines of a specialized professional occupation. 

3.  Cartesian Dualism: This latter misunderstanding, involving an unconscious acceptance of the error of the fragmentary nature of true knowledge, is related to the third problem I can think of, which is the most serious, because it can lead to dogmatic heresies in the areas of Christian anthropology, epistemology, Christology, and soteriology, our understanding of the Church’s great commission to teach the nations – well, everything.  When we read the statements of various Church authorities, for example, which have decreed that the matter of taking or not taking the so-called Covid vaccine (which we now know beyond all cavil is not a vaccine but is in fact a form of genetic engineering technology) has no relationship to pastoral concerns, that pastors have no moral responsibility to guide their flock in such a matter, and that any and all physicians – whether Orthodox, heterodox Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, New-Age, Communist, Satanist, whatever – have total authority over the bodies of our spiritual children in such matters, while the Church has no authority whatever, we can only conclude that the authors of such statements have  – we trust through carelessness and not malicious intent – rejected Orthodox anthropology and have adopted some kind of an anthropology based on Cartesian dualism, on the basis of which we are to accept that man is, as Descartes famously said, a “ghost in a machine” and not the body-soul unity revealed in Holy Scripture.   Such a position, of course, implies not only the obvious anthropological heresy, but also heresies regarding the Incarnation, the literal truth of Scriptural history, the Sacraments, the ascetical life, the nature and constitution of the Church – you name it.  It affects everything.   And this kind of fragmented thinking, if accepted as the normative basis for Church policy, will inevitably be applied to areas besides medicine: to education, to politics, to technology, to child-rearing, to all of our social and domestic activities – with the result that the Church’s authorities end up claiming authority for the Church over nothing –  and their own responsibility for nothing! – in the lives of the faithful, except for what goes on within the four walls of the Church building on Sundays and feast days, which is precisely the situation that obtained in the Soviet Union, a policy condemned by the right believing New Martyrs and Confessors as “Sergianism.” And the shame of it is that the Bad Guys won’t have to kill millions of us to achieve this result, as they did in Russia in the years after 1917.  We are sleepwalking into a shameful self-destruction: we are going to perish not with a bang but with a whimper.  That’s where we are heading, if this problem is not addressed. 

Some Conclusions 

To return to our original question:  Is the current American national government a divinely blessed authority requiring our obedience or not?  The answer is that to the extent that its policies are in the service of the goal of world government, its commands are not blessed by God, and, far from being entitled to a godly obedience, such commands require godly disobedience.   We do not need to know if the final Babel of the personal Antichrist is being built before our eyes.  We can conclude, however, with confidence, that a form of a new Babel, a world governance in the spirit of the Antichrist is being formed.   To the extent that this world government has replaced the legitimate government of the American republic – to that extent it is our patriotic duty, fully in compliance with the teaching of  Holy Scripture, to resist such an illegitimate anti-authority.  Furthermore, it is the duty of the Church’s pastors to provide this resistance with their prophetic, teaching, and pastoral leadership, in activity and authority.   

        If God is with us, no one can prevail against us.   Let us be careful to make sure that we are really with Him.