| Today is commonly known as Meatfare Sunday, the last day to eat meat before Pascha; it’s western equivalent used to be Carnival (from Latin to remove meat) but in the west removing meat doesn’t have much meaning anymore. But today’s real impact is so much more than just what we eat. Liturgically this is the Sunday devoted to The Last Judgment and it is critical to know that Chapter 25 of St. Matthew’s gospel from which Christ’s sermon about the sheep and goats takes place after Palm Sunday, His triumphant entry into Jerusalem, and was told by Our Lord only to His apostles on the Mount of Olives, away from the crowds of Jerusalem. That’s why this gospel is read again on Holy Tuesday, exactly 50 days from Meatfare. Our Lord’s private sermon is remarkable in the language that He chose to use to explain things to the apostles, not in a parable, now at the end of His ministry, directly. He makes it clear that His second coming will be with “glory” with “holy angels” as opposed to His first coming, as He was right then and there on earth knowing that later in that week He would suffer the dishonor and indignities of being tried, scourged, and crucified. Christ also uses the phrase “inherit the kingdom” to show that God has made the blessed of His Father, whom he refers to as the sheep on His right hand, to be true sons, not to be GIVEN eternal life, but to INHERIT what is rightly theirs, eternal life that was prepared for all men from the beginning of time. On the other hand, the left hand that is, are the goats. To the goats, He uses the words “depart from Me” signifying what hell really is: Being utterly cut off from God. Remember the words of Psalm 50 (Psalm 51 KJV): “Cast me not away from thy presence and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.” In the west, the Last Judgment is a fearful thing. It brings to mind the fire and brimstone sermons that were popularized in Colonial America by preachers such as Jonathon Edwards, grandfather of Aaron Burr who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, who is famous for his fiery “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” An angry God. That motif of an Angry God is manifest in the famous Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel in which Michaelangleo paints Christ sitting on the Judgment Seat with His right arm upraised in a threatening position and His left arm repelling the condemned goats on His left. |
| If Christ is really the Son of God, then death, judgment, Paradise, and hell are real as well. If we accept these realities, our acceptance is the first act of faith. Faith is the first step on the path to salvation, and fear of God is the second step. “Come you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Matt. 25:34 Last Sunday we spoke of the Prodigal Son and God’s incomparable compassion towards us. This Sunday our subject is Christ’s Second Coming, the terrifying Judgment when “the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements themselves shall melt with indescribable heat” (2 Peter 3:12). Of this, St. Gregory Palamas adds, “Worse still than this awaits unrepentant sinners and the godless.” And on that day, God will divide the goats from the sheep with absolute dispassion. For the Last Judgment is not the burning wrath of an angry God, but rather it is the fairest court ever to be held. In this court man is not condemned for lack of favor in the sight of God, or some predestined state of being saved or damned. Each person is simply acknowledged, with eternal certainty, as what they have freely chosen to become by their own free will, in accordance with their knowledge of Truth. Those who are divided eternally from the righteous are granted this separation for it is what they have desired. We know that God has mercy on those who repent. We know also that God does not force our salvation or our condemnation, but as the Righteous Judge, confirms eternally the choice we make for ourselves. If Christ is really the Son of God, then death, judgment, Paradise, and hell are real as well. If we accept these realities, our acceptance is the first act of faith. Faith is the first step on the path to salvation, and fear of God is the second step. “Faith which hasn’t reached fear will not lead to action. In the beginning, we aren’t spiritually mature enough to feel the joys prepared for us in Paradise, so we can’t be torn from the world by those joys that await us. Therefore, we must be snatched from the world by an act of power, of fright, by a great fear, by fear of God. Fear of God is experienced in two stages. The first is a fear of punishment, fear of existing forever in hell, the second is a fear caused by love, the fear of not having God’s blessings, the fear of losing Paradise.” —Fr. Dumitru Staniloae |
| Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching; and again, unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless. Beware, therefore, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep, lest you be given up to death and lest you be shut out of the Kingdom. But rouse yourself crying: Holy, holy, holy, art Thou, O our God. Through the Theotokos, have mercy on us. + Troparion of Bridegroom Matins The services of the first few days of Orthodox Holy Week have a collective theme of judgment. The centerpiece of those days is the service known as “Bridegroom Matins,” so named for the icon of Christ the Bridegroom (pictured here), an interesting name for Christ depicted in His humiliation, crowned with thorns, robed in derision, with the rod of His chastisement in His hand. It is part of the “upside-down” character of Holy Week. Judgment is clearly one of the most upside-down characteristics of the events that unfold in Christ’s last earthly days. I was nurtured on stories as a child that contrasted Christ’s “non-judging” (“Jesus, meek and mild”) with Christ the coming Judge (at His dread Second Coming). I was told that His second coming would be very unlike His first. There was a sense that Jesus, meek and mild, was something of a pretender, revealing His true and eternal character only later as the avenging Judge. This, of course, is both distortion and heresy. The judgment of God is revealed in Holy Week. The crucified Christ is the fullness of the revelation of God. There is no further revelation to be made known, no unveiling of a wrath to come. The crucified Christ is what the wrath of God looks like. The first three days of Holy Week are collectively known as the End. And it is this End that forms the character of judgment. The end of something always reveals the truth of a thing. As the popular saying has it, “Time will tell.” When the End is the end that is brought by God, then the true end of all things is revealed. And this is the characteristic of the judgment made manifest in Holy Week. Christ is moving towards His end, the consummation of the Incarnation. As He is increasingly revealed, everything around Him is revealed as well. Things are shown to be more clearly what they are. Those who hate Him, begin to be revealed as plotters and murderers. What was once only thoughts and feelings of envy become plots and perjury. The power of Rome is unmasked for its injustice, mere people-pleasing. The High Priest is revealed to believe that the destruction of God is good for his nation. The weakness of the disciples and the empty boasting of Peter and the rest are shown for their true emptiness. The sin of the world is revealed in the death of God. |
| Metropolitan Onuphry: “Through Fasting and Praying, We Prepare Ourselves to Do Good” By fasting and praying, we must purify ourselves of sin and evil deeds and to grow to be able to do good, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry explained. His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine. Photo: news.church.ua On February 23, 2020, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine said in his sermon on the Last Judgment that only sacrificial good, when we do not expect anything in return, is real, reported the Information and Education Department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Primate of the UOC noted that the Holy Church does not accidentally recall the Last Judgment (Matthew 25: 31-46), “when all people will be rewarded for good deeds,” before the Great Lent. Because by fasting and praying, according to the hierarch, “a person is filled with the good grace of the Holy Spirit and grows to be able to do good.” “In life, all people live differently: one is trying to do good, forgive, love, while the other is messing around, doing what he wants. But the end will be the same for everyone – it will come during the Second Advent of Christ, during the Last Judgment,” said His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry. His Beatitude reminded that at the Last Judgment, the Lord will not ask whether we prayed and fasted, He will ask if we did good deeds. “The point is that a person cannot do sacrificial good unless he prepares himself,” said the metropolitan. “Through fasting and praying, a person makes himself ‘good’, i.e. he fills his soul with the good grace of the Good God. Therefore, if a person does this, then he becomes capable of doing sacrificial good; in addition, by doing good he does not expect anything in return.” As the Primate of the UOC emphasized, by fasting and praying we must purify ourselves from the sin and evil deeds – “in this way we will make ourselves capable of doing sacrificial good.” “May the Lord help us, dear brothers and sisters, so that during the Holy Lent, to the best of our ability, we would work, pray, fast and make ourselves good, so that we can do good to our neighbors and be able to hear the Lord’s voice: ‘Come, you who are blessed by My Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world’ (Matthew 25: 34),” His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry noted. |
| Sunday of the last judgement On the past two Sundays of this pre-Lenten period, the focus was placed on God’s patience and limitless compassion, of His readiness to accept every sinner who returns to Him. On this third Sunday, we are powerfully reminded of a complementary truth: no one is so patient and so merciful as God, but even He does not forgive those who do not repent. The God of love is also a God of righteousness, and when Christ comes again in glory, He will come as our Judge. Such is the message of Lent to each of us: turn back while there is still time, repent before the End comes. Source: http://www.goarch.org/ introduction Icon of the The Last Judgement used with permission and provided by: ΕΚΔΟΣΗ και ΕΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΥ , ΓΑΛΑΚΤΙΩΝΟΣ ΓΚΑΜΙΛΗ ΤΗΛ. 4971 882, ΕΚΤΥΠΟΣΗ Μ. ΤΟΥΜΠΗΣ Α.Ε. , http://www.toubis.gr The Sunday of the Last Judgment is the third Sunday of a three-week period prior to the commencement of Great Lent. During this time, the services of the Church have begun to include hymns from the Triodion, a liturgical book that contains the services from the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, the tenth before Pascha (Easter), through Great and Holy Saturday. On this day, focus is placed on the future judgment of all persons who will stand before the throne of God when Christ returns in His glory. biblical story The commemoration for this Sunday is taken from the parable of our Lord Jesus Christ concerning his Second Coming and the Last Judgment of all, both the living and the dead. In Matthew 25:31-46 , Christ speaks about what will happen at this specific point in time when He will “come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him” ( v. 31 ). At His coming, “He will sit on the throne of His glory,” and all of the nations will be gathered before Him. He will separate them “as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats” ( v. 32 ). The sheep will be placed on His right hand, and the goats on the left. To the sheep, He will say “Come, you blessed of My Father, |
| Just what the Last Judgment is, every person knows to some extent—even if he has not read the Gospels or heard a Christian sermon; even if he has no faith at all. He knows because every person has a conscience . Even before the books of judgment are opened and the Impartial Judge pronounces His sentence about our eternal lot, even in this earthly life, the stern voice of conscience will condemn us. Just like the Heavenly Judge, this accuser is just and incorruptible, because the conscience is Vox Dei , the voice of God in man. It performs the small rehearsal of the Last Day of the Lord, evoking a nagging feeling of guilt and shame before the final judgment of our iniquity. Photo: Pravoslavie.ru But of course, our earthy existence leaves us the right not to obey this testimony and do whatever we want; but the inner voice of conscience will nevertheless continue to reproach us to the end of our days, reminding us of our wrongdoing. The apostle Paul wrote about this in his epistle to the Romans. Talking about the pagans, Paul notes, Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another (Rom. 2:15). Of course, this relates to Christians just as much as it does to pagans, because the law of grace does not invalidate the law of conscience. The apostolic words allow us to imagine an interesting picture. On people’s hearts as on a kind of scroll is written the divine law of conscience, which raises its voice independent of our wishes. Furthermore, in the soul of every person both believing and non-believing a certain inner parliament is constantly in session. Besides the voice of conscience, other speeches and proclamations are heard—our desires, feelings, mind, and will. The speakers take their turns, various “legislative projects” are discussed, and resolutions are passed. The voice of conscience can be compared to the speech of the supreme ruler—the president. His opinion has the advantage over the noisy meeting. But there is an opposition party that speaks in counterweight to the president, in which one can discern the whispering of the enemy of mankind. It is his ancient occupation to place the president’s orders under doubt. |
| Metropolitan Georges Khodr When I was studying in my youth with French monks, we were told that there is a particular judgment at death and a general judgment on the last day. At that early point, I was continuing Orthodox instruction and I did not come across this duality in it, so I said to myself that there is only the general judgment, and I feared it. After this, I learned that the Eastern Church says that after death you realize your situation before God. You are in a state of waiting for recompense; if you are not weighed down by sins, this is the beginning of joy, even if it is not total beatitude. During this, you await final retribution, and if you bear many sins this is part of the punishment. Then, in my old age, I came closer to the idea of the particular judgment, though I did not adopt the expression itself because my Church does not use it. Of late I have become convinced that the hour of death is an hour of encounter with the Creator and that this encounter is terrifying because you appear before Him with the weight of your sins, which are incompatible with the nature of the Lord. You feel that this meeting is part of your eternal destiny, even if God announces His mercy at the beginning of your meeting with Him and at the end. It does not seem right to me that you have a prosecution that determines your eternal fate. That God is a judge, this is an image from our Holy Scriptures, as these books tell the story of humankind with God starting from the beginning. But the greater story is in the meeting immediately after your departure from this earth. The image that I use is of Christ coming to your side in the coffin and speaking to you in a whisper, a whisper of rebuke. Perhaps Jesus was gentle in the meeting, but in obedience to His Father, sin cannot be minimized with Him because it wounds His Father’s compassion toward you. You undertook nothing to mend the Father’s wounds. You remain an enemy through sin and the Father still holds you to His breast or the Son places you on His breast and the Father sees this and has compassion without setting aside His blame for you because if He set aside blame, then He would be biased towards you and not towards His law. |
| Скачать epub pdf The fate of man after death Death is the inevitable end of all organic life on earth, including human life. But from the Christian point of view, the death of a person is not a normal or necessary phenomenon. On the contrary, human death is the result of the disobedience of our first parents. God warned Adam about the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: «For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die» ( Gen. 2:17 ). From Adam death was passed on to his descendants. A man " s death, however, is not the annihilation of his identity, but only the destruction of his physical shell. The words: «For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return» ( Gen. 3:19 ) refer to the human body. The soul of a person, as that which carries within itself the image and likeness of the Creator, is eternal: «Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it» ( Eccl. 12:7 ). After its separation from the body, the soul continues to think, feel and act, but in another world, one unlike our material world. What, then, happens to a man " s soul after its separation from the body? Man is given life in order to learn how to believe, to do good, and to develop his talents. All of these things make up his spiritual riches, or, in the words of the Saviour, his «treasure in heaven.» Death sums up the life of a person, and his soul must then come before God for an accounting, to receive its reward or punishment. But the judgment which follows soon after death is not yet the final judgment, because only the soul is being judged, without the body. About the existence of this preliminary judgment the Apostle Paul wrote: «It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment» (Heb. 9:27). At the end of the world, after the universal resurrection of the dead, there will be the universal Last Judgment, at which God will judge all people simultaneously. Then each person will receive either eternal reward or eternal punishment with his or her resurrected body. |
| " But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken " (Mark 13:24-25). The Church was preparing us for pre-Lenten Sunday, on which we once again remembered the coming Last Judgment. Before the Last Judgment, events no less terrible for the human mind accustomed to the rational development of events will occur. Natural disasters will end with the return of the Savior to the world. Angels will come with Him, whom Christ will instruct to gather together all Christians scattered throughout the world. What will happen to the rest of the people? According to St. John Chrysostom, “they will suffer not only from that punishment, but also from this one,” in other words, they will suffer from the catastrophe of the visible world, and then their souls will come in contact with the abyss of the spiritual world… It sounds like lines from a science fiction film script, doesn’t it? The end for civilization when the ontological need for God and sincere faith in Him will be so negligibly small in people is even more logical, so that the only way to reach them will be through such supernatural intrusion into the orderly laws of space and time. Fear, as you know, paralyzes the will. Why did the Savior tell the apostles about this, why did the apostles write down these words, and why does the Orthodox Church focus on them on the eve of the Sunday of the Last Judgment? One wants to shout: “Don’t exaggerate! We have enough trials already!” But in Christ’s words only scenes of the future are reflected with the description of the roles of people depending on their free choice in the days of the calm flow of their personal time. The time that should be used correctly. What is always striking in Christians who live in the spirit is their amazing calmness, peace of mind and joyful mood, despite the trials that have befallen them. The point is that these people love God. Not in words, but in the very fact of their lives. First, they talk to Him. With the help of the past centuries’ wondrous words of the Church Slavonic language, and “speeches” that came from the heart. Building a connection with God is a very personal process. Since God is a Person, it is essential to make a conversation with Him as with a Person, not an abstraction. Especially since He calls Himself our Friend. And how else can we talk with a friend, if not heart to heart, about personal worries and asking for help? It is precisely communion with God that is the first way to receive that transforming grace that illuminates our minds. The same thing happens during our participation in the Sacraments of the Church. Naturally, they always precede prayers for the grace of God. By uniting with God, a person receives that piece of eternal peace that covers all worldly anxieties. Why grieve when you are protected and in unity with the Creator of the universe? |
| If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn puts his finger on the problem: the human heart is a “mixed bag.” This thought hovered in my mind this past Sunday, the Sunday of the Last Judgment, on the Orthodox pre-Lenten calendar. The gospel reading was the familiar passage in St. Matthew on the parable of the sheep and the goats. There everyone is judged according to what they did “to the least of these my brethren.” But the Solzhenitsyn-inspired thought asked, “But what about those who sometimes act like sheep and sometimes act like goats?” Such an analysis is actually quite accurate. We are none of us always kind to the least of these our brethren, but neither do we always ignore them. So questions arise? Does the judgment involve adding them up and seeing which one holds the preponderance of our actions? In a novel I read back in the 80’s, a science fiction writer imagined a world in which those whose good and bad actions were too closely matched for an easy judgment were sent to a purgatory in which they had to do the calculations on their whole life, with forms that had been designed by the IRS. It sent shivers down my spine! Of course, the very suggestion of the problem will immediately raise howls of protest from those who want to remind us that we are saved by grace and not by works. That facile distinction cannot obliterate the parable, however. For what seems to linger most about the parable is its conclusion: “And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Mat 25:46) For, regardless of how you reckon that some get there, the parable suggests an eternal punishment. My question, regarding the mixed-bag of souls, is, doubtless impertinent. Anyone can rightly say that the judgments of God are inscrutable. But if they are so inscrutable that we cannot know anything about them, why the parable? |
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