121. Слово в неделю четвертую великого поста, и в день Алексия, человека Божия

(Spoken in the Alekseevsky Monastery, March 17th; printed in Christian Reading of 1837 and in collections of 1844 and 1848) And being patient, you will receive the promise. (Heb.6:15). The lack of patience and constancy in matters necessary for eternal salvation seems to some to be an ordinary shortcoming, due to human weakness, and therefore not very important. Unfortunately, it is almost true that this shortcoming is common: but it is by no means true that it is not very important. Due to this lack, many souls do not achieve salvation: is this really unimportant? Who would not agree to enter heaven if everyone could enter it in a few steps, in a few minutes or hours? Both the thief and the robber would rather go for this easy and sure prey than for the dangerous and unfaithful prey of theft and robbery. But when they see that to eternal salvation it is necessary to walk a long narrow path, to pass through narrow gates with difficulty, constancy, patience, long-suffering are needed: then many are seduced onto the broad path to seek temporary pleasure; and, just as the path of legal and permitted pleasure is also not quite wide, and the means of it are in some way limited and constrained by legality itself; then, due to the same lack of patience, they move on to unauthorized, vicious, lawless pleasures, and imperceptibly approach eternal destruction. Therefore, the holy Apostle beneficially teaches us constancy and patience in order to achieve eternal salvation, and for this he points to the example of Abraham, who “having suffered long, received the promise.” Let us follow his instructions with the eye of the mind. Let's delve into his teaching. God commanded Abraham to leave his fatherland and go to an unknown land: and as a reward for faith and obedience to this command, he uttered a promise: “I will make you a great language, and I will bless you, and I will magnify your name, and you will be blessed. And I will bless those who bless you, and those who curse you I will curse, and all the families of the earth will be blessed because of you” (Gen. 12:2, 3). Abraham believed and obeyed. Left Ur; came to Harran. Here he lost his father, perhaps not only from old age, but also from the difficulties of travel. But the promise was not fulfilled. Abraham came to the land of Canaan and learned that this was the land promised to him and his descendants. But famine drove him from this land to Egypt, even more unknown to him, even more dangerous. The promise was becoming almost impossible to fulfill: however, Abraham continued to believe and endured. Upon returning to the promised land, a quarrel between the shepherds of Abraham and his nephew Lot forced them to split up: as a result, Abraham became weaker, and was exposed to greater danger from neighboring foreign nations; and subsequently, on the occasion of the capture of Lot in Sodom, he intervened in the war against four kings. Melchizedek blessed him as a conqueror with a word: but the blessing of God, which should have made him a great tongue, did not appear. Abraham did not yet have the promised son, as the enslavement of his descendants had already been predicted for him for four hundred years. Long-suffering was needed to look upon such long-lasting disasters, while the beginning of blessing was not yet visible. Abraham hastened to have a son from Hagar: but that was a mistake; Ishmael was not the son of promise. The son of promise was to be born of Sarah: but Sarah was barren; Abraham and Sarah were both old: what long-suffering was needed in order to still believe, to still hope for the fulfillment of the promise! Finally, the promised Isaac was born and grew up; the event of God's promise has begun; the hope of the blessed posterity shone forth. Is there an end to Abraham's long-suffering? - Not yet. Suddenly God demands Isaac for a burnt offering: the father must sacrifice his son, and in him all his offspring, and destroy God’s promise! One cannot be surprised enough that in this case the father of the believers had enough faith and patience: but it was enough. Isaac was sacrificed in his father's obedient heart to God; and thereby secured for life and universal and eternal blessing. At this time, through the distance of centuries, Abraham saw the day of Christ, sacrificed as a living and saving sacrifice on the cross, “and saw it, and rejoiced” (John 8:56), not only about his promised offspring, but also about his promised eternal salvation. “Be patient and receive the promise.” Maybe some will think: what do we care about the Patriarch? Who could be another Abraham? – You cannot approve of these thoughts. These are deviations and excuses from the good deeds of long-suffering in faith, characteristic of that very impatience, inconstancy, cowardice, laziness, against which the Apostle wants to arm us with the power of Abraham’s example. It is true that Abraham is the only man, the Patriarch, the father of believers. But you, children of faith, are not you the children of this very father of believers? Is it proper for children not to imitate their good father? Is it decent to say: what do we care about our father? Why does Scripture tell us about Abraham and other ancient Saints, if this does not concern us? - No, the same Scripture speaks about their paths and destinies: “All these images were received silently; But God was written for our instruction, and in them the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor. 10:11). There is no need that we live almost at the other end of the centuries from the Old Testament Patriarchs; their examples are not as far from us as their times; their adventures were so guided by Providence that while they were moving toward the fulfillment of the temporal and eternal promises given to them, they showed us the paths to our eternal salvation; and for this very reason their adventures are described in the sacred books. The point is not to literally and sensually repeat what we see in them: God “has pleased us to be ministers of the new Testament, not in writing, but in the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:6). It is necessary to notice in the Old Testament Saints the spirit of faith, which from afar brought them closer to the coming Christ, and to adopt it as an inheritance that legally follows us, who believe in the coming Christ. So we must look at Abraham’s long-suffering in faith, and encourage ourselves to constantly and patiently exercise ourselves in the works of faith and salvation, as much as our weakness allows, and moreover, as much as grace bestows. Of course, Abraham is not the only one who sets an example in this, but many, if not all, who pleased God. The immediate son and heir of Abraham's promise, Isaac, is it not, just like the father, “having suffered long, receive the promise” of a blessed offspring? He had, without wavering in faith, to endure the twenty years of barrenness of Rebekah, the dangers and insults from the Gerarites, and finally blindness, which prevented him from giving, as he wanted, the blessing to the firstborn of nature, Esau, but at the same time, with his long-suffering faith, helped to give an inalienable blessing to the chosen firstborn of grace, Jacob. And blessed Jacob, whom God Himself promised “not to abandon” (Gen. 28:15), did not have to endure for a long time the mortal enmity of his elder brother, twenty years of work in the house of the ungrateful Laban, the dangers of attacks, various family sorrows, the deprivation of his son of love and hopes, Joseph, finally the burden of famine and the difficult resettlement in old age to the unpromised land of Egypt, in which he had to suffer posterity, what about the prediction that was made to his grandfather could not be known to him? Who doesn’t know how much Joseph had to endure in order to achieve the salvation of himself and his tribe? He endured the enmity of brothers, slavery, slander, bonds, and prison. Moses, in order to make the temporary salvation of his people, in the image of our eternal salvation, also had to endure all his life, either a forty-year voluntary exile, or a difficult struggle with the bitterness of Pharaoh, or an almost continuous struggle with the obstacles of nature, and with the inconstancy and unfaithfulness of his people. But let’s hasten from distant images to closer examples. Apostles, martyrs, saints, how long they endured in preaching the Gospel, in suffering for the faith, in the exploits of spiritual life! Let us listen to one Saint Paul, who tells about himself: “I received from the Jews five times and forty times one,” that is, on five different occasions he received thirty-nine blows; “I hit them with clubs, I hit them with stones; three times the ship has contradicted me; I created night and day in the depths; in the traveling processions in abundance: troubles in the rivers, troubles from robbers, troubles from relatives, troubles from the tongue, troubles in cities, troubles in the desert, troubles in the sea, troubles in false brethren, in labor and struggle, in vigils in abundance, in hunger and thirst, in abundance in fasting, in winter and nakedness" ( 2 Corinthians 11:24–27 ). Let us finally remember the long-suffering of the Man of God who has now gathered us into this church. The wonderful Alexy left his house, wealth, parents, and bride, choosing the narrow path of salvation; he spent seventeen years without a home, among the poor in the church vestibule; and, what is even more difficult, to “stay,” as the story of his life says, “unknown in his father’s house, thin and exhausted, we overcome the enemy, we kindle our relatives out of love, and we scold our slaves, not ten days or a hundred, but seventeen whole years” (Prologue). What determination in the intention of salvation, what constancy in execution, what patience in temptations! Our laziness is reluctant to look at such examples of long-suffering in faith. She is more willing to look for examples of how to be saved easier and faster. True, the infinitely merciful God made this possible, so that no sinner, under any circumstances, would have reason to despair. In the Gospel we see how a few words of repentance and faith opened up paradise for the thief. But at the same time, let us not ignore the fact that this example is unprecedented in some circumstances, namely in what unexpected closeness fate placed the perishing man with the Savior, without the ability to move away from Him nailed to the cross 555, and in what miraculous moments of grace. Let us also note that repentance, not too late for the thief on the cross, was too late for another, in the same circumstances, in the same moments of grace; that the saved thief turned to Christ alone, in contrast to the unrepentance of the Bishops, Princes, Pharisees, Scribes, Elders, and the whole of Jerusalem. Who would dare to say that this quick, unstoppable emergence from destruction into salvation is easier and more reliable for fulfillment than achieving salvation by gradually moving along the path of repentance and self-correction, with patience and long-suffering? To calm our laziness and fickleness, we say that God accepts those who often fall. So, He accepts these too: but first He sees whether they fall through weakness, through ignorance, through involuntary temptations and stumblings, or, on the contrary, through negligence, through addiction to vices into which they fall, despite the testimony of conscience against the iniquities into which they fall. There are those who fall, to whom the help of grace hastens: and there are those who fall, to whom the wisdom of God, neglected by them, sends a word worthy of them: “For I will laugh at your destruction; - It will happen that when you call on Me, I will not listen to you; They will seek Me for evil, and will not find Me” (Prov. 1:26–28). If you were testing a person whom you intend to accept into your home; and if he were to do for a few minutes what you entrust to him, and then for a whole day, or more, turn to what he likes, what disgusts you, what is incongruous with the order of your home: would you really accept him? How can one think that the all-holy God cares less than we do about His eternal home, about the heavenly city of His Kingdom, so that “not to bring into it any evil” (Rev. 21:27)? How can one think that He will be pleased with a person who remembers Him for a minute and forgets Him for a whole day, or for many more days; who somehow fasts for several days, and then indulges in intemperance for a year; who, with the same language, now “blesses God and the Father, and then curses men who are in the likeness of God” (James 3:9); who, after repentance, blithely returns to sin, and after sin, just as blithely does not rush to repentance; in which there is not only no readiness or desire, for the sake of faith and love for God and Christ, to endure every sorrow, every deprivation, every calamity and death itself, but who does not have the strength, for the sake of pleasing God, to overcome passion, correct a wrong inclination, reject a bad habit, prefer the work of piety to the work of his own self-interest or ambition; who, even after dedicating himself to God with a special vow, just as without a vow, lives in the world and works in its vanity? Let us, Christians, trust in the grace of God, which promised and gives us salvation: but at the same time, “let you not be lazy, but imitators of those who inherit the promises through faith and patience” (Heb. 6:12). Amen. In Christ. There is no reading of these words. You might be interested in: