122. Слово в день Благовещения Пресвятыя Богородицы

(Spoken at the Chudov Monastery, March 25th; printed in the Christian Reading of 1835 and in the collections of 1844 and 1848) And the greatness confessed is the mystery of piety, God appeared in the flesh, was justified in Dus, appeared as an Angel, was believed in the world, ascended in glory. (1 Timothy 3:16). We reverently remember and celebrate now that unique day in time, that great moment when the great mystery of piety: “God in the flesh,” not only in the word, but in the power of the Most High, was brought by the Archangel Gabriel to earth, hidden in the pure heart and in the ever-virgin womb of the Most Blessed Mary, sealed by Her humble silence. Afterwards, this “mystery, hidden from time immemorial and from generation to generation” (Col. 1:26), turned into worldwide glory: but nevertheless, even now it still remains a mystery. “Greatness is the mystery of piety, God appears in the flesh.” They marveled, without a doubt, at this mystery in heaven when it was revealed there; when Jesus Christ, risen, and ascending to sit at the right hand of God the Father, “appeared to be an Angel,” in the unprecedented glory of the God-man. Heavenly wonder, like everything heavenly, is beautiful. The Angels marveled at the mystery and glory of the God-Man: but they were not embarrassed. They asked: “Who is this King of glory?” but they were not curious, they did not doubt; they wanted to know in order to revere; and before the solution to their question was proclaimed to them: “Who is this King of glory,” they already accepted Him as the King of glory; because they have already cried: “Lift up your gates, O princes, and lift up the everlasting gates: and the King of glory will come in” (Ps. 23:7-8). The more incomprehensible they see the mystery, the more they find it worthy of the incomprehensible God, the more they reverence, the more they glorify God, the more they are enlightened by His glory, and they are blissful. There, knowledge and glory do not contradict or envy the mystery: and the mystery multiplies glory and light to infinity. But does the earth really accept the wondrous mystery of God in the flesh - the earth for which this mystery itself was invented, and used, and hidden, and revealed, and brought down, and exalted, and betrayed to shame, and glorified? – Truly blessed among women is the only Most Holy Virgin, who presented herself as a worthy repository of the secret that came from heaven, so that it would not turn back, like a ship filled with treasures from a shore that has no pier; - who, having been elevated to the exalted rank of the Mother of God, did not allow her thoughts, one hair lower, to rise from the depths of humility; - who knew how to embrace the infinite Word of God with such a small human word: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). After Her, let us also bless those by whom the mystery of God in the flesh was “believed in the world,” who accepted it with faith, faithfully preserved it, and preached it to all nations; - through which she, in unchanging purity, in undiminished strength, reached us. But these are those who, although “are in the world” (John 17:11), are nevertheless “not of the world” (John 17:14). What about the world? - He did not want to accept the secret of God that was saving for him: upon hearing about it, he rose up in alarm in order to suppress it, to overshadow it with lies, to confuse it with fictions, to cover it with contempt and slander, to block its path with the sword, to fill it with the blood of its witnesses, to bury it in their graves, to burn it in fire, to drown it in water, to destroy it by all possible means of extermination. Failed! In spite of the efforts of the world, the mystery of God in the flesh has become, as I have already said, a worldwide glory. But even now, how many people are there who either have not learned this secret, or, having known it, have not accepted it! And what is even more regrettable, even among those who received it as an inheritance from their fathers and forefathers, those either remain or appear again who do not know what to do with this incomprehensible secret; they ask, sometimes with curiosity, why such an extraordinary means was used to save the human race - the incarnation of the Divine; then with doubt - is it really impossible for a person to be saved without this? And where curiosity is, there is still no pure knowledge; Where there is doubt, there is still no complete faith. Mystery drives away curiosity by the very fact that it is a mystery. She calls upon herself to have faith: however, she does not forbid her from casually using the aid of modest reflection to remove from her path the stumbling blocks that cast doubt on him. If, therefore, you dare to think about the need for the incarnation of the Son of God for our sake as humans, and for our salvation: then the believer can base his thinking on the following sayings of Jesus Christ Himself. The first saying: “no one knows the Son but the Father; Who knows the Father, only the Son, and whosoever the Son wills, he will reveal it” (Matthew 11:27). That without knowing God one cannot be saved and blessed, no one sane will doubt that. But if the treasure of the knowledge of God lies hidden in the interior of the Divinity itself, inaccessible due to His inaccessible height; if one takes from it for one’s own need of salvation, one can only “open it to him if the Son wills”; and yet the Son of God Himself, Who “wills to reveal” the knowledge of God to man, “no one knows except the Father”: then how can the saving discovery of the knowledge of God be accomplished? – It is necessary that the Son of God, from the ignorance of the Divine, which is above all images of knowledge, so to speak, emerge into certain cognitive images, as He is called “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). But in what images? – Of course, closer to the Divine, to the spiritual. Let's put it this way. Through this it begins to be clear how the revelation of the heavenly knowledge of God takes place in the spiritual, angelic world. But the earth is not like the sky; and a person is not like an Angel. Especially in the present state of earth and man, heaven and Angel are closed to earth and man: consequently, the revelation of the knowledge of God, characteristic of heaven and Angels, would not yet be a revelation for earth and man. And so it is necessary that the Son of God, when He “wills to reveal” the saving knowledge of God to present-day man, should also descend and enter into the forms of knowledge closest to man; so that the Word of God, without ceasing to be the Word of God, enters into the images of the human word; so that the “image of the invisible God,” without ceasing to be what He is, enters into images visible to the eye of the earthly mind; so that He would appear either in transitory images - and here are the revelations and visions of the Saints: or in an abiding image - and here is the incarnation of the Son of God. The second saying: “No one will come to the Father except by Me” (John 14:6). What does it mean to come to God? - To God, Who “lives unapproachable in the light, whom no one has seen, who can see below” (1 Tim. 6:16) in His being, - of course, man cannot come either with his feet on the ground or with his wings in the air. What does it mean to come to God? They come to the one from whom they are removed: but how can one be removed from the omnipresent God? – “The Spirit is God” (John 4:24): there must also be a spiritual procession to Him. Spiritual moving away and approaching occurs primarily in the will. By the will of sin, evil, a person moves away from God, as it is said in Scripture: “your sins separate between you and God” (Is. 59:2). By the will of repentance and goodness, a person comes to God. And this cannot happen without the incarnate Son of God, as He Himself says: “no one will come to the Father except by Me.” If you ask: why shouldn’t a person come to God by his own will alone, which is free? I answer: good morning! Do an experiment. But if you are attentive, then, without a doubt, you will find and recognize what the best of you and I admitted: “Even if I want to, I do not find it; It is not because I want good that I do it, but because I do not want evil, I do it” (Rom. 7:18-19). Strange as it may seem before the eyes of reason, this self-contradictory phenomenon in human nature; but it has long been noticed even by those who were not taught this observation by Christianity: and if you delve deeper into the reason for it, you can make sure that this is how it should be under certain circumstances. The source of goodness and strength is one God. If a person stands in goodness, and through this in communion with God, then he continually draws from God the power to do good; and therefore, just as he is free to desire good, he is also strong to do it. But if he allowed himself to sin, and through this he entered into separation from God: then, as he moves away from God, the convenience for him to draw strength from God decreases; and therefore, when his will, by its natural freedom, makes a reverse movement towards good and towards God, the power to do good does not correspond to the desire to do it; and a person cannot come to God by himself, without a special, extraordinary bringing down to him of the power of God; - without such a medium by which the distance between God and man would be filled, the division destroyed, communication, uninterrupted, restored; - without a medium that would touch with perfect unity both divided sides - God and man. And such a medium is the God-man. The third saying: “God so loved the world, as He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God cannot do anything superfluous or unnecessary: ​​for this would be inconsistent with His wisdom. So, if God gave His Only Begotten Son to the world, then it is clear that this was necessary. For what? – For, as the Son of God Himself says, “Whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” Would the world really perish otherwise and not have an eternal life? - apparently so. Why? – To make this as understandable as possible, let us ascend in thought to the beginning of creatures. In the book of wisdom it is written: “God do not create death” (John 1:13). This line from the book of Divine wisdom can be copied without difficulty into its book by any human wisdom, if it is not completely devoid of the concept of the all-perfect Creator God. God is a purely vital principle. The creature, as a creature, is subject to change: but its changes, in creation and under the control of the all-perfect Creator, can be arranged in order, towards perfection, without suffering, without the destruction of the rough, unclean, dead, even if they are resolved into their constituent principles, which can occur easily and pleasantly, such as (since 558 examples can be found in the current imperfect dispensation of creatures), the resolution of pure oil into light, or resolution of incense into fragrant smoking. Where does disorder, ugliness, uncleanness, suffering, destruction, decay, in a word: death come from? “It seems to me that even natural reasoning will not find anything else to say about this than what the teaching revealed by God says: “sin came into the world, and death through sin” (Rom. 5:12). Sin, as separation from God, is at the same time “alienation from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18), and consequently, sooner or later, death for a physical being, destructible, temporary, and for a spiritual being, indestructible, eternal, because besides God there is no, and never will be, another source of life. Thus, sin and death vouch for each other in the world that they are here. Do you see the reigning sin in the world: you can say: the world is on the path of death. Do you see death in it? You can also say: the world has apparently sinned and is heading towards destruction. Who is not so blind as not to see in the world the dominion of either one or the other, neither sin nor death; he can understand how much the world needs deliverance from destruction, the gift of eternal life again. And for this need, God “gave His only begotten Son to eat.” Death and destruction come to a person, both as a natural consequence of separation from God, and together, as the action of God’s justice over sin. Therefore, in order to save a person, it is necessary, firstly, to satisfy the justice of God (because no property of the Divine can be deprived of the action inherent in it; and because the announcement of unconditional forgiveness or impunity for a person already standing on the path of sin would most easily lead further along this path, and consequently not to salvation, but to destruction); - secondly, to reintroduce the life of God into humanity, which would defeat and destroy the death that reigned in it. The requirements are difficult and naturally impossible! To satisfy the justice of God means to give the sinner up to eternal death: for this, the possibility of eternal life completely disappears for him. How can we bring the life of the all-holy God closer to sinner man? Such a sharp contrast between the approaching extremes threatens more with the extermination of an unworthy creature, like hay from a fire, than with the hope of salvation. What does God do miracles? He introduces His Hypostasis life, His Only Begotten Son, into a small, chosen portion of human nature, prepared by the long, hidden action of His destinies, protected from the infectious admixture of sin, unites Divinity and humanity into a single Hypostasis of the God-Man; reduces the Divinity clothed with humanity to human states, except sin, even weakness, suffering, death. So what? – The justice of God is completely satisfied, because in the person of the God-Man humanity suffered the death condemned to itself, and suffered it completely, since the instant of death of the God-Man, by the co-presence of the eternal Divinity, is equal to eternity; the right of the Redeemer to forgive the repentant sinner is based on satisfaction of justice, without the harmful hope of impunity for the unrepentant; and at the same time, the life of God, descending into the depths of human death, but not possessed by death by its nature, from the depths of death shines into all humanity that has died in sin, and brings eternal life into all souls that open themselves to it by faith, and do not reflect it from themselves through unbelief and bitterness. “So God love the world.” These reflections give way to the questions: how did a person live, do good, know God even before the incarnation of the Divine took place? How do people live, do good, and know God now who do not enjoy the fruits of the incarnation of the Divine? Questions worthy of attention. For those who have not sufficiently penetrated into the interior of the mystery of God in the flesh in order to see its life-giving light from within, to experience its saving power, the solution of the questions now proposed can, at least from the outside, show the greatness of this mystery, which alone builds from the human race a harmonious building, with amazing unity in diversity, stretching across all dimensions of space and time, and with its height lost in the heavens; and outside of which humanity presents disordered ruins, rarely where and sometimes rising somewhat, but generally fragmented, scattered, barely rising above the ground. How did man live before Christ? – He lived in the original purity of his creation, through communion with God the Word, in whom “there was life, and life was light of man,” “in the beginning” as well as always after (John 1:1-4). And from the time when sin separated man from God, until Christ, if man, already “dead in sins” (Eph. 2:5) internally, still lived externally; and if there were also some glimpses of a higher life in him: then he lived, firstly, with the remains of the life given to him from God in the beginning, just as a cutting lives, cut off from a living tree, until the living sap in it is depleted, or until it is grafted back onto the living tree; secondly, he lived by the preliminary beginnings of the life of Christ, which can be sought further than the cradle of Bethlehem, and earlier than the Annunciation of Nazareth, one might say final, and not initial: for at the very time that the original life was damaged by sin, it was necessary to introduce the healing of Christ into humanity; and it is introduced by the word of the first annunciation about the incarnation of God the Word: “the seed of the woman will erase the head of the serpent” (Gen. 3:15); and from that time on it began and continued to act gracefully, as can be noted in the Patriarchs and Prophets. As for the natural life of mankind, damaged by sin; Is it possible not to notice, both in former times and now, how it moves not towards perfection, but towards destruction and death; how over the centuries it has decreased in the chronology of personal life; how it cracked and disintegrated into incoherent blocks 559, which are called tribes and peoples; as in many nations alien to Christ, she fell to the lowest levels of bestial and brutal life. How did a person know and know God, do and do good before Christianity and without Christianity? – My answer is one: if I knew God, then I knew it with the remains of the original light in the mind, with the help of pious tradition; if he did something, in some sense, good, then with the remnants of the original kindness in the will. By the fall of man into sin, the image of God in him is crushed, but not completely destroyed and destroyed; the eternal Sun has set in his soul, but some rays of dawn from Him still touch its heights. And with this diminished light, “the invisible things of God from the creation of the world were understood by the creatures, and His everlasting power and Divinity” (Rom. 1:20) “The pagans, having no law, create by the lawful nature; “They demonstrate the lawful work that is written in their hearts” (Rom. 2:14–15). But they will say, perhaps: if naturally in the human race there is at least some knowledge of God, and at least some doing of good: then could not he, by natural means, with continued efforts and mutual assistance, be exalted, perfected and saved? The answer to this is not very difficult: for the experiments are ready, you just need to point out them. The human race, before Christianity, for several thousand years had enough scope to test its natural efforts. What did he work out? – After the most ancient legends about the one God, about the purity of paradise, or, as the pagans said, about the golden age, - polytheism, idolatry, vices and atrocities, the very names of which are terrifying in their unnaturalness 560, such as, for example, not only murder, but also infanticide, and parricide, and man-eating. The pagan world, pitiful in ignorance, when it passes into education, becomes disgusting in depravity, which usually goes alongside it, and turns it into its instrument. What did pagan philosophy do? Has she brought even one pagan city or village to the knowledge of the one God? Was it not she who, on the contrary, invented doubts about the existence of God and virtue? - In the times of Christianity, it was easy for the mind to ignite many tricks of natural knowledge in the sun of Divine revelation: but even in these times, the natural mind, intending to act without Christ, did not deprive itself of the very remains of spiritual light, did it not disgrace itself with fury, which was not seen in paganism, namely, proclaimed atheism as a state law? Let them call this a random fit, a private disorder, an abuse of reason in a few people possessing passions, only externally presented in a broad form: I don’t argue, if you want 561; but if it is abuse, disorder, disease; then where is the good use, order, health of natural reason, without the highest government of revelation, without the physician Christ? Let them show, if they can, in a more extensive, or although not in a lesser, form, the social action of such reason towards the perfection and bliss of the human race! And who can guarantee that his abuse, disorder, illness will not return many times, in new, depending on the circumstances, forms, with new cruelty, if you leave him without supreme guardianship and provide him with independent dominion; if, before the unrealizable merit from him, you proclaim him the savior of the human race? Truly, there are quite sad experiences to confirm that the self-salvation of humanity, through natural means and the efforts of reason, is nothing more than a dream and a painful delirium of a spiritually ailing humanity. The best and truly saving feat of the human mind towards the perfection and bliss of mankind can only consist in impartially testing and measuring one’s strengths, means, and shortcomings for this great goal; understand the possibility, recognize the need for revelation from above; approach “the great mystery of piety”, lay your weapon and your crown at its feet; and surrender oneself into noble captivity, into free obedience to faith in “God manifest in the flesh.” Christians, children of faith, heirs of Revelation, guardians of the mystery of God! Let us bless the God of secrets and revelations. Let us glorify the God-man, the Author and Finisher of faith. Let us preserve the secret of God, only condescendingly entrusted to us. Let us also consider that it would be indecent to keep the secret of piety in an unclean soul and life. One must keep the holy and Divine treasure in an ark of pure gold - “the sacrament of faith in a pure conscience” (1 Tim. 3:9). Amen. In the Author's manuscript: disgrace. In the Author's manuscript: how much. In the Author's manuscript: incoherent pieces. In the Author's manuscript: absurd unnaturalness. In the Author's manuscript: whatever you want. You might be interested in: