299. Беседа пред благодарственным Господу Богу молебствием по прекращении губительной болезни

(Said in Miracle Mon. October 24; printed in the Works of the Holy Father and Provincial Gazette of 1854 and in the collection of 1861) Mother Church invited her children, and you accepted her invitation to offer a conciliar prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord God, the punisher and the merciful. “Give prayer to the one who prays” (1 Samuel 2:9) may he open the hearts of all of us, “may our prayer be corrected like an incense” before Him (Ps. 140:2), and may the incense of reverent thoughts, resolved in the fire of love, bring down and spread the fragrance of heavenly grace. With much difficulty, and not with the desired success, the natural scientists of the educated world searched for the hidden causes in nature of a destructive disease that has been walking around the educated world for more than twenty years, and no matter how strongly its presence can be felt, it allows itself to be understood just as little. But this very fact that it comes in a hidden way, does not allow its entrance to be blocked, falls like a sudden irresistible blow of fate, this very thing makes it easier for the children of faith to discover in their own way its origin in nature and beyond nature - in nature, in the arbitrary evil of moral nature, giving rise to the involuntary evil of the subordinate material nature, in the evil of sin, attracting the evil of punishment - beyond nature, in the Providence and judgment of the Creator of nature, allowing evil material in order to punish, suppress, heal moral evil. This is how the incarnate Wisdom of God teaches us to understand punitive incidents that are inexplicable to ordinary understanding. The Tower of Siloam fell in Jerusalem, killing eighteen people. Pointing to this incident, Christ the Savior extracted from it the following reasoning: “They are eighteen, and the pillar of Siloam fell on them, and beat them, do you think that they owe more than all those living in Jerusalem? Neither, I say to you: but unless you repent, you will all perish likewise” (Luke 13:4–5). This example leads to the general conclusion that in a public calamity, which for those who do not understand is random and incomprehensible, those who understand and believe must see the rebuke of God’s judgment, which amazes some, and threatens all “debtors” of God’s justice, that is, sinners, in order to arouse them to repentance, and protect them from further punishment and destruction itself. Thus, following the direction of thought given by the word of Christ, could someone tell us now: these several thousand, struck in three months by a destructive disease, “do you think that they are the most obligated to kill all those living” in Moscow? “Neither, I tell you, unless you repent,” you cannot consider yourself safe from new, similar or different, punishments of God’s justice. Already for the third time, in a few years, we were visited by a destructive illness: we need to think with care whether this is a revelation of the fact that we were dissatisfied with the first and second visit, or constantly used it to repentance and correct our lives. However, if we are still punished, then we are also pardoned. The illness did not burden us too much with its continuation, but as if it only wanted to enlighten us, taking such a number of days for its increase, and such a number for its decline, which in the Holy Scriptures and in the Church is presented as the number of repentant and cleansing feats. In about forty days it grew from its beginning to the highest degree of its strength; for about forty days it diminished until it ceased. It seems that the Angel of Death paid attention to some times of special church reverence, and suspended his harvest. On the day of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos, abundant in prayer and reverence, there were half as many dead as on the previous day, and three times less than on the next. A similar advantage was given to the day of the Presentation of the Miraculous Icon of the Mother of God of Vladimir, marked by the procession of the cross. The first day on which not a single person fell ill or died from a destructive disease was the day of St. Sergius. Is it not possible to see in these features some sign that if we were all constantly and completely filled and embraced by the spirit of prayer, reverence, sanctification, then the corrupting spirit of earthly nature, constantly reflected by the life-giving spirit of heavenly grace, would never dare to touch anyone? We will not withhold the words of truth in order to give evidence of good. We had comforting views of the excited spirit of prayer. In addition to participating in daily prayers during church services for deliverance from a destructive illness, the brethren of one or another church, or several neighboring churches, on their own impulse, established special prayers, in the presence of a particularly revered shrine, and the square and street were turned into a church for a numerous prayer council. Many tried to consecrate their houses with similar prayers, no doubt, with faith in the protection that came through them. With these comforting views, I hear the word heard of old from heaven, approving and encouraging for good, the word: “Whoever will cause their heart to fear Me, and keep My commandments all the days, that it may be good for them and for their sons forever” (Deut. 5:29). But at the same time, unfortunately, the bitter word of the Prophet comes to mind about how far the people who were awarded it did not correspond to this heavenly favor: “When I killed, then I sought Him, and turned, and at the morning service to God; and remember that God is their helper”: and then - “their heart... theirs is not right with Him”; “The kolkrat made Him sad” (Ps. 77:34–35, 37, 40)! People of the Lord! Let us pay attention to ourselves, and let us be vigilant over ourselves, so that the heart, excited and turned to God during the days of His terrible visit, does not cease to turn to Him, strive, and cleave to Him in the days of mercy. Let us examine the path of our heart, and let us guide it with spiritual reason, and not with carnal blind desires, so as not to deviate onto the obstinate and leading to the abyss path of the old Israel, ungrateful before God, who for a while turned to a punishing God, and soon forgot the merciful and good God. There is a voluntary disease, which opens the door to many other diseases, voluntary and involuntary, and finally destructive. Such a disease is moral neglect. Those who hear this may think that this disease is not serious and not dangerous. But because it is considered light and harmless, it becomes serious and dangerous. The Gospel parable shows us people who, having been invited to a royal feast in honor of the king’s son, accepted this with negligence: “They went away carelessly, and went to their village, and went to their purchases” (Matthew 22:5). They did not think of being rebels or criminals: they only allowed themselves to be careless. But what happened? They deprived themselves of the honor and joy of being participants in the royal meal; showed disrespect and disobedience to the king; they set a bad example for others who went further and killed those sent from the king; They provoked the king to anger, and subjected his city to rebuke. Brethren, the Heavenly King, by the grace of His only begotten Son Jesus Christ, calls us all to His spiritual table, to partake of the power, life and joy of His kingdom, in time and in eternity. If the tempter came to us and said: do not go to the table of the kingdom of Christ: we, of course, would be horrified and would say: go away, Satan! He knows this and does not act so rudely. We are called to Christ in the church; but the tempter says: you don’t have to go, or not very often, and not for a long time; you have your own affairs; - and, with our negligence, what happens to us is what happens in the parable: “We carelessly left for our village, but for our purchases.” The messengers of the King of Heaven, the Prophets and Apostles, inspire us that we must go to Christ and to the table of His kingdom through repentance, prayer, and fulfillment of the commandments of God: but the tempter says: who is without sin? It is impossible for those living in the world to go more or less the way of the world; the path of repentance will be found even open closer to death and to the heavenly table itself: - and we, although we do not renounce this meal, we either do not go to it, or we go, church on both knees, and hardly move forward from worse to better. The Gospel teaches us that in order to partake worthy of the table of the kingdom of Christ, one must have a clean robe, worthy of closeness to the King; that our mind should be clothed with reverent thoughts, our heart with holy desires, our body purified by abstinence, that works of faith, truth, and virtue should form the bright clothing of our spiritual being: but an evil thought creeps in and whispers that this means demanding from a person an Angelic life, which is higher than him: - and many of us, under the pretext that we are not obliged to lead an Angelic life, carelessly plunge our entire being into a worldly, distracted life, sensual, unclean, bestial. What of this? – By our negligence we deprive ourselves of the enjoyment of the gifts of Christ’s grace; in our insufficient performance of duties, people who are more prone to violating duties see their justification and go further into the depths of evil; The king of heaven is offended; the time given to us for our salvation is exhausted without benefit; the repression of God's justice threatens; - it is also the mercy of God if the threat of divine repression is temporary, punitive and corrective, and not yet final and eternal condemnation. I repeat: let us pay attention to ourselves, and let us be vigilant over ourselves. Let us restrain ourselves not only from allowing ourselves to do evil, but also in apparently non-judgmental activities, let us fear negligence and lazy carelessness, which damage the good and quietly pave the way for the evil. The Prophet writes: “Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord with negligence” (Jer. 48:10). You see that not only is it disastrous not to do the works of God, but it is also terrible to do it carelessly. Let us, according to the teaching of the Apostle, “be not lazy, eager in spirit, working for the Lord” (Rom. 12:11). Amen. You might be interested in: