487. Слово в неделю дванадесятую, при посещении города Коломны

I tell you, brethren, the gospel that was preached to you, which you have already eaten, and stand in it; by which you are saved, by the word of the good news that is preached to you, even if you hold it: unless you have faith in vain. (1 Cor. 15:1-2). If St. The Apostle Paul to his brethren, the children of the Church of Corinth, “tells the gospel,” which he had already preached to them, that is, he reminds, repeats, confirms the Gospel teaching, previously taught, and already known: it is fitting and necessary that we also be brethren of the holy, catholic and apostolic church, who have also received the gospel, and become partakers of the same ministry by the grace of God, recognizing our imperfection and insufficiency, in good time they reminded each other, repeated, confirmed the Gospel teaching, which they promised to believe and follow at holy baptism; and consequently, it is not done according to the Apostolic rite that some mentors teach and some brethren of churches neglect to listen to the Gospel teaching, without fear of errors and errors from ignorance, without fear of condemnation for negligence. Fearing this disorder, but following the order and example of the Apostles, not by sending a message from afar, but talking to you face to face, as an envoy of the church, “I say... to you, brethren, is the gospel,” which was already announced to you from your ancestors. The Apostle, before pronouncing the very content of his gospel, prepares the attention of the Corinthians for it, describing some of the circumstances of it. What kind of gospel is this? “As soon as you take it,” he says, “in it you stand, and in it you are saved.” There is no doubt that your attention, brethren, is greatly aroused when you hear that they want to tell you the gospel, through which you can be saved. Who doesn't want to be saved? And wanting to be saved, who would not want to know the sure way to obtain salvation? Be attentive to the teaching of the Apostle, who proclaims to you this sure means for this longed-for goal, who tells you the gospel, “by which ... you are saved.” This is how he, continuing his conversation to the Corinthians, sets out the very essence of his saving gospel: “For I delivered it unto you from the first, even as it was received, that Christ died for our sins, according to the scripture: and as he was buried, and as he rose again on the third day, according to the scripture” (1 Cor. 15:3-4). This, brethren, is what the apostolic gospel consists of, by which true Christians are saved; it all consists in these few words, that Christ died for our sins, and rose again on the third day, in accordance with how this was predicted in the prophetic writings. He who has learned the gospel of the saving death and life-giving resurrection of Christ has learned the sure means of his salvation. Whoever uses this gospel as it should, will certainly be saved. How? Some will say, is the path to salvation really so short? Truly, brethren, God, infinite in mercy, has wonderfully shortened the path of salvation for us sinners through the death and resurrection of His Only Begotten Son Jesus Christ. For then, just as all of us, through the sin of our forefathers, withdrew from the paradise adjacent to heaven to the very limits of hell, and Christ in His death opened for us the nearest passage to paradise, which He Himself announced, even from His cross, saying to the repentant thief: “Today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43), and by His resurrection, “to rise "to His Father" by nature, by grace and "to our Father" (John 20:17), opened the entrance for us with Him into heaven itself, so that, according to the Apostle, God the Father "who is dead in sins" by faith, "has made us alive in Christ," and by hope, "raised us with Him and seated us in the heavenly places" (Eph. 2:5-6 ). It is only necessary that each of us freely and decisively enter into the order in which the saving gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ leads to the salvation of everyone. The Apostle points to this order when he says to the Corinthians about his gospel: “Even if you eat it, you stand in it, and you are saved by the word of the good news that you have.” From these words it is clearly seen that in order to achieve salvation, everyone must, first, accept the saving gospel; secondly, to stand firm in this gospel; thirdly, contain it exactly as it is taught. Accepting the saving gospel does not only consist of mentally recognizing the gospel as true. The mind is the eye of the soul, it tends to discern the truth and distinguish from lies, and accepting and, so to speak, assimilating it is a matter of the heart and will. Therefore, the Apostle describes the acceptance of the saving gospel as follows: “if you confess the Lord Jesus with your mouth, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you have been saved: for with the heart you believe the truth, but with your mouth you confess for salvation” (Rom. 10:9-10). To belief with the heart, he adds confession with the lips, because, as the Chief of Salvation Himself said: “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34): and therefore, if your heart is filled with the spirit of faith, with the power of the saving gospel, then, without a doubt, your lips will vomit the confession of salvation at the right time; and if you do not have the zeal to confess your faith as a testimony to the truth, then this shows that your heart is not content with the power of faith, that the saving gospel has not been completely accepted by you. But just as oral confession can be an imperfect, and even insignificant, manifestation of faith, since some, as the Apostle denounces, “they confess God, but His works are averted” (Titus 1:16): then the truly accepted gospel, according to the lips, must be confessed by works of faith and the whole Christian life. If you accept that “Christ died for our sin” (1 Cor. 15:3): then, according to the Apostle, “you also think of yourselves as dead for sin, but as living as God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Let sin not reign in your dead body, unless you obey it in its lusts” (Rom. 6:11-12). If you accept that Christ, “Who was delivered up for our transgressions, and raised up for our justification” (Rom. 4:25): then you “think of God as from the living dead, and your arms are the weapons of God’s righteousness” (Rom. 6:13). “If... you are risen with Christ, seek those on high, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God: be wise on things above, not on earth” (Col. 3:1-2). From what has now been said about the acceptance of the gospel, it is self-evident that this acceptance should not be a transitory action, but that the received gospel must be maintained constantly, or, as the Apostle puts it, “stand in it.” God our Savior is eternal, and salvation prepares for us eternal: but everything that is impermanent, wavering and transitory contradicts the very concept of eternity, and therefore will not achieve eternity: therefore, in the order of salvation, it is necessary that a person should try in every possible way to make permanent in himself those properties and dispositions of spirit that are required in him as a preparation for salvation. “Be faithful even unto death, and I will give you the crown of life,” says the One who lives forever in revelation, not to one “Angel of the Church of Smyrna,” and not to one “having the sorrow” of martyrdom, but to all who strive for salvation: for “the Spirit speaks” to all “churches” (Rev. 2:8, 10-11). In addition to the constancy of faith in its continuation, the Apostle also indicates its immutability in quality, as a special condition of salvation, “You are saved,” he says, “by the word of the gospel that is preached to you, if you support”; you are saved through the gospel only if you contain it exactly in the word in which I preached it. In order to determine what the Apostle means here by the name “words,” we distinguish between “the word of hearing, the word of writing and the word of reason.” The Apostle recognizes one “word of hearing” as useless when he says about the Israelites that “the word of hearing was not mixed with the faith of those who heard” (Heb. 4:2). And he stubbornly considers the contents of the “word of letters to be” even murderous: “a letter... kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). So, the word that he invariably finds necessary for salvation is, without a doubt, “the word of understanding given by me through the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:8), the very spirit of the gospel, the very essence of faith, the main dogmas, the fundamental rules of Christianity. They must be contained exactly as they were handed down to us by the apostles of Christ, like the divine word of faith, like the spiritual word of reason. They must be contained in such a way that we are not carried away by the “word of hearing” when it does not have evidence from divine scripture, or, as the Apostle explains otherwise, so that we do not “wander about with every wind of doctrine, in the lies of men, in the deceitfulness of the wiles of flattery” (Eph. 4:14), and so that we do not become attached without reason to the “word of writing” when it is not from the life-giving spirit The Gospel happens, and does not prepare us to accept this spirit. Behold, under the leadership of the Apostles, in a brief reminder, I “said” to you, brethren, the gospel, which our God-wise fathers brought to us, “even”, as it apparently is, “and took it in it”, confidently, “and stand there” - oh, if only I could add the rest with full confidence about all of you! “That’s how you’re saved!” I am led to the longed-for hope for you by the pure confession of faith, which you contain, and by its holy sacraments, imprinted in you, and by ancient piety, by fruitfulness and good deeds in holy churches, and by deeds of love for mankind, which is still witnessed among you. But just as our leaders led by God, while they were on earth, did not consider themselves to have achieved perfection in the work of salvation, how much more should we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and even think with holy care about whether we have made a good beginning for our salvation. “Test yourselves,” I will say again with the Apostle, “if you are in the faith” (2 Cor. 13:5); test yourself often, carefully, whether you have truly accepted in your heart the spirit of faith, the confession of which you carry in the mouth of those who pray or praise; Has your heart been established in the Lord, Who died for you and rose again for you? does your faith operate in your entire life? lives in all your deeds; and by such a test, as true disciples of the Gospel, daily encourage yourself to new successes in the teaching of Christ. In this self-examination, do not overlook without special attention the fact that the Apostle especially draws the testing attention of the Corinthians: “if you keep” the gospel exactly, “in what word should we preach the gospel” to us first the Apostles of Christ themselves, and then the faithful successors of their ministry. For, unfortunately, we are not far from examples of the fact that people who, in their ancestors, were born and raised with us in the same gospel of Christ Jesus, from the one Mother, the Eastern Church, now do not so much contain the true word of Christ and the Apostles, but are carried away by the hypocrisy of false talkers, like a rowless boat by the wind and waves, or cling only to the words of writing, without thinking of looking in it words of life. Isn’t it Christ’s word that says about the Church that “the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18)? And they falsely say that it is overcome and almost destroyed. Isn’t it the Apostolic word that assures that the Lord “has given... shepherds and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service for the building up of the body of Christ: until we attain all things to the unification of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God” (Eph. 4:11-13). And they, having made themselves shepherdless, try to assure that the shepherds have already been taken away, without reasoning that by destroying the work of pastoral ministry, they are depriving themselves of the hope of achieving both the union of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to which the ministry of shepherds was supposed to lead. Doesn’t the Apostle speak about the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ: “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until it comes” (1 Cor. 11:26)? But they want this to stop before the Lord comes. What could be more decisive than this word of the Lord: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you do not have life within you” (John 6:53)? But they run away from the Lord’s table, and are still thinking of getting eternal life for themselves by ignoring this word of the Lord. Is it not with his finger that the Apostle points to some of them in these terrible verbs of the spirit: “for in the last times there will be some who will depart from the faith, heeding spiritual flatterers and the teachings of demons in the hypocrisy of a liar, seared by their conscience, forbidding to marry, moving away from the waste, which God has created to be eaten with thanksgiving by the faithful and those who know the truth” ( 1 Timothy 4:1-3). But those who are burned with conscience do not feel the power of these fiery words of the spirit, and, after such an open reproof, they are not ashamed to be hypocritical in the hope of the ignorance of their followers, they teach the very teaching that the Holy Spirit attributes to apostates from the faith; “I forbid getting married” in such a way that they do not preserve chastity, but spread debauchery; they are ordered to “move away from the trash”, which is consumed by the faithful and those who know the truth; They command their disciples to seek salvation not in cleansing their minds and hearts, but in separating for themselves a special glass and dish. Faithful and knowledgeable brethren! In our eyes, one of the signs of the last times: all the more, “keep awake, stand firm in the faith, take courage, be strong,” arming yourself, however, against those who differ in their views not with enmity, but with prayer and love: “Let all love be given to you” (1 Cor. 16:13-14). Amen. 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