Омилия XXXIX 190 .

Said at a prayer service held on the occasion of the unprecedented and ongoing deadly epidemic that was raging at that time John, the beloved Theologian of Christ, says: “If our hearts do not blind us, we have boldness toward God; and if we ask, we are acceptable from Him, because we keep His commandments and do what is pleasing in His sight” (1 John 3:21-22). But we, who carry within ourselves a self-condemning conscience, who follow our evil lusts, who transgress the commandments of God and do what is abominable before Him, who drink every day and spend our days drinking wine and planning where to go on a drinking binge, and who spend the night in mental and physical uncleanness, who spend our lives in untruth and covetousness, who rejoice in thefts and robberies (which we commit), who feed envy and hatred of each other, reviling each other, slandering each other, hating all virtue and moderation, plunging ourselves into every kind of sin - how can we have the boldness to ask something from God in prayer and psalmody?! Can we, rejecting God’s commandments, hope to receive from Him what we ask for?! For “to the sinner,” as the Psalmist says, “God said: You will tell all my justifications, and you will receive My covenant with your lips. But you hated the punishment and you rejected My words. If you saw your father, you flowed with him, and you considered your participation with the adulterer. Thy lips have multiplied malice, and thy tongue weaved with flattery: thou hast slandered thy brother, and thou hast laid offense against thy mother's son. I will reprove you, I will bring your sins before your face. Understand this, you who forget God, lest he snatch away, and there will be no deliverer” (Ps. 40:16-22), just as now we are snatched away (by death), and there is no one who delivers, no one who helps! But although not every one of us has all of the above types of sin in their entirety, yet each of us in one or several of them has all deviated (from righteousness) and become inextricable; however, even one of these sins is sufficient to remove God’s mercy from us and bring His wrath upon us. What made the Israelites unworthy of the God-made tablets? - Isn't it drunkenness? – Because Moses, having climbed the mountain, fasted for forty days and talked with God about the people; from there he accepted tablets not made with hands, written by the finger of God, and descended from the mountain, bringing this gift to the Israelites; but when, from the noise and disorderly screams, from afar, he felt that they were drunk - “the noise of drunken people,” he said, “I hear” (Ex. 32:18), - then, considering them unworthy of the tablets made by the very hands of God and written by Him, he broke them; He equipped other people against those lawless people who had a mind not weakened by drunkenness and who did not make drunkards into God 191, and with the help of those people he killed many thousands, and thus appeased God of the sober. And going up the mountain again, he then brought other tablets, written in a similar way, but no longer the same as the first ones: because they were made of worse material. Do you see how drunkenness has brought death since ancient times? What kind of condemnation is it worthy of, and how does it make those who surrender to it unworthy of both God’s gifts and this life? Drunkenness is the incarnate demon itself, a perversion of the mind, a relaxation of the body, life is worse than death, the reason for God’s turning away from us. And what is even greater evil is that it makes us alien to the life promised by God. “Drunkards,” says (the Apostle), “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:10). What can we say about fornication? “The people of God then left Egypt completely unarmed, and many armed Egyptians pursued them. And so, when they reached the sea, some fleeing, others pursuing, then by the power and will of God, and by the rod and hand of Moses, it divided and provided passage; the pursuers were flooded and thrown dead to the neighboring shores; and thus the unarmed were shown fully armed, because they had taken the weapons from those dead men washed ashore. What happened next? - Defeating everyone who opposed them, they passed through places and lands, both inhabited and deserted and not yet conquered by man. When they fell into fornication, they became so weak that 23,000 people immediately died in battle. That is why Paul tells us: “Ye have committed theft, for some have gone astray from them, and fell in one day twenty-three thousand” (1 Cor. 10:8). And if Phinehas had not become jealous (of God), and with a single blow had not put an end to the one who committed the abomination and the one who committed fornication with him, and had not restrained the evil and appeased God, everyone would have perished, publicly tempting the wrath of God for the lawlessness of fornication. And that this God-hating phenomenon takes place among us, who doesn’t know? And there is no one who would curb in this regard: Neither father - son, nor brother - brother, nor each other; but sometimes they also contribute to this, although the Apostle says: “It is lower to eat with such” (1 Cor. 5:11); That’s why we all deserve death and total destruction. But if fornication is worthy of such and such condemnation, then how much more is the guilt of adultery, which not only one or two, but entire houses and families, family ties and successions destroys and nullifies, and before this makes their souls full of all evil and depravity? Envy, being the parent of murder, since as a result of it man first experienced the experience of death and Cain became a fratricide, how will he not be rightly condemned to death or something worse than death? And to what extent does theft raise the wrath of God against oneself? – The Old Testament tells that Achar was the only thief (among the then army of Israel), and so, the whole army suffered defeats until, having investigated the matter, they stoned the one who committed this sin among them. All this was written for our edification, so that if we fall into the same sins, we would not be subject to the same condemnation; It’s better to say - an even more painful sentence: because having been honored with greater care of God for us than those people, we are worthy of greater blows if we do not protect ourselves from the evils forbidden by God. “If the word spoken by the angels is known, and every crime and disobedience, the righteous accepts recompense: how shall we escape,” says the Apostle, “from the capital that has not given birth to salvation? He began to speak from the Lord, who heard in us that he would work together with God with signs and wonders and with various powers, and with the divided Holy Spirit, according to His will” (Heb. 2:2-4). Therefore, Ananias and Sapphira, who committed theft not of someone else’s, but of their own property, for the lie that is always associated with theft, were killed by Peter, or better yet, by God, to whom the Prophet David says: “Destroy all who speak lies” (Ps. 5:7). Paul betrayed the harlot in Corinth to Satan and commanded the Corinthians, instructing: “It is beneath him to eat” (1 Cor. 5:11); and did not show love to him until he, having left this evil deed, actually showed repentance. To the covetous man, who, despite the fact that the earth bore abundant fruit, did not give anything to the poor, but expanded his warehouses, what does the Lord say in the Gospels? - “You fool, this night they will take your soul from You: and what You have prepared, for whom will it be”? (Luke 12:20). And lest anyone think that this sentence applied to a specific person (living at that time), He adds: “Gather for yourself this way, and not become rich toward God” (Luke 12:21). And although this rich man did not become rich on the basis of untruths, for what was his fault that the land brought a good harvest? - but still, since he abused the things abundantly given from God, and did not become rich in God by giving those in need a share in them, therefore he became worthy of death, without using the wealth in any way. Among us there are those who, not only what they acquired in a righteous way, but also what they stole from the poor, keep in their homes, following covetousness, which, according to Paul, is the second idolatry, suffering from the love of money - the guilt of all evils; and this applies not only to our princes, but also to merchants: because what great damage is caused to buyers by our shopkeepers and other sellers, who, even when they can, do not use the correct weights or adhere to the correct measures! For this and for similar things we are punished, and will continue to be punished; because we desire and seek liberation from troubles, and at the same time we add other guilts to the existing faults for which we are punished. Do you want to know what a great evil covetousness is? – You can see this based on the epidemic from which we are now suffering: because, as you see, blood, which is one of the elements of the body, having increased enormously in quantity, brings death to those who suffer from this disease. So, just as the accumulation of surpluses in the body destroys the body, so covetousness destroys and mortifies the soul, expelling from it God’s grace, which is the expression of a more divine (exalted) life. This spiritual death always precedes physical death, which occurred due to the abandonment of man by God, since as a result of sin and rejection of God’s commandment at the beginning, death entered the world, but man, having thus sinned, did not die immediately after this, because God gave him time for repentance. God could bring all people in their entirety into existence out of nothing, just as He created Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Strength, Power, Dominion, Cherubim, Seraphim, and the Highest Thrones. He only conceived, and, behold, His thought became action, and all of them together in their entirety came into being. So He could, in a single moment, create the entire human race (in its entirety), and, again, at one certain moment He could, through death, wipe it off the face of the earth, as He did during the Flood, preserving only Noah and his sons for the birth of a new generation of people. But out of His love for mankind, He did not want to do this, but arranged it so that on another, or better yet on many others, whether related in the flesh or not, each of us could see the inevitability of death, and thereby, as a result of this fact, moved towards repentance and concern for the afterlife. Since God sees that we live completely far from repentance and do not show any concern for the future life, He rightly brings death to almost all of us as a whole, not allowing us to live in evil and commit sins. And death is the extreme punishment here for sinners, as we learned from the Egyptian plagues. So, even based on the type of this just punishment, we can conclude: how gravely we have sinned before God; for when a person punishes, it is possible that this happens without actual guilt (the person being punished) or because of some small sin, the offender is subjected to severe punishment due to the unreasonableness or cruelty of the punisher; but the highest (God's) love for mankind cannot be moved to such an extent to anger and to inflict deadly blows, unless, indeed, we sin great sins, and, while sinning, remain in unrepentance. Consequently, brothers, and on the basis of this, let us realize the multitude and severity of our sins, and let everyone turn away from their carnal worldview and turn to the Lord. Let us repent from the heart and turn away from evil habits and sin-loving ways of thinking, so that we can stop God’s wrath and change it to mercy. Let us cure our evil so that we will not be destroyed by it. Let us imitate not those who perished in the Flood, but the Ninevites who were saved by repentance; They, although they did not have then, on the basis of many examples, the concept of God’s love for mankind, however, they zealously cried out to the Lord, and each one turned from his evil way and from the violence of his hands, saying: “Who knows, if God repents and turns from the wrath of His wrath, we will not perish” (John 3:9). We recognize God’s love for mankind both on the basis of many other things and on the basis of this story with the Ninevites; for “God saw their works, as if they had repented and turned (from their evil ways): and He repented of the evil that He had said He would do to them, and He would not do it” (Jon. 3:10). But there, behold, there was Jonah - proclaiming and threatening and, by no means, calling for repentance and not promising compassion (God's for repentant sinners)! Jonah, having descended from Judea to Joppa (Yapha), and from there, being thrown into the depths of the sea and swallowed up by a whale, after three days was returned to Nineveh and preached there. But how much greater is Jonah here! Because the Eternal Word of God Himself, whose image was Jonah, descended from heaven - as he did to Joppa, so He did to earth, and giving Himself over to temptations and sorrows - like that one to the waves - descended through death into the lowest part of the whole earth, by hell - like that one by a whale - swallowed up, and rising from there on the third day, promised the repentant the heavenly kingdom, and explained and announced to all of us what the affairs were repentance, which, however, rejecting, we are rightly given over to a cruel death. Yes, cruelty is death both in its coming and in anticipation, but it is many times more terrible not to turn from our sins; behold, for this reason the punishment increases, and then we will be given over to endless torment, which may none of us know from experience! Because if the disasters here seem unbearable to us, although they are passing and only affect the body, then what are those torments that torment the soul along with the body and from which we can never expect relief?! But let us repent, brethren, and turn, showing repentance in deed and word, and let us fall to God with a contrite heart, saying to Him: “Lord, do not reprove me with Your wrath; do not rebuke me with Your wrath” (Ps. 6:2); but - “do unto Thy servant according to Thy mercy” (Ps. 119:124). He is close to those who call on Him if they cry out not only with their lips, but also with their hearts, turning to Him in deeds and in the way of their lives. “Return to Me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord, “and I will not remember your iniquities” (Zech. 1:3; Is. 43:25). If we either flee in every possible way without looking back from our sins, or, through confession and repentance, through deeds that compensate for our sins, we appease God, with effective humility in us, propitiating Him towards us, then, with the support of God’s love for mankind, which makes up for our shortcomings, we will now get rid of this God’s wrath and from this untimely and massive death, which can result in general destruction; in the next century we will receive immortal life, to the glory of the one Life-Giver Christ, to Whom belongs glory, power, honor and worship with His Beginning Father and the Life-Giving Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen. PG.151:485–496. Homilia XXXIX. Dicta in supplicatione publica quae facta est propter insolitam et ubique tunc grassantem mortis plagam. This refers to the “golden calf” smelted in the desert by the Israelites. You might be interested in: