Поучение в среду 1-й недели Великого поста. О вреде лицемерства

“Even if you fast, do not be like a hypocrite and complain” (Matthew VI, 16). Beloved brothers! Our Lord Jesus Christ, having commanded us before entering into the feat of fasting to forgive our neighbors for their sins, commanded us to carefully protect fasting itself from hypocrisy. Just as a worm that originates inside a fruit destroys the entire inside of the fruit, leaving only its shell, so hypocrisy destroys the entire essence of virtue. Hypocrisy is born from vanity (Matt. VI, 1–2, 5, 16). Vanity is a vain desire and the search for temporary human praise. Vanity arises from deep ignorance of God or from deep oblivion of God, from oblivion of eternity and heavenly glory, and therefore, in its darkness, it insatiably strives to acquire earthly temporal glory. This glory seems to him, like earthly life, an eternal, inalienable property. Vanity, which seeks not virtue itself, but only praise for virtue, cares and works only to present the face of virtue before human eyes. And humanity faces a hypocrite, clothed in the robe of sheer deception: on his outward appearance one can see virtue, which in essence he does not have at all; in his soul one can see complacency and pompousness, because he is, first of all, deceived and deceived in himself. He painfully enjoys the vanity that kills him, painfully enjoys the deception of his neighbors, painfully and unfortunately enjoys the successful hypocrisy. At the same time, he becomes alien to God: before God, “every one who is high-hearted is unclean” (Proverbs 16:5). Vanity and the hypocrisy it engenders are destructive at their very beginning: they deprive a person of every heavenly reward, giving him the vain human praise he has chosen and desired as his only reward. Such a sentence was pronounced by the Lord on vain hypocrites. Instructing His disciples to do good deeds in secret, the Lord commands: “Take heed that you do not do your alms before men, so that you may be seen by them; otherwise, you will not receive any reward from your Father who is in heaven. Whenever you give alms, do not blow the trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the congregations and hundred places, that they may be glorified by men... And when you pray, do not wake them up, as the hypocrites do, for they love to pray worthily in the congregations and in the hundred ways, that they may appear to man... Whenever you fast, do not wake them up as hypocrites lament: for they darken their faces, that they may appear to men to fast: Amen, I say unto you, that they may receive their reward. And you, having fasted, anoint your head and wash your face: for lest you appear by man to fast, but to your Father who is in secret: and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you in reality” (Matthew VI, 1–2, 5, 16–18). Vanity and hypocrisy are terrible in their development and maturity, when they prevail over a person, when they turn into a rule of activity, into character. They form a Pharisee, striving with frantic and blind determination to commit all lawlessness and atrocities; they create a Pharisee who needs the mask of virtue only in order to drown more freely and successfully in atrocities. The darkened and embittered Pharisees committed the most terrible crime among human crimes: they committed deicide. And if there could have been any crime more severe, they would not have shuddered: they would have encroached on it. This is a deplorable picture of moral devastation, moral disasters caused by vanity and hypocrisy in fallen human nature. Our Redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ, who has given us the most effective healing against all our ailments, physical and mental, commands us to heal the passion of hypocrisy at its root, at its beginning, in vanity. Vanity hungers and thirsts for human glory. The Lord commanded to kill him with his characteristic famine. He commanded that food and drink—human praise—be taken away from vanity; He commanded that all good deeds be carefully hidden from the eyes of men; he commanded that all good deeds, even love for one’s neighbors, should be sacrificed entirely to the one God. And the Old Testament, teaching the holy truth to the mysterious Israel through the painting of prototypes, establishes: “Let every gift of your sacrifice be salted with salt: do not forsake the salt of the covenant of the Lord from your sacrifices; in every gift you offer you must offer salt to the Lord your God” (Lev. II, 13). Salt in every gift, in every sacrifice to the God of the Israelite is the thought and goal of pleasing God in every good deed of a Christian. The Holy Fathers, teachers of the Church, in the light of Christ, in the light of the Holy Spirit, having peered into the depths of the human heart, having seen in this depth the mode of action of various passions, call vanity a diverse passion, the most subtle, incomprehensible 39 . All other passions disturb a person’s peace of mind and are immediately denounced by conscience; the passion of vanity, on the contrary, flatters the fallen son of Adam, brings him a kind of pleasure, seems to be spiritual consolation as a reward for a good deed. All other passions directly violate the virtues opposite to them: thus abstinence is violated by overeating, meekness by anger, generosity by the love of money. Vanity does not seem to violate any virtue; it, having thus taken away from man the remembrance of God, of the unspeakable greatness of God, of His unspeakable shrine, before which “heaven itself is unclean” (Job XV, 15), entices fallen man to look at himself with approval and pleasure, to admire himself. “I am not like other people,” it says! ( OK. 18, 11) In his blindness from self-satisfaction, the vain person thanks God, forgetting that thanksgiving to God by fallen humanity can only be brought from the vision of the multitude of one’s own sins and infirmities, a vision combined with the vision of the ineffable benefits of the Creator to His creation, to the lost creation. Vanity rejoices when it sees that a person is enriched with virtues: it hopes to turn every virtue into sin, it hopes to make every virtue the reason and reason for the condemnation of a person at the judgment of Christ. It attempts to prophesy! It boldly strives to create miracles, and decides to tempt the Lord! Alien to a spiritual gift, it seeks to present itself as having a gift, or at least to instill suspicion of itself in people, as if of something supernatural; it seeks to console itself with this deception. It is co-present with the ascetic during his fasting, during his prayer, during his almsgiving, during his vigils, during his kneeling, trying to delight the sacrifice offered to God, and, having desecrated it with man-pleasing, make it obscene. It pursues the servant of Christ in the solitude of his cell, in his seclusion; not being able to provide the ascetic with soul-destroying praise from outside spectators, he brings him praise in thoughts, draws and seductively depicts human glory in his imagination. Often it acts without thought or dreaming; but it is known only by the absence from the heart of blessed tenderness, blessed remembrance and contrition for sins. “If you do not have heartfelt tears,” said some great Father, “you have vanity” 40. Let us resist with determination, with selflessness, the soul-destructive and flattering passion of vanity! Let us resist it by establishing our weak heart on the rock of Christ’s commandments, which in itself conveniently sways, as if from the winds, from the influence and action of various passions on it. Having rejected and constantly rejected vanity, we will be safe from another passion, from the terrible passion of hypocrisy. We will perform our good deeds and exploits according to the instructions of the Savior - in secret. When taking part in church activities, let us beware of displaying any special impulses of our piety that would sharply distinguish us from our brethren. “Pay attention to this,” said Saint John Climacus, so that, being among your brothers, you will not seem more righteous than them in anything. By doing otherwise, you will do two evils: you will offend your brothers with your feigned zeal, and you will certainly give yourself a reason for arrogance. Be diligent in your soul, without revealing it either by body movement, or appearance, or word, or fall” 41. If, in a solitary retreat, during solitary prayer, during soul-edifying reading and meditation, a vainglorious thought, penetrating through the closed door, penetrating to our very mind, to our very heart, presents to us, to deceive us, human glory as an adorned harlot, let us rather raise the thought to heaven before God. When the human mind is illuminated by the spiritual contemplation of Divine glory and greatness, and descends from there to the contemplation of itself: then it no longer sees the greatness of humanity. He sees his poverty, sinfulness, weakness, fall; sees the sentence of death pronounced on everyone; sees the decay and stench of everyone during the gradual, inevitable execution of the sentence. He acquires a correct concept of man, alien to vain deception, and exclaims along with Job: Sovereign Lord! “Now my eye sees You. In the same way I reproached myself and died: and I remember earth and ashes for myself” (Job XLII, 5, 6). True humility comes from the knowledge of God. Amen. Venerable Cassian the Roman. About eight passionate thoughts; St. John Climacus, word 22, about vanity. The Great Barsanuphius, according to the link of Xanthopoulov, ch. 25, Philokalia, part 2. You might be interested in: