Поучение в пяток 1-й недели Великого поста. О теле человеческом

“Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit living in you” (1 Cor. VI, 19). Beloved brothers! At the present time, when we are preparing to become partakers of the all-holy Body and all-holy Blood of the God-Man, it is fitting for us to enter into consideration of the significance of our own body. Its meaning is extremely important. The Holy Apostle Paul depicted this meaning as follows: “Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit living in you.” Brethren! have we paid due attention to the meaning of our body? Have we not looked at this object easily and superficially, as an object that does not need any consideration? Meanwhile, God proclaims to us through the mouth of the Apostle: “Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit living in you.” The human body was taken from the earth, but it was not created for the earth. It fell into corruption; it was not created for corruption. Created, beautified by the Creator for eternity and eternal, it, immediately after creation, is revived by an immortal and holy soul, and together with it is raptured from earth into a bright paradise for stay in it, for spiritual activity, for spiritual pleasure; it was incapable of carnal pleasures. It could not come out of the hands of the All-Holy Creator except completely pure and holy; subsequently distorted and disfigured by sin. His eye was so pure that it did not see the nakedness of the other members, which, in turn, did not represent anything that needed to be covered. The soul was not overwhelmed and agitated by passions; the body was not disturbed by them either. The blood did not boil from anger and it did not cool from sadness and despondency. Death was foreign to this body; illnesses were unusual for him; it had no need to protect itself from the influence of the elements; it was not a bond and a prison for the soul: it was a wonderful, eternally new garment for it. The man fell. Sin struck with death both his soul and his body. The realm of death over humanity is so universal and so powerful that not one of the numerous human family has escaped it; Every person is born with the beginning of death in himself, can be subjected to it every hour during earthly life, and will certainly be subjected to it at his certain hour. It is unmistakably possible to recognize all the wanderers of the earth as moving dead! What is our life on earth if not a constant struggle with death? From such a state we cannot in any way infer the state that was natural to man before his fall; We cannot judge the body of the primordial by our body. We can contemplate the primordial blissful and immortal state only in Divine Revelation. We can see experimental, complete proof of it in our Lord Jesus Christ and partly in those chosen ones of God who demonstrated not only in their souls, but also in their bodies, the power of redemption given by the God-man to humanity. Adam's body did not drown in waters, did not burn from fire, and was inaccessible to death 42. Thus appeared the body of the new Adam, our Lord Jesus Christ; it tasted death, but tasted it solely by the good will of the God-Man: having tasted death, it did not cease to be alive, because, having been separated from the soul, it was not separated from the Divinity. It ascended to heaven, repeating in abundance the rapture of Adam's body into paradise. There it will attract the bodies of true Christians: “where the body is all holy, there the spiritual eagles will be gathered” (Luke XVII, 37). Although we see that now the bodies of the deceased fathers and brothers are descending into a gloomy grave and are covered with earth; although we expect that the same fate will befall our bodies; but we believe and know that these bodies will not remain in the earth forever. They will be resurrected. Moreover, the resurrected righteous and the living righteous - I call true Christians righteous - will not remain on earth: on the last day of this transitory world, at the beginning of the unevening day of eternity, they will be caught up with their bodies into the air, to meet the Lord, and so always there - in heaven, they will abide with the Lord (1 Cor. XV, 51–52; 1Sol. IV, 15–17). A body sown into the grave in corruption will rise in incorruption, will rise in glory, will rise in power; the earthly body will become a heavenly body, the spiritual body will become a spiritual body (1 Cor. XV, 42-44). This is the purpose of the human body. It will be born infected with death and sin, it will be born into death, in the image of that body, which was the body of the first, created from dust and returning to dust, the lost man; but is reborn in the baptismal font for salvation in the image of the body that the Heavenly Man received, conceived and born of the Holy Spirit and the Most Pure Virgin: “for as soon as you were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ” (Gal. III, 27). Through the wonderful sacrament of the Eucharist, our body is united with the body of Christ Himself - the body is united with the Divine body, the blood with the Divine blood. “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood,” said the Lord, “abides in me, and I in him” (John VI, 56). He who eats the all-holy body of Christ and drinks the all-holy blood of Christ, through such fullness of eating, comes into perfect union with the God-man: his body becomes the body of the God-man, his blood becomes the blood of the God-man. A true Christian rests in the Lord, and the Lord rests in him; the Christian is clothed with Christ, and again in the Christian is Christ. Contemplating this greatness of Christians, the Apostle calls out to us: “Your bodies are the delight of Christ” (1 Cor. VI, 15). “The body of the Lord and the Lord the body” (1 Cor. VI, 13). “Put on our Lord Jesus Christ, and do not please the flesh through lust” (Rom. 13:14). “The gifts of the Holy Spirit,” said some great saint of God, 43 “are already natural to a renewed nature.” It is already natural for the body, which is one with the body of Christ, to be the temple of the Holy Spirit: where Christ is, there the Holy Spirit is unfused and inseparable from Christ. Many true servants of God demonstrated during their earthly life the presence of the Holy Spirit in their bodies and thereby experimentally proved that the bodies of Christians should and can be the temple of the Holy Spirit. The shadow of the Holy Apostle Peter healed the sick (Acts V, 15); accessories made of linen, which the Holy Apostle Paul had for his use, were brought to the sick - and the sick were healed by touching them, and unclean spirits left those tormented by them (Acts XIX, 12). Echidna, this most poisonous snake, bit the Apostle; but he remained unharmed, as if he had not been bitten by a snake at all. Some Saints walked on waters, flowed through large spaces like winged ones in a very short time, and during prayers raised their bodies from the ground, as if, in the words of some holy writer, 44 initiating a future admiration in the air and demonstrating the ability for such admiration. Not only in their souls, but in their very bodies the Holy Spirit acted! Just as in human bodies, reduced to the likeness of senseless beasts, various passions boil; so, on the contrary, in consecrated bodies Divine grace boils and overflows, delighting the body with heavenly and spiritual sweetness, and at the same time killing it for sin. After the soul is separated from such a body, corruption does not dare to touch it: because, despite the absence of a soul, the Holy Spirit is co-present with it, revealing His presence with various signs worthy of the Spirit and characteristic of the Spirit. Why are our bodies alien to spiritual sanctification? Why is it that our bodies are only capable of bestial sensations, while the Holy Spirit has testified that “there is one other flesh for men, and another for the flesh of beasts” (1 Cor. 15:39)? Because we do not heed the warning of our Lord, Who said: “Take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be burdened with gluttony and drunkenness and the sorrows of this life” (Luke XXI, 34). Our hearts are burdened, our souls cling to the earth: such a position of the spirit reduces the body to whiteness, and we remain alien to the experimental knowledge that “our flesh can rejoice in the living God” (Ps. 83:3): We have grief in our hearts, and the body will be drawn there, following the heart. Let us love the Lord as He commanded to love Himself, “with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, with all our strength” (Mark XII, 30), which cannot be done without the participation of the body. Let us make our bodies spiritual, heavenly! Let us save them from the sorrowful transition from prison to prison: from the prison of the grave to the prison of hell. We have an indispensable obligation to do this: we were originally created for heaven, subsequently, after the fall, we were redeemed for heaven. We completely belong to God, and not to ourselves. “Bring your own,” the Apostle tells us: “you bought them with natural price,” at the price of the priceless blood of the Son of God. “Glorify God in all your bodies, and in your souls, which are God:” “For your body, not only your souls, is the temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells in you” (1 Cor. VI, 19-20). Amen. Ave. Macarius the Great, word 4, chapter 3. Great Sisoi. See Skete Patericon. Callista and Ignatius Xapfopoulov on silence and prayer, ch. 25. Dobrotol., part 2. You might be interested in: