Поучение в неделю всех святых, 1-ю по Пятидесятнице. Знамение избранных Божиих

“Everyone who has confessed Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in heaven. And whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32–33). The Lord said this to His disciples, who then stood before Him; this was said by the all-seeing Lord, who looks at the distant future as if it were the present, and said this to all His disciples, without exception, of all times and countries; The Lord said this to you, who are standing here in His church, who have inscribed yourself among His disciples by holy Baptism. Just as lightning quickly flows from one end of the heavens to the other, without losing anything in its brilliance, so the definition of the Lord reached us after eighteen centuries, in all its power and clarity it was announced to us today in the Gospel. The disciples of the Lord are not only those who are called Christians in His name, not only those who have taken upon themselves vows of serving Him: the disciples are those who truly confess Him as their Lord, confess Him as the sovereign Master over themselves and the eternal King, following His teaching as the teaching of the Lord, fulfilling His commandments as the commandments of the Lord. Confession must be done with the mind, heart, word, deed, and whole life. Shame, timidity, hesitation are intolerable during confession. Confession requires decisive self-sacrifice. It should be solemn. It must be fulfilled, as if in open disgrace, before all humanity, before the holy angels and before the fallen angels, before the eyes of earth and heaven. “The world is a disgrace, both angel and man” (1 Cor. 4:9), says the Holy Apostle Paul about himself and about the other holy apostles. The apostles were not ashamed and were not afraid to confess the God-Man, who was executed by slander, condemned by the ecclesiastical and civil courts, they were not ashamed and were not afraid to confess before the ecclesiastical and civil courts, before the strong and wise of the earth, before tyrants and tormentors, in the face of torture and executions, in the face of violent death. The same confession of the Lord was brought to the Lord by the holy martyrs, who watered the entire expanse of the earth with their blood, and made the whole earth public with the holy testimony of the true knowledge of God and worship of God. The reverend monks confessed the Lord through invisible martyrdom and constant self-sacrifice throughout their lives: they served as a union of earth with heaven, angels with men, belonging to heaven during their stay on earth, and entering into communion with angels and their faces during their stay on earth. Those saints of God who labored in the midst of the world, to whom the words of the Gospel can be attributed with such justice: “These are in the world, and are not of the world” (John 17:11, 16) confessed the Lord with contempt and trampling upon the principles of the world. Confession of the Lord, accompanied by a decisive and complete renunciation of the world and oneself, was the sign of all saints. Whoever, during his earthly pilgrimage, confesses the Lord with a confession bequeathed by the Lord, whoever proves with his life that he definitely confesses the Lord as his Lord and God, the Lord confesses him as His disciple; He confesses to his relatives not only before the universe, he confesses before God the Father. Confession of a person by God the Son before God the Father is the introduction of this person into the closest unity with God (John 14:20). God-established God-pleasing confession of God by a person is a sign of God’s election of that person. Inclusion in the number of the chosen ones is the fruit of good human will. Confession that is weak and ambiguous is not accepted and is rejected as obscene, as unworthy of God. Confession in the secret of the soul is not enough; confession with the lips and the word is necessary. Confession in word is not enough; confession in deeds and life is necessary. “Whoever will be ashamed of Me,” said the Lord, “and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, and the Son of man will be ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38). We must not only confess the Lord, we must not only acknowledge His Divinity and sovereignty, we must confess His teaching, we must confess His commandments. The commandments are confessed by fulfilling them. Their fulfillment, contrary to the customs generally accepted in human society, is the confession of the Lord and His words before men. Human society is called sinful and adulterous because it, for the most part, has deviated into a sinful life, betrayed and exchanged the love of God for the love of sin. The customs that dominate the world, which have the meaning of a law that exceeds all laws, are disgusting and hostile to living a life pleasing to God. Living a life pleasing to God serves as a subject of hatred and ridicule for the proud world. In order to avoid the hatred of the world, its persecutions and arrows, a weak heart, unsupported by faith, inclines toward man-pleasing, betrays the teachings of the Lord, and excludes itself from among the elect. The Lord confirms His disciples in loyalty to Himself and His teaching, confirms them with a formidable word, a formidable definition, announced at the right time. “Everyone who has confessed Me before men, let us also confess him before My Father who is in heaven. And whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven.” Dependence on human society is weaker than family dependence. It is more convenient to evade submission to the demands of society than to evade submission to the demands of the family. Family demands are supported by natural law, and when these demands agree with the law of God, the law of God itself will help them. A servant of Christ is often perplexed by contradictory demands, not knowing which of them should be considered acceptable to God. The Lord, who foresaw it, resolves this bewilderment and resolves it with all satisfaction. He supplemented the above words with the following: “Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 10:37). “Whoever prefers the will of his parents or any relatives in the flesh to My will, who prefers their way of thinking and their thinking to My teaching, who prefers pleasing them to pleasing Me, he is unworthy of Me.” Difficulties and obstacles to the confession of Christ that affect a Christian from the outside mean little in comparison with the difficulties and obstacles that he finds within himself. Sin, living in the mind, heart, body, is directly opposed to the confession of Christ, the confession of fulfilling His commandments; sin stubbornly opposes this fulfillment. The most natural good, damaged by sin, complicates confession, trying to introduce into this confession, to mix with it the confession of the virtues of fallen nature. By such a confusion the confession of Christ is destroyed, an incomplete fall is attributed to the fallen nature, the meaning is taken away from Christ, a meaning that, as all-perfect, does not tolerate admixture, requires consciousness of the decisive damage to nature by the fall 115. It is possible to escape from human society, from relatives, but where can you escape from yourself? where can I hide from my nature? how to get rid of it? To liberate fallen nature from enslavement, the Lord commands the crucifixion of nature, that is, the rejection of its mind and its will, the nailing of the actions of the mind and the inclinations of the heart to the commandments of the Gospel. Thus, “they who are Christ’s are the flesh crucified with passions and lusts” (Gal. 5:24): they crucified the carnal wisdom and the will of the fallen nature, on which the sinful attractions of the soul and body, and sinful life are based and built. Thus the world was crucified to the apostle, and the apostle to the world (Gal. 6:14). Saint David prayed to God for the granting of strength and ability for such a crucifixion: “Nail my fear to Thy fear” (Ps. 119:120), that is, my carnal wisdom and my will, so that they remain inactive! “Make Thy word to Thy servant to fear” (Ps. 119:38), so that I may be unswervingly guided in my visible and invisible activities only by Thy word. Whoever mortifies his fallen nature with the sword of the teachings of Christ, “whoever loses his soul for the sake of Me and the Gospel,” said the Lord, “will find it, he will save it” (Matthew 10:39; Mark 8:35). On the contrary, the one who acts according to the understandings and inclinations of fallen nature, mistakenly recognizing them as good, “having found his soul, will destroy it. He who does not accept his cross will not take upon himself the yoke of My commandments, and will follow Me in self-denial, but will follow himself, and is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 10:38–39). The Holy Church, in the intention of explaining in the most satisfactory way the fate of God's chosen ones in time and in eternity, decided to read today, after we heard the terrible, impartial, decisive definition that came from the mouth of God, the Lord's answer to the question of the holy Apostle Peter. “Then Peter answered and said to him: “Behold, we have left everything, and followed You as a dead man: what then will happen to us?” (Matthew 19:27) The Lord promised special honor to the twelve apostles. Just as the God-man is the only eternal King of Israel, that is, the King of all Christians, this spiritual Israel, which must be made up of all the nations of the earth and populate the promised land - heaven, so the apostles of the God-man, through whom all nations were subjugated to the God-man, naturally became the leaders and judges of this new Israel, this eternal, heavenly people. Having declared to the apostles their significance in the state of re-existence (Matt. 19:28) human, the Lord added: “And everyone who leaves home, or brothers, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or village, for My sake and for the sake of the Gospel, will receive it a hundredfold now, in this time, in exile, and in the age to come will inherit eternal life” (Mark 10:29-30; Matt. 19:29). Earthly life is called exile. She is an exile, because people were cast down to earth and subjected to a painful wandering on it for the crime of the commandment of God. It is a place and time of exile for the followers of Christ, because the ruler of the world dominates in it, the dominion of sin prevails in it, hostile to the followers of Christ, pursuing them with incessant, fierce persecution. They are subjected to various torment of sin both within themselves and from without: with frantic malice and incredible cunning, their fallen spirits, thirsting for destruction, act against them; the majority of people who have arbitrarily enslaved themselves to fallen spirits and serve as blind, unfortunate instruments act against them with enthusiasm; their own passions and predilections act against them. And in this temporary exile, the followers of Christ receive a hundredfold in comparison with what they left for the sake of Christ and for the sake of His teaching. They tangibly receive the grace of the All-Holy Spirit. Before the consolation delivered by Divine grace, all the joys, all the pleasures of the world are insignificant; Before spiritual wealth, before spiritual glory, all the riches of the world, all its glory, are insignificant; sinful and carnal pleasures in the view of the saints of God are disgusting filth, filled with mortal bitterness; The position of the glorious and rich of the world is like watered-over coffins, shining on the outside, but inside filled with decay and stench - these qualities inseparable from every corpse. A soul struck by eternal death—alienation from Christ—should rightly be called a corpse. All earthly blessings and advantages leave a person, remain on earth when a person, according to the inevitable and inexorable law of death, leaves the earth and moves irrevocably into eternity. Divine grace will follow a different rule: it accompanies those who acquire it here into the afterlife. As soon as a person throws off his body like chains, grace, as if hitherto constrained by the flesh, develops extensively and majesticly. It serves as a pledge and testimony for God’s chosen one. When he appears at the court that awaits every person after his death, and presents his testimony and his pledge, then, according to them, as a logical consequence of them, spiritual, eternal, ineffable and unlimited riches, splendor, and pleasure are provided to him in heaven. “In the age to come he will inherit an eternal life” (Matthew 19:29; Mark 10:30), said the Lord, a life so abundant and graceful that a carnal man, basing his judgments about the unknown on concepts about the known, cannot form any concept about it through his own judgment. May we also be granted, for the exact confession of the Lord, to inherit this life, prepared for all of us by the incomprehensible, boundless mercy of the Lord who redeemed us with Himself. Amen. ( Gal. 5:4 ) ( Gal. 2:16, 21 ); A word about salvation. See Ascetic experiences, part 2 You might be interested in: