Поучение в 27-ю неделю. Объяснение дневного Евангелия: Иисус бе уча на едином от сонмищ в субботу

Beloved brothers! It is comforting to hear that our Lord Jesus Christ on the Sabbath day, which in the Old Testament Church had the same meaning that the Sunday or weekly day has in the New Testament, was engaged in teaching the people (Luke 13:10–17). Now we, gathered here in the holy church, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, eighteen centuries after His departure from the earth, are doing the same. With our bodily eyes we do not see our Lord, but we look at Him and see Him with the eyes of faith: we hear his teaching, proclaimed by the Holy Gospel; the events that accompanied His earthly journey, described with holy simplicity and extraordinary clarity by the apostles, are picturesquely depicted before us; they seem to be taking place before us. Through the holy sacraments we are brought into constant communion with the Lord; we can strengthen and develop this communication by constant reflection on Him, activities directed according to His all-holy commandments, constant prayerful attitude towards Him and calling on Him. Exactly: our Lord Jesus Christ is among us. He is not there only for those who reject His presence. This is not a work of overheated imagination! This is not a seductive dream! The Lord Himself said to His disciples: “Behold, I am with you, always to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). He who does not see the Lord present is not a disciple of Christ. There is no benefit in seeing the Lord with bodily eyes when the mind is blind, when faith - this power of spiritual vision - does not work. On the contrary, when faith acts, then the Heavens are opened, and the Son is seen at the right hand of the Father, everywhere according to the Divinity and fulfilling everything, indescribable 167 . Nothing prevents us from acquiring faith! Let us acquire faith and we will receive a vision. Let us stop being content with the weak literal knowledge of God; Let us stretch out our weakened hands to the works of faith; let us acquire active, living faith—the Lord appears only to this faith. The eyes of the body are insensitive and blind when the mind is blind. Our Lord Jesus Christ, during His stay on earth, performed the most amazing miracles to confirm His Divinity; These signs were so obvious and tangible that the Divinity of God incarnate had to become obvious and clear to the most limited, to the most sensual people. But people looked with all their eyes and saw nothing. As if with surprise and bewilderment, as if complaining about his contemporaries and being sick about them, the Evangelist says: “I will do such a sign for Him before them, I will not believe in Him!” (John 12:37) Further, the Evangelist discovers the reason for this blindness: darkening of the mind, hardening of the heart, born from a sinful life, making the vigilance and health of the sensual eyes useless for the knowledge of the Truth (John 12:40; John 3:19–20). The event told in the Gospel today is terrible. The Lord, after delivering a teaching to the people, sealed the teaching with the healing of a woman who was languishing under the burden of a serious and long-term illness. Those who did not understand the words could understand the miracle; those who did not recognize God from His “word of the eternal life,” as St. Peter learned (John 6:68), could at least recognize a godly man by the sign that was accomplished, as Nicodemus knew (John 3:2) or as the healed blind man knew (John 9:33). The spectacle was the most pitiful, edifying, amazing. The fallen angel, to whom humanity submitted and became a part of the fall, bound a certain woman with a strange, extremely tiresome illness. The woman hunched over and remained in this bent position for eighteen years, unable to straighten her limbs or give them any rest from the forced, unnatural position. The Lord said to this woman: “Woman, you have been released from your illness. And he laid his hand on her and stretched out his arms, and glorified God” (Luke 13:12–13). While the woman, who had so easily shaken off the burden that weighed on her, glorified God in delight; while the assembly of the people indulged in feelings of just joy at the obvious action of Divine grace, clearly revealed by the deliverance of the sufferer from the calamity that oppressed and exhausted her, at this time the elder of the congregation became indignant. He doesn't see a miracle! He doesn't see healing! He does not see the Redeemer and Savior of men! He does not see the Holy Spirit at work! He doesn’t even see a godly person: his mental eye is perverted by some incomprehensible and incomprehensible hellish power! He saw in God's action a violation of God's Law. He meticulously found labor and work in the effortless healing of the sick woman and, in his self-deception, directed against this healing the commandment of God, which commanded to engage in labor and work on six days of the week, and forbade doing it on the Sabbath day. The essence of the matter was that the elder of the cathedral was a Pharisee, at least in his spiritual mood, and when he saw, in his opinion, a man, a servant of God, supporting his strong word with a miracle, he became inflamed with envy. The cause of envy was pride and vanity: the elder wanted to excel in the opinion of the people with his earthly truth. This primacy is easily obtained by the revealed Heavenly Truth; the elder, in order to maintain his wrong primacy, rebels against Heavenly Truth, tries to humiliate and slander it, in order to cover up the vileness of his behavior with the guise of justice, and presents himself as a zealot of the law. The Lord, the knower of the heart, rebuked the Pharisee. He called his behavior hypocritical. Hypocrisy, trying to satisfy its passions, working entirely towards sin, wants to preserve the guise of virtue in the eyes of people. Among our passions, vanity occupies a very significant place, seeking to enjoy human praise. It does not care whether this praise is fair or unfair, whether the ways to receive it are right or wrong, obtaining praise by any means is the whole goal of the vain hypocrite. God is forgotten by him: the hypocrite is incapable of either faith or knowledge of God. “How can you believe,” the Lord said to the Jews, a significant and major part of whom were infected with Pharisaism, “accepting glory from each other, and not seeking glory from the one God?” (John 5:44) The elder of the Jewish host, mentioned today in the Gospel, proved by experience the hypocrite’s inability to believe in Christ and accept the Redeemer. This vain soul, thirsting for praise and human veneration, recognizing itself as worthy of them, could not tolerate the fact that the involuntary praise and surprise of people was attracted by the miracle that had taken place before everyone. This soul was seething with envy. It was impossible to reject the miracle: she seeks to humiliate him, to humiliate him, accusing God’s miracle of violating God’s Law. The hypocrite with determination enters into the fight against God, with determination he begins to blaspheme the Holy Spirit and pronounces it. If the one who performed the miracle was a grace-filled person, then the Pharisee despised and blasphemed the grace of the Spirit. If the one who performed the miracle was a God-man, then the Pharisee enters into open opposition to God. A true miracle cannot be accomplished by a person by himself: it is accomplished by the good will and action of the all-holy God and therefore cannot in any way be contrary to the will of God and the Law of God. The Pharisee’s accusation and disparagement of God’s sign only serves as a revelation of his mental darkness and heart’s hardening, produced by a sinful life. The daring, terrible act of the Pharisee, who dared to condemn the action of the Savior in the very presence of the Savior, deserves our special attention and must be mourned with hot and inconsolable tears. He should be mourned with such tears, because he arose from the common fall and rejection of us all. We must pay special attention to it, so that, having weighed its full weight and fearing it as something truly terrible and painful, we can avoid it. And now Christ acts; and now the Holy Spirit performs saving signs in the Christian sacraments! And now God has detractors, opponents, and His enemies among men. Every kind of sinful life contains resistance and opposition to God; every kind of sinful life is a violation of the Law of God, there is a rejection of the will of God. “Everyone commits sin,” said the Apostle, “and he commits lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). Hypocrisy is that type of sinfulness that especially opposes the knowledge of Christ and Christianity. The beginning of turning to Christ lies in the knowledge of one’s sinfulness, one’s fall; from such a view of himself, a person recognizes the need for a Redeemer and approaches Christ through humility, faith and repentance. But a hypocrite, suffering from passions that are not quite noticeable for people - vanity, pride, love of money, envy, deceit, malice - covering them with hypocrisy and pretense, is incapable, just as Satan is incapable, of recognizing himself as a sinner. And virtues and passions become, as it were, natural from skill, and hypocrisy from skill becomes, as it were, a natural quality. Those who possess it no longer see hypocrisy as the most destructive vice; they commit acts of hypocrisy as if they were acts of truth. The soul of the hypocrite is struck by blindness: why did the Lord call the Pharisees insane and “blind” (Matthew 23:16–26). A hypocrite is that unfortunate, in his opinion, righteous person who is rejected by God: “I did not come,” said the Savior, “to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Matthew 9:13). Here the Pharisees are called righteous not because they were exactly righteous, but because they themselves recognized themselves as such, fulfilling with petty precision the ritual decrees of the Law of God and trampling on its essence, which lies in the direction of the mind, heart, and entire human being according to the will of God. The Lord gave people the virtue of repentance to reconcile them with God; How could those who were completely satisfied with themselves and expected in the promised Messiah to be primarily a conqueror who was supposed to crown their carnal, absurd righteousness, filled with pride and malice, with abundant carnal rewards, accept this spiritual gift? In their darkness and bitterness, the Pharisees even boasted of their inability to know and accept the Redeemer: “Whoever is of the prince who believed in him, or of the Pharisees,” they said (John 7:48). The Lord also pointed out this inability of them to truly know God: “Amen, I say to you,” He said to them, “you are preparing publicans and fornicators in the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 21:31). An obvious sinner, a sinner who has fallen into mortal sins, a sinner who has attracted the contempt and disgust of people, is more capable of repentance than that imaginary righteous person who, in outward behavior, is blameless, but in the secret of his soul is satisfied with himself. Pharisaism is a terrible illness of the human spirit, similar to the illness that afflicts a fallen angel, with which this angel keeps for himself, as if a treasure, his fall. “Take heed to yourselves,” the Lord commanded his disciples, “from the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy” (Luke 12:1). Hypocrisy is called leaven because it, having crept into the soul, penetrates into all thoughts, into all feelings, into all the deeds of a person, becoming his character, as if his soul. Anyone who wants to protect himself from hypocrisy must, firstly, according to the will of the Lord, do all good deeds in secret (Matthew 6:1-6); then he must renounce judging his neighbor. Condemning one's neighbor is a sign of hypocrisy, according to the all-holy instructions of the Gospel (Matthew 7:5). In order not to condemn one’s neighbor, one must renounce judgment about one’s neighbor, which is why in the Gospel commandment, which prohibits judging one’s neighbor, judgment about him is first prohibited. “Judge not, and you will not be judged: and condemn not, lest you be condemned” (Luke 6:37). At first, people allow themselves to judge the affairs of their neighbor, and then they involuntarily fall into condemnation. Let us not sow seed, and the tares will not grow; let us forbid ourselves unnecessary judgment about our neighbors, and there will be no condemnation. They will ask here: what is the connection between judging your neighbor and hypocrisy? This connection is obvious. He who condemns and humiliates his neighbor unwittingly exposes himself as righteous, perhaps without saying it in words and without even understanding it. We are all sinners: any presentation of oneself as righteous, both direct and indirect, is hypocrisy. When we get together for a friendly conversation, often, if not always, most of this conversation consists of gossip about our neighbor, ridicule of him, slander, humiliation, and denigration of him. Sharp words flow like a river; laughter and laughter are heard as signs of approval; In this unfortunate time of self-forgetfulness and self-delusion, our souls become familiar with demonic properties and are imbued with the poison of hypocrisy. The Holy Gospel here also pursues sin, seeking our salvation: “every idle word,” it threatens us, “if men speak, they will repay the word about it on the day of judgment: for by their words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matthew 12:36-37). Let us, brethren, look closely at the beginnings of sins, let us protect ourselves from the beginnings of sin, and let us avoid sinful development. The seeds of sin, such as idle talk, are, at first glance, insignificant: they imperceptibly sow the field of the soul. But when these seeds sprout, especially when the sprouts become stronger and mature, then sin embraces the whole person, and the destruction of sin becomes extremely difficult. “Whoever forbids gossip from his lips,” said a certain great holy father, “keeps his heart from passions. He who keeps his heart from passions sees the Lord every hour. He who concentrates the vision of his mind within himself sees the spiritual dawn within himself” 168. What will we see, brothers, in our spiritual cell when the divine light illuminates it? We will see countless of our sins. The fall of our ancestor, which the Holy Scripture will tell us about, we will see and perceive in ourselves 169; we will see and perceive within ourselves the need for a Redeemer. Having come to know the Redeemer in our Lord Jesus Christ, we confess Him; Having known and confessed, we will see Him and worship Him with that worship that is fitting and fitting for God, our Creator and Savior. Amen. Troparion at the Hours of Holy Pascha St. Isaac of Syria. Word 8th Hieromartyr Peter of Damascus, Prince. 1, art. 2 You might be interested in: