Поучение в неделю жен-мироносиц. О мертвости духа человеческого

The Gospel today announced (Mark 16:1–8; Luke 23:54–56, 24:1–11; Matt. 28:1–10) the exploits of the holy women who followed the God-man during His earthly journey, who were witnesses of His suffering, and who were present at His burial. The burial took place on Friday evening. When the anger of the Jews poured out, like fiery lava from fire-breathing Etna, rushing not only towards the Lord, but also towards all those close to Him; when the holy apostles were forced to hide or could only observe the amazing event from afar; when one confidante of love, for which there is no fear, persistently remained with the Lord, then the disciple, who was always hidden, constantly hiding his heartfelt pledge for fear of persecution from the Sanhedrin, an honorary member of the Sanhedrin, Joseph, suddenly tramples all the obstacles, hesitations, perplexities that had hitherto bound and worried him, comes to the cold and cruel Pilate, asks for the body of the one executed by diarrhea, receives the body, buries the body with reverence and honor. The Gospel gives Joseph's act the meaning of a generous, courageous act. That's how it was. A member of the Sanhedrin, in the face of the Sanhedrin, who committed the deicide, in the face of Jerusalem, who took part in the deicide, removes from the cross the body of the God-man, killed by men, and takes it to the garden located near the city gates and walls. There, in solitude and silence, under the shadow of the trees, in a new coffin, carved out of a solid stone rock, with an abundance of fragrance and ointments, he lays down the body with which the bodies and souls of all people were redeemed, wrapping this body in the purest shrouds, as a precious treasure is wrapped and covered. Another member of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus, took part in the burial of the Lord, who came to the Lord at night and recognized the Lord as the messenger of God. Having rolled a great stone to the doors of the tomb - the low opening into the cave is called the door in the Gospel - Joseph leaves as if he had completed his ministry with due satisfaction. The Sanhedrin monitored Joseph's actions. After his departure, he took the trouble to place a guard at the tomb and put a seal on the stone that blocked the entrance. The burial of the Lord was witnessed by both His followers and His enemies. Some members of the Sanhedrin, in a frenzy and rage, committing the greatest atrocity, unconsciously performed the greatest sacrifice (Acts 3:17–18): they redeemed humanity by the slaughter of the all-holy Sacrifice, concluded a fruitless series of educational sacrifices, and made these sacrifices and their very establishment unnecessary. Other members of the Sanhedrin, representatives of all the Old Testament righteous, in a godly direction and disposition of spirit, served the burial of the Redeemer of men, completed and sealed with this action the pious activity of the sons of the Old Testament. From here begins the exclusive ministry of the leaders of the New Testament. The holy women are not inferior in courageous self-sacrifice to Joseph. Having been present at the burial on Friday, they did not consider it permissible on Saturday - the day of rest - to disturb the peace in which the body of the Lord rested in the sacred darkness and shutter of the tomb cave. The women intended to pour out their zeal for the Lord by pouring out peace on His body. Returning from the burial on Friday, they immediately bought a significant amount of fragrant compositions and waited for the coming day on Saturday, called the day of the week, Sunday. On this day, as soon as the sun rose, the pious wives headed to the tomb. On the way, they remembered that a large stone was rolled up to the entrance to the coffin. This worried them, and the wives began to say to each other: “Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us? The stone was very great” (Mark 16:3–4). Arriving at the tomb, they, to their surprise, saw the stone rolled away. A luminous, strong angel rolled him away: after the resurrection of the Lord, he descended from heaven to the tomb that contained the One who cannot be contained by heaven, struck with horror the guards, together he crushed the seal and pushed away the heavy stone. He sat on a stone, awaiting the arrival of his wives. When they arrived, he announced to them about the resurrection of the Lord, commanding them to tell the apostles about it. For their zeal for the God-man, for their determination to honor the all-holy body, which was guarded by military guards, which was vigilantly watched by the hatred of the Sanhedrin, the holy women, the first of men, received accurate and true information about the resurrection of Christ, and became the first and powerful preachers of the resurrection, as if they had heard the news about it from the lips of an angel. The all-perfect God has no partiality: all people are equal before him, and that person is honored with special gifts of God, in special abundance and spiritual grace, who with great selflessness rushes to God. “Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us?” These words of the holy women have their own mysterious meaning. It is so edifying that love for one’s neighbors and the desire for their spiritual benefit do not allow one to remain silent about it. The coffin is our heart. The heart was a church; it became a coffin. Christ enters into it through the sacrament of Baptism to dwell in us and act from us. Then the heart is sanctified as a church to God. We deprive Christ of the opportunity to act, reviving our old man, constantly acting according to the attraction of our fallen will, our mind poisoned by lies. Christ, introduced by Baptism, continues to dwell in us, but as if wounded and killed by our behavior. The church of God not made by hands turns into a cramped and dark tomb. A “Veliy Zelo” stone is leaning against its entrance. The enemies of God place a guard at the tomb, seal the hole closed with a stone, sealing the stone to the rock so that, in addition to the weight, the significant seal forbids touching the stone. The enemies of God themselves observe the preservation of mortification! They thought about and set up all the obstacles to prevent the resurrection, to hinder it, to make it impossible. Stone is an ailment of the soul, which keeps all other ailments intact and which the Holy Fathers call insensibility 102. What kind of sin is this? Many will say that we have never heard of him. According to the definition of the fathers, insensibility is the killing of spiritual sensations, it is the invisible death of the human spirit in relation to spiritual objects with the full development of life in relation to material objects. It happens that from a long-term bodily illness all the strength is exhausted, all the abilities of the body wither, then the illness, not finding food for itself, ceases to torment the physique; it leaves the patient, leaving him exhausted, as if mortified, incapable of activity due to exhaustion from suffering, due to terrible, silent soreness, not expressed by any special suffering. The same thing happens with the human spirit. A long-term careless life among constant entertainment, among constant arbitrary sins, with forgetfulness about God, about eternity, with inattention or with the most superficial attention to the commandments and teachings of the Gospel, deprives our spirit of sympathy for spiritual objects, mortifies it in relation to them. Existing, they cease to exist for him, because his life has ceased for them: all his forces are directed towards one material, temporary, vain, sinful. Anyone who wants to impartially and thoroughly examine the state of his soul will see in it the illness of insensibility, will see the vastness of its meaning, will see the heaviness and importance of it, will recognize that it is a manifestation and evidence of the deadness of the spirit. When we want to start reading the Word of God, what boredom attacks us! How everything we read seems to us obscure, unworthy of attention, strange! How we wish to be freed from this reading as soon as possible! Why is this? Because we do not sympathize with the Word of God. When we stand up for prayer, what dryness and coldness we feel! How we rush to end our superficial, entertainment-filled prayer! Why is this? Because we are strangers to God: we believe in the existence of God with dead faith; It is not there for our sensation. Why have we forgotten eternity? Are we excluded from those who must enter its vast realm? Isn’t death facing us face to face, just as it is facing other people? Why is this? Because we have attached our whole soul to matter, we never think and do not want to think about eternity, we have lost a precious foretaste of it, and have acquired a false feeling for our earthly journey. This false feeling represents to us earthly life as endless. We are so deceived and carried away by a false sensation that we arrange all our actions in accordance with it, sacrificing the abilities of soul and body to corruption, not caring at all about the other world awaiting us, while we must certainly become eternal inhabitants of this world. Why do idle talk, ridicule, condemnation of our neighbors, caustic ridicule of them flow from us, as from a source? Why do we spend many unburdened hours in empty amusements, do not find satiety in them, try to replace one vain activity with another, and do not want to devote the shortest time to considering our sins, to crying about them? Because we have acquired sympathy for sin, for everything vain, for everything by which sin is introduced into a person and by which sin is preserved in a person; because we have lost sympathy for all exercises that introduce, multiply and preserve God-loving virtues in a person. Insensibility is implanted into the soul by a world hostile to God and by fallen angels hostile to God, with the assistance of our will. It grows and is strengthened by life according to the principles of the world; it grows and strengthens from following one’s fallen mind and will, from abandoning the service of God and from carelessly serving God. When insensibility hardens in the soul and becomes its quality, then the world and the rulers of the world put their seal on the stone. This seal consists in the communication of the human spirit with fallen spirits, in the assimilation by the human spirit of the impressions made on it by fallen spirits, in submission to the violent influence and predominance of rejected spirits. “Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us?” A question filled with concern, sadness, and bewilderment. Those souls who have turned to the Lord, leaving the service of the world and sin, feel this concern, this sadness, this bewilderment. Before their eyes is revealed, in all its terrible scope and significance, the disease of insensibility. They want to pray with tenderness and practice reading the Word of God apart from any other reading, and to remain in constant contemplation of their sinfulness, in constant pain about it, in a word, they want to assimilate, to belong to God - they encounter unexpected resistance, unknown to the servants of the world, in themselves: insensibility of the heart. The heart, struck by the previous careless life, as if by a mortal ulcer, does not reveal any sign of life. In vain the mind gathers thoughts about death, about God’s judgment, about the multitude of one’s sins, about the torments of hell, about the pleasures of heaven; The mind tries in vain to hit the heart with these thoughts: it remains without sympathy for them, as if hell, and heaven, and the judgment of God, and sins, and the state of fall and destruction had nothing to do with the heart. It sleeps in deep sleep, the sleep of death; it sleeps, drunk and intoxicated with sinful poison. “Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us? This stone is great.” According to the instructions of the holy fathers, in order to destroy insensibility, a person needs constant, patient, continuous action against insensibility; a constant, pious, attentive life is needed. Such a life is cursed by a life of insensibility; but this death of the human spirit is not mortified by man’s own efforts alone: ​​insensibility is destroyed by the action of Divine grace. An angel of God, at the command of God, descends to help the toiling and weary soul, rolls away the stone of bitterness from the heart, fills the heart with tenderness, and announces to the soul resurrection, which is the usual consequence of constant tenderness 103. Tenderness is the first sign of revival of the heart in relation to God and eternity. What is tenderness? Tenderness is a person’s feeling of mercy and compassion for himself, for his distressed state, the state of fall, the state of eternal death. About the Jerusalemites, brought into this mood by the preaching of the holy Apostle Peter and inclined to accept Christianity, Scripture says that they were “pricked in heart” (Acts. 2:37). The body of the Lord did not need the fragrant world of the myrrh-bearing women. The anointing with myrrh preceded the resurrection. But the holy women, by their timely purchase of peace, by their early march, at the first rays of the sun, to the life-giving tomb, by their disregard for the fear that was inspired by the malice of the Sanhedrin and by the warlike guards who guarded the tomb and the Buried One, demonstrated and experimentally proved their heartfelt pledge to the Lord. Their gift turned out to be superfluous: it was rewarded a hundredfold with the appearance of an angel hitherto unseen by wives, with the news, which cannot but be extremely true, about the resurrection of the God-man and the resurrection with Him of humanity. God, for His own sake, does not need the dedication of our life, the dedication of all our strength and abilities to serve Him - this is necessary for us. Let us bring them, like ointment, to the tomb of the Lord. Let us buy myrrh in good time—a good will. From our youth let us renounce all sacrifices to sin; For this price we will buy myrrh - a good will. Serving sin cannot be combined with serving God: the former destroys the latter. Let us not allow sin to kill in our spirit compassion for God and for everything Divine! Let us not allow sin to imprint us with its impressions and gain violent dominance over us. He who has entered into the service of God from the days of unspoiled youth and remains in this service with constancy submits to the unceasing influence of the Holy Spirit, is imprinted by the gracious, all-holy impressions emanating from Him, acquires, in due time, an active knowledge of the resurrection of Christ, comes to life in Christ in spirit, and becomes, by the election and command of God, a preacher of the resurrection for his brethren. Whoever, out of ignorance or infatuation, has become enslaved to sin, entered into communion with fallen spirits, identified with them, and lost in his spirit the connection with God and the inhabitants of heaven, let him heal himself through repentance. Let us not put off our healing day by day, so that death does not creep up unexpectedly and suddenly take us away, so that we do not find ourselves incapable of entering the villages of never-ending peace and holiday, so that we are not cast, like obscene tares, into the fire of hell, forever burning and never burning. The healing of old ailments is not accomplished as quickly and not as conveniently as ignorance imagines. It is not without reason that God’s mercy grants us time to repent; It was not without reason that all the saints begged God to grant them time to repent. It takes time to erase sinful impressions; it takes time to be imprinted with the impressions of the Holy Spirit; it takes time to cleanse oneself of filth; it takes time to put on the vestments of virtues, to be adorned with the God-loving qualities with which all the inhabitants of heaven are adorned. Christ is resurrected in a person prepared for this, and the tomb - the heart - is again transformed into the church of God. “Arise, O Lord, save me, O my God” (Ps. 3:8); in this mysterious and at the same time essential resurrection of Yours lies my salvation. Amen. Ladder. Word 1, ch. 6 You might be interested in: