MARY of EGYPT (445-522AD)
This past Sunday in the Orthodox Church is not Palm Sunday (which is next week), but the Sunday of Mary of Egypt.  Mary’s life story is fascinating.  At the age of 12, she ran away to Alexandria and proceeded to live the life of a sex addict, not even accepting money from the men she slept with so as to sleep with as many men as possible.

Around 475AD, she learned of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the feast of the Holy Cross, and the thought of all those men in one place became all too enticing.  Paying for her passage in sexual favours, she sailed to Jerusalem, continued her dissolute behaviour while there.  However, on the day of the feast, she was miraculously barred entry to the Church of the Resurrection.  After her third attempt to enter, she saw an icon of the Theotokos on the wall and began seeking her intercession to enter and forgiveness from God of her sins.  It was only after this that she was able to enter, venerate the Cross, and receive the Eucharist.

Leaving her former life behind, Mary took three loaves of bread and wandered out into the Jordanian desert away from other human beings and all external temptation.  By her own account, it took her seventeen years of struggle before she was able to overcome her lusts and desires, after which she continued to remain in the desert another thirty years.  When she was finally discovered – by Zosima of Palestine not long before her repose – she had reached levels of holiness such that she had the spiritual gift of foreknowledge and was able to levitate and walk on water.  She had gone from being the basest of whores, to a virginal and holy being – an example of what great humility, prayer and struggle can accomplish by God’s grace.

TIKHON of MOSCOW (1865-1925AD, 25th March)
Tikhon, born Vasily Ivanovich Bellavin, is remembered as a great Bishop and martyr of the Church.  Consecrated at a young age, he was quickly appointed Archbishop of Alaska, and by extension, all North America.  Becoming an American citizen, he oversaw a period of great growth in the Orthodox Church in the United States, and translated many of the Church’s services into English for the first time.  He also approved what is now known as the Liturgy of Saint Tikhon, an Orthodox adaption of the Anglican Mass used to this day in many Western Rite Orthodox churches and former Anglican parishes.

Recalled to Russia in 1907, he continued to impress as Archbishop of Yaroslav and of Vilnius, such that, following the abdication of the Czar, the Russian Church revived the position of Patriarch of Moscow (which Peter the Great had abolished) and elected Tikhon to serve.  He wasted no time in being a vocal critic of the new Bolshevik regime, for which he was placed under arrest and officially “deposed” by the Soviets (though this is not recognised by the Church).  He is widely regarded to have been poisoned by them as the cause of his death in 1925.

JOHN of the LADDER/JOHN CLIMACUS (579-649AD)

The world’s most famous monastery is the one on Mt Sinai in modern Egypt – Saint Catherine’s.  And its most famous resident and Abbot was undoubtedly Saint John Climacus, or John of the Ladder – named as such for his famous book The Ladder of Divine Ascent.  This Sunday we celebrated his memory.

Climacus is one of the greatest minds the world has ever known, a sort of mediaeval Tony Robbins.  The Ladder is the first, and maybe even the only, book you will ever need on living the Christian life.  With it, he practically invented the “self help” book, and it to this day probably still remains the greatest “self help” book ever written.  Much Christian thought and dialogue is based on the person of Christ and His acts, which is as it should be, but too little is expended on the human response – how should we live with this knowledge of Christ’s gospel – His nika – His victory?  The Ladder, while primarily written for monks, provides us with answers in this regard, of how we unite ourselves to that victory, in a set of thirty “steps”, which Climacus likens to a “ladder” which we ascend to meet Christ.  This is not, of course, “works based salvation”, but Orthodox synergia – a daily putting on of Christ and humbling ourselves.  It is salvation viewed as a journey, not as a legal status, and it is a book that is realistic about human nature and the deceits that our brains run past us when we are striving to be more like Christ.

You can read, download, or print The Ladder of Divine Ascent here.  Of course, the book is written for monastics, and ordinary people should not expect to work on the steps therein with the same vigour, but nonetheless there is plenty that can be applied to ordinary believers “in the world”.  As John himself says:  “To admire the labours of the saints is good; to emulate them wins salvation; but to wish suddenly to imitate their life in every point is unreasonable and impossible.”

PATRICK of IRELAND (390-461AD, 17th March)

Saint Patrick is probably familiar to most of us.  Sold into slavery in Ireland, he managed to escape to France, before returning later on, this time as a Bishop and as a missionary.

Patrick, while not the first Christian missionary to visit Ireland, is definitely the most important.  He founded many monastaries and converted many of the pagan Irish to Christ.  The legend that he drove the snakes from Ireland probably refers to the pagan druids that many a village made redundant following Patrick’s preaching.

In the Orthodox Church, Patrick is known as the Enlightener of Ireland, and is commemorated as such.  Far more than just some mythical man that liked shamrocks and green beer, he is a real Saint of the Church who did great things for Christ in Ireland.

FORTY MARTYRS of SEBASTE (320AD, 9th March)

While Christianity had officially been legalized in 313AD, the Eastern Emperor Licinius continued to cause trouble for Christians, most famously in Sebaste (in central modern Turkey) where he had forty of his soldiers stripped naked and frozen to death on a lake.  The story goes that, while one of the soldiers acquiesced and renounced his faith, another soldier, on seeing this, confessed Christ, threw off his clothes, and joined the other 39 on the ice.  While their bodies were burned the next day and the ashes scattered, Christians gathered as much of their relics as they were able.

The bravery of these forty men soon became renowned, and there are many churches now dedicated to them, including a chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.  They are even mentioned in the modern Orthodox wedding service as examples of how a couple must sacrifice for one another!

SYMEON the NEW THEOLOGIAN (949-1022AD, 12th March)

Symeon, a monastic of Constantinople in the Roman Empire, is one of only three Saints to be given the title “Theologian” by the Church (the others being the Apostle John, and Gregory Nazianzus, an Archbishop of Constantinople).  A controversial figure whose unconventional ways as a monk and abbot often put him offside with his brethren, his major themes were the direct experience of God through the ascetic life (not academic knowledge or learning), God as Divine Light, and the importance for every Christian of having a spiritual father – a more senior figure to whom one could be accountable in one’s walk and seek guidance from.

Saint Symeon, more than any other Saint, is probably the embodiment of the “mystical East” in terms of what sets Orthodoxy apart.  I am hoping to read some of his work and familiarize myself with him more in future.

GREGORY the GREAT (540-604AD, 12th March)

Gregory, along with Leo a century and a half earlier, is probably the most revered of all the canonical Roman Popes, presiding during a period when Rome had been reunited with the empire bearing its name.  He is famous for sending the missionary Augustine of Canterbury to re-evangelise Britain after the settlement of English tribes there.  He also is famous as a liturgist, having composed the bulk of what is now, in the Orthodox Church, the weekday lenten Eucharistic service (the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts).  Gregorian chant is attributed to him.  Ironically, given the nature of the modern papacy, he defended the equality of the Bishops against the Bishop of Constantinople, who had recently taken the title “Ecumenical”.

On a personal level, Gregory was renowned for his pious monastic way of life, and his generosity towards the poor.  During his reign, the Byzantine holdings on the Italian peninsula began to shift more and more under Papal, rather than imperial command, spurred by necessity from Lombard incursion and a lack of leadership from the East.

GREGORY PALAMAS (1296-1359)
This Sunday 8th March is the Sunday of Gregory Palamas, a pivotal figure in Christianity and specifically in the Eastern understanding of Christian faith.

By the 14th Century, the Roman Catholics had solidified their break from the traditional faith.  In addition to the filioque – the idea that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as God the Father, they now taught penal substitutionary atonement as their primary soteriology, and had introduced the concept of a legalistic purgatory, as well as defined indulgences to alleviate the harsh torture of such a supposed place.  Their vision of the faith had turned scholastic and theoretical.

Into this debate came Gregory Palamas, who, having learned traditional hesychastic prayer on Mt Athos, promulgated the more noetic view of faith – that God is experienced, not philosophised into existence, that experiencing God comes through prayer of the heart and quietness, not intellectual musing.  Furthermore, when God is experienced in His fullness, as the three Apostles experienced Him at Christ’s Transfiguration, then this experience itself is uncreated – God’s light is not a creation of God, but God Himself.  God has an essence, which cannot be known or experienced, but He also has uncreated energies, which can be experienced.  These energies constitute God’s grace, which Western Christians spearheaded by the monk Barlaam tried to argue was not uncreated, but a created product of God, and that in seeking God, philosophy was more useful than prophecy, prayer or visions.

Gregory’s theology was controversial, and came under huge scrutiny by Barlaam, and by many people in the Eastern Church.  Finally, there was a Council in Constantinople in 1341, and the Church came down on the side of Gregory:  The Uncreated Light was real and Christianity was an experiential, not a scholastic faith, and to this day this is the Orthodox Christian approach.

Here’s a nun to talk all about him:

JAMES THE FASTER (6th Century AD)

I wasn’t planning to write about this fellow, but he came up as a Saint of the Day on Wednesday (4th March) and I was blown away by his story.  How many Saints out there have sex with a teenage girl, then kill her to hide the evidence?!  And yet this is the story of Saint James the Faster – a great ascetic of the Eastern Roman Empire from what is now Lebanon, who even burned his own hand to stop himself from having sex with a temptress, only to sin with, and then kill, a young girl he had healed from demon possession.  In James we see the worst of the worst – it’s hard to imagine a greater fall from grace – and yet he bounced back and was healed and restored by God… after spending ten years sleeping in an open grave of course!  Saint James, like King David before him, is testament to the unmerited grace of God, and the truth than anyone can be redeemed.

42 MARTYRS of AMORIUM (845AD)

The recent martyrdom of the 21 Coptic Christians in Libya is nothing new.  In fact, on March 6th 845, Muslims beheaded 42 Christian Generals nearly 1200 years ago after capturing them during a war of conquest in modern day Turkey.  They were kept prisoner for 7 years in Samarra, then martyred when, after many tortures, they would not submit to Islam and deny Christ.  The more things change, the more they stay the same…

I thought I might introduce a new feature here at Eternal Vigilance – the Saint (or Saints) of the week.  There are several reasons – the first is that many modern Christians have no clue of their famous forbears in the faith, or the history of the Church from the resurrection of Christ until the present day.  The second is the amazing example that these people set, and the things they teach us even today.  The third is that the Church celebrates these people on feast days every single day throughout the year, and I thought it might be good to mark the more prominent of them as we go.

All these Saints will be great men and women canonised by the Orthodox Church, of course, but I hope you will forgive my bias in that regard.  It needs to be clarified that the Church does not make people Saints – it is the grace of God alone that does it, and the Church merely confirms whomever has been revealed.  There may well be millions of Saints in heaven abiding with Christ.  However, lest we become complacent about diligently working out our own salvation, God reveals to us a comparative handful of people only, to give us hope and something to aspire to, as well as people through whom we can seek intercession for our ongoing theosis.

This last week was kind of a bumper week, and I have three Saints I want to recognize:

POLYCARP (80-167AD)
Polycarp, whose feast day was celebrated last Monday 23rd February, was a disciple of the Apostle John, and was appointed Episcopos (Bishop) of Smyrna by him.  He is one of the most prominent of the next generation of Christians after the passing of the Apostles.  We have one surviving text from him – his Letter to the Phillipians, but in him we see a continuation of the Church the Apostles founded, and their faith.  It has even been suggested by scholars that he was the first to compile the New Testament as we know it today.

The account of his martyrdom is one of the most famous of the Early Church, and has relevance today, especially with the violence of radical Islamists against Christians.  Brought into a Roman arena, he was challenged:

“…the proconsul asked him whether he was Polycarp. On his confessing that he was, [the proconsul] sought to persuade him to deny Christ, saying,  Swear by the fortune of Cæsar; repent, and say, Away with the Atheists. …Then, the proconsul urging him, and saying, Swear, and I will set you at liberty, reproach Christ; Polycarp declared, Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?

The man had balls.  They proceeded to burn him alive, though the flames did not actually kill him, and they had to finish the job with a dagger.  We also see in the account of his martyrdom that 2nd Century Christians would venerate and honour the remains of reposed Saints, such that the Romans actually decided to rekindle the fire to burn his body after his death so that his relics would be dishonoured.  He remains one of the most famous of the Early Church martyrs.

PHOTINI (?-66AD)Better known as the Samaritan woman of John 4, her feast day was last Thursday 26th February, and her encounter with Christ at the Well of Jacob was truly transformational.  She converted her five sisters to the faith, as well as her two sons.  She later moved to Carthage in North Africa, before the persecution of her son Victor brought her to Rome to face Nero.  After her sisters and sons were brutally and savagely murdered, Nero offered her one last chance to sacrifice to other gods, to which she replied:

“O most impious of the blind, you profligate and stupid man! Do you think me so deluded that I would consent to renounce my Lord Christ and instead offer sacrifice to idols as blind as you?”

Photini was, fittingly, martyred by being thrown down a well.  She is my family’s patron saint, and well loved for her ability to turn her life around into one of service and devotion.

RAPHAEL of Brooklyn (1860-1915)
Friday 27th February saw the 100th Anniversary of the repose of St Raphael, the first locally consecrated American Bishop, and the first Arab Bishop to serve in the United States.  He personally founded 30 parishes in the United States and was adored for his personal piety, asceticism and love for his people.

Holy Polycarp, Holy Photini, Holy Raphael, pray unto God for us!

Pop theology often likes to confront Christianity with what it sees as inherent contradictions in its viewpoint.  You have, they say, a Messiah purported to be God, in the New Testament, advocating peace and love and turning the other cheek.  How do you square this with the YHWH of the Old Testament, a God who kills people with floods and plagues and encourages genocide of whole subgroups and tribes of people?

The response of modern Christians to this problem, it has to be said, has been horrible.  Responses range from attempts to minimize or play down the malevolence of YHWH, to blunt juridical defenses of the “justice” of God, to bizarre attempts to claim that the Biblical narratives are not literal or historical.  None of these are satisfactory – God really did do this stuff! – and it seems that even in the Orthodox tradition nobody can offer a robust apologia.  Which is silly, because frankly, if one is Orthodox and approaches this problem with an Orthodox world view, it’s not that hard.

To start to answer the question, we have to first get rid of misconceptions.  We have to say that God is not a God of whim.  He is not like the Islamic god, who is a god of will and passion that initiates every material interaction from the atomic level on up.  In that sense, the touted “Divine Command Theory” of morality is nonsense.  Morality is not a creation of God.  Morality (or moral values) IS God IS morality.  Good is not good because God said so.  Good is what tells us there is a God in the first place.  Goodness reveals God.  God is Good is God.

This leads us to the Apostle John, the man who knew Christ, the incarnation of God, most intimately.  Expanding on the Apostle Paul, who discoursed on the greatness of love in his first letter to the Corinthians, John tells us that GOD IS LOVE.  Not that God created love, or God supports love, but God IS love.

What does this mean?  To paraphrase John himself, the world could not contain the books.  But in terms of the nature of God, it limits His actions substantially.  To quote Blessed Augustine in his Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed:

“God is Almighty, and yet, though Almighty, He cannot die, cannot be deceived, cannot lie; and, as the Apostle says, cannot deny Himself. How many things that He cannot do, and yet is Almighty! Yea therefore is Almighty, because He cannot do these things. For if He could die, He were not Almighty; if to lie, if to be deceived, if to do unjustly, were possible for Him, He were not Almighty: because if this were in Him, He should not be worthy to be Almighty. To our Almighty Father, it is quite impossible to sin. He does whatsoever He will: that is Omnipotence. He does whatsoever He rightly will, whatsoever He justly will: but whatsoever is evil to do, He wills not.”

To be Love is to forswear forceful power over creation.  A deity cannot force compliance from His creation and remain Love at the same time – love necessitates free beings with free will.  So when we define God as a set of “Omnis” (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc.), this is not without boundary.  There are just some things that God cannot/will not do and remain Love.  Death and sin and evil are not creations of God, but the absence of God, just as darkness is not a “thing”, but the absence of light.

So, from seeing God as Love, we conclude that this necessitates the possibility of evil.  A created being that is not capable of choosing evil is coerced – it cannot love and therefore cannot be created by Love and with love.  So evil may result.  Is God responsible for this evil?  Only in the sense that He created creation, and knew what was going to happen.  But if God is Love, there is no alternative – evil had to be possible.  Either He created beings, in love, with separate essences that were capable of not returning His love, or He did not create at all, or He created robots for His amusement.  The latter two options are an impossibility for such a God, who exudes Total Love.

Having created mankind, in love, the possibility to simply “magic away” the results and consequences of the Fall and the bringing of death to the cosmos is no longer there.  Creating the world, declaring it good, then making man in His own image to declare him “very good”, only to have this goodness corrupted and degraded by His creations, there are no good options.  God cannot be selective about evil – if He is going to get rid of any of it, He must destroy all of it.  This is why Stephen Fry’s recent outburst was so pathetic – God can’t just choose to destroy the eyeball-burrowing insects, yet leave a sodomite like Fry alone.  That would make Him morally inconsistent, which is the very thing that Fry accuses Him of in the first place!  No, God is Love, He has mercy on all His creation, and if He is going to redeem it, that redemption must be consistent with love – that is to say, voluntary on our part.

So God has no circuit-breaker in terms of eliminating evil.  There is also no divine way of circumventing basic moral/ethical dilemmas that even we humans face in things such as war or criminal justice.  Just as President Truman in World War Two faced a choice between a bad option (killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with an atomic bomb) and a worse one (an invasion that would take years and cost millions of lives on both sides), so the evil of the entire world only left God with either bad options or worse ones.

God needs to save the world from the bad choices that love enables.  How does He do that?  To tell the end of the tale, He incarnates, shows the Way of righteousness, suffers, is crucified, and rises again, trampling death by death and destroying the power of death and Hades.  He sends His Son.  And so we are now living in an age whereby His salvation can be received.  But it remains to ask why He didn’t just do this straight away?  Okay, so Adam and Eve have fallen, and now they will surely die.  Why not just send JC down to fix everything up like nothing ever happened?

Well… it wouldn’t work is probably the best answer.  Adam and Eve would not have truly repented.  They needed to work through the consequences of their actions for that.  Death and judgment and separation needed to be a reality for the human race so that it could, to use AA terminology, reach “rock bottom”.  God needed to be sure, in sending His Son to redeem humanity, that it would take.  The redemption had to occur in baby steps.  And so that’s what the Old Testament is really about – a lovesick God who has lost His creation desperately doing all He can to bring it back to Him.

We see the beginning of the redemption in the Flood, where Noah and his family were saved through “baptism”, so that a remnant of some God-consciousness could survive and grow on the earth.  Then there is the calling and covenant with Abraham, who is served the Eucharist by Melchizidek, and the growth of a covenanted “people of God”.  From this follows Moses, another salvation by passing through the waters of the Red Sea, and the giving of the Law, which is the Logos of God, and will indicate the One to come who fulfills it.

To establish His Son as a Priest for His people, it was first necessary to establish His people, and establish His nation.  This was an omelet which required the breaking of a few eggs.  There were no good options for confronting the evil of the world in establishing a Holy people.  Either this was going to be done by force, or nobody would be saved.  The Antediluvians of Noah’s day, the Canaanites that Joshua fought against, the Amalekites of Saul’s day whom God commanded to wipe out, all of them were a danger to the fragile plan that was the Holy nation of Israel and the salvation of the world.  Even the children?  Sure!  The corruption of the world was and is a reality.  To paraphrase that oft-quoted phrase from the Vietnam War, “we had to kill the children in order to save them”.  It’s either kill these children, leaving them in the hands of Christ the Redeemer who is all Love and merciful to all, or let them grow up and corrupt even the remnant that God has reserved – the remnant that makes Christ’s incarnation and salvation even possible.

This may sound like callous utilitarianism on God’s part.  It is not.  It’s not God making arbitrary decisions so He can save the many at the expense of the few.  It’s more that some people, because of their evil will and choices, simply cannot be saved in the end, or at least not without the loss of too many others.  Someone could object – what about Matthew 11:23?  If Christ could have saved Sodom with a few miracles, why didn’t He?  To my mind, the answer is that God’s salvation is a marathon, not a sprint.  It’s tantra, not a quickie.  He is not hung up on individual battles, but the whole war.  Sometimes to have your D-Day, you need to organise a Dunkirk.

So did God command genocide in specific circumstances for specific times? Yes He did.  There was no other way to save us.  There was no other way to win the war, to attain the Nika, the Gospel, the victory that Christ has achieved.  God is desperate for us.  He is John Cusack, standing on our street, with a boombox, playing Peter Gabriel, hoping we will requite His pure and Holy Love.  He is always working for us and for our salvation.  He has saved us, He is saving us, and by His grace He will yet save us at the last.  But for now we live in the age described in Psalm 109 (LXX), the most quoted Old Testament verse contained in the New:

“The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand,
Until I make Your enemies the footstool of your feet.”

The struggle, and the battle, are real.  To criticize God for His righteous acts in saving US is to apply naivety to the reality of evil in the world, and the necessary actions required to be rid of it after all other options have failed.

One of my favourite things to do these days while going about my day job is to listen to Ancient Faith Radio podcasts on my phone as I work.  Probably my favourite podcasts are by Father Thomas Hopko, a former Dean of St Vladimir’s Academy – an Orthodox Seminary.  He has an amazing knowledge of Church history and Orthodox theology which has been a great help to my journey of faith.

One of the podcasts I listened to recently was one in a series on the names of Jesus, where he makes the astonishing claim that “[Christian] faith is not about salvation…”  I have to say this blew my mind, and caused me to look at my faith in a completely new way.  In fact, I think what he had to say is so important, I am just going to quote a large chunk of the transcript for you verbatim:

What does it mean that Jesus is named the Savior? What does it mean that he saves us?

We know that he does. We confess that he does. Our whole faith is that he does, and he’s the only one who does. What is this salvation? What is the content of it? What makes salvation, salvation?

When I was a seminary student, I was sitting in a class of dogmatic theology with my beloved professor, Professor Serge S. Verhovskoy. I discussed this issue countless hours with Professor Verhovskoy about salvation. What is it, how do you understand it? How does it work? Once in class, he said “my dears.” (He always called us my dears). “…we must, we must, he used to say, avoid, this abominable preoccupation with salvation.”

Well, that blew me away, and after I fell off my chair and got up again, I raised my hand, and I said “Professor, why can you say such a thing? Isn’t it all about salvation? Isn’t Jesus our Savior? Doesn’t he save the world? Isn’t salvation what it’s all about?”

And he looked and smiled and said, “Of course.” But what I would like to say is this. There are many Christians who are hardly interested in God at all. They’re really not interested in Christ. They’re not interested in life. They’re not interested in the beauty of creation. They’re not interested in their fellow man and their neighbor. They’re not really interested in just about anything except salvation. Translated, meaning: How to get to go to heaven when you die.

Because a lot of Christians think of salvation meaning: Do you get to go to heaven? And so, Christians will go around saying “Are you saved?” And then they’ll even claim that to say “I’m saved” means I know for sure that I have my place cut out in the age to come, and I’m certainly going to heaven and anyone who believes and is baptized will be saved, and I believe, and I’m baptized, so I’ll be saved, and I’m saved by grace and not by works, and all this kind of stuff. But then they’ll start arguing about what do you need to do to be saved? Do you need to believe? Do you need only to believe? Do you need to do works too? And then what about pietistic actions? You may not need to be circumcised, I mean that might be agreed upon, but Christians might argue and say well, you got to go to church to be saved. You got to be a member of the church to be saved. Some people might even say, you’ve got to be baptized, but that’s a spiritual reality. You don’t need to be baptized in water to be saved. And even some people who are baptized into water, they’re pretty ugly, miserable, horrible creatures, so you know, baptism doesn’t save you. And just going to church and standing there and singing hymns doesn’t save you. Baking a cake for the cake sale doesn’t save you. Knowing the Nicene Creed doesn’t save you. Or maybe it does save you? Maybe you’ve got to never eat any meat, milk products, or anything on any Wednesday or Friday or you’re going to go to hell? And other people say no, that’s nonsense.

So there becomes a huge debate that split Christians up into literally thousands of churches, and many of those churches are the churches that claim salvation through faith and belief in the Bible and belief in Jesus, but then they argue about how does it work? There are some who will say, I must accept Jesus as my Savior or I’m not saved. There are others of a more Calvinistic, Augustinian line who would say, oh no no, God chooses you. You don’t choose God. There’s predestination. God decides who is saved. God is sovereign. If he wants to save you, he’ll save you, and if he doesn’t, you’re going to hell. And you have no case to make whatsoever, because God does whatever he wants. He’ll save whom he wants to save, and he’ll damn whom he wants to damn, and you’re nothing but clay, and he’s the maker, and you’re the earth, and he’s the potter: so forget about it. So there’s a big debate about that. Then there’s a big debate about all the sacraments and do you need to have Holy Communion? It’s written in the Scripture, if you don’t eat body and drink his blood, you have no life in you, no eternal life in you. So some people say well, unless you’ve gone to communion, you can’t be saved. Anyone who is not baptized in water can’t be saved.

So there’s so many different kinds of arguments. And what my professor that day wanted to tell us and has stuck with me forever just to this very day is that the faith is not about salvation in that sense. It’s not like figuring out “what do you got to do to be saved minimally” like do you have to go to church or don’t you? Do you have to believe in Jesus or don’t you? Do you have to participate in sacraments, or don’t you? Do you have to be in some particular church and not another or don’t you? Do you have to be in communion with the Bishop of Rome who is the Pope or don’t you? And there are times when people said if you’re not in one or another particular church, you are simply not saved. You are just simply going to hell. And there’s plenty of folks around that think that we Orthodox Christians are going to hell because our understanding of Christianity is so weird.

Now, Professor Verhovskoy taught us: you can’t look at it that way. You can’t begin with what you need to do to be saved. No. In fact, in that sense, it is an abomination, almost a blasphemy, even to be interested, if not obsessed, with the issue of salvation and start trying to figure out who’s saved and who’s not and telling who’s saved and who isn’t saved, and why it’s so. Real authentic Christians should never, ever get involved in that kind of thing. Never. That is my deepest conviction. It’s not according to Jesus. It’s not according to Christ. It’s not according to Scripture.

But what is? What is? What is, is that there is God. Beautiful, marvelous, magnificent, splendid, glorious God Almighty. And his only begotten Son Jesus Christ, born of a virgin on earth, the all-holy, life-creating Spirit that proceeds from God, dwells in the Son, is breathed upon us. There’s life, there’s world, there’s reality; there is truth. There is peace. There is joy. There is the fruit of the Holy Spirit. There is God himself. And what we have to realize is that we’ve got to be interested in the God who saves us, not in salvation as such. We’ve got to be interested in loving God, not salvation. God. Life is about God. The Bible is about God. Church is about God. Sacraments are about God and being about God they’re about Christ, and if they’re about Christ they’re about crucifixion and resurrection and glorification and humility and love and mercy and meekness. Jesus says learn from me, I am meek and lowly of heart. You will find rest for your soul.

It’s about the grace of God coming in us and being manifested for our salvation. The grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all people. God desires all to be saved and come to a knowledge of the Church. God is the Savior of all human beings, especially those who believe. So, our confession has to be that God, in Christ, has already, on the Cross, saved everyone and everything. That’s the gospel. That’s the glad tidings: that he has come for Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slave and free, whoever we are upon the earth, and even the whole earth, and even all the galaxies and the stars and the sun and the moon. God, who created all of that, is saving all of that, and he’s saving it all in Jesus Christ. And that’s what we have to be thrilled about. That’s what we have to confess. That’s what we have to live by.

Now, if we do, then we will glorify God, and we will try to keep his commandments because we will love him. And we will try to love him with all our mind, all our soul, all our heart, all our strength. We’ll try to love our neighbor, even our worst enemy as ourselves. We will not judge anyone for anything. Our holy fathers teach us that we judge no one for nothing. Who are we to judge? God who is the Savior is the judge, and guess what? He judges us by saving us. He came to save the world, not to condemn it. So the judgment of the world as we just heard from St. John’s gospel is his salvific act in Jesus. It’s that salvation that judges the world. But what is that salvation? That salvation is God. You can put it this way, quickly. It’s God acting to destroy everything that is ungodly, everything that is not according to God’s good creation, everything that he does not want.

So we are saved first of all, from. The salvation is a salvation “from”. We are saved from ignorance, from darkness, because he gives us the truth, and he is the truth, and gives us the spirit of truth. We are saved from our sins. We are saved from our madness our insanity, from our diseases, from our transgressions. We are saved from our own self, from the vain imaginations of our own heart and mind. We are saved from everything that destroys and ultimately the last enemy to be destroyed is the destroyer itself which is death. So we are saved from death. So you can speak about being saved from. And so we’re saved from everything that is no good. Everything that is not true. Everything that is not beautiful, everything that is ugly, everything that is diseased, everything that is corrupted, everything that is just plain rotten and no good. Everything that is morbid and dead and demonic. We’re saved from the power of the devils. It says that in I John, the reason for the epiphania, the appearance of the son of God is to deliver us from the works of the devil. So we’re saved from the works of the devil. Whatever they are, that’s what we are saved from by God.

And then we are saved for. Not only from, but “for”. We are saved for life. What makes life, life? According to the Holy Scripture, what makes life life is the glorification of God. Not trying to figure out who gets saved and who is not saved, and what you got to do to get to go to heaven and then do the minimal amount of things that you need. Professor Verhovskoy would say it would be like saying how often do I have to be with my wife? Do I have to see her every day? Can I see her every other day? Can I see her just on Sunday mornings for two hours? What do I have to do with her? What do I have to give to her so that I can be quote, unquote “in good standing” with her? That’s an abomination. That’s a blasphemy. Human beings who are created in the image and likeness of God do not act that way. In fact, we do everything to be in communion all the time, to love all the time, give everything, to share everything, to enjoy everything. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not about some kind of minimal standards or rules that if we fulfill them externally, we get to go to heaven.

And it’s very interesting that many Christians who claim to be saved by faith alone and not by works, they’re still very interested in what works you need to do to be saved. And I would even suggest let’s strike once and for all from our life this question: what do I need to do to be saved? The answer is: everything and nothing because there’s nothing I can do to be saved if God doesn’t save me. But once God saves me, then I have to do the works that he does, and that means I can never rest assured of my salvation. Oh yes, I can say and I must say the gospel of God in Jesus Christ is that we are all saved. I’m saved, you’re saved. Joseph Stalin is saved. Osama bin Laden is saved. Whoever you want to think of is saved, as far as God is concerned. And then the question is, do we accept that salvation? Do we live by that salvation?

And here the teaching of Scripture and the saints would be that nobody could claim to do it. Nobody is righteous, no, not one, even after baptism. And we’re always sinners saying God be merciful to me, a sinner. We’re always saying, I am not worthy, I am not worthy. I am not deserving. Certainly I am not deserving of the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the fire of God, and the broken body and the spilled blood of Jesus. I am not worthy of salvation. It’s a gift. But once I realize that there is that gift, then I have to take that gift, and I have to repent every time I don’t take it. I have to repent every time I neglect it, forget it, and worse, that I would just refuse it and live by my own standards and my own life. That’s hell. That is hell. Hell is being and doing what you want to be, not according to what God wants, which is salvation.

So once I know that I am saved by Jesus, then what I do is that I pray without ceasing. I give thanks in all circumstances. I rejoice in all things. I try to share everything I have. I try to do everything as well as I can, and I know that even if I do that, I am not deserving of salvation. And I know there’s nothing I can externally do. I could go 100 Divine Liturgies and give all my body to be burned and everything, even as St. Paul says, but if I have not the love of God in me, if I’m doing out of arrogance and pride or trying to get to go to heaven when I die, and earn my salvation, then I’m still in the hands of the devil. My life is still an abomination. I have not yet understood salvation. Why? Because I have not yet understood God. So to understand salvation and to receive salvation, you have to understand and receive and love God. We love God, not salvation. God. We love God. And therefore, we are saved for loving God, glorifying God, praising God with every breath, more than we breathe the holy fathers say. We are saved for work. We are saved for activity. We are saved for rejoicing in one another. We are saved for serving each other. We are saved for repenting, in fact. We can only repent because we’re saved, because that salvation is always available to us.

For as often as we sin, when we get up again, that very salvation once and for all accomplished on the cross by God with his son Jesus, God our Savior, and Christ our Savior, that allows me to repent. That’s one of the elements of salvation, the ability to repent daily. And the holy fathers would even say, we are saved for tears. We are saved for weeping over our sins and the sins of the world. We are saved for weeping over how we have ruined our world and corrupted our planet, and destroyed our universe and killed our economy, and how our greed and how our competition, and how our, I don’t know what, racisms and all kinds of have stuff have created a hell on the planet Earth. Well, God has saved us in Christ from that hell, but it’s not only from the hell, it’s for the paradise. And that’s why St. Simeon the New Theologian said, we are saved so that each day we can become a fresh paradise to everyone around us, including our most horrible hated enemy. We are saved to be by grace everything that God in Christ is by nature. That’s what we’re saved for.

And so a person who knows that, that person is no longer interested or obsessed in salvation as such. They are totally devoted to God as the Savior, to Christ who is the Savior, to the eternal life to the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the fire into which they are baptized into which they are saved by the Savior Jesus, by his broken body and spilled blood. They’re not looking around, figuring out salvation. In fact, a saved person who is not interested paradoxically in salvation anymore at all, a saved person is not trying to figure anything out. A saved person is just praying to be illumined by God to testify to the fact that we are saved, that salvation is here, eternal life is here. Joy is here. Peace is here. God is with us. Emmanuel is Christ’s name also. God with us, that everything has been redeemed, saved, delivered, protected, purified. All the enemies have been destroyed. All of God’s enemies have withered up and are like smoke vanishing in the fire, and nothing over stands against God anymore. And to be saved is to be in that reality, and even more modestly, to want to be in that reality. To struggle to be in that reality, to confess with tears that we are not in that reality, and to confess that we have no claim on salvation. We cannot name anything, we can’t claim anything.

And we certainly cannot dare to claim, there’s my place in heaven, made for me because I accept Jesus as my Savior. Because the question would be, do you really accept Jesus as your Savior? Then your works will show it. That’s the teaching of Holy Scripture. Your deeds will show it. What do you do? Oh, no. We come before the face of God always as penitents and sinners until he comes again in glory, and we say, “Save me, O Lord.” We pray all the time in church, help us, save us, have mercy on us, keep us, oh God, by your grace. And what we will see is that the content of salvation is the outpouring of the divine chesed, the divine mercy, the divine love upon us, and we bask in that as our salvation. And to the measure that we are in that, to that measure we are saved. But it isn’t over until it’s over.

There’s a wonderful story of St. Macarius of Egypt, who when his life was over was entering into paradise. According to the story, he had one foot into paradise, he heard a voice saying, Macarius you have conquered. Actually, the voice should have said, Macarius, Christ has conquered in you, Christ is the victor. He’s the Savior. But when the voice said, Macarius, you have conquered, Macarius turned around and looked, and it was the devil. And Macarius looked at the devil, and he said to him, not yet. Until both feet are safely in, not yet. We presume nothing, while at the same time we confess that everyone and everything in all of creation has been saved by God in the blood of Jesus. It’s our task to receive that salvation and to re-receive it, take it again, and again, and again, every moment of every day with every breath to be again loving God and loving our neighbor and trying to keep the commandments.

And if we do that, then God will save us if he wishes, and he will know how. But we won’t be interested in salvation anymore. We will be interested solely in pleasing, glorifying, worshipping, and loving God, who is love, who has loved us so much that he sent his beloved Son into the world to save us and to pour his saving power and love of the Holy Spirit into us, even now while we live in this fallen and corrupted world. So every day we say to the Lord, Lord have mercy, Lord save me, Lord be with me. And then we say Lord let me be worthy of your great salvation. Lord, let me be an instrument of your salvation, your love, your truth, your reconciliation, your victory over death and the devil to every single person around me. And when I fail in that, oh Lord, have mercy on me, and I know that you will. Why? Because you have saved me, and you have saved everyone and everything.

So this should serve as a sufficient rebuttal to Ayn Rand’s view that “The first duty of a Christian is the salvation of his own soul”.  To be a Christian and merely seek salvation is a bit like buying a girl flowers and dinner just so you can have sex with her.  When what we should really be interested in is getting to know the girl and loving her with a view to spending the rest of our lives with her.  The sex, like our salvation, will happen naturally if we put love and the relationship first.

The news recently of a 29yo woman seeking the right to have her suicide assisted by others has brought out a few odd opinions, to say the least, especially from those who purport to be Christians.

The simplistic argument (and it is simplistic), is that it is compassionate to allow the voluntary death of someone if there is no longer pleasure in their life, but only pain and suffering.  Is it not our purpose as Christians to alleviate suffering?

Well… sort of.  Christianity is about life.  We, as ministers of Christ, are here to offer life, and life in abundance.  If it is a battle between suffering and life, then we are on the side of life.  However, this is not what Brittany Maynard, and others like her, face.  The battle is between suffering and death.  The argument is being made that death is better than suffering.  But Christians who advocate this betray a deeply flawed theological view of their faith.

At the very least, the Christian must reject gnosticism – that ancient heresy that despises the body and sees the body as a prison of the soul.  Unfortunately, this is a prominent view among Protestants and Evangelicals.  They see the body as responsible for sin and pain and death, and to die is to finally escape the body and be a “free spirit”, so to speak.  To escape is to be be at peace.  But this is not Christianity.  It is a damnable lie.  Souls and bodies are supposed to be together – that is how God created us.  To separate them, through death, is not God’s will, and a soul separated from the body that does not commune with Christ is by definition unfulfilled and in torment, a captive to its own passions, pride and selfishness, all of which can only be satiated by the body.  So on this basis alone, to take one’s own life and destroy the image of God in oneself is, without the intercession of the Church, an act that eternally condemns the soul to despair.  It’s better to stay alive and suffer in the body than go through that!

But this is not just about fear of what lies beyond.  Nor is it even about the “redemptive power of suffering”, an offensive concept to many people, although I believe it to be true.  (If you want to read a good explanation of redemptive suffering, Andrew Damick does it very well here).  It is about life and hope and faith and the conquest of death and Hades that God achieved in Christ through His own suffering.  It is about the image of God in us that He created in us.  It is because we have this hope that we seek to persevere, as so many people in the Bible persevered through trials and suffering, and we seek to affirm and cultivate that image of the loving, suffering God in us, instead of destroying it to remove some temporal physical pain we experience.

This hope is not some scholastic, intellectual, theoretical hope.  It is an ontological hope that naturally exists within us, that struggles for life even as we seek to suppress and destroy that hope.  In suffering, rather than giving in, we affirm that our life has meaning, that it has purpose, that it is valuable.  We struggle for it because it is worth something.  And that is where the contradiction in euthanasia lies.  Suicide is the obliteration of the meaning of one’s life – the floccinaucinihilipilification of it.  And yet euthanasia is sold as “death with dignity”!  Well what a nonsense.  Dignity implies some meaning to one’s life and death.  Either your life has meaning, and you seek life, through whatever miserable crawling struggle that entails, or it has none, and you kill yourself.  There is no Mr Inbetween.  To seek dignity of any sort is to be on the side of life, not death.  It implicitly recognises the Source of dignity – God’s image in us.

To struggle for no end is truly pitiable.  But we do have an end – a great hope! our union with Christ, which we strive towards when we undergo suffering, and we run from when we subject ourselves to indignities of any kind, whether licentiousness in food, drugs, sex, money, power, or in its purest form, actively killing ourselves.  This is Christianity:  To struggle with Christ, to suffer with Him, to restore His image in us, to seek His dignity, and to die with dignity, despite the indignities forced on us, and especially the indignities forced on Christ.  That’s where we find meaning and dignity in life.  Not in destroying our body to eliminate physical pain.

I hope and pray that Ms Maynard, and all like her who suffer in pain, find their value and dignity not in death but in life, and in the Giver of Life.