If any man be devout and love God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast.  If any man be a wise servant, let him rejoicing enter into the joy of his Lord.

If any have laboured long in fasting, let him now receive his recompense. If any have wrought from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward. If any have come at the third hour, let him with thankfulness keep the feast. If any have arrived at the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings; because he shall in no wise be deprived thereof. If any have delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near, fearing nothing.

If any have tarried even until the eleventh hour, let him, also, be not alarmed at his tardiness; for the Lord, who is jealous of his honour, will accept the last even as the first; he gives rest unto him who comes at the eleventh hour, even as unto him who has wrought from the first hour.

And he shows mercy upon the last, and cares for the first; and to the one he gives, and upon the other he bestows gifts. And he both accepts the deeds, and welcomes the intention, and honours the acts and praises the offering.

Wherefore, enter you all into the joy of your Lord; and receive your reward, both the first, and likewise the second! You rich and poor together, hold high festival! You sober and you heedless, honour the day! Rejoice today, both you who have fasted and you who have disregarded the fast! The table is full-laden; feast ye all sumptuously! The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away!

Enjoy ye all the feast of faith: Receive ye all the riches of loving-kindness. let no one bewail his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let no one weep for his iniquities, for pardon has shown forth from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Saviour’s death has set us free! He that was held prisoner of it has annihilated it! By descending into Hell, He made Hell captive! He embittered it when it tasted of His flesh. And Isaiah, foretelling this, did cry: Hell, said he, was embittered, when it encountered Thee in the lower regions.

It was embittered! for it was abolished!

It was embittered! for it was mocked!

It was embittered! for it was slain!

It was embittered! for it was overthrown!

It was embittered! for it was fettered in chains!

It took a body, and met God face to face! It took earth, and encountered Heaven! It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen!

O Death, where is your sting?! O Hell, where is your victory?!

Christ is risen! and you are overthrown!

Christ is risen! and the demons are fallen!

Christ is risen! and the angels rejoice!

Christ is risen! and life reigns!

Christ is risen! and not one dead remains in the grave!

For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen!

– John Chrysostom

Forgive the lateness, I was busy all weekend…

LAZARUS (d.33AD & 63AD)
Just the one Saint this week.  The day before Palm Sunday is the Saturday of Lazarus, when Christ raised His friend from the dead.  In doing so, He forshadowed His own resurrection, and showed that He has power over all death, including our own.

After his revival, Lazarus, as living proof of Christ’s works, was forced to flee Jerusalem, and he travelled to Cyprus where he preached Christ and established the Church there.  Paul and Barnabas ordained him the first Bishop of Cyprus, where he led the Church and is regarded as their patron Saint.

He is famously reputed never to have smiled in the thirty years after his revival, except for one occasion where he saw a pot being stolen, smirking that “the clay steals the clay”

…do you really think Gregorian calendars have any meaning in this place…?

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.