Sunday of the Holy Ancestors of Christ : Accepting the Fulfilment of the Promise

Archbishop Seraphim : Homily
Accepting the Fulfilment of the Promise
Sunday before the Feast of the Nativity of Christ
(Sunday of the Holy Ancestors)
23 December, 2007
Hebrews 11:9-10, 17-23, 32-40 ; Matthew 1:1-25


In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

At this time of year when we are generally so distracted by everything else except the central fact that we are celebrating right now, it is important for us to pay attention a little bit more closely to what exactly is happening now. When we hear all these long lists of names that are almost unpronounceable (and which are for some people unpronounceable), it just sounds like a long list of names, and odd names, too, because they are all Hebrew names. However, those names are not just a list of names, and it is not even the whole list of names. Saint Matthew, the Apostle, today gives us fourteen times three generations of names of the ancestors of Christ. However, if we look in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, he goes farther. Saint Luke takes us all the way back to Adam. The list of the ancestors of Christ is very long indeed.

All these persons are not simply names on a piece of paper that we proclaim once a year. These are all persons (like those of whom the Apostle was speaking to us in the Epistle to the Hebrews) who suffered for the sake of the Promise yet to be fulfilled. Abraham was the first to receive clearly of this Promise when he pulled up stakes and took his whole family and everything to a strange land where he was a complete stranger, unwelcome, unaccepted. He wandered and wandered around with his family, his sheep and their tents all over Palestine. This region is not nearly as pleasant as Mesopotamia (as it was at that time). Nevertheless, Abraham did this because the Lord’s Promise was such that he was compelled because of love to do this very unusual thing : to get up and move, and spend the rest of his life wandering. There are many similar examples amongst his descendants, up to the time of Jesus Christ. The Apostle is reminding us of people who suffered every sort of inconvenience for the sake of the Promise of the Saviour, for the sake of the Promise of God with us. I suppose one could say that it is an inconvenience to be burned at the stake, to be beheaded, to be sawn in two, to be crucified, to live in caves – all these things are definitely inconvenient. However, all these persons, real human beings who lived out their lives (just as you and I are doing), lived their lives for the sake of a Promise that was as yet unfulfilled.

We who follow have not done much better in accepting the fulfilment, in accepting the continuation of the Promise, in accepting His love, in being obedient to His love. Everything did not immediately become rosy and wonderful (at least visibly). The Lord had no home and no place, and even in His infancy He was rejected. He had to flee to Egypt with His family. Later, when they returned, they had to try to establish their domestic life. Our Saviour was considered to be a stranger during the whole course of His life. In the course of everything, He suffered – physically, yes, but in the heart much more because of the nature of His love for us. His love for us is, as it were, with open arms, accepting anything.

You that are parents have experience of this in your own children, I am sure. You love them with all your heart, and you give up everything for their sake. Sometimes parents starve themselves for the sake of their children, so that the children eat and grow (whereas the parents can sometimes stand to lose a kilo or two here or there). Yet in the course of life, willy-nilly, children sometimes poke the parents in the eye. Willy-nilly, sometimes children, not understanding the love of the parents, give them a kick – that is the way human beings so often are. With our self-centredness and pre-occupation with ourselves, we do not always realise the immensity of the gifts that God has given to us. I know I certainly did not fully understand it when I was growing up. Like many people, I took my parents for granted. As so often happens with human beings, it was after my parents had died that I more properly understood how valuable they were for me in my life, and how much they had given up for the sake of us four, and how much they indeed did and do love us. Well, this is “how the cookie crumbles” in being a human. We are always too late about all sorts of things. However, the Lord makes up for our weakness, for our shortsightedness, for our selfishness. He bridges all these gaps that we produce by our selfishness.

I bring up the life of the family, and the difficulties with love which we have in the family, and sometimes our mistreating of each other in the family because it also happens in the parish family, too, from time to time. We misunderstand each other or we lose sight of one thing or another, or we are just plain afraid of one thing or another. Without intending to, we can mistreat each other. Sometimes this may be the result of some sort of reflex reaction. We often do not treat each other the way we ought to.

Amongst the saints who are being remembered today, there is Saint Nahum of Bulgaria, who was named after the Prophet Nahum. This man was a co-worker with Saints Cyril and Methodius in Moravia, in that part of the country now known as Czekhia. Here Saints Cyril and Methodius, Saint Nahum and others established a whole village of up to 50,000 people who were very anxious to bring Orthodox Christianity and the Gospel to people who spoke Slavic languages. It was in this village that they were doing the translations of the Divine Liturgy and the Scriptures, and making the alphabet for the Slavic-speaking people. By God’s mercy, when our Metropolitan was making an official visit to Czekhia and Slovakia some years ago, I had the blessing to be with him. We went and visited this very place which has been archeologically discovered and unearthed to some extent. Here, these holy persons were living and giving this gift to us. It is because of their life and their work there in that village that most of us are here today. It was their evangelisation of the Slavic people that directly and indirectly produced our presence here together today. In one way or another, we are indebted to those men and women who lived in that village in the ninth century. However, certain other sorts of Christians decided that they were “no-goodniks”, and drove them all out, and some of them were killed.

Saint Nahum went then to Bulgaria, which is why he is now associated with Bulgaria. There he finished translating the Scriptures into Slavonic. Because of their love for Jesus Christ, this man and all the others were ready to share this love with people who did not know the Lord, and who needed to know Him. Saint Nahum and the others suffered all sorts of pain and difficulties. It was not easy to build the village in the first place, and it was certainly very painful to be driven out. Yet the driving out produced a scattering of the seed. This, one could say, providentially made the Gospel grow in many more places faster than it would have grown if the village had stayed intact for a much longer period of time.

Nevertheless, it was still at the hands of so-called Christian brothers that this happened. This sort of thing still happens to this day. We Christians do not necessarily treat each other very well because usually we are afraid of something. More than anything else, that is what makes us behave badly : we are afraid of something or other. We “strike out”. We forget Christ. We try to protect things ourselves. We try to be engineers of one thing or another.

You and I are here today because of the love of Jesus Christ. We are here because we love our Saviour, and we know definitely that He loves us. That is what brings us all together here. That is what enables us human beings to manage to live through all the difficulties of life that we face. We all face difficulties and pain in our lives. It is the love of our Saviour that enables you and me to live through it all (and not merely to endure). It is this love which enables us to live with joy and with hope. It is not that we simply stand there “gritting our teeth”. With hope, with love, with joy we pass through the pain, the difficulties, the sorrows, the rejections, the misunderstandings. We pass through it all praying for those who do not understand us and who sometimes reject us. We keep our hearts and our minds on the Saviour, Himself, who is the only reason for any of us to live on. Keeping our eyes and our hearts on Him we continue ; we persevere ; we pass through it all. The Lord renews our joy, our hope, and our strength.

Why we are remembering all those names is that they are not just names, but people with long and difficult lives, people also like Saint Nahum. Let us not forget that each one of us is not just some sort of statistic or disembodied name. We are all lovers of Jesus Christ who are suffering together, persevering together. It is important that we, with our love, pray for each other. It is necessary that we support each other, encourage each other, and always live in forgiveness with each other. In doing this we will fulfil the work of Christ which is beginning in this Incarnation about which we are hearing, and which we are celebrating now. In doing this we will glorify our Saviour who loves us, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.