In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
At the time of the Great Entrance, n will come out with the aer over his head. He has not been seen doing this before, and he will not be seen doing it again. Why is he doing this ? It is because at this time he will be ordained to the Holy Priesthood, God willing, and he will be offered by us. That is why his head is covered with the aer. He is part of our offering, along with the bread and wine for the Eucharist. It will be his responsibility afterwards to feed the flock by celebrating the Divine Liturgy. The priest is part of our offering, therefore, at this particular time. That is why it is important for you to pray for him when the deacon comes out and makes a prostration in your direction, saying “Command”. He is prostrated in your direction, because he is asking for your blessing, concurrence and agreement that he be part of this offering.
On this day, Meat-fare Sunday, the day of the Last Judgement, we are presented with a theme which seems to run all over the place these days (and not only these days). I grew up in Alberta, and when I was about fourteen or fifteen, I first heard Gospel radio programmes talking about the end of the world which they said was going to happen in five minutes. These things were generally scary. I had a very interesting conversation last night with the youth group, who brought up the same subject, because this theme is still running around : the end of the world is coming in five minutes, and it is a scary thing. The young people were right to express their concern about the gravity of all this.
The whole point of the Second Coming is not to be making us run scared, because when we are running scared, we are not paying attention to anything around. If we pay attention closely to both of today’s readings, we understand that they refer to the nature of our relationship with each other and with God. The Apostle Paul is saying that if a person is going to eat meat offered to idols, then one has the liberty to do so because we are blessing it anyway, and giving thanks to God. God’s blessing overcomes anything and everything associated with what is offered to idols.
However, for the sake of a brother or sister who might be tempted by our exercise of liberty, we restrain ourselves for their sake. The weaker person is not to be led into temptation by the exercise of my liberty. It is true that we have great freedom in Christ, but this freedom is not wild-fire freedom that is to be exercised on a whim. It is freedom that is to be exercised having regard to everyone around us, and first of all, having regard to whether it is being exercised in accordance with God’s will. We have the freedom to live in harmony with God’s will, and the freedom to live against God’s will. We have always had that liberty in God’s love. That is how the Fall came about in the first place, because our first parents listened to the Tempter and accepted the hypothesis which he presented.
When it comes to the Last Judgement itself, people have a strong tendency to focus in on little details about this – who exactly is going to go left, and who exactly is going to go right, and what do I have to do to make sure I go right. We are often so obsessed with these details and mistaken in our belief that God is interested in our fulfilling these details so that we can somehow “qualify” to get in. God is not interested in our fulfilling of all these little details. God is interested in the condition of our hearts, and the effect of our life on the people around us and on the environment. That is what He is interested in. Celebrating the Divine Liturgy well, beautifully and correctly, for instance, is necessary, but we are not going to be judged by that alone by any means. Observing the fast is very important. However, we do not observe the fast in order to “qualify” to get into the Kingdom of Heaven and to get “brownie points” from God. That would be blasphemy. What truly has meaning is my offering to God of my abstaining from flesh-meats and other delightful things, in order to spend more time with Him because I love Him.
What do we do with Great Lent ? Instead of spending less time cooking (having salads, and things that take little time to prepare), we seem to involve ourselves in observing the letter of the law of Lent, so that there are no dairy products, no fish, no meat, no oil of the wrong sort in the food, and we spend three times as long making this food. It seems that perhaps we even go to the Seventh Day Adventist shops, and get nice food which looks like chicken, but is not chicken (it is soy). Perhaps we purchase nice, good-tasting hot dogs that look like hot dogs (but are soy), and nice turkey and beef things that look like something they are not. They look good – they taste good – but they are probably not all that pleasing to God. I suppose they are pleasing to the palate, but I doubt that it is pleasing to God when we go about observing Lent like this. Is our God our stomach and our taste buds ? We have to ask ourselves this question.
The fulfilment of Great Lent, the true fulfilment of Great Lent, is, and always has been, not in observing the strict letter of the law (observing the dietary prescriptions which are good in themselves, but taken in the wrong direction they can be deadly), but in how I am to other human beings. What we are almost always forgetting in North America is that the other significant half of Great Lenten activity is almsgiving, caring for the poor, paying special attention to people who are in need. That is one of the reasons why this lesson comes to us at this particular time. As this parable from our Saviour indicates, we have to take care of those who are around us. The need may not be a material need. The need may be a spiritual or an emotional need. People have all sorts of needs, and God gives each of us all sorts of different gifts in order to meet those needs. The Christian way is, and always has been to ask : “How can I serve ? How can I help someone else ?”
N is about to be ordained to the priesthood in order to help in the nurturing of this flock, in nurturing those gifts that we all have, which are for the building up of the Body of Christ. Now we will have two priests here. Much more is going to be expected, somehow. God will give everyone more and more Grace, but more will be expected.
What is important to remember, brothers and sisters, is that the indications that we have been given are indications of how we should go about our lives, but they are not rules. The Pharisees went wrong with the Ten Commandments, for instance, by losing sight of the summary of the Ten Commandments, which was, and is, to this day : “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (5 Moses [Deuteronomy] 6:5). Our Saviour added here : “and your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31). All that is in the Ten Commandments. The Pharisees enshrined the Ten Commandments in such a way that the commandments had to be protected to minimise the risk of breaking them. The Pharisees invented thousands of other rules about how to live life in order to protect oneself from offending the great Ten Commandments. However, that again was all because of fear. The Lord is not interested in our being afraid of Him. The Apostle John says : “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). He is, of course, right. God is love, and His relationship with you and with me is all life-giving love. Fear comes from Big Red down below. Love, liberty, and life come from the living God who loves us, and is interested in our life, our eternal life. He is interested in our interior healing. He is interested in our well-being.
The Lord is not interested in holding swords over our heads and threatening us all the time, even though sometimes when He disciplines us, it might feel something like that. Anytime I have been disciplined by the Lord, I have definitely deserved it. I do not as a result feel that God is “after me”, somehow, much less, “against me”. In the same way, in my childhood I was disciplined rather firmly, corporally, frequently. I do not resent my parents and grandparents, or even the teacher who embarrassed the life out of me in grade three when she slapped me over the knuckles with a ruler. That was after I had said no to her. I do not resent that at all. I was not afraid of them either, because I was very wilful, very wilful. It was difficult for people to put me on the right path, and it took a lot of pushing and shoving, because of their love, to keep me on some sort of straight-and-narrow. The Lord does the same with you and with me in order to keep us well directed and focussed.
It is important for us, brothers and sisters, to keep our focus and our priorities straight in the coming Great Lent. This means that we offer our fasting and our abstinence to the Lord because of love, so that we can spend more time with Him, and less time cooking. Let us not worry about the “exact” rules of everything in Great Lent. Rather, let us worry about deepening our loving relationship with the Lord. That is the purpose of everything. Let us be concerned about what we are doing for our brothers and sisters, and how we can be good to them. It is about precisely those things that our Saviour is going to be asking you and me at the end as He says in the Gospel today. He is going to be asking you and me : “How did you love Me ?” “How do you love Me ?” “How did you show your love for Me ?” “How do you show your love for Me ?” Let us ask the Lord to help us to have our hearts attuned to Him, His love, His will, so that we will know what His will is, and so that we will do what He is asking us to do, quickly, with love, to His glory : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.