THE GOSPEL
1 March 1989
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In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
It is of the Gospel that I wish to say a few words to you. In
countries that are nominally Christian or allegedly Christian it is
very difficult for one to recapture the true meaning of the word and
of the event of the Gospel. What is the Good News? What is new in it?
What is good in it? Those of us who discovered the Gospel as a new
life may perhaps feel that more intensely whether we are people of the
East or people of the West. What is news? O, something very wonderful
and very simple - it is life but only those who were ill can know what
it means to be whole, only those who were dead can appreciate what it
means to be alive.
In one of his broadcasts in 1943 C.S.Lewis said, “What should happen
to those who meet a Christian, a believer? They should stop arrested
by what they see and exclaim, “Lo, a statue has come to life!” That
is, something that was nothing but stone, beautiful or not, but inert,
insensitive, which could not hear or speak, of a sudden has become a
living being. Can you imagine what would happen to people if all of us
who call ourselves by the name of Christ were such that people
encountering us should say, “Look, this is a living being and because
I have met him or her I understand now that I don’t know yet what it
means to be alive. I am a corpse, I am half dead, there is no life in
me, and in these people there is life.”
I would like to single out a few elements of newness also in what one
may discover in the Gospel and to do this, I am afraid, I will be a
little too personal for the taste of Britain. I was baptised an
Orthodox when I was a child but then the first World War came, the
revolution came, the bitter and hungry and painful years of
emigration. And there was no time for me to receive any kind of
religious education so that God did not exist for me. I was not an
atheist by conviction (one is not an atheist at the age of 7 and 10,
and 12, and 15) but I was an atheist in the truer sense of the word -
there was no God in my experience, no God in my life. And therefore
there was no ultimate meaning in my life, all the meaning of life
could be summed up in the necessity of survival. There was no common
roof for my parents and me, there was food when it happened to be
there and there was a great deal of violence and hardship around. So
that all my vision of life was that of a struggle and all my
understanding of people around me was that of a jungle peopled by
prospective enemies.
And then one day I happened to read the Gospel. It happened by the act
of God as it were because it happened in order for me to discard it. I
heard a priest speak to us, boys, in a youth organisation and what he
said shocked me, revolted me so much that I decided to check whether
what he had said could possibly be true. We were teenagers, preparing
to re-conquer Russia sword in hand and here was a man who spoke of
Christ and spoke of nothing but meekness, humility, forbearance,
turning one cheek when one was hit on the other, giving us an image of
what was no manly. I came home determined to make sure and to finish
with the Gospel if that was the Gospel and that was Christ. I counted
the chapters of the Gospels because as I expected no good from the
reading I thought that the shortest would be the best and so I was
landed with St. Mark’s Gospel, a Gospel written for young ruffians
like me, the youth of pre-Christian Rome.
And then something happened to me which you may interpret either as a
hallucination or as a gift of God - between the beginning of the first
and the end of the second chapter of his Gospel, of St. Mark’s Gospel,
I suddenly became aware with total, absolute certainty that on the
other side of the desk the Lord Jesus Christ was standing alive. There
was no hallucination of the senses - I heard nothing, saw nothing,
smelt nothing, I looked and my certainty remained as total and as
totally convincing. And then I thought that if Christ is alive, if I
am in his presence, then the man who died on Calvary was truly what is
purported him to be, the man who died on Calvary was God come to us as
a Savour.
And then I began to read the Gospel with new eyes in a different way.
I turned pages simply to read other passages than the one I had read
about the beginnings and I landed on a passage that said in St.
Matthew’s Gospel that God shines his light upon the good and the evil.
And I sat back and I thought, “All my life I’ve been surrounded by
people whom I considered as enemies, who to me were like beasts of
prey, people of whom I was terrified and whom I wanted to fight,
people who had taught me that the only way of survival was to become
as hard as nails - and God loves them all. And if I want to be with
God I must learn to love them whatever they may do to me because if I
reject them I will not be with God, I will not be with Christ who on
being crucified said, “Father, forgive, they don’t know what they are
doing.” Who said to Judas who had come to betray him, “Friend, why
thou hast come hither?” I did not know these examples but that is what
I perceived.
And I remember coming out into the street the next morning, going to
the suburban train that will bring me to my school and crowds of
people to their work and I looked round at all these people moving
towards the station that had been so alien, that were to me
prospective danger, tormentors, enemies, whom I wanted to ignore and
fight if necessary, I looked at them and thought, “God loves them all!
O, the wonder! - we are in a world of love. Whatever they may feel
about me I know what they may not know themselves”. This was my first
experience, this was a moment when I suddenly felt that I was alive
and that I had been dead. I had been a corpse among corpses, now I was
alive among people who, who knows, perhaps were as alive as I, or,
horror of horrors, were corpses that needed come to life. And with the
foolishness of a boy of 14-15, pressed in these carriages of the
suburban train I turned to my neighbour and said, “Have you ever read
the Gospel?” He looked at me condescendly, smiled and said, ‘Now, why
should I?” And then I told him what I had just discovered. He probably
thought I was mad. And I was and I am still and I hope that this
madness will never leave me because from that moment onward I felt
there was no point in life except in whatever way of life, in whatever
walk of life you are to proclaim the Gospel, to proclaim this miracle
that the Gospel is a power of life, that Christ can give us life. And
by contrast that as long as we are not possessed of the life which
Christ can give we are dead whatever we imagine.
And then I discovered other things. I discovered the parable of the
prodigal son and that was such a wonderful experience because that
corroborated what I have felt within myself. Twice does the father
say, “My son, your brother was dead and he is now alive.” He says that
to the servants, he says that to the older son, he knew what it meant
to be alive, and he knew what it meant to be dead. The prodigal son
knew also what it meant to die and to resurrect. He was partaker after
a fashion in the experience of Lazarus who had come to life after
having, tasted death. The older son did not know that, in his
imagination his younger brother had gone into the far country, enjoyed
life seeing things which he, faithful servant, slave, hireling of his
father, had never seen. Perhaps was he jealous of him but he certainly
did not feel that he missed or had lost anything. And so what was
there to be rejoiced at when he came back? And why was it that the
father was so happy to see him back instead of saying, “No, you have
squandered all my goods, go and earn your living.” He did not know
what it meant to be dead because he had never been alive.
And then I discovered something more. I discovered an answer (o, that
didn’t come immediately) to a question that puzzled me - how could it
be that God could know what it means to be a creature? How could the
Immortal One know what it means to be dead? What could the Eternal One
know how one can lose even the transitory, ephemeral life which is
ours? And then I realised that God in his Incarnation had become one
with our creatureliness, he had not only a human body and a human
soul, he had inherited this body and soul from generations back, he
was the heir of centuries and centuries of humanity, of real, concrete
people. He was true man, the only true man because to be a true man
means to be a man in perfect oneness with God, partaker of divine
nature, as Peter the Apostle puts it in his Epistle. The union of
divinity and humanity had made his humanity not less human but more
truly human. He knew what it meant to be a human being, he knew what
it meant to be alive. Did he know what it meant to be dead?
Later I discovered the Cross. On the same evening, turning pages (the
way I put it now of course could not have been the thing I perceived
and put it when I was a boy in my middle teens) what I discovered was
this - that Christ had chosen as it were simultaneously to be totally
solid with God and totally solid with man, at one with God, at one
with man. And that had two tragic consequences - because he stood
before man in God’s name, in total solidarity with him, without any
compromise, he had become inacceptable to all those who were not
prepared to accept God on his terms, on God’s own terms, to be God’s
own people in a real full, sacrificial, heroic sense. And because he
has chosen to remain in total, ultimate solidarity with man before the
face of God he had to share with mankind all the predicament of being
a creature, of living in fallen world, of being a man who had brought
through sin mortality and death. And so he had to be rejected by
mankind, he had to die outside of the city of men as the Anglican hymn
has it “on the little hill without the walls,” not within Jerusalem,
not within the company of men, outside, like the scrape-goat who was
loaded with the sins of Israel and cast out to die in the wilderness.
On the other hand he could not die because in his very humanity
inseparably, perfectly united to his divinity there was no space for
dying and yet, he chose to share with us the only ultimately tragic
predicament of mankind - He chose mortality and death and this he did
on the Cross, something happened that he became unaware of his unity
with the Father and having lost God he had to die, he could die and he
could go down into the pit, into the Hades, into sheol of the Old
Testament, the place of the irremediable and ultimate separation from
God. He came down into it as a man and he filled it with the glory of
his divine presence, harrowing hell, making an end to it. He had
united God and man in his person, he called every human being to unite
himself to him and through him to become the son or the daughter of
God. What a marvel, what a wonder!
That is what the Gospel meant to me when I began to discover it. And I
ask you to look at it with the eyes of one who was alien to the
Gospel, who knew nothing about it and to ask yourself, “What is there
in the Gospel which is new to you, not yet ever experienced, never
known and what is in the Gospel which is so good that one can turn...
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* All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh Library
http://www.mitras.ru/eng/
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