A WEEK AFTER CHRISTMAS
13 JANUARY 1985
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In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
In imagination we think ourselves 2000 years back. What wonder should
fill us: a week, and the world has become different. The world that
had been for thousands of years like the lost sheep was now the sheep
found, taken upon His shoulders by the Son of God become the Son of
man. The unbridgeable gap that sin had created between God and man was
now at least incipiently bridged; God had entered into history, God
Himself had become man. God had taken flesh, and all things visible,
what we perceive in our blindness as dead, inert matter, could in His
body recognise itself in glory. Something absolutely new had occurred,
the world was no longer the same.
Moreover, there is another aspect to the Incarnation. God had become
man, but God in Christ had spoken words of truth that was decisive,
that gradually like yeast dropped into dough was to change the world.
God had revealed to us the greatness of man. Christ becoming man was
evidence, is and will remain forever evidence that man is so vast, so
deep, so mysteriously deep, that he can not only contain the divine
presence as a temple, but can unite himself with God, “become partaker
of the divine nature”, as St. Peter puts it in his Epistle. And again
that man is great, and that however far we fall away from our
vocation, however unworthy we may become of it, God will never
re-establish with us a relationship which is less than that of His
fatherhood and our condition of sons and daughters of the Most High.
The prodigal son was asking his father to receive him as a hireling
now that he was unworthy of being called a son; but the father did not
accept it. When the son made his confession, the father stopped him
before he could even pronounce those words, because God does not
accept our debasement, we are no slaves and no hirelings. Has not
Christ said to His disciples, "I no longer call you servants, because
a servant does not know the will of his master, and lo, I have told
you everything."
Again, the proclamation in Christ and by Him is that what matters
supremely is every person, that He lives and dies for every one of us,
that it is not collective units that matter, but each of us. Each of
us, tells us the Book of Revelation, possesses from God a name, a name
which will be revealed to us at the end of time, but a name which no
one can know but God and he who receives it, because this name is our
relationship to God, unique, unrepeatable; each of us is unique for
Him. What a wonder! The ancient world knew of nations and races, it
knew of slaves and owners, it knew of categories of people, exactly in
the same way in which the modern world that is gradually becoming not
only secular but pagan, distinguishes categories and types and groups.
God knows only living men and women.
And then a new justice was introduced, or rather proclaimed by Him,
not the distributive and retributive justice of the law, another
justice. When Christ says to us, "let your justice be beyond that of
the scribes and pharisees," He speaks of the way in which God treats
each of us. He accepts each of us as we are. He accepts good and evil,
He rejoices in the good, and He dies because of and for the sake of
what is evil. And that is what God calls us to remember, and how He
calls us to be and to behave — not only within our Christian circle
but in the whole world, to look at every person with that kind of
justice; not judging and condemning, but seeing in each person the
beauty which God has impressed upon it and which we call "the image of
God in man". Venerate this beauty, work for this beauty to shine in
all glory, dispelling what is evil and dark and making it possible, by
the recognition of beauty in each other, for this beauty to become
reality and to conquer.
He has taught us also about a love which the ancient world did not
know, and the modern world, like the old one, is so afraid of: A love
that accepted to be vulnerable, helpless, giving, sacrificial; a love
that gives without counting, a love that gives not only what it
possesses, but itself. That is what the Gospel., that is what the
Incarnation brought into the world, and this has remained in the
world. Christ said that "the light shines in the darkness, and the
darkness cannot comprehend it," but it cannot put it out either. And
this light shines and shall shine, but it will conquer only if we
undertake to be its heralds and the doers of these commandments of
justice and of love, if we accept God's vision of the world and bring
to it our faith, that is, our certainty and our hope, which is the
only power that can help others to start anew; but to start anew they
must see newness in us. The world has become incipiently new by the
union of God with man, when the Word became flesh; it is for us to be
a revelation of this newness, the resplendence and shining of God in
the darkness or the dusk of this world.
May God grant us courage and love and greatness of heart to be His
messengers and His witnesses, and may the blessing of the Lord be upon
you by His grace and love towards mankind always, now and forever and
world without end. Amen.
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* All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
3rd International Conference dedicated to Metropolitan Anthony’s
legacy in Moscow, September 23-25, 2011
http://www.mitras.ru/eng/eng_conf3mow.htm
Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh Library
http://www.mitras.ru/eng/
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