Gospel: Luke 6:31-36 (§26);

In the Name of the Father, Son & Holy Spirit!

Dear Father, brothers & sisters: Spraznecom! Happy Feast!

In today’s Resurrectional Gospel reading we are with the Saviour and his newly recruited fishermen turned disciples at the very beginnings of our Lord’s earthly ministry. This section of the Gospel, between chapters 6 – is the Lukan equivalent of what is known in St Matthew’s Gospel as the Sermon on the Mount, and contains some of the most important moral discourse in the whole of the Gospel. The traditional site for this Sermon of our Lord is on what is now called, the Mount of Beatitudes on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, between Capernaum and Gennesaret. This would have been a fairly short distance from the place where Simon, or Simon Peter as he was now named, would have had his boats and the place where they had made that extraordinary catch in the Gospel reading we heard just last week. To understand and interpret our short Gospel reading, let us turn to our father among the saints, St Cyril, the 5^th century Patriarch of Alexandria who discusses our reading in the 29^th Sermon of his Commentary on the Gospel of St Luke.

Our Gospel reading today comes a little way into chapter 6, after our Lord has proclaimed the Beatitudes, or the list of those people who are worthy of blessings. In St Luke’s version this is a very truncated list, compared to St Matthew’s version, consisting of four blessings which is then uniquely counterbalanced with four “woes” towards the list of people who deserve moral censure. In this chapter of the Gospel we are given as it were the main substance of our Lord’s moral teaching, the manifesto of the Kingdom of God which develops the principles established in the Beatitudes. We hear these beatitudes so regularly, at every Divine Liturgy where they are sung at the Third Antiphon whilst the clergy and servers make the First or Little Entrance, that it is easy, by overfamiliarity, to miss their power and challenge. If we listen carefully however, to our Lord’s teaching in this informative chapter of the Gospels we can see just how radical, just how searching and transcendental our Lord’s teaching is, what a progression this represented from fulfilling the basic demands of the Jewish Law.

In the passage immediately before our Gospel reading, our Lord commends us to do a series of extraordinary things – to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek when struck on the face, to give away our cloak or possessions when someone wishes to them from us. As our Lord concludes –

Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again.

What is sketched out here is a way of being that is completely beyond anything in the Law and indeed any secular philosophy. In his commentary, St Cyril

That Christ is the end of the Law and the prophets, is declared by the most wise Paul for the law served as a schoolmaster to guide men unto His Mystery.

The Jewish Law asked for restraint and proportionality as opposed to any excess retribution. However, through the Incarnation, Christ as God-made-Flesh is now asking so much more of his creatures, that they not limit themselves to proportionate and reasonable justice but that rather they aspire to make manifest a divine and perfect love towards everyone they meet, whether that person is their worst enemy, has just slapped them in the face or, indeed, stolen their jacket. This is the love that God now demands of each one of us.

Slightly earlier in his sermon on this chapter, St Cyril well anticipates how each one us might be feeling when confronted by such lofty and almost inaccessible heights of moral and spiritual perfection.

Our mistaken preconceived ideas and the fierce tyranny of our passions, render it a thing difficult for our minds to accomplish and therefore knowing that the natural man does not admidst of these things, regarding as folly and mere impossibilities the oracles of the Spirit … But perhaps thou wilt object, saying, ‘Christ was God, but I am a frail man having but a feeble mind, and one unable to resist the attachment of covetousness and pain’. Thou speakest rightly, for the mind of man easily slides into wrong doing. Nevertheless I say, the Lord has not left thee destitute of His compassion and love: thou hast by thee, yea within thee, by the Holy Spirit: for we are His abode, and He logeth in the souls of them that love Him. He gives thee strength to bear nobly whatever befalls and to resist manfully the attacks of temptations.

At this very moment we are surrounded by the ikons of the saints and the life of each of these Friends of God demonstrates to us that the perfection of love that was manifested in Christ-God is not limited to His own Divine Example. Rather, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, He has given the power for us to trample down the passions and to show forth a greater love.

We then arrive at the first verse of our Gospel reading –

And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.

This brief verse is one of the most famous in the whole of the Gospels and is also known as the Golden Rule. Perhaps anticipating the concerns of the apostles, and of us, that the moral perfection that Christ demands is too much for us sinners, our compassionate Saviour condescends to our weakness and returns to a more basic moral maxim.

He therefore Who knoweth all things takes the natural law of self love as the arbiter of what any one would wish to obtain from another. Shew thyself, He says, to others such as thou wishest them to be towards thee.

At the same time, though this rule of self-love also prevents us from retributive retaliation and always commends us rather to the love, kindness and gentleness that we would all wish to be received and treated. But then in the verses that follow, our Saviour again goes further, reminding us that the principle of self-love should not be reflected merely on those that we already know and love and whom we already receive this love and respect from.

For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again.

This short passage from today’s Gospel should make each one of us question the degree to which we have even begun to live as Christians, according to Christ’s teaching and example. For is it not the case that perhaps so many of the “good” deeds that we might think we have done in the course of the past week, month or year have in fact been limited to those that love us, respect us and may well reciprocate the kindness we have shown. How easy it is, in one sense to love those who already love us. To give to those, we know and love, to lend to those disadvantaged people we already know and fully expect will repay us. Of course there is nothing wrong with being kind to our wife, of lending money to a friend or doing some good deed towards someone we know well. But, our All-Compassionate Saviour is always asking us to go one step further, to love more radically, more purely and more disinterestedly without consideration of reciprocation or reward. For in the case of us limiting our love to those we know and are already in relationship with we also know and expect that we will receive due recognition and reward for whatever good deeds we have done.

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.

And here Christ our God presents us with an ikon of Divine Love. Of loving our enemies and persecutors, of doing good to those that hate us, of lending to those from whom we could never expect to repay us, indeed actually hoping for nothing in this world in return. This kind of loving without any possibility or hope of return in this life, in this world, only makes sense against the backdrop of eternity, in the presence of the God Who sees our secret deeds, and knows our innermost thoughts and intentions. If we can manifest this kind of loving, this kind of giving, this kind of lending outside the usual narrow sphere of our love and generosity we kindle and revitalise something of that lost image of God within each one of us and reflect something of the Love and Mercy of God Himself.

As our Gospel reading concludes:

Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.

For this virtue, St Cyril says,

Restores us to the form of God and imprints on our souls certain characters as it were of the supreme nature.

Dear Fathers, brothers and sisters: just yesterday our church celebrated the secondary, Autumn feast of our dear Vladyka St John the Wonderworker, the commemoration of the uncovering of his incorrupt relics on 12^th October 1993. This modern saint of our own latter times, who was our Archbishop in London, manifested through his small, frail body the fullness and maximal love towards all people which our Saviour commands us. We can think of the universality of his love, his searching out of the little babies and children in the back alleys and slums of Shanghai who had been discarded like trash and taking them to his orphanage. Some of these children were so traumatized that Vladyka became a true father to them. Or we might think of his selfless pastoral visits, usually late at night, and often at unexpected times, taking the Holy Gifts to the mentally ill and physically infirm in hospital and wards throughout Europe and America. Very often Vladyka was the only one who visited and cared for these people, and certainly the only cleric that would minister to them. Many of them were too sick or too unwell to be able to thank him or reward him. Let us follow then his living example to us of this disinterested, elevated love of Christ beyond the circular, reciprocal logic of this world, and thereby live as children of the Highest, children of the Light, sons and daughters of the Kingdom of God.

Amen.