35th Sunday After Pentecost – Orthodox Homily on Judgement

Today is the Sunday of the Last Judgment. Many in today’s world avoid discussing topics like Judgment, sin, hell. The erroneous thought is that God, being a “God of love,” would never condemn anyone to eternal damnation. Many consider the very idea of judgment a great stumbling block to the Christian faith and likewise, the idea of sin, which has been greatly subjectified according to modern, popular cultural beliefs. And so, in an effort to be more ‘appealing’, these groups avoid discussion of what we call sin and judgment, along with other Gospel teachings that challenge and convict us to repent and recognize that God is our Judge.

In the Orthodox Church, we devoutly affirm our belief every week in the Creed, that Christ God will “come again to judge the living and the dead.” This belief is part of Holy Tradition, part of the teaching of the Gospels. So, this truth being so, the question arises, how is God both the ‘only Lover of mankind’ as well as the ‘Righteous Judge,’ since we refer to God as both?

The answer to this important question, so pertinent to the Sunday of the Last Judgment, begins with the affirmation that God in His great love and mercy toward us desires our salvation more than anything else. This divine will is clearly revealed in the Holy Scriptures: God “desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (I Tim. 2:4) and revealed through the life of Christ, Who, as the Logos (Word) of God, has been revealed as that Truth. No surprise then that the next verse in I Timothy says, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus…”, that is, our Savior, who redeems our human nature and rescues us from damnation through new life in Him.

God the Father invites us into a relationship, a communion with Him through His Son, Jesus Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that we too may “put on Christ” in the language of Holy Baptism. In Christ, we become fellow victors with Him over sin and death—those very enemies that Christ God became incarnate to defeat, and which, would, otherwise keep us from life with holy God. Through His redemption, God made a way for us to grow in holiness and participation in the life that He alone is. Such is His great love and mercy for us: He created us for love and communion with Him. He created us for adoption as His sons and daughters, co-heirs with Christ. He created us to participate in His divine life, in the relationship of unity and love that God the Holy Trinity is in His divine nature.

Through the lives of the Saints, we see that growth in love and relationship with God is possible through our cooperation with God’s redemptive work in their lives by the Holy Spirit. But, we see too in our own lives and in the sin around us, the possibility of our rejection of that love—rejection of that life that God so graciously entrusts to us every time we say yes to sin and grow apart from life and relationship, communion, with Him.

The truth is that God’s love and judgment are not incongruous paradoxes of God’s nature, as some suggest in today’s culture in their eagerness to dismiss Christianity. Rather, they go hand in hand: Without a correct understanding of sin and judgment, there is no Christianity, no healing, no salvation, no life with God.

This is where judgment comes in: When we talk of the Final or Last Judgment, we’re acknowledging that God’s judgment is happening even now. Judgment began when God rejected our first parent’s separation from life itself—their true life in God and their true identity—and, instead, chose death. But through His Christ, God made a way so we would not remain in perpetual alienation from Him, our life source. God, in His love for us, doesn’t leave us in sin and death: He repeatedly calls us back from sin and death to life with Him—as we hear every Divine Liturgy, as we see in His relationship with Israel. He invites us to ‘put on Christ’ in baptism and receive the sealing of the Holy Spirit in Chrismation.

At the present, before His glorious Second Coming, it’s we who must, in a sense, judge ourselves through our choices for or against God. This doesn’t mean that we make it up as we go along: All such relativism and subjectivism of our sins or even of the Orthodox Faith, leads to fantasy, delusion, and our own prideful self-condemnation and willful separation from God’s life.

When we speak of judging ourselves, we mean that our pilgrimage of life with God is dynamic and active: we are actively repenting, we are bringing our sins before God in regular confession, we are praying for God’s mercy on us sinners, we’re seeking His healing from our sin-sickness and passions, we’re confessing our negligence of our divine calling of adoption, we’re confessing and repenting of our inaction towards our church, our neighbors, the world around us.

This judgment of ourselves, this active repentance, we engage in now so that come the Last and Final Judgment we may be spared from separation from Christ. The Ikos of Canticle Six from Matins for today says, “O Lord supreme in love, as I think upon Thy fearful judgment-seat and the day of Judgment, I tremble and am full of fear, for I am accused by my own conscience.“

Moment by moment, repentance and regular sacramental confession purges us of our sin and heals our conscience as it aids us in our growth in faith so we can experience more of God’s love as we humble ourselves through repentance and submission to the life in Christ in His Church. In this way, we’re saved from condemnation at Christ’s dread judgment seat. At the same time, Christ in His mercy heals us of our sin-sickness, grows us into the men and women of God He’s called us to be. By this mercy, we come to enjoy the blessed life with God, the filling of that emptiness within us that only God is meant to fill and that only God can fill.

Back to the question about love: What we really need to ask is not how God can judge; He’s holy, He created us, He’s the only One who can judge, being the Truth itself. What we need to ask is: How is it love if we refrain from speaking of this truth about sin and judgment when given the opportunity? How is it love, if we look sin in the eye and don’t address it in our own lives, subjectify it, or refrain from speaking the truth with others whom we love? We can do so without judging them, for judgment is an attitude of the heart, an attitude of ultimate condemnation, but if we don’t understand sin and its sad consequences on us, on them, or subjectively decide that we can define sin for ourselves, then we’re keeping ourselves and others from the very freedom from sin that leads to our and their healing, salvation, and eternal life with God. In short, denial of the reality of the Last Judgment, of the consequences of sin, is a rejection of life, a rejection of the possibility of glory. And that, brothers and sisters, is no love but only self condemnation.

Now the season is upon us to take Christ’s words to heart and apply the teaching of His Body the Church to our daily lives. Now is the time for us to ready ourselves to purge the passions and sin from our lives, as we continue to struggle and grow to love and serve Him, His Church, and our fellow man. If we are to make the most of this holy season, we prepare ourselves, our families, our homes (our ‘little churches’) now so that we are ready to go into the desert with Christ during the 40 days of our Lenten journey with Him. Now is the time to prioritize Christ and His Church on our calendars. Now is the time to speak with your priest about your participation and fasting so that you can make the most of this opportunity for deification, growth, healing, and salvation.

Christ God beckons us, “Come!” Our faith in Christ, our love for God, is manifest in the spiritual fruit we produce in cooperation with the Holy Spirit’s work in us and through us. Then, on that Last Day, by God’s grace, we’ll hear from Christ’s own lips those joyous words we sang last night in Vespers, “Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you.”

Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Sunday, 19 February 2017
Sunday of the Last Judgment

Epistle: I Corinthians 8:8-9:2
Gospel: Matthew 25:31-46