Reflections by a priest of St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Lewisburg PA on the Gospel reading for the Sunday of the Dread Judgment, February 26, 7532 (March 10, 2024, civil calendar)

When I was new in Orthodoxy I was sent by my parish priest to a monastery where I visited often, received instruction in Orthodoxy, and volunteered to do some cleaning and most often lawn mowing. While there I got to know a Greek monk who helped instruct me in the ways of Orthodoxy. He even got me to stop smoking, when he noticed pipe tobacco in my car and told me that on Mount Athos tobacco is called “the devil’s incense.”

But most of all I felt he was a holy presence, with whom I didn’t interact much, but whom I was unworthily blessed to have in the background of my baby steps in the faith as a great sinner.

So, it was with surprise I learned years later, in a conversation on the internet, that this same holy monk who helped my journey to Orthodoxy, had once killed a man. He was reportedly a bouncer at a club in Queens, New York City, and there was a fight. I don’t know the details but it must have been proven accidental, because he was not in prison. As a former newspaper reporter I knew how things happen at liquor-filled clubs at night, when fights break out, and security tries to break them up.

But I was thinking of him in relation to this Sunday of the Last Judgment. That’s because of how I could imagine he must have felt when that happened, that his last judgement was at hand. God took a hand, though. This man’s repentance and I’m sure sorrow, together with his faith and God’s mercy, led him to a life of monasticism and helping others to salvation.

It is like a story from Dostoevsky. But it happened in recent times in America not far away, and touched my life. Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov said, “we are all in part responsible for each other’s sins.” So no matter how we may not be legally responsible for a sin or a crime, instead of gloating like the Pharisee in a recent Gospel reading, we should repentantly say “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me” like the Publican, as we look to Final Judgement.

There have been times in my life when I thought the final judgement in a secular sense had come, that things were over for me in terms of my hopes and dreams, and sometimes they were, and that was a good thing because my hopes and dreams were not founded on Christ.

When it comes to the Final Judgment of Christ, none of us is safe, although we all can and should and must pray, “Lord help me.”

Some Church Fathers say that the Second Coming of Christ and the Final Judgment may in God’s time partly reflect the prayers of the faithful and the need for repentance of many. Perhaps as God is beyond time, and God’s time is non-time really, grace adjusts the time as we would understand it, and changes it, to allow more potentially to repent.

In the Gospel reading, a central indicator of salvation is how we treated our neighbors in need. Did we help the poor and the sick and the imprisoned? This even is suggested by the account of the Wise Thief on the Cross, known as St. Dimas or St. Rakhtin. Even at the very end of life, the Wise Thief acknowledged Christ and asked to be saved. It is granted to him to be first into Paradise in the New Covenant. Yet the thief’s words to Christ are also an offering of love to a neighbor, even though Christ our true God needs them not. For the thief recognizes Christ as God and gives Him worship, even when Jesus is at the lowest point imaginable for the human being He is also.

In biblical Greek, justice is synonymous with righteous, and so judgement relates to righteousness. Biblical righteousness means harmony and balance, more than legalism. It means being in harmony with the logos that also is love.

This is why Dostoevsky had such skepticism as an Orthodox Christian about modern bureaucracy and even modern legal and court systems. They could not fathom, he believed, that real depth of justice as harmony, or the depths of both depravity and redemption in the human heart.

He illustrated this in the story of the onion told by the scorned character Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. An old woman died who had been a miser and a scold. At her particular judgment her guardian angel found in reviewing her life that she had once given an onion to a beggar. If she could hang on to that onion, representing an act of compassion, she could be lifted up from the fires of hell, the angel explained. But as the old woman was being lifted up, others tortured in the afterlife grabbed onto her. There were many pulling on her and holding on to her legs as she held onto the onion. She kicked them away, screaming, this is my onion, this is mine. And then the onion broke and she fell back down.

Grushenka tearfully said in her life she had only given one little onion, a line echoed in the novel by its two Orthodox protagonists, Alyosha and Elder Zosima. They had just given an onion. That’s what we can hope. And from our particular judgment to the final dread judgment of Christ, we hope that the prayers of the Church may help our situation, so that the glory of God will be for us not so much a burning fire, as energizing and loving light. The difference comes in our receptivity to God’s love here and now.

The Sunday of the Dread Judgment points to Great Lent. But on the far shore is Pascha, the Resurrection of Christ and the source of our resurrection and potential redemption. Yet this Sunday reminds us of the seriousness with which we should take our faith, and the meaninglessness of all else in the light of Christ’s love and our living and sharing of His love with others. Our Patron Saint John said in a series of sermons he gave on this Sunday, the Sunday of the Dread Judgment, that the great trap of the Anti-Christ before the final judgement would be compromise, the temptation to compromise with worldiness, and the spirit of the world. Such compromise could come in incompleteness of our confessions and in the lack of our ascetic strictness with ourselves, even as we should be merciful to others. The Day of Judgment’s ledger books, St. John said, will be read in our souls, not in legalistic account books. Unrepented, a soul with a love of sin will bring that same unsatisfied desire to the Dread Judgment, St. John tells us. This will be the state of hell. This we must remember as we approach the Great Fast, getting ready to dive into the renewal of our baptism, with Pascha twinkling like a lighthouse on the far horizon.

Glory to God for all things!