An Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, for the 20th Sunday After Pentecost
In junior high, a classmate was always getting on the wrong side of our teacher, who was very old school so to speak, for he had grown up in a sod house on a farm in Nebraska and was a dedicated Seventh-Day Adventist, although we were in a secular school just outside Chicago affected by the aftermath of the 1960s.
Once as a punishment my fellow pupil was given the assignment of writing the Golden Rule 100 times.
This was the era before artificial intelligence, and my classmate was quite puzzled, to begin with, about just what was the Golden Rule, for he was Jewish and the Golden Rule seemed more like a phrase from old-time American Protestant culture back then.
We were told not to tell him what the Golden Rule was, which maybe went against the Golden Rule itself.
I think he must have figured it out, though, because he passed eighth grade with the rest of us.
Anyway, we don’t have to guess about the Golden Rule today, even if we don’t know it by that name, because the Gospel presents it to us today:
“The Lord said, ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.’”
St. Theophylact of Ohrid in his commentary on the Gospel writes that this Golden Rule draws on natural law, which Orthodoxy defines as the spark of God’s love in each of our hearts. It’s from our perspective in Creation, what we would like to have done to us.
But what comes after it, St. Theophylact wrote, points more directly to the divine, to the goal of theosis, or oneness with the divine energies, for it speaks of God’s perspective on this.”…love ye your enemies, and do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return; 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. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.”
The Golden Rule for Christians really follows from what Jesus Christ our Lord identified as the two Great Commandments of the Old Testament law, namely to love the Lord our God with all our heart and all our will and all our mind, and to love our neighbor as ourself. To love our neighbor as ourself, we first have to have love for ourself, but the Great Commandments answer how to do that as Christians: It is to love God so wholly that we empty ourself in Him in effect.
Then to love our neighbor as ourself becomes to love our neighbor as we love God, not idolatrously, but iconographically, our neighbor also being an icon of Christ, made in the image of Christ, and following our Lord’s New Commandment to love one another as He loved us.
That goes beyond the Old Testament law, or rather fulfills it, because our Lord loved us more than Himself, as He died for us.
He also prayed that we be one with His Father as He is, in love, and one with Him. This is why we are part of the Body of Christ in His Church, to experience that oneness, or sobornost, that we also find with one another in Christ.
The other Gospel Reading today also tells us to let our light shine, and this is the same message really as the Golden Rule. We love others because Christ loved and loves us. He is the Light of the world, and because of that He said also in today’s Gospel that we are the light of the world. This is the uncreated light of God shining through. To let our light shine, St. Theophylact also explains, is not to display virtue, or virtue-signal as we say today, but is simply to shine, to love by example, and let the uncreated light flow through us from Him.
He notes that the jot and title of the law described as being fulfilled was understood by some Church Fathers as mystically referring to the upright beam of the Cross, the jot, meaning an upright letter, and the cross beam as the tittle, a crossed symbol of writing. This points symbolically to the law being fulfilled in our Lord’s love for us more than Himself.
We can think of this being sealed on the Cross but also expressed in our Lord’s sorrowful and co-compassionate embrace of all our sins, in the Garden of Gethsemane, where in agony he sweated as blood, mingling with tears on the earth, just before He was betrayed. So pierced by a spear on the Cross, water symbolizing baptism and blood symbolizing the Eucharist sprang from his most pure Body, emblematic of the mysteries of the Church, His Body still today.
As we commemorate the synaxis of the wonder-working hierarchs of Moscow today, we can remember how Metropolitan Jonah in the 15th century A.D. stood for such love, along with other faithful, in rejecting the false council of Florence and false union with Rome, which had fallen away from Orthodoxy.
Metropolitan Jonah with the support of a Russian Orthodox Church Council became the first such hierarch to be appointed without the Patriarch of Constantinople, because the latter was embroiled in the false ecumenism with Rome.
Later good relations were properly restored with the Constantinople church, after the false union was no longer a threat, and eventually the position of Metropolitan of Moscow became for a time the Patriarch of Moscow, although that too was lost for a while after the Westernization of Peter the Great.
Still , St. Jonah of Moscow fulfilled the law in loving enough to risk all to stand for the truth against falsehood that would have damaged our Lord’s Church on earth and harmed or misled many spiritually. He marked the formation of the Russian Orthodox Church in a stand for freedom in Christ, more significant spiritually even than our secular 250thanniversary of American freedom today.
His stand bore good fruit. Even today the Russian Orthodox Church in recent years has taken a stand against a type of false union with the West in terms of rejecting the schism in Ukraine supported by the non-Orthodox, and breaking official communion with Constantinople in resistance to it.
In Church history, this break, we pray, will be temporary, and must be handled in terms of love, exemplified by the Golden Rule. We seek to bear each other’s burdens, and in humility even when taking a stand for truth, must do so humbly, realizing that tomorrow undoubtedly we will need lessons ourselves.
But sacrificial Christian love sometimes means also being confessors of truth, not enablers of falsehood for our neighbors, as we strive to love them when the devil tempts them.
Let us pray in our little mission parish that we may always preserve our zeal in the Spirit, but with humility avoiding pride. May the Golden Rule be our banner in standing for truth with love for our neighbors, by helping them to find safe haven in the ark of the one holy apostolic and Catholic Orthodox Church.
Glory to God for all things!
***
The Reading for Sunday from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,
§26 [6:31-36]
The Lord said, ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them that love you, what thanks have ye? For sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them that do good to you, what thanks have ye? For sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them from whom ye hope to receive, what thanks have ye? For sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return; 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. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.’
Holy Gospel according to Matthew,
§ 11 [5:14-19]
The Lord said to His disciples: ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in Heaven. Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or one tittle shall in any wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven; but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven.’