Remembering Loved Ones Who Have Died

“Emperor Julian the Apostate (c. 331-363) once complained that Christians had ‘filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchers,’ and by their processions with and in honor of the departed they were ‘straining the eyes of all with ill-omened sights of the dead.’  Early Christians, by contrast, held that the death of believers was a cause of hope, and their bodies, far from being ill-omened, were precious links to the faith Christians had in the Resurrection of the Dead.  The Apostle Paul describes this in 1 Thess 4:16-17 as a joyous day when a loud call will sound and the Lord will come again, “and the dead in Christ will rise first.  Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever.”  Christ himself says in Jn 5:28-29 that that ‘the day is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his [the Son of Man’s] voice and will come out . . .”  These are the two readings used in the Orthodox Order for the Burial of the Dead, and they set a resurrectional tone for the whole liturgy.

The boundaries between the living and dead were first broken by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The tomb was empty because the actual, physical resurrection of Christ’s body had taken place (Mt 28:5-6, Mk 16:6, Lk 24:5) . . . This is the hope for all Christians.  Our bodies will also be resurrected, not just our souls: we will recognize each other, and the the ‘marks’ of our spiritual and physical battles will somehow be a part of us.  Our physical bodies are inseparable parts of our identity because, as Orthodox anthropology maintains, a human person is a soma, an animated body – one individual unit of sarx (body) and psyche (soul).”  (Kathryn Wehr, SVTQ Vol 55 #4 2011, pp 502-503)

St Paul’s Interpretation of Scripture

“First, Paul’s interpretation of Scripture is always a pastoral, community-forming activity.  His readings are not merely flights of imaginative virtuosity; rather, they seek to shape the identity and actions of a community called by God to be the bearers of grace.  The conversion of the imagination that Paul seeks is not merely the spiritual enlightenment of individuals but rather the transformed consciousness of the community of the faithful.

Second, Paul’s reading of Scripture are poetic in character.  He finds in Scripture a rich source of image and metaphor that enables him to declare with power what God is doing in the world in his own time.  He reads the Bible neither as a historian nor as a systematic theologian but as a poetic preacher who discerns analogical correspondences between the scriptural story and the gospel that he proclaims.

Third, as the previous observation suggests, Paul reads Scripture narratively.  It is not for  him merely a repository of isolated proof texts; rather, it is the saga of God’s election, judgment, and redemption of a people through time.  Paul sees the church that has come into being in his own day as the heir of that vast ancient story and as the remarkable of fulfillment of the promises made to Israel.

Fourth, the fulfillment of those promises has take an entirely unexpected turn because of the world-shattering apocalyptic event of the crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus.  When he rereads Israel’s Scripture retrospectively, Paul finds numerous prefigurations of this revelatory event – which nevertheless came as a total surprise to Israel and continues to function as a stumbling block for those who do not believe.    Once the Scriptures are grasped in light of this hermeneutical key, their pervasively eschatological character comes into focus; therefore, Paul seeks to teach his readers to read Scripture eschatologically, mindful of God’s final judgment of every human thought and action, while also looking forward in hope to God’s final reconciliation of all things to himself.

Finally, Paul reads Scripture trustingly.  He believes the Scripture discloses a God who loves us and can be trusted, in his righteousness, to keep his promises and to save us.  Thus, he always comes to the reading of Israel’s Scripture with the expectation that what he will find there is a word of deep grace.”  (Richard Hays, THE CONVERSION OF THE IMAGINATION, pp xv-xvi)

The Prodigal Son and Our Father

St Gregory of Nyssa connects the parable of The Prodigal Son to the Lord’s prayer as both bring us to think about God as our Father.

“‘Who art in Heaven’ (Mt 6:9)

These words I think have a very deep meaning.  They remind us of the homeland we have abandoned, of the citizenship we have lost.

In the parable of the young man who left his father’s house, went off the rails and was reduced to living with pigs, the Word of God shows us human wretchedness.

That young man did not find his one-time happiness again until he had realized his moral degradation, had looked into his own heart and had pronounced the words of confession.

These words almost agree with the Lord’s Prayer, because the prodigal son says: ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.‘ (Luke 15:21)

He would not confess himself to be a sinner against heaven if he were not convinced that the homeland he had left at the time of his going astray were not in actual fact heaven.

By this confession of his he makes himself worthy once again to stand in the presence of his father who runs towards him, embraces him, and kisses him.

The conclusion is this:  To return to heaven there is only one route and that is to admit one’s sinfulness and seek to avoid it.  To make the decision to avoid it is already to be perfecting one’s likeness to God.”  (DRINKING FROM THE HIDDEN FOUNTAIN, pp 345-346)

Seeking God in Scripture

“Jesus said, ‘Seek, and you will find‘ (Mt 7:7).   . . .

St Ephrem, a fourth century Doctor of the Church, has these beautiful words of wisdom for those who approach the fountains of the living word (Commentary on the Diatessaron, 1.18-19):

The thirsty man rejoices when he drinks and he is not downcast because he cannot empty the fountain.  Rather let the fountain quench your thirst than have your thirst quench the fountain.  Because if your thirst is quenched and the fountain is not exhausted you can drink from it again and whenever you are thirsty.  Be grateful for what you have received and do not grumble about the abundance left behind.  What you have received and what you have reached is your share, what remains is your heritage.

. . .  St Jerome said: ‘Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.’”  (Renu Rita Silvano, SEEKING JESUS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT, pp 13-14)

Praying Correctly

“Let us pray neither for show nor against our enemies, and let us not be arrogant to think that we can teach Him [God] the method of assistance. . . .  Did you tell Him your injury?  Did you tell Him everything you suffered?  Do not tell Him these and how to help you, because He realizes exactly your best interest.  However, there are many who, in prayer, recite thousands of verses, saying: ‘Lord, grant me physical health, double all my possessions, repel my enemy from me.’  This is completely absurd.

We must dismiss all these things and pray and supplicate only as did the publican, who repeatedly said: ‘God be merciful unto me a sinner.’ Afterwards, He knows how to help you.  For He says, ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.‘  Therefore, in this way, my brethren, let us pursue wisdom with toil and humility, beating our breasts like the publican, and we will succeed in getting whatever we ask for; but when we pray filled with anger and wrath, we are hated by God and are found to be an abomination before Him.

Let us crush our thought, humble our souls, and pray for ourselves as well as for those who have hurt us.  For when you want to persuade the Judge to help your soul and take your part, never pit Him against the one who grieved you.  For such is the character of the Judge, that, above all, He sanctions and grants the requests of those who pray for their enemies, who do not bear malice, who do not rise up against their enemies.  As long as they remain unrepentant, however, God fights them all the more.”  (St John Chrysostom, ON REPENTANCE AND ALMSGIVING, pp 52-53)

A Prayer attributed to St. Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, is written in the spirit of St John Chrysostom’s comments on prayer above:

My Lord, I know not what I should ask of You.  You alone know my true needs.  You love me more than I am able to love.  O Father, grant to me, Your servant, all which I cannot ask.  For a cross I dare not ask, nor for consolation;  I dare only to stand in Your presence.  My heart is open to You.  You see my needs of which I am unaware.

Behold and lift me up!  In Your presence I stand, awed and silenced by Your will and Your judgments, into which my mind cannot penetrate.  To You I offer myself as a sacrifice.  I have no other desire than to fulfill Your will.  Teach me how to pray.  Pray Yourself within me.  Amen.

Mother Syncletica on the Publican & Pharisee

Mother Syncletica, a desert mother, said: “Imitate the publican, and you will not be condemned with the Pharisee.  Choose the meekness of Moses and you will find your heart which is a rock changed into a spring of water.”  (THE SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS,  p 233)

Fr Alexander Men writes:

“Whoever believes in Christ is saved.  Whoever calls on the name of Jesus and follows the Lord is saved.  But to be saved, you must begin to follow Him.  And in order to follow Him, we have to see that we are unworthy, that we cannot save ourselves and that first we must repent.  We must take a truthful and honest look at ourselves.  That’s why we pray in the great canticle: ‘Open unto me, O Give of Life, the gates of Repentance’, for we are already used to things as they are, and the gates of repentance are closed to us.  We think we are living normally, like everyone else, and sometimes, like the Pharisee in the parable, we take pride in ourselves and put on airs before others.  But what do we have to be proud of? 

Today, in the Gospel reading, the Church bids us: ‘Arise, like the tax collector, without thinking about your merits, your power or your good works.  Just get up and repeat, as he did: ‘Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.'”  (AWAKE TO LIFE!, pp 4-5)

God and Mammon

 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.  (Matthew 6:24)

St Silouan the Athonite writes:

“The truly repentant man readily bears every affliction – hunger and nakedness, cold and heat, sickness and poverty, humiliation and exile, injustice and slander; for his soul is turned with longing towards God, and he has no care for earthly things but prays to God with a pure mind.  But the man who is attached to worldly goods and riches can never have a mind pure in God, since in the depths of his soul he is constantly preoccupied with his possessions; and if he does not repent whole-heartedly, and mourn at having grieved God, he will die bearing the burden of this passions, without having come to know the Lord.”   (ST SILOUAN THE ATHONITE,  p 349)

The World as a Passageway to the Kingdom

The Elder Aimilianos writes:

“In general, the Fathers were concerned about the Kingdom of heaven, and in a certain manner theologized based on their personal, spiritual revelations and eschatological experiences.  That is, they saw the world as a figure, a prelude, a passageway to the kingdom of God.  This is why they always endeavored to raise the human person from earth to heaven.

The Church Fathers saw the Old Testament as a foreshadowing of the New.   The events of the Old Testament and even the words of the text were seen as both revealing Christ and hiding Christ.  The saints of the Old Testament saw Christ, but only at a distance or in shadow or in a prefiguring.  Only when the Word became flesh in Christ was the reality revealed.  According to the Elder Aimilianos, life now on earth is similarly a prelude to the reality of the Kingdom.  We must live this life on earth, yet it remains only the passageway to the reality for which we hope and desire.  As such, this world is viewed as temporary or transitional, or the path upon which we must trod to reach our destination.  The things of this world for the Fathers are to be viewed in this perspective – their import is not eternal or permanent but is passing away.  This spirituality caused the Fathers to see this world as of secondary importance to our eternal lives.  Thus through the centuries, the Orthodox spiritual writers did not focus very much on studying the world, but rather were far more interested in the world to come which they believed was the only true reality.  Or, as Galileo puts it, “The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”  This was indeed the interest of the Fathers.

The Elder continues:

The Fathers did not focus their theology on matters pertaining to this world.  This is why they did not produce a theology of marriage.  They certainly taught marriage, and taught things about marriage, but always with an emphasis on raising the human mind from marriage itself to what marriage represents and symbolizes.  St Paul does the same thing when he says that ‘marriage is a a great mystery concerning Christ and the Church.'”  (THE MYSTICAL MARRIAGE: Spiritual Life According to St Maximos the Confessor, p 120)

Thus for the Fathers, as the Elder notes, even marriage for them was not about living on earth, but a way to experience salvation, to experience a way to the Kingdom of God.  The Fathers didn’t produce a theology of marriage because they were not very interested in the physical life in the material world.  They were focused on raising people from this world to heaven.   Marriage was not an absolute for them for it really only belonged to the fallen world and they weren’t trying to figure our how to better enjoy this world.  Though Orthodox concerned about the culture wars proclaim Orthodoxy has a clear idea of marriage, Elder Aimilianos says, “not so.”   There still are plenty of things for the Church to discuss today.

The Heart As God’s Temple

As we celebrate the feast of The Meeting of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple we realize that the Temple’s purpose was fulfilled – it became the place where God came to earth.  But now Christ is the living temple and so the Temple as a building or area was no longer needed.  In a certain sense, its destruction was a natural result of the fact that it had become superfluous in the life of the people of God.  Christ is everything the Temple was ever meant to be or symbolize.  This idea is already reflected in early Christian writings.  Origen (martyred in 254AD) writes that all of the purpose of the temple ended with the coming of Christ.  The destruction of the Temple was simply eliminating something no longer needed for salvation:

“But when the Word became flesh and lived among us (Jn 1:14), his earthly presence in Jerusalem, with its temple and altar and everything that was borne there, was torn down, at that time her [Israel’s] husband died, i.e., the law according to the letter.  Or will it not rightly be said in this section that the message of the law is dead, since no sacrifices, no priesthood, and no ministries associated with the Levitical order are being offered?  It cannot punish the murderer or stone the adulteress, for the Roman authorities avenge themselves on these things.

Do you still doubt whether the law according to the letter is dead?  No male goes up to appear before the Lord three times a year (Ex 23:17; 34:23; Dt 16:16); no sheep is being slaughtered at the Passover festival in the city that is believed the Lord God had chosen (Dt 16:2); no offering of the piles of first-fruits are being celebrated; no leprous diseases and no defilement of sin are being cleansed.  It is possible to doubt in all these things that the letter of the law is dead?”  (COMMENTARY ON THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS Books 6-10, p 25)

For Origen, the Temple served a similar purpose as the Old Testament Scriptures – they were the covering or flesh of the pre-incarnate Word of God.  But when the Word became flesh in Jesus Christ the shadow of the law as well as the Temple was no longer needed for the Word no longer needed such a covering as He had been fully revealed.  He no loner was hidden in the written word or in the Temple.  Now God was present in Christ in the world.  And Origen realizes that even all that was written about the Temple really was prophecy about Christ.  Jesus has entered the real Temple in heaven as is described in the book of Hebrews (Hebrews 9:11-12, 24).  As Roman Catholic scholar Louis Bouyer says:

“… from now on the Shekinah no longer simply dwells in a sanctuary in the midst of its people: it makes their reconciled hearts its sanctuary.”  (EUCHARIST, p 39)

The Feast of the Lord entering the Temple in Jerusalem is the beginning of God coming to dwell in the hearts of His people rather than in a building, which could never contain Him (2 Chronicles 2:6, 6:18).   No longer do we need concern ourselves with a temple in Jerusalem, for now each of our hearts becomes God’s dwelling place.

For thus says the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite.” (Isaiah 57:15)

The Great Doxology

“First of all every holy rite begins with the doxology:  ‘Blessed is the kingdom of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ Intercourse with God consists of thanksgiving, doxology, confession, and petition.  The first of these is doxology, because when grateful servants approach their Master it is fitting that they should begin not by pushing their own affairs into the foreground, but should concentrate on those of their Master.  Such is the nature of doxology.

In petitioning we have in mind the advancement of our own interests.  In confession we seek to be delivered from evils, and accuse ourselves.  In giving thanks we clearly rejoice in the good things which we enjoy.  But in doxology we lay aside ourselves and all our interests and glorify the Lord for his own sake, for his power and his glory.  And so the very nature and the appropriateness of the act demand that the doxology should come first.  Immediately we approach God we recognize the inaccessibility and force and grandeur of his glory, and are filled with wonder and awe and similar feelings.  This is indeed doxology.  We go on to recognize this goodness and love for mankind, and this gives rise to thanksgiving.

Then we consider his exceeding goodness and the liberality of his love for mankind, counting our own wickedness as the first and sufficient proof of that generosity and liberality, for whatever our shortcomings he continues to crown us with blessings.  This is something which is near at hand within us, before our very eyes, and it proves to us more than anything else how much God loves mankind.  And so we remember our sins before God, and this is called confession.  The fourth element is petition.  It follows that we can be confident that our requests for our needs will be granted, for we have just learned something of God’s goodness and his love for mankind.

He who has been good to those who were still sinners will surely be more so to those who have repented, and have become righteous by avowing their sins, according to the words of the prophet: ‘First confess yours sins in order that you may be justified.”  (St Nicholas Cabasilas, A COMMENTARY ON THE DIVINE LITURGY,  pp 43-44)