Sermons & Homilies
God is always providing a means to grant us humility. But humility cannot be acquired without humiliation. Humiliation comes about either through our interior passions and falls into sin, or from painful circumstances of body or soul, or from our brother, or by the feeling of God’s grace having withdrawn from our soul, or from all of these together, or a combination of some of them.
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Our brother is our life. We’ve all heard this saying before. But have we really grasped it yet? Have we actually started to live it ourselves? Does it bear any relation to how we experience each day of our monastic life? Even in the monastery—or we might say, especially in the monastery—the force of this saying can be lost on us. Instead, we see our brethren as obstacles to be overcome, as burdens to be endured, as competitors to be defeated, or nuisances to be ignored.
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In its simplicity, even a child could tell us that the purpose of this account is the importance of thankfulness to God, but what is the importance of thankfulness? Why be thankful? Is it only a matter of politeness or good manners or a sign of a well-bred individual? Perhaps we think there is a social code that is important to keep, which amounts to my being upset if you do not thank me for something I have done for you. Even if these questions are worthy of consideration, the point in question is much deeper and has further-reaching effects.
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It is the serpent of anger and wrathful condemnation that St. Joseph the Hesychast counsels us, in one of his letters, to suffocate through silence. When irritation and anger flare up in the soul, he says to shut the mouth of both body and soul in order that this serpent might suffocate and die.
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There are two important truths we ought to remember on this feast day. The first is that there is no Christianity without the full, unequivocal divinity of Jesus, the God-man. The second is that the truth is only manifest when we come together in a communion of love.
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