The Measure of Our Christianity - A Sermon on the 20th Sunday After Pentecost (2026)

My brothers and sisters, just as today’s Gospel reading is brief, so too I will be brief. Yet we must be very careful not to confuse brevity and simplicity with unimportance or ease. Indeed, in all the Gospels there can scarcely be found any passage more important than these six short verses for the living out of a truly Christian life — and there can scarcely be found any commandment more difficult to put into practice than that which we have just heard.

It begins with what has come to be known as the Golden Rule: “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” (Luke 6:31). Perhaps many of us have heard these words so many times that we no longer really listen to them. Perhaps we subconsciously suppose them to simply mean: “do not do to others what we would not wish them to do to us.” But although to act in such a way of course is good, nevertheless it is far from sufficient, and falls exceedingly short of that which Christ in this Gospel passage actually commands. Of course none of us want others to hurt or offend us. But is a world in which men simply do not wrong one another truly the antechamber of the Kingdom of God? Such a condition could quite easily be satisfied if everyone in the world simply left one another alone for all eternity. No, my brothers and sisters, such a negative formulation of the Golden Rule is only the palest shadow of the active and self-sacrificial love which Christ came to this earth to bring.

And Christ not only calls us to an active and self-sacrificing love of those around us, He calls us to something far more radical as well: He calls us to such a love for all men — without exception, and without qualification. He makes this abundantly clear in the next few verses:

For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same… But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; 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.

Luke 6:32-33, 35

This commandment to love our enemies — even to the point of laying down our own lives for them — is what sets Christianity apart from all other religions and philosophies and moral systems. It is, as I said at the beginning, quite possibly the most difficult of any conceivable commandment to put into practice. But there is also no greater conceivable love, whether in heaven or on earth — and there is therefore no other way for us to become “the children of the Highest” (Luke 6:35) than to acquire such love ourselves. Such love is truly the measure of our Christianity.

How is it possible for us to acquire such love, which on a human level is quite simply inconceivable? First, it is absolutely essential to understand that — contrary to everything the world teaches us — love is not fundamentally an emotion. As Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron said: “Love is not sentimentality, but sacrifice.” We are not capable of forcibly producing within ourselves some sort of warm and fuzzy emotional response to the people around us — especially our enemies! But such a response really has very little to do with genuine love (though it can have quite a lot to do with self-love), and therefore the absence or presence of such feelings has absolutely no bearing on our ability to fulfill the commandment of Christ: to lay down our lives for one another.

So what does give us the ability to fulfill that commandment? Quite simply: the grace of God. We must have no illusions, my dear brothers and sisters: to acquire such love is by no means within our own power. It is beyond our own abilities, stunted and crippled as they are by our passions and sins. How often do we ourselves fail even to show genuine love to our closest friends and kindred — much less our enemies! So we must approach the struggle to acquire genuine Christian love first of all with genuine humility.

But after laying the foundation of genuine humility, we must build upon such a foundation by means of true faith. Although true Christian love is a thing divine, nevertheless Christ has given us absolutely everything needed to make such love and divine life our own. He has done this above all through the Mysteries of the Church: baptism, chrismation, confession, and Holy Communion. When yoked together with a life of prayer and of faith, the Holy Mysteries fulfill in very truth the words of Christ: “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God” (Luke 18:27).

And what if we are already living such a life — at least, to the best of our ability — and still find ourselves unable to love as we ought? In such a case, the Holy Fathers have passed down to us a particularly powerful practice: to pray every single day for those whom we are struggling to love, making a prostration and saying: “Save, O Lord, and have mercy on Thy servant N., and through his/her holy prayers have mercy and save me, a sinner.” This prayer is especially powerful because we are not only asking God to bring the other person into the Kingdom of Heaven, but we are also relying on their prayers for us to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. In particular, the humility it takes to rely on the prayers of our enemies (especially when yoked together with physical prostrations) does much to draw down upon us the grace of God. And in the long run, it is impossible for such a prayer to coexist in a human heart together with any kind of hatred or animosity or even coldness toward that other person. One will eventually drive out the other.

Yet we must be extremely patient. The inexpressible greatness and beauty of love for one’s enemies is not a prize that any of us are likely to win overnight. And we must not be discouraged if our prayer initially feels to us like hypocrisy — again, we must always remember that love is an action, not a feeling. The Lord will in no wise condemn us for acting and praying in a way contrary to the sinful passions that arise within our hearts — rather, He will praise us for our struggle, and will by no means fail to come to our aid when the time is right.

Finally, in the meantime we must carefully guard our hearts against all evil thoughts, judgments, anger, and resentment. We must always make excuses for one another, remembering how little we ourselves truly understand, how little we truly see of one another’s hearts, how easily we fixate on one another’s real or imagined failures, while ourselves failing to see the good which still shines within even the most darkened of sinners. We must also always remember how easily the demons can deceive us about one another, and how they love nothing better than to set us against one another. Therefore, at all times and in all things we must strive zealously to fulfill the final words of Christ in today’s Gospel passage: “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful” (Luke 6:36).

May God abundantly bestow upon us all such mercy, through His grace and compassions and love for mankind, through the intercessions of His Most-Pure Mother and of all the saints. Amen!