Saint Vladimir Seminary
January 30, 2024
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today, we celebrate the feast of the Three Holy Hierarchs. This feast is a feast of harmony, of unity, of peace in the Body of Christ.
Many of you may know the story: in the eleventh century, a controversy arose over the question: Who is the greatest father? Was it St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, or St. John Chrysostom? In the midst of this growing dissension, the three saints appeared together in a dream to St. John Mauropus, bishop of Euchaita, and said: “There are no divisions among us, and no opposition to one another.”
Prompted by this dream, St. John established the present feast day and wrote the service celebrating the three hierarchs equally as exemplars of Orthodox theology and the Christian life, whose teaching, taken together, provides a comprehensive exposition of the holy Gospel of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ.
The image of three hierarchs has become a symbol for the fullness of the Faith, and there are other groupings of three hierarchs that express the authentic Orthodox Christian tradition in other contexts. Famously, the Three Pillars of Orthodoxy, Sts. Photius, Gregory, and Mark, together articulate the truth of Orthodoxy in the face of heterodox errors. The feast of the Three Hierarchs of Russia—Peter, Alexis, and Jonah—symbolically confirmed the presence of the Orthodox tradition in its fullness in Moscow and all the lands of Rus. (This feast day has become, over the centuries, the Synaxis of the Holy Hierarchs of Moscow.)
Lesser-known groupings also exist: the Three Hierarchs of Perm—Gerasimus, Pitirim, and Jonah— whose feast was marked yesterday, January 29—serve as an affirmation of the reception of the Gospel among the Permic people.
In this way, today’s feast might be seen not just as a celebration of three great fathers—though certainly it is that—but also as a celebration of the harmony, the unity in diversity, of the holy Tradition of the Orthodox Christian Church.
There is another element of harmony of today’s celebration, and that is the harmony between words and deeds, doctrine and practice, contemplation and action. This is clearly expressed in today’s Gospel, when the Lord tells us, his disciples: “Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”
The fullness of Orthodox Christianity is not just an intellectual proposition, a set of doctrines, or even a corpus of holy texts for our study. It is also a way of life. We are called to serve and love the Lord with all our mind, but also with all our heart and life and strength.
Our faith, then, requires us to understand each part of the sacred Tradition in the context of the entire tradition. As the three saints told St. John in his dream, the holy Fathers are not at all opposed to one another, but this means that none can be understood in isolation. And our holy texts—the Gospel, the Apostle, the prophets, the services, the Fathers, the spiritual writers—can only be understood in the context of actually leading an Orthodox Christian life and putting those texts into practice.
As one father on Mount Athos told me, we must learn the Fathers so as to forget them. In other words, we must study them, not so that we can cultivate an isolated body of knowledge, but so that their doctrines and their deeds can become a part of our lives, shaping who we are now and who we shall be in the age to come.
On the occasion of this feast, it would be good for us to take stock of our efforts to lead that harmonious life of doctrine and practice, a life that accords with the fullness of the Orthodox faith.
Especially at the seminary, it is easy to start to make the criterion of Christianity one particular social cause or ecclesiastical program or captivating theologoumenon or certain saint’s writings. It is perhaps even easier to start to equate Orthodoxy with head knowledge, academic achievement, and scholarly or theological propositions.
But the true criterion of Orthodox Christianity is its faithfulness to Jesus Christ—its reliance on his mercy and its acknowledgement of his everlasting Lordship. To manifest such faithfulness in all aspects of our lives: this is what the present feast calls us toward. We study the fathers and elders and spiritual writers so that we might learn to repent of every sin and be converted to Christ with every action and breath.
But eventually, we, like the Three Great Hierarchs themselves, hope to leave behind mere study and move on to greater things.
In the Prologue of Ochrid, St. Nikolai writes that a certain holy bishop, after the repose of St. John Chrysostom in exile, desired to know whether St. John—not yet canonized—had attained unto the kingdom of heaven. An angel came to this bishop in a dream, and showed him many saints in heaven, but nowhere did the bishop see John. The bishop was saddened, and the angel asked why. When the bishop said he was sad because he did not see St. John, the angel replied: “That is because he stands beside the throne of Christ, where no mortal eye can see.”
St. John, without losing his personal identity, has disappeared into God. With St. Paul, we know that prophecies will pass away, tongues will cease, knowledge will disappear. But, when the mirror is gone and we see face to face, when we truly know as we are known, then faith, hope, and love alone will remain, and the greatest of these is love, for God himself is love.
With the unbroken holy Tradition as our guide, by the intercessions of the Three Holy Hierarchs, may we always learn better to repent of our sins and to grow in the love of God, in unity with the saints from the beginning to the end of the age, commending our whole mind and whole life and entire self to Christ our God, to whom is due all glory and adoration, together with his Father and the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.