November 14, 2021
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My Beloved Children in Christ,
Today a certain lawyer comes to our Lord and asks what he shall do to inherit eternal life. And our Lord’s answer is strikingly simple, but also incredibly daunting. Jesus Christ tells us that we have but to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
In other words, we need to love God completely, and will the good of our neighbor as thoroughly and wholeheartedly as we will our own good. Even if we think of love as a mere attitude or disposition, these two commandments, so simple, sound simply impossible. But of course, love is no mere attitude. Love is incarnate in service and in action: to love God completely is to turn every breath and act over to seeking and doing God’s will. And to love our neighbor is to act in the interest of our neighbor’s good at every turn.
And this is what our Lord asks of us, we who are barely able to act for our own good, so weighed down are we by our passions and proclivities. We struggle against selfishness and ignorance and vainglory at every turn, and we’re asked to love our neighbor as much as ourselves? We thoughtlessly indulge in laziness and self-satisfaction and pride, and we’re asked to love God with all our faculties, all our being?
Even Saint Herman of Alaska said that he had served God his whole life but still could not say with certainty that he loved Him. So, what hope could we have to love God and neighbor and so inherit eternal life?
The answer is no hope at all—apart from the hope that abides in Jesus Christ.
This lawyer, this scholar and practitioner of the Law of Moses, thought that he could find some way to salvation on his own, through fulfilling the ritual and ethical requirements written in the stone. But Christ came to fulfill the Law in a way that no fallen man could fulfill it, with wholehearted love and total self-abasement, and that fulfillment culminated in His fulfillment of every sacrifice of the old Law in the total sacrifice of Himself to God and to neighbor on the Cross.
And so the words of Saint Paul in today’s Epistle fill us with hope:
A man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ…. For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. (Gal 2:16, 19–20)
We could not love God fully and without blemish, so Christ came and loved His Heavenly Father and loved us in such a way that His love covers the whole multitude of our sins (cf. 1 Pet 4:8). His crucifixion opened up the path to the Resurrection, the way to eternal life. And now He is Himself the Way that leads back to life everlasting. And if we place our faith in Him, He Himself lives in us, loving God and loving neighbor, transforming and renewing us to love ever more perfectly with His perfect love.
But just as love is about both heart and deed, so is faith. We may not have yet achieved that perfection that belonged to Christ from the beginning. But we who have Him abiding in us must strive to believe sincerely with our hearts and show our faith in our deeds.
After all, as Saint Paul says, we have been crucified with Christ. If we place our faith in Him, and our trust in the Cross that is now a ladder leading to heaven, then we must allow ourselves to be scourged and crowned with thorns, pierced with nails and lance, lifted up as a spectacle. We may not be able to live with perfect love. But we must make an effort to die, little by little, to ourselves and the world, for the sake of that love with which our Lord first loved us.
In other words, the way of love is the way of self-denial, the way of the Cross.
And so we walk that way. Day by day, we struggle. We make the small sacrifice for the sake of our neighbor: we set aside time for him begrudgingly, we give way to him begrudgingly, we speak well of him begrudgingly. At least we make a little effort to speak no evil of him.
And we struggle, too, to love God. We say our prayers when we are tired. We pull back our minds from daydreams during the divine services. We repent, honestly and unsparingly, both in our daily prayers and at the sacrament of confession. We give up sinful pleasures, certainly, but we even strive to make less room for innocent pleasures—less room for ourselves, less room for the world, and more room for God.
These are all small sacrifices. And these are by no means the deeds of the perfect. But every small sacrifice is received by the God who is love and desires nothing but love. And all these sacrifices are added to the one, great, and unrepeatable sacrifice of Christ. Perhaps these tiny sacrifices are what Saint Paul has in mind when he writes elsewhere of “complet[ing] what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col 1:24).
No matter. In any case, these small sacrifices are our widow’s mite. We make them out of our small, crooked, wavering love of God and neighbor, but we have hope that they are received and perfected by Jesus Christ, who loved God unwaveringly and perfectly.
And this same Jesus Christ now lives in us, giving us the power to love with His love, strengthening us to fulfill His simple and easy commandments and so inherit eternal life: the life of the one God in Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.