Homily on the Sunday of Thomas
By St. John of Kronstadt
By St. John of Kronstadt
Christ is Risen!
Beloved brethren, Bright Week has passed and taken our deeds with it to the throne of the heavenly Lord and Judge: there, brethren, there now are our deeds. I say this in order to frighten with the fear of heavenly judgment those who spent the feast of the Holy Resurrection of Christ unworthily and in a non-Christian manner, and to console those who spent it in abstinence and spiritual joy.
How did many people celebrate and spend the feast of Bright Resurrection? I would not like to bring to mind the wicked deeds of men, but we must remember them and condemn them on behalf of God, along with the persons who did them. The all-bright feast was greeted after the bright Paschal service with dark deeds: intemperance and drunkenness, fights, foul language and every kind of sin. You might think that we fasted before the feast only in order to rush with greater greed into all carnal sinful deeds, so that with greater shamelessness and impudence we could indulge in all kinds of lawlessness. Alas! woe, woe to us!
All those who celebrated the feast with intemperance and drunkenness, adultery, foul language and other similar carnal deeds, lost all the benefit that they received (if they received) from fasting, lost the benefit from repentance and communion of the Holy Mysteries, trampled on them like unreasonable animals with their feet, they have lost the time favorable for salvation, given to us by the mercy of the Lord, and will no longer turn back this time. “Behold, now is the acceptable time, behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2), it was fitting to say to you during holy fasting: for then only did you approach the saving bath of repentance and the all-purifying Mysteries of the faithful, the Mysteries of the Body and Blood of the Lord. From now on, your confession and communion have been postponed until a future fast, and who knows whether the Lord will vouchsafe you or not to confess and receive communion? Who knows whether you will not die in those very iniquities with which you again defiled yourself after the bath of repentance? How painful, how pitiful, beloved brethren, that so soon you turned out to be traitors to Christ and gave yourself over to the side of the devil in order to serve him, the original murderer, the author and teacher of all sin! I tell you in the words of the Savior, you and I too are great sinners - “you are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do” (John 8:44).
What remains for us to do, beloved brethren? Pray and weep for your sins. Weep over the fact that many of us celebrated the feast not in a Christian or even human way, but like vile idolaters and like wild animals who were not allowed to eat for a long time, who were not fed their favorite food for a long time; to weep because the greatest, soul-saving Mysteries of Christ - repentance and communion - have been trampled underfoot and they have been imputed to nothing; weep that the time given for salvation was recklessly lost. Let us weep and pray to the Lord, so that He “will not be completely angry with us, and will not destroy us with our iniquities,” but will turn us to the path of repentance and make us skillful fulfillers of His commandments. Let us firmly decide from now on not to indulge in intemperance and drunkenness and all the sins that result from them, and with tears we will ask the Lord to strengthen us with the grace of the Holy Spirit in our intentions and good deeds.
Brethren! Let us all shed tears: for we all unworthily celebrated the greatest feast of the Lord and we all angered our Lord. Truly, this is not how we should celebrate the feasts of the Lord. We must greet them with spiritual joy in the Lord, in our deliverance from sins and in eternal salvation through Christ, the Son of God, through works of mercy, abstinence from passions, visiting the temple of God in spirit and truth, and simplicity in food and clothing.
O you, adorned with gold and many precious fabrics, wives and maidens! I will address my speech to you on behalf of the Lord! How many poor people could you please on the bright day of the Resurrection of Christ, and thus worthily celebrate this greatest feaast, if, out of generosity and Christian love, you turned at least some of your jewelry into money and distributed this money to the poor, of whom there are so many in our country? city? How prudent would you be as a Christian if you had less precious clothes and the money left over from buying them was distributed to the poor? What rich mercy would you receive on that day from Christ the Lord? Yes, in a truly Christian way you would then celebrate the feast of Christ’s Resurrection. Now what? You are adorned like idols, but the members of Christ are naked; you are full, and the members of Christ are hungry; you drown in all kinds of pleasures, and those are in tears; we are in rich and decorated dwellings, and they are in cramped and unclean dwellings, in dwellings that are often no better than stables. We do not have Christian love: for us there is no true feast of the Resurrection of Christ. For the one who truly celebrates the Resurrection is the one who himself rose from dead works to works of virtue, to faith and Christian love, who trampled on intemperance, luxury and all passions.
Brethren! Let us celebrate the feasts of the Lord as Christians, and not as pagans! Amen.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
