Homily on the Holy Great Martyr Demetrios, the Wonderworker of Thessaloniki
By Archimandrite Kirill Pavlov
(Delivered in 1960)
By Archimandrite Kirill Pavlov
(Delivered in 1960)
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit!
Today, dear brothers and sisters, we honor the memory of the Holy Great Martyr Demetrios of Thessaloniki and ask for his prayers for us before the Throne of God, the right to stand before which he was granted for his valiant deeds in confessing the Christian faith.
This marvelous Passion-bearer of Christ labored at the end of the 3rd century, when a terrible persecution was raised against Christians. He came from noble and distinguished parents. His father, the governor of the city of Thessaloniki, was a secret Christian, who had in his prayer room icons of Christ the Savior and the Mother of God. He taught the Christian faith to his only son, Saint Demetrios, who preserved this faith until the very end of his life and sealed it with a martyr's death.
After the death of his father, Emperor Maximian, for the noble and courageous qualities of Demetrios' soul, appointed him commander of Thessaloniki, ordering him to exterminate Christians in his city. However, Saint Demetrios, upon his arrival in Thessaloniki, on the contrary, gave freedom to Christians and openly confessed himself a Christian, which was reported to the emperor.
Upon returning from the war, Maximian stopped in Thessaloniki and when he learned that Saint Demetrios was truly a Christian, he removed him from his position as commander and ordered him to be locked up in prison. Here, in prison, the Passion-bearer was stabbed with spears. Thus, for confessing the faith of Christ, he received a glorious martyr's death and departed to the Lord. Here is a short account of his life and exploits.
Our attention, dear brothers and sisters, is drawn to the word from the Gospel read today in memory of the glorious Great Martyr Demetrios: "This I command you, that you love one another," says the Lord to His disciples. "If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own, but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you: if they have kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things will they do unto you for My name's sake, because they know not Him that sent Me" (John 15:17–21).
As we see, the Lord commands His disciples to have love among themselves and warns them that they will be persecuted by the world, will be driven out and hated by people who do not know and do not accept the Lord Jesus Christ, who came in the flesh for our salvation, or reject Him by their behavior; who deny the future eternal life and love only the earth and here they establish their eternal dwelling and find their joy in satisfying their passions. Heaven is a foreign country for them, they do not recognize Divine laws, but are guided by the customs of this age - "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life" (1 John 2:16). This world, which previously hated Christ Himself, will also hate Christ's faithful followers.
"In the world you will have tribulation" (John 16:33), says the Lord. The world and its people hate the true followers of Christ because they do not participate with them in their dark, evil, wicked deeds. The life of a follower of Christ is not like the life of lovers of the world: "He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange" (Wisdom 2:14-16). He is a thorn in their eyes, a man who is most unbearable for the world, and therefore he is hated by world-lovers. The world hates the good also because the Lord, of course, shows His great grace to good people sooner than to the wicked, and therefore they persecute the righteous out of envy, as we see in the example of many righteous people, such as the Patriarch Isaac, the Righteous Joseph and many others. They are hated because they do not participate in the realm of sinful darkness, where the devil is the ruler, but serve their Lord and obey His Divine law. And the Lord allows these sufferings for Christians for our own benefit, so that through them He can bring down our arrogance, test our fidelity. A person in happiness, in contentment, in honor can easily become arrogant and forget God. Sorrows purify the soul, humble it and bring us closer to God.
It is because of these circumstances that the Lord commands us to love one another, to have mutual communication and unity among ourselves. Love binds people together. We must extend our love to all our neighbors, starting with our parents, relatives and ending with our ill-wishers and enemies. The commandment about love is easy and pleasant in itself, because love itself is already the highest pleasure. Living in love and harmony is happiness and blessedness for a person.
Love for our neighbors sometimes demands some sacrifices from us, for we are called by duty to serve our neighbors in whatever they need, to help them. But even this good deed for the sake of our neighbor brings happiness and is the purest pleasure of a loving heart. Let our neighbors be our enemies. God be with them. We must not only love them, but also do good to them and pray for them, because it is not they who are at enmity with us, but our common enemy – the devil. Through love for our enemies and doing good to them, the enemy is put to shame and defeated.
It is not difficult to love our neighbors, but even pleasant. But we do not always feel such a feeling of love towards others. Sometimes we experience selfish feelings that drown out and kill love for our neighbors. The Lord, commanding us to love our neighbors, also indicates a model, a measure of this love. This measure is always with us - it is ourselves. Look at yourself and just as you love yourself, love your neighbor.
"Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:31). Sometimes these words are hard for us. “What?!” our pride will say. “Love others as ourselves, make them equal to ourselves?” Yes. This is precisely the will of God, a holy and righteous will. We see the motivation to love our neighbors first of all in our nature. Are we not all brothers by nature and faith? Do we not all have one God, one Savior, one Holy Church? Have we not all been baptized with one Baptism and partake of one Bread and one Cup? Has not one Heavenly Kingdom been prepared for all of us? Does not our Heavenly Father love and have mercy on everyone equally?
Our sinful self-love alone wants to take advantage of everything, and the commandment of God, which commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, prescribes to have brotherly unity with everyone, to do to others what we wish for ourselves: "As you want people to do to you, do also to them" (Matthew 7:12). And indeed, if we look at the religious life of humanity, especially at the Christian Church, we will see that here, as nowhere else, this very brotherly unity is required, and the very concept of the union of mutual communication is of great importance. By its very essence and name, the Church is a communion, a union – the highest, moral, spiritual union. Therefore, mutual communication, unity, love are the basic principles of Christian religious life.
"By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35), said the Lord in his last, farewell conversation with His disciples. And indeed, living unity, mutual love and fellowship have always been the most distinctive features of Christian life in the best times of its development. The writer of Acts writes about the first Christians of the Jerusalem Church: "Now the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; and no man said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. There was no one among them that needed; for as many as were the owners of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of the things sold, and laid them at the apostles' feet; and to every man was given as he had need" (Acts 4:32:34–35). Worthy of imitation is this most perfect unity of the first Christians - unity in spirit and in the most external life among the then Jewish and pagan society, corrupt, depraved and rude, where everyone cared about their own benefits, and everyone tried to crowd each other, and therefore everyone felt cramped from each other.
And after the times of the apostles, in the following centuries of Christian history, mutual love and fellowship between Christians were so high that there was nothing like it in the ancient pagan world. The Christian Church quickly spread then throughout all cities and countries, but in each city the Church had a comparatively small number of followers, surrounded on all sides by a huge multitude of unbelieving and hostile pagans. And yet the members of the various Christian Churches, scattered throughout the world, in different countries and tribes, constantly persecuted by countless enemies and slanderers, were as if members of one family - brothers and sisters, as they called each other with sincerity and in the true meaning of these words.
In the pastoral epistles of that time that have come down to us, often sent by people who had never seen each other, there breathes a spirit of such closeness, sincerity, mutual trust, and mutual participation, as if these were really members of the same family who had grown up together since childhood and had long been accustomed to sharing thoughts and feelings, joys and sorrows.
Whenever any need or misfortune arose in one or another Church – famine, persecution by the unbelievers – the members of other Churches accepted this disaster as their own and tried to help the distressed as best they could. In Jerusalem a famine began, in Antioch they hurried to collect aid for the starving. From Macedonia, Christians in apostolic times sent aid and donations on one side of the sea to Palestine, and on the other side to Rome.
The pagans themselves were amazed at such love and closeness between Christians, not understanding the power that binds them together in such a union of love. And Christians, by their example of virtuous life, transformed the moral foundations of the world that existed at that time – solely by the spirit of faith and the power of their love. "Truly, this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith" (1 John 5:4) - faith aided by love.
Thus, love and mutual communication are the basic principle and essential property in the development of the religious life of Christianity. Without this, it will be dead, because only love gives rise to all life. Therefore, we also need to take care to acquire love, which, according to the word of the Apostle Paul, is long-suffering, merciful, does not envy, does not exalt itself, is not proud, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not irritated, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and never fails (cf. 1 Cor. 13:4–8). And in the future age it will prevail among the members of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Let the example of the holy martyrs and the now honored Holy Great Martyr Demetrios, who laid down their souls for their neighbors, be a model of true love for our neighbors as well. Let their example inspire us to courageously and calmly endure sorrows in the awareness that sorrows lie before us and that "through many sorrows we must enter the Kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22). Amen.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.