By Archimandrite George Kapsanis
Our Lord, the leader of our faith and the founder and head of our Church, has taken care and is taking care that His Christians, His faithful, have proper spiritual guidance for the life in Christ. For this reason, He has raised up within the Church many Spirit-bearing and God-bearing teachers, who, with the illumination of the Holy Spirit, teach us the life in Christ. Among these great teachers of our faith is Saint John the Sinaite, the author of the "Ladder", whose memory we celebrate today.
He himself struggled as a monk, as a coenobite, and as an abbot. He succeeded in climbing – with struggle, of course – the steps of theosis, starting from the first stages of the spiritual life and reaching the highest, which is perfect love for God and people and union with God and theosis.
And the good news is that not only did he himself climb the steps of virtues one by one, but with the Grace of God, with the illumination of the Holy Spirit, he also handed down to us this Ladder of virtues. How can a person, in other words, climb the steps one by one, little by little, in order to reach union with God and achieve the purpose of his life.
Saint John of the Ladder did not teach things that he heard, but those that he experienced with labor and blood and much struggle. That is why they are true; and because they are true, they are eternal. And that is why the “Ladder”, this famous book of Saint John, is a book that, although written many centuries ago, has never lost its relevance and its usefulness for the Church of God and for the faithful.
The Fathers of our Church are a gift from God. Saint John of the Ladder is also a gift from God. The Spirit of God illuminated him. Christ sent him and placed him in the midst of the Church as a teacher. And you see how much the Church honors him and how much it recognizes his contribution, so that not only do we celebrate him on the day of his memory, but also exceptionally every year on the Fourth Sunday of Lent the Church honors him and dedicates this Sunday to his memory. As if telling all Christians that we must all live ascetically, strive, imitate the Saints, who fought such great battles for their salvation.
I wish that the Holy God will illuminate all of us, both us monks and you, our brothers in the world, so that we may zealously and with desire undertake our salvation. And not only to make a good start and then become numb and give up and waste our effort, but to constantly have the desire to strive. We begin a good work, we set a good program in our spiritual life; not to let it fray, but to continue it with desire and consistency, so that we may have both good fruits and good results.
Blessed are those who will undertake this struggle, because when they reach the end of their lives, they will be happy, because their life was not wasted. Because they struggled, because they did the will of God, because they progressed in virtues, because they loved God and their fellow man with perfect love, and for this reason they expect to gain the eternal Kingdom and live eternally with Christ in the unending day of eternity.
May Saint John be our help! Good strength and good struggle to everyone!
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
