April: Day 7: Teaching 1:
Saint George, Bishop of Mytilene
(Why Does God Send Sorrows to Virtuous People?)
By Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko
Saint George, Bishop of Mytilene
(Why Does God Send Sorrows to Virtuous People?)
By Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko
I. Saint George, whose memory is celebrated today, was Bishop in the city of Mytilene, on the island of Lesvos.
He lived at the end of the 8th and beginning of the 9th century. In his youth he took monastic vows. He was especially distinguished by his mercy towards the poor. Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitos loved him and made him a bishop. Under the iconoclast Leo the Armenian, Saint George was exiled to Kherson for denouncing iconoclast heretics, where he died in captivity at a ripe old age.
II. We have seen, brethren, that Saint George began to serve God from his youth; for his mercy to the poor he was even made a bishop. Meanwhile, despite his love for God and people, he suffered great sorrows: for refusing to change the holy faith, for denouncing the iconoclast heretics, he suffered imprisonment far from his homeland in the city of Kherson, where his life ended.
Why does the Lord send sorrows to virtuous people?
a) Sorrows are sent to pious people, first of all, for the cleansing of sins. There is no virtuous person who would not have his weaknesses, his own at least small sins. John the Theologian is a witness to this: “If we say,” he says, “that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). To cleanse these sins, the just God sends sorrows to virtuous people. The Almighty punishes such people in this life for small sins with a small, short-term grief in order to reward them for their virtues with eternal blessings, endless blessedness on the other side of the grave. The following words of Scripture can be applied to such people: “Having received a little punishment” in life, “they will receive great benefits” (Wisdom 3:5). This is the first reason why God sends sorrows to virtuous people.
b) Besides this, sometimes the Lord sends sorrows to virtuous people in order to show them the unnoticeable instability of their faith and virtue. Often, in moments of well-being, we seem to feel a firm faith in God, and consider ourselves heroes of devotion to the Providence of the Most High; but the hour of disaster strikes, and we fall in spirit, weaken in faith, feel a lack of trust in God, and lose peace in the omnipotence and goodness of the Almighty. Our thought about the strength of our faith deceived us, we were in delusion. Now the veil of error has fallen from our eyes. We begin to feel that we did not have even a grain of living faith, that we need to repent, humble ourselves, and with sincere humility pass at least to the threshold of the sanctuary of truly firm faith in God. The same thing happens to us in deeds of virtue. God's Providence, having visited us with sorrows, wanted to show us our deception in the high opinion of our devotion to the rules of virtue, to protect us from error and to raise us to the pure, immaculate foundations of moral life, which depends not on human thoughts and views, but on selfless love for God, on pure love for good.
c) However, the Lord God sends sorrows even to such pious, virtuous people, whose faith not only does not waver in sorrows, but whose faith, on the contrary, is strengthened by sorrows, and whose virtue increases from adversity. This trial is sent to provide us with an opportunity to earn for ourselves new crowns of God's mercy and heavenly glory through proven steadfastness in faith and constancy in virtue and in the midst of temptations. The long-suffering Job was subjected to such a trial. God Himself testifies to the righteous and pious life of Job. "There is not," says God, "on earth a blameless, true, devout man like Job, who shuns every evil thing" (Job 1:8). For all this, Job was subjected to the greatest sorrows. For what? To receive greater mercy from God than this righteous man enjoyed before the temptations that befell him. "And the Lord gave Job double of that which was before" (Job 42:10), says the Scripture. Gold is heated so that it becomes purer, and God pierces the righteous with sorrows in order to exalt them, improve their holiness and make them worthy of the highest degrees of the Kingdom of Heaven.
III. Listen, if you see virtuous people in sorrows, do not be tempted, do not weaken in faith and good morality. These sorrows are sent or allowed by God with an important, soul-saving purpose. Amen.
Source: A Complete Annual Cycle of Short Teachings, Composed for Each Day of the Year. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
