By Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene
Sermon on the Gospel according to Luke 6:31–36
Which of us doesn’t seek the equal for the equal, or who doesn’t measure friendship by the standard of requital? In the labyrinth of the heart, where the shadowy paths of reasoning are intertwined, each of us carries an invisible scale, weighing the actions of our neighbours against our own beneficence. Like certain merchants of life, not loving but rather transacting, we seek the debt of return, so that the reckoning of life might show no deficiency.
Our love, often, is nothing other than a loan upon the interest of expectation, a silent agreement of souls, so that we might not be wronged in ungratefulness. Is this truly living? Or rather, is it a shadow of life, turning in a circle, where the self sees and loves its own reflection in the face of the other? For us to return love to those who love us is nothing great; it is something empty and vast, the reflection of the mirror onto the mirror, generating nothing new, but only eternally recycling the old.
And the word of the Lord comes, like a two-edged sword cutting the soul, separating the human from the divine, that which is from the world from that which is heavenly. “And if ye love them that love you, what grace have ye?” (Luke 6:32). This question doesn’t seek an answer, but a deep silence, in which the soul stands naked before its own poverty.
Because grace is not an exchange, nor a reward for a righteous deed, but the irrational gift, which is outside every reckoning and every necessity. The love of sinners, the reciprocal love, is the natural flow of the waters, which always fill the hollows, never moving upwards. But Christ’s commandment calls the soul to a counter-motion, to the lifting of the cross of selflessness, where the reward lies not in receiving but in giving.
“But love ye your enemies.” Do we truly understand the weight of these words? Or is it that our ears, weighed down by the noise of the passions of the world, can no longer hear this fine breeze? To love the enemy; not just to endure him, nor only to forgive him, but to love. What is this fire which doesn’t burn but illuminates, the wound which doesn’t kill but gives life? Perhaps it is not a passion of the heart, but a stance of the will, a deep and obscure choice, where man, denying his own self, becomes a vessel of the energy of God.
“Lend, hoping for nothing again.” This loan is not of gold or silver, but of the soul itself, of hope, of time. You give to someone not because he is worthy, but because you have been called to give, to imitate the Father, “for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil” (Luke 6:35). For He makes His sun to rise upon the righteous and the unrighteous, and rains down His beneficence upon those who praise and those who blaspheme.
And how can one imitate God? By fasting? By having no possessions? Or by unceasing prayer? But Saint Eustathius of Thessalonica also says somewhere that the Lord “Did not say: Fast, as your Father which is in heaven fasts. Nor did He say: Become without possessions, as your Father which is in heaven is without possessions. But what does He say? Become merciful, as your Father which is in heaven is merciful.”[1]
For this virtue in particular, pity, the unexamined mercy, characterises God. For in this lies the measure of deification, not in the knowledge of the mysteries, but in the communion of God’s suffering for the world. Such is the divine imitation, about which Saint John of the Ladder also confirms that “love, as to quality, is a likeness of God, in so far as it is attainable by men.”[2] This love, which seeketh not her own, becomes the place where man meets God, not as a judge, but as a Father. In the exercise of mercy, man discovers that heaven is not a distant place, but a state of the soul, which has learned to see in every face, and especially in that of the enemy, the image of Christ.
Thus become ye the sons of the Highest. This adoption is neither by birth nor by the will of the flesh, but by the heart’s free choice to love without conditions. Then the reward is great. Not requital, not honour, not glory from men. The reward is the participation in the very life of God, the power to love as He loves, to become merciful as He is merciful. The reward is peace, not that of the world, which comes from the absence of war, but “my peace I give unto you” (John 14:27), the peace of the Son hanging upon the wood, who loved his crucifiers.
In the depth of the abyss of this divine commandment, man finds the spring of his own freedom. For he is freed from the bonds of his own self, from the tyranny of requital. No longer a slave under the yoke of fear, but a son in the house of the Father, partaker of that nature which is love. And this love is not a harbour into which we sail, but an ocean into which we are always sinking, finding in its infinity the only end, which is an endless beginning.
[1] Eustathius of Thessalonica, Apanta [Complete Works], in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 136 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1865), 856.
[2] John Climacus, Klimax Theias Anodou [The Ladder of Divine Ascent], in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 88 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1860), 1784.
