by Archim. Dionysios Karagiannis
“Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”
The Carnival Sunday (or Sunday of Apókreō) is a special Sunday when the Lord reminds us of the parable of the Judgment of the great and eminent day of Ηis presence.
God is merciful and good, but Ηe is also the Judge. Christ will judge the world and today’s evangelical reading refers to the facts of the Last Judgment.
And they are facts because the Judgment is a global issue which relates to the End Time (Eschaton); this concerns the Creation and the history of mankind, as we say in the Apostles’ Creed, “And he will come to judge the living and the dead.” Saint Gregory Palamas says in his Gospel on the Second Coming of Christ: “So, mercy and forbearance precede the divine Judgment.
God himself is the first possessor of every virtue and embraces them all. He is both just and merciful. But as mercy does not go with judgment, as it is written, “Thou shalt not be merciful to a poor man at judgment.” God rightly allotted a proper time to each, appointing the present for forbearance, the future for retribution.
The grace of the Spirit so ordered the rites of the Holy Church, that when we learn that we receive forgiveness of sins from what happens here and now, we may press on while still in this present life to attain everlasting mercy and make ourselves worthy of the divine love for mankind.
For that Judgment is without mercy for the unmerciful.”
If the first time, He came to earth, humbly, to “save the world,” He will now come “gloriously” to judge the world.
He, who has become a “curse” for us on the Cross, has every right to judge us.
Second, He will not judge only the Christians or the pagans, as the Jews believed concerning the judgment of God. He will judge all people, Christians and non-Christians, believers and nonbelievers. Third, the basis of the judgment, the criterion, will be love.
Saint Gregory Palamas once again mentions: “Let us show loving deeds towards our brethren in Christ by being merciful to the poor and restoring those who have gone astray, whatever their poverty or error may be, by obtaining justice for the wronged, by encouraging those laid low by sickness, whether their suffering be due to visible enemies and physical ailments or to invisible evil spirits and dishonourable passions, by visiting those confined in prison, and even by bearing with who injure us, forgiving one another any cause for complaint we may have among ourselves, as Christ forgave us. In a word, let us show love to one another by all our actions and words. So may we attain to God’s love, receive His blessing and inherit the eternal heavenly kingdom promised to us and prepared for us from the foundation of the world.”
That is, our attitude towards our fellow human beings. The universal law of humanity, in which everyone meets, Christians and non-Christians.
Both those who knew Christ and those who could not get to know him and, therefore, stayed away from the Gospel.
Hunger, thirst, nakedness, illness, prison roar, they cannot stay secret, for someone to have the right to claim that he did not notice them.
One cannot ignore them, without having to cease to have the feelings of a man, if he has not completely eradicated the image of God within him, and thus that day, “The books will be open, the deeds of people will be revealed, in front of the insufferable Bema” (Vespers).
Love therefore regulates everything in both present and future life. Even the most noble and important deeds must have a criterion of love in order to be genuine.
Hell is when you do not love and you are not being loved. Instead, when you truly love you find a lot of ways to show it and invent a thousand solutions to relieve those in need.
We can take ourselves a place in paradise, because it is the fruit of the works of our love, with humility.
These works will come to make us worthy of the terrible Bema Seat of Christ.
Amen.
