Our lessons today bring a tone of judgment. Our Epistle echoes Jesus’ words in Matthew 25 regarding the curse of those who have not ministered unto the least of his brethren. Our Lord’s parable in the holy Gospel speaks of those invited to the great feast who make all sorts of excuses as to why they can’t attend, who place everyday business ahead of the claims of God and the Kingdom, and who are no longer welcome.
The truth is that our very coming into this sacred space is a judgment.
Here imperfection meets with perfection, which is always a moment of judgment for us. Sometimes we come, we worship, we participate, and yet we do not sense the Presence. On one level, we should be grateful. God is merciful not to be “present” when it would be a condemnation for us.
Just as in confession our lives are laid bare and there is a little dying to the self, in speaking forth our sins, in laying down our own preferences, so it is when we approach any of the holy Mysteries.
We see in Leviticus that Atonement had to be made for the holy place as well as for the people. Preparation is necessary to meet God. We need to remove the deadness of routine – which was the source of the church’s ancient custom of removing their shoes when entering the sacred space. I love that tradition (which we have handed over to the Mohammedans, by the way). Exposure to the ideals of the Kingdom is judgment – confronted by the goal and experiencing how far we are from it is a challenge for us to live up to the ideal. We have wandering minds – our minds are like the Prodigal: we must gently bring the mind back to the Father who receives us, takes us back in our repentance.
We are here because of the possibility of transformation – the eyes of faith see the possibility of redemption – exposure to the Saints reminds us that people can change. We are called to live in a state of hopefulness. But we need preparation. As the priest vests in the sacristy, both the prayers and the action are to elevate the mind. We elevate our dress to elevate our minds – and that needn’t only pertain to sacred vestments, but to our dress for assembling in the Presence.
These are the qualities of Liturgical experience in Orthodoxy: sacred assembly in the presence of sanctity; sacred space in the presence of possibility; sacred awareness in the presence of judgment.
The calls to action in our lessons today are not merely moralistic commands – they are the expressions of the transformed heart. Only with a heart enlarged by the love of Christ can we love our brother and sister as we are called to do. Only with a heart aflame with the sense of the Presence can we enter deeply into the worship of the One who transforms us, and receive the grace He bestows by His gifts in the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
Only with that sense of hopefulness, that as we have been baptized into Christ, so we have put on Christ, can we come into this place which is both the place of judgment, but also of repentance and redemption.
We are not engaged in a merely moralistic program of self-improvement. We are here to enter more fully into our life as new creatures in Christ, and members in particular of His Body – made one in Him, and here to learn to love one another as perfectly as we are able, by His grace. He is our life, and it is His life which He bestows upon us at this Eucharistic Sacrifice, where He is present to us as He promised.
His judgments are given to perfect us in His love – to strengthen what is weak and to manifest the mercy for which we continually pray. He is the Lord of our lives, who, as our collect states, “never failest to help and govern them whom thou dost bring up in thy steadfast fear and love.”