Melkite Eparchy of Newton

WOULD WE BE AFFECTED if someone rose from the dead? We would probably say “Yes,” but the Lord says “No.” What does He know that we don’t?

Throughout the centuries, and even today, many people have what might be called mystical experiences. They see visions and dream dreams, to quote the Prophet Joel. Thus St Paul experienced the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and it changed his life. Similarly, St Peter and the other disciples encountered Christ risen from the dead and proclaimed it throughout the world. These experiences energized their ministries and jump-started the spread of the Gospel throughout the ancient world.

Such experiences continued throughout Christian history, right up to our own day. One well-known Christian thinker in the modern world, the Russian Orthodox bishop in London, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom (1914-2003) described his encounter with the Lord in these words: “I met Christ as a Person at a moment when I needed Him in order to live, and at a moment when I was not in search of Him. I was found; I did not find Him.

“I was a teenager then … I could not accept aimless happiness. Hardships and suffering had to be overcome; there was something beyond them. Happiness seemed to be stale if it had no further meaning … I decided that I would give myself a year to see whether life had a meaning, and if I discovered it had none, I would not live beyond the year. I had no use for Church. I did not believe in God.”

Under duress, young Anthony attended a religious lecture at the Russian youth organization. He was greatly disturbed by the lecture and asked his mother for a copy of the New Testament to check the truth of what the speaker had been saying.

He describes what happened: “I expected nothing good from my reading, so I counted the chapters of the four Gospels to be sure that I read the shortest, not to waste time unnecessarily. And thus it was the Gospel according to St Mark which I began to read.

“I do not know how to tell you of what happened. I will put it quite simply and those of you who have gone though a similar experience will know what came to pass. While I was reading the beginning of St Mark’s Gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I became aware of a Presence. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. It was no hallucination. It was a simple certainty that the Lord was standing there and that I was in the presence of Him whose life I had begun to read with such revulsion and such ill-will... This was my basic and essential meeting with the Lord. From then I knew that Christ did exist.”

PBS commentator Frederica Mathewes-Green tells of a similar experience. She was a vocal agnostic who had dabbled in Hinduism. In Facing East – A Pilgrim’s Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy (San Francisco, 1997), she describes her husband Gary as “a political animal who just didn’t think much about God.” She then tells how that changed:

“Gary’s shell began to crack when a professor required his philosophy class to read a Gospel. As he read the words of Jesus, he became convinced that here was one who ‘speaks with authority.’ Since Jesus said there was a God, Gary began to doubt his doubting.”

Federica’s turn came on their honeymoon trip to Europe where the following took place: “One day in Dublin I looked at a statue of Jesus and was struck to my knees, hearing an interior voice say, ‘I am your life.’ I knew it was the One I had rejected and ridiculed, come at last to seize me forever.”

What was different about these people, compared to the brothers of the rich man in Christ’s parable?

Why “Few Are Chosen”

The Apostles were religious people; they observed the precepts of Judaism as practiced in their day. Others were contemptuous of religion and had ridiculed it. Yet somewhere deep inside them was a search for meaning, a hidden disposition to faith, even if they were not practicing any religion at the moment. Thus when these momentous experiences took place, they received them wholeheartedly and changed their entire way of life.

People who have no interest in God or in any kind of an interior life, who are content pursuing a materialist way of life might easily shrug off a spiritual experience as some kind of delusion. They might blame it on a touch of the flu or having too much to drink.

Similarly the rich man’s brothers in the parable may have paid lip service to the Scriptures, but the focus of their lives was far from the things of God. They would not even have heard a voice from the dead.

Christ’s Alternative

A parable is a story with a moral, not a detailed history of an event. In this case, as in most, the moral is found at the end of the story. When the rich man in the parable asks Abraham to send Lazarus to shake up his brothers, Abraham says, “They have Moses and the prophets: let them listen to them” (Luke 16:29). In other words, they have the Scriptures – what we call the Old Testament – as their means of discerning the mind of God for them.

This saying, of course, is directed at us – it is the moral of the story. We are meant to base our faith on the mystery of Christ as revealed in the Scriptures rather than on some fantasy that the Holy Virgin or an angel might visit us. Just as our daily life must be based on something more practical than a hope of winning the lottery, so our Christian life must have the solid foundation of the Word of God to us.

We have not only the Law and the prophets, but the Gospels and Epistles. We have the witness of Christ and the apostles, the testimony of the martyrs and the ascetics. We have the power of the holy mysteries, the words of our liturgical texts and the unspoken voice of the holy icons. These are the voice of the Lord to us – let us hear them in faith.

A Missed Opportunity

When people think about violating God’s law, they think about sins of commission: doing something prohibited like stealing, harming another, or the like. We often forget that sins of omission – things that we neglect to do – are often even more damaging.

The rich man in Christ’s parable is not accused of any sin of commission. He is not blamed for being rich any more than Lazarus is praised for being poor: in itself, having money is not a sin. We are not told how he made his money. He is not accused of defrauding people as Zacchaeus claimed to have done. The only thing he is accused of is not giving alms.

The poor man, Christ says, lay at the rich man’s gate, hoping for scraps. It may be easy to ignore a panhandler on the street; it is not so easy to ignore him when he is at your doorstep day after day. Yet this is what the rich man did. He did not overlook abstract appeals from far-away charities; he passed by a flesh-and-blood person in need on his own doorstep, “the living creature,” as St John Chrysostom describes him, “for whom God cares.”

The rich man in Christ’s parable may have felt that he needed every scrap he had acquired, but as St John Chrysostom affirmed, he did not know what he needed it for: “If a person enjoys luxury in moderation and distributes the rest to the stomachs of the poor, then his wealth does him good. But if he is going to give himself up to luxury and profligacy, not only does it not help him at all, but it even leads him down to the great pit. That is what happened to this rich man” (On Wealth and Poverty).

IN HIS PREACHING OF CHRIST to the Gentiles St Paul was challenging the heart of Jewish practice in his day: the necessity of observing the Law. What was required, he taught, was faith in Christ.

In writing to the Galatians, St Paul mentioned an objection which he probably heard from critics: “if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is Christ therefore a minister of sin?” (Galatians 2:17) In other words, if a Christian sins, is that the fault of his faith or even of Christ in whom he believes?

St Paul would go on to say that it is a sinner’s heart, rather than his faith which is at fault. He believes in Christ, but does not act consistently with his belief. As one popular expression has it, “He talks the talk, but does not walk the walk.”

The Dark Side of the Church

There are many believers who sincerely wish to follow Christ, but are not able to control their passions in line with their faith. There are others who dismiss the Church’s traditional teachings as outdated, if these teachings contradict their own preferred way of life. Still others simply ignore Christ’s way of life because they have the power to do so. They have been called the dark side of the Church.

Sergei Fudel was a young Russian layman of twenty when he was first arrested for his religious activities in the Soviet Union. He spent the next twenty-five years in prisons, labor camps and internal exile. He witnessed many acts of infidelity on the part of clergy and other Christians, whom he called “the dark double of the Church.” Many people have been hurt in such circumstances. Some have even left the Church as a result.

In response, Fudel echoed the teaching of Moscow priest Valentine Sventitsky: “a sin within the Church is not a sin of the Church, but against the Church.” Evil has always existed within the very enclosure of the Church, Fudel stressed, noting the example of Judas. “We must see this with our eyes open, always remembering that ‘He who dipped his hand with Me in the dish will betray Me.’” (Matthew 26:23)

“The Church,” Fudel insisted, “is only Christ in His humanity, it is His Body… Breaking away from the Church because of the moral derelictions we see in it is religiously foolish and reflects our inability to think things through. Anything wrong, distorted and impure that we see within the gates of the Church is not the Church.”

God Makes Up for Our Failures

It is the Church’s traditional belief that the whole Church – those in heaven as well as those on earth – are present at its worship. Our liturgical texts are written with this faith in mind. Thus we sing at the Presanctified Liturgy, “Now the Powers of Heaven minister invisibly with us. For, behold, the King of Glory enters.”

From time to time people have been made deeply aware that the whole Church is with us when we worship. The Russian priest-confessor Arseny Streltzoff, held captive in a Soviet prison camp, was singled out for special punishment for trying to stop the beating of another prisoner, a non-believer named Alexei. Both Fr Arseny and Alexei were put in an outdoor steel cell in below freezing weather. They were not expected to survive. Fr Arseny saw this isolation as a chance to pray freely and without restraint. His companion told how the priest’s clothes were transformed as he prayed into brilliant white priestly vestments. “There was no more cell; now they were in a church… Alexei saw with surprise that there were two men assisting Fr Arseny. Both were dressed in the same bright vestments and both shone with an undefinable white light.” Alexei saw the universal Church in his punishment cell. Needless to say, he became a believer.

Fudel tells the following remarkable story that illustrates how God works to preserve holiness in His Church despite our failings. If what we see is the “dark double” at work, the angels and saints supply what is lacking.

“A five-year-old boy was baptized in a parish church. A week later he and his grandmother were walking when they met the priest in the street. ‘Say hello to Father,’ said Granny, ‘he baptized you.’ ‘No,’ answered the boy, ‘he did not baptize me, an angel baptized me and Father was lying on a bench, with his hands tied down.’”

A similar confirmation is attributed to a most unlikely source, the nineteenth-century German romantic poet Clemens Brentano. A frequent visitor to the nun and visionary, Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), Brentano recorded his recollections of their conversations. In one such recollection, she reportedly spoke of a vision:

“I beheld pictures referring to the defects in divine worship and how they are supernaturally repaired…  God receives the honor due Him from a higher order. Among other things I saw that when priests have distractions during the sacred ceremonies, Mass, for instance, they are in reality wherever their thoughts are — and during the interval a saint takes their place at the altar… Sometimes I see a priest leaving the sacristy vested for Mass; but he goes not to the altar. He leaves the church and goes to a tavern, a garden, a hunt, a maiden, a book, to some rendezvous, and I see him now here, now there, according to the bent of his thoughts, as if he were really and personally in those places. It is a most pitiful and shameful sight!  “But it is singularly affecting to behold at this time a holy priest going through the ceremonies of the altar in his stead. I often see the priest returning for a moment during the sacrifice and then suddenly running off again to some forbidden place. Such interruptions frequently last a long time.”

What Should We Do?

Among the Twelve Apostles there was a representative of the dark side – Judas. He was in a distinct minority. At other times representatives of the “dark double” have been in the majority. Think of the years that Arianism and Iconoclasm were supported by many bishops. The existence of the dark double does not render the wider Church unfruitful. It is particularly helpful to keep this wider vision of the Church in mind when we seem to see only the dark double of the Church in our midst.

Believers who are troubled by the presence of the dark double in the Church should keep in mind:

A) The Apostolic Tradition of holiness is always present in the Church. When the words or actions of individual churchmen contradict the Tradition, keep your eyes on the Tradition.

B) Remember that any of us may be distracted in prayer and “wander” to other places, good or bad when we try to pray. Ask the Lord’s help in deepening your ability to focus on the words of your prayer.

Recalling Christ’s parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30), Sergei Fudel reminds us, “Either you or I, or he or she, may be weeds at this moment, and in an hour any one of us may become wheat. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons said: ‘Every man is himself the reason why he sometimes becomes wheat and sometimes straw’ (Against Heresies, Book 4, ch 4).”

Passages from Sergei Fudel’s writings, which appeared in various Samizdat journals during the Soviet era, were published in English as Light in the Darkness by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY in 1989.