And once again the Lord repeats to us the commandment: do not worry about what to eat, what to drink, and what to wear. He repeats it in order to wean us from vain and superfluous cares that darken our spiritual vision, blind our minds and leave us, remote and separated from God, in the darkness of this world, in the hands of the evil master, mammon.

Having food and clothing, let us be content with this, says the Apostle (1 Timothy 6:8). That is, having only the bare necessities – which is what God cares about – let us not demand more, for concern for the superfluous, as well as concern for tomorrow, will ultimately push us to serve the devil. And the Lord Himself teaches us to ask God in prayer only for our daily bread, by which we must also understand spiritual bread, by which people actually live. Let us not seek from God any luxury and no excess for our body. Because the pagans are looking for all this. That is, those who do not know about the true God and His infinite power and love, nor about the value of the immortal human soul, nor about the beauty and sweetness of the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, they demand more than they need. And God gives them according to their desire, and remains to them nothing either in this life or in the life to come. They receive all their reward here on earth, like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. For all the glory of the birds of the air consists in their earthly life, and all the beauty of the flowers of the field is an instantaneous beauty in time. But God has prepared for His sons from the foundation of the world the Kingdom of Heaven and unspeakable glory in this Kingdom. Thus, the glory of man is not in food, drink and clothing. For if this were the glory of man, then man would be a thousand times better fed, watered, and clothed in this life than all other creatures on earth, in the air, and in the water. But it is precisely for this reason that King Solomon himself, in all his glory, was dressed worse than the lilies of the field, so that the people might see that their glory is not in the luxury of their garments, but in the highest and eternal; that they may turn away their eyes and their hearts from the transitory glory of this world, and seek for themselves that glory which has been prepared and promised to them by God.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. That is: do not seek thread from Him Who can give you royal vestments; and do not seek beggarly crumbs from the table of Him Who desires to seat you at His royal table. He is the King, and you are His sons. Seek that which befits a king's children, that which you once had, but have lost through sin. Seek treasures, which moths and rust do not destroy, and thieves do not steal. And if you are worthy to acquire the greatest, surely the least will be added to you. Seek the Kingdom of God, where God Himself sits on His Throne and reigns, the Kingdom of grace and all righteousness, where the righteous will shine like the sun (Matthew 13:43), and where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, nor death. Do not be like the prodigal son, who, having left his father, wanted to be satisfied with the food of swine, but seek ways to return from the far side to the house of your Father in heaven, where righteousness and peace and joy are in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17). And do not be like Esau, who sold his birthright for a dish of lentils. Will you also give up the eternal Kingdom and bliss for the lentil soup that this world offers you? May the Lord God in His mercy preserve you from such shame and humiliation. May He preserve the eye of your mind, so that it may not be darkened and seduced by the evil mammon of earthly corruption and deceit. May He instruct you, that you may be like the king's sons, who have lost their kingdom, but do not think or care about anything else but return to their kingdom.

On one church in Syria, built by the emperor Justinian, the words have been preserved even today, which the emperor himself commanded to be written: "Thy kingdom, O Christ God, the kingdom of all ages" (Psalm 144:13). May the Lord help us that our thirst for Christ may engrave these words in our hearts. Everything else is secondary and unimportant. All the other kingdoms on earth cannot escape the grave and the worm. And when there shall be no more earth nor earthly kingdoms, the righteous with the angels in heaven will joyfully sing: Thy kingdom, O Christ God, the kingdom of all ages, and Thy dominion in every generation and generation. For this be honor and glory to the sweetest Teacher under the sun, Christ God, with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit – the Trinity, One in Essence and Indivisible, now and ever, at all times and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost. The Gospel of Great Faith

Matt. 25 rec., 8:5-13.

If a person is not filled with deep humility, meekness, self-abasement and obedience to God, how can he be saved? How can an atheist and a sinner be saved, if even the righteous can hardly be saved? Water does not collect on high steep cliffs, but collects in low, flat and deepened places. And the grace of God does not rest on proud people, who exalt themselves and resist God, but on the humble and meek, who have deepened their souls with humility and meekness, self-depreciation before the greatness of God and obedience to the will of God.

When the disease dries up the grafted vine, which the husbandman has carefully and long cultivated, he cuts it off and throws it into the fire, and in its place he transplants and grafts a wild one.

When sons, forgetting all their father's love, rebel against their father, what will the father do? He will drive his sons out of the house, and instead of them he will adopt his hirelings.

This is what happens in nature, and this is what happens in people. Unbelievers say that this happens according to the laws of nature and human laws. But this is not what the faithful say. Those who have parted the veils of natural and human laws and looked into the mystery of eternal freedom into the fiery eyes speak differently. They say: "This happens according to the will of God for our admonition." Yes, God writes this with His finger, and only those who know how to read the manuscript of God, written by fire and the Spirit in the objects and events of nature and in the objects and events of human life, only they understand the meaning of everything. Those before whose eyes nature and human life flicker like a huge heap of typographic type, letters without spirit and meaning, speak of chance and assert: "Everything that happens to us and around us happens by chance." By this they mean that this whole gigantic heap of letters moves and mixes of its own accord, and that from such a mishmash one or another event is formed. If our God were not merciful and compassionate, He would laugh at such madness of earthly interpreters of the world and life. But there is one who laughs maliciously at this madness: this is an evil spirit, an enemy of the human race, who has neither mercy nor compassion for people. When a goose slaps on a variegated carpet spread on the grass, it may think that all the patterns and colors on the carpet are somehow piled up by chance, and the carpet has grown out of the ground by itself, just as grass, according to goose reasoning, grows from the ground by chance. But the weaver who wove the carpet and dotted it with patterns knows that it did not come from somewhere by chance, just as she knows why the patterns and colors are placed in this way. Only the weaver knows how to read and interpret the carpet woven by her hand - the weaver and those to whom she tells. Thus the unbelievers slap uselessly on the precursory carpet of this world and talk about accidents. Only God, Who wove this world, knows what every thread in the world's fabric means. And he knows whom God vouchsafes and tells him. The clairvoyant Isaiah writes: "For thus saith the High and Exalted One, Who lives forever, His Holy Name: I dwell in the high heavens, and in the sanctuary, and also with the contrite and the contrite in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the hearts of the contrite (Isaiah 57:15). This means that God lives on earth only with those who are contrite in heart and humble in spirit. And with whom God lives, He reveals the mysteries of the world and life and the spiritual depths of all His scripture, contained in things and events. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and David were contrite in heart and humble in spirit, and therefore the Lord dwelt with them and promised to be with their descendants as long as they remained contrite in heart and humble in spirit. But people who are proud of frequent communion with God fall into an abyss worse than those who have neither any knowledge of the true God, nor communion with Him. The most obvious example of this is shown to us by the people of Israel, that is, the descendants of the great and God-pleasing forefathers whom we have mentioned. Proud of communion with the true God, this people began to despise all other nations as tares on the threshing floor of God. But by doing so he ruined himself, for because of the pride that blinded him, of all that God had revealed to him through His prophets and saints, he remembered and left only one, namely, that he was God's chosen people. The spirit and meaning of the Old Testament revelation of God completely disappeared for him, and the Holy Scriptures danced before the eyes of this people as a heap of incomprehensible words. And by the time when our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world with a new revelation, the Jewish people had not only descended in their blindness and ignorance of the will of God to the level of the pagan nations, but in their darkening of spiritual sight and hardness of heart they were in many ways inferior to the latter. Today's Gospel reading shows us the judgment of the Savior Himself about this. It describes an incident that revealed the health of the sick and the sickness of the healthy, the faith of the pagans and the unbelief of those who boasted of calling themselves chosen and faithful. And this Gospel passage was written for admonition for all times and for all generations, including our time and our generation. This admonition is as sharp as a cherubic sword, clear as the sun, and as a mountain flower, fresh and striking. Let it frighten us with its sharpness, enlighten us with its clarity, and strike us in our present spiritual negligence and negligence. And let him especially remind us: we, Christians, must not forget and not be proud of the fact that we go to church, pray to God and confess Christ, so that before the judgment of God it does not turn out that those who are outside the Church have more sincere faith and more good works.

When Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion came to Him and asked Him: "Lord! My servant lies at home in paralysis, and suffers terribly. A captain, or centurion, or centurion headed a military garrison at Capernaum, the chief city on the Lake of Galilee. Whether he was directly subordinate to the Roman authorities or to Herod Antipas is quite immaterial, although he was most likely a Roman officer; The main thing is that he was a pagan and not a Jew. This is the first Roman officer mentioned in the Gospel as having believed in Christ. The second was the centurion, the commander of the guard at the Cross of Christ, who, seeing the terrible manifestations of nature that took place at the death of the Lord, exclaimed: "Truly He was the Son of God" (Matt. 27:54). Then it speaks of Cornelius, a centurion from the city of Caesarea, who was baptized by the Apostle Peter. All of them, although they were pagans, saw the truth and life in Christ and believed in Him, in contrast to the whole horde of extremely learned but blinded Jewish scribes.

My servant lies at home in paralysis, and suffers terribly. Not really a servant, but rather, according to the Greek word of the Gospel, a lad, or an altar boy; and probably this servant was a soldier, since the petitioner is an officer. The illness was terrible: he was paralyzed, and the altar boy was already near death, as the Evangelist Luke relates. And the centurion treasured it, and therefore, when he heard that Jesus had entered Capernaum, he tried to personally appear before Him and ask for help from his dear servant.

Whoever reads the descriptions of this event in the two holy Evangelists, Matthew and Luke, at first glance it will seem that there is a great difference between them. For Matthew writes that the centurion himself personally approached Christ and asked Him, and Luke writes that he first sent the elders of the Jews and set forth his request through them, and then, when the Lord was not far from his house, he sent his friends to tell the Lord: Do not labor, Lord! for I am not worthy that you should come under my roof; "But speak the word, and my servant shall recover." And indeed, there is a difference in these two descriptions, but there is no contradiction. And the whole difference lies in the fact that Matthew omits and does not mention the two representations that the centurion had previously sent to the Lord; Luke, however, omits and does not mention the fact that at last the centurion himself, with all his contrition and humility before the majesty of Christ, came out to meet Him. The fact that the evangelists complement each other so beautifully evokes only joy and admiration in a spiritual person. For, according to Chrysostom, if all the events were described by all the Evangelists in the same way, they would say that the Evangelists copied from each other. Why then would there be four Gospels and four evangelists? At every earthly judgment two witnesses are needed, and when they testify the case is considered reliable, and God has given us two witnesses twice in the person of the four evangelists, so that those who wish to be saved may believe as easily and as quickly as possible, and those who are perishing may have no excuse. And God also gave us four evangelists for this purpose, although He could set forth all the wisdom of our salvation through one, so that we, seeing how they complement each other, may learn from their example, understanding that we also are predestined to complement each other in this life, according to the various spiritual gifts received from God, like the members of one body, which help one another in their own measure of each member, whereby the body receives an increase (Ephesians 4:16).

Thus, having two descriptions before us, we can clearly imagine the picture of the event in question. Hearing about the glory and power of our Lord Jesus Christ, and at the same time feeling his human sinfulness and unworthiness, the centurion first asked the Jewish elders to go to the Lord and call Him. He was not at all sure that the Lord would want to come. He could think to himself, "Behold, I am an idolater and a sinner, He is clairvoyant, and He will see my sinfulness as soon as He hears my name, and who knows if He will want to come into my house? It is better for me to send the Jews to him, and if he refuses, let him refuse them, and if he agrees to come... we'll see." And when he learned that the Lord had agreed, he was all agitated and confused. Now he sends his friends to tell Christ not to enter the house of him, a sinner and unworthy, but only let him speak the word, and the servant will recover. But as soon as his friends approached the Lord and told Him what the centurion had instructed, the centurion himself came. Overcome with great excitement, he could not stay at home. Behold, he cometh under his roof. No, no: his friends do not yet know who He is, and will not be able to tell Him what is needed. And the captain could already know about the Jewish elders that they did not love Christ and did not have faith in Him. And therefore he must personally hasten to meet Him, especially since now he knows that the Lord will not refuse him and thus will not humiliate him, an officer, before the people.