September 27, 1986

Sunday before the Nativity of Christ, Holy Fathers

On the Sunday before Christmas, the genealogy of Jesus Christ is always read, and all these numerous generations before Him are listed. What distinguished those people whose names we heard from all the others? Faith that the Redeemer will come, the Savior will come. This deep faith was a thread that binds not only by blood, but most importantly - by faith, by faith. And when the Lord, after His resurrection, descended with His soul into hell, those who lived by the promise of the coming of the Saviour, seeing Him, rejoiced, and He led them out of there - thereby uniting the two Churches, the Old Testament and the New Testament.

After Adam fell away from God, his mind became darkened, and he ceased to perceive God directly. The Bible says that he was expelled from paradise. Paradise is communion with God, and expulsion from paradise is the loss of this communion. But Adam heard the words of the Lord that the time would come and he would be saved. And he believed in it and waited. He waited for a long time, but waited and was taken out of hell. And all the children of Adam were divided, as they are to this day, precisely by faith. Some of them believed that the Redeemer would come. And someone forgot about it, deviated into other, false faiths. Among those who remained faithful to the One God and never forgot about Him and prayed to Him, there was, for example, Abraham. And this faith, as it is said in the Scriptures, was imputed to him for righteousness.

Each person, when he is born, has his own special character, everyone has his own infirmities, everyone has his own special gifts. And if we consider the saints, we will see that they are also all different: some are courageous fighters, others are humble workers. Some, as we read today in the Epistle to the Hebrews, "by faith they overcame kingdoms, they did righteousness... they stopped the mouths of lions, extinguished the power of fire", that is, all sorts of miracles worked. And others, on the contrary, lived inconspicuously, hiding from people, and their exploits were often learned a few days before their death, and sometimes even after death. That is, all people have a different manifestation of character and the manifestation of some virtues and qualities.

For example, Alexander Nevsky became famous for his humility, courage, bravery. And Philaret the Merciful was not, perhaps, as brave as Alexander Nevsky, but he gladly gave alms. The third saint was a great pastor - for example, Macarius the Great or Isaac the Syrian. Everyone was famous for some virtue, and some even for many. For example, John of Kronstadt was a pastor, and a man of prayer, and a miracle worker, and a healer, and a preacher - he had a lot of gifts.

And faith is the same virtue. Abraham accomplished the feat of faith. He, being already old, has lost hope that one day he will have children. But the Lord said to him: not only will they be, but a great nation will come out of you. Indeed, soon he had a son. And then the Lord said: "Go and offer your son to Me as a sacrifice." And Abraham did not doubt for a second that it was necessary to do this; that although the Lord requires a son as a sacrifice, he will still become a great nation. And he took his son and led him up to the mountain, and he had already made a fire to be slaughtered and burned, and then the Lord stopped him.

The Lord thus tested Abraham's faith against all so-called common sense. Let's take a father who has a small son, very late, and was born by some miracle, because the father is very old. If the child is the only one, and even late, as usual, parents shake over him! And here the Lord gives a command: go kill him. And Abraham goes to kill him, but not just to kill him for the sake of some selfishness, malice, envy - no, but offers him as a sacrifice to God. That is, his hand did not tremble, his heart did not doubt in the least.

If we try this situation on ourselves, we will immediately see that we do not have such faith. And it was this powerful, indestructible faith, conviction in the truth of the Divine words, that made Abraham the father of all believers. And this faith was passed down from Abraham to Isaac, from Isaac to Jacob, from Jacob to his children. And so it went, walked like a river, and reached the parents of the Most Holy Theotokos, Joachim and Anna, and the Mother of God Herself.

Faith is the highest virtue. That is why it is said that faith was imputed to Abraham for righteousness. Although, if we compare his life with, say, the life of some New Testament saint, Abraham was not so righteous. Take and compare him with Sergius of Radonezh. Of course, the height of Sergius is immeasurably greater from the moral point of view. But Abraham showed his faith so strong that the Lord promised him: "From you will come a nation." Because the Lord demanded a supernatural effort from him, and Abraham's soul had such a capacity for faith that this virtue - his faith - simply overshadowed all his shortcomings. In the light of this great faith, all of Abraham's infirmities seem to fade.

When a person fulfills a virtue and manifests the main diligence in it, then even if the other virtues are not present in such a developed form, then this main one, in its supernatural form, as it were, pulls up all the others. Therefore, it happens that a person does not pray. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot achieve in prayer what Arsenius the Great achieved, for example. And how can he be saved? And he can do alms, for example. Or to fulfill the virtue of love: to take some poor person and begin to follow him, to help him, to fulfill the virtue of loving service, and to succeed in this in order to please God. And by fulfilling one virtue, a person gradually comes to the full Christian structure of the soul.

At the heart of every Christian feat is faith. That is why today this genealogy is enumerated, that since Christ came into the world, the blessing of faith has been transmitted not from father to son and from son to grandson, but through faith in Jesus Christ. That is, the forefathers believed that He would be, and now He came. And we also believe that He was and is. And depending on the depth of our faith, to the extent we can carry out the Christian podvig, to the extent we can succeed in virtue. The stronger the faith, the greater the feat. The greater the podvig, the greater the grace. The greater the grace, the closer a person is to God. The closer a person is to God, the more the Kingdom of God is revealed in him, that is, the Lord begins to reign in this person, and all his deeds, words, and thoughts become Divine, because the Lord dwells in him and begins to live in him.

A simple example. A person reads evening prayers. The greater his faith, the more concentrated his prayer is. You can read simply, as they say, looking for familiar letters in the text. You can read while thinking about something, without delving into the words at all. But if a person firmly believes that when he stands up for prayer, the Lord is before him, how can his mind be scattered? Imagine that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself would stand here instead of me. Would we have such thoughts now? Would we stand like that? Would we listen like that? This presence of God would be absolutely crushing for us. But in fact He is here and stands invisibly. He is also present at our confession, and it is not for nothing that the address is always read: "Behold, children, Christ stands invisibly..."