Today we see the Pharisee standing
in the court of the Temple ,
praying “O God, I thank you that you have not made me as other men.” The
Pharisee perhaps believed that the words of the Scriptures concerning the
righteous man applied to himself. For
example, he may well have thought of the words of the First Psalm: “Blessed is
the man, who has not walked in the counsel of the wicked.” When the Pharisee
read these words, he believed that the psalm was referring to him.
Every week, at the first service of the observance of the Lord’s Day,
the office of Vespers on Saturday evening, we recite the words of this same
psalm, but we know in the light of the Gospel, that those words do not refer to
us. No, there is only one to whom that description applies. The Prophet David wrote those words in a
spirit of prophecy foretelling Christ. “Blessed is the Man, who has not walked
in the counsel of the wicked.” We ourselves, apart from Christ, can not lay
claim to that blessing, on account of the fact that many times and in many
ways, again and again, and even daily, we have walked in the counsel of the
wicked. We have followed the counsels of the Evil One. We have surrendered to
his temptations, and thus we have made resentment a part of our lives, have
disdained communion and friendship with God, and have abandoned the path of
peace and inner stillness.
Yet, we long for that blessing, which we see in Christ (Blessed is the
Man). Our path as Christians is often presented as a path of emulation or
imitation. There are spiritual books,
which teach us to imitate Christ in the ways of His earthly life. But our path to communion with God is
actually a matter of participation.
There is only one way for us to inherit the blessing of God uttered in
the 1st Psalm: to become one with Christ. But how may we accomplish this? The Church’s
services teach us how.
We must remember that our path to Christ will not be easy, but the
services gives us mystical knowledge of that path, and reveal our passage to
God to be the great adventure of our lives.
So often in the Byzantine Rite, we, and especially the clergy, hear
comments from people, who have attended our churches to the effect that there
is too much ritual; the tradition is like a weight too heavy to bear. But the people
who respond in this way to the rites of the Church seldom understand the
meaning of the signs contained in the services; seldom do they understand the
purpose of the symbols to elevate our minds from simple things that are seen to
the unseen and imperishable realities, which they represent. These realities,
these mysteries, can not be represented in words, for all the forests in the
world could not produce enough paper upon which to write a summation of even
one of them, for the things of God are far superior to human thought. They can only be conveyed by means of
symbolic representation, because by means of this language of signs, our hearts
can be lifted up into heaven to be taught by God Himself. Ten centuries ago, St. Volodymyr sent
emissaries to capital of the Roman Empire, Constantinople ,
in order to inquire about the Romans culture, civilization, and especially
religion. Later, these emissaries told
St. Volodymyr, “the Greeks took us to their temple where they worship their
God… and we did not know whether we were in Heaven or on Earth, but of this we
are sure, that there God dwells among men.” In just the same way, we come
Sunday after Sunday, and feast day after feast day, in order to be elevated up
to Heaven, to enter into the Kingdom of God, and to be ennobled by God’s
gracious plan for us. Our ascent to the
heavenly places here in God’s holy temple can be accomplished only if we have
“laid aside all anxious cares of life,” or “laid aside all earthly cares” as
another translation has it. Then the
meaning of the things of God will become clear to us.
First of all, we believe that the world in which we live is divided into
two different “worlds.” There is the material world, which is accessible to us
by means of our minds and our reason. Then, there is the spiritual world, whose
vastness far surpasses the material world.
This world is accessible only to our hearts, the deepest reality of our
souls. The spiritual world is the Holy of Holies, the place where God resides,
and although it is different from this material creation in which we find
ourselves, nevertheless there is constant communication across its subtle
membrane from one side to the other. This fundamental division in all of
creation is the meaning of the iconostas.
What the words of the psalm reveal to us is that there are two kinds of
men: there are the men, who are rooted in this material world, held down by the
chains of covetousness, pride and resentment, and then there is the Man Who has
not walked in the counsel of the wicked, in other words, the Man who has His
heart, the whole attention of His whole Being focused on the Holy of Holies,
the spiritual world. We are invited in the Liturgy to share His Life, just as
the priest says: “Let us lift up our hearts.” When we respond, “We lift them up
to the Lord,” we affirm that we desire to conform ourselves to Him, that we
want to be Christ, the Man who has not walked in the counsel of the wicked. The
only way is to have our hearts where His is, for the Lord tells us: Where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also.” True repentance is precisely this
desire, to conform our hearts to Christ.
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