In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit!
Today, this Sunday, the Holy Church commemorates the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, which took place in the town of Nicea in 325 A.D. This Council, which united the holy fathers, was summoned for a specific reason: In the bosom of the Holy Church, a heretical departure had arisen, which was heading in the direction of blasphemy against the Son of God.
A certain presbyter named Arius and his cohorts had unrighteously judged the Person of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ. Their judgment denigrated His divine dignity, His divine essence, and degraded Him to the level of a creature and not a Divinity. They said that supposedly Jesus Christ was not the true God, but a creature that God had created. This impious teaching was dangerous in that if we were to allow that Jesus Christ was not of one essence, of the same rights and power with His Father, God, if He was not the true God, then that means that the Savior’s struggle on the Cross, His redemption of the human race, was in vain. Which means that we are still in sin, that we are still under the curse of Adam, and that we are not a new creature but the old man. All the power, all the might of the Christian faith consists in the recognition of Jesus Christ as our true Redeemer, the Author of the salvation of the human race. It was to resolve this matter that 318 men gathered at the First Ecumenical Council.
The aim of the Council was to prove the ridiculousness, the absurdity of Arius’s teaching, because it is impossible for anyone other than the Son of God Jesus Christ to perform the salvation of the human race, and take upon Himself the sins of the whole world. The Arians wanted essentially to steal from Christians any hope of salvation by claiming that the Son of God had not yet come, that the Messiah promised by the prophets had not yet appeared, and that the One Whom we accept as God was only a creature.
The holy fathers anathematized Arius’s teaching, and over the span of 1500 years now we remember this anathema when we read the Creed, which confirms Arius’s disgrace, our confession of the faith, and the confession of our Lord Jesus Christ. What do we read?
“I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-Begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages. Light from Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father, by Whom all things are made.” This is what the Church proclaims at every divine service in the daily cycle.
Hieromonk Pavel (Shcherbachev)
In order for us to understand why in the Gospel reading today we heard the Savior’s high-priestly prayer, we apparently need to think about the fact that this prayer says precisely that the Lord Jesus Christ is the true God. These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word… And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them (John 17:1–6; John 17:10). From this prayer it revealed that besides the hypostatic qualities of the Son of God, the Son is fully of equal honor to the Father and the Holy Spirit, equal in pre-eternality, in omnipotence, all-goodness, in immortality, equal in immeasurable power and authority, equal in wisdom and righteousness, and in all that is God’s inheritance. In nature and essence these Three are One and undivided, and in hypostases, as the holy fathers taught, they are the unconfused union of the Trinity. From this we see that all that the Father possesses, so does the Son and the Holy Spirit. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine, we heard in today’s Gospel reading.
This is true also in relation to Christ’s followers; they belong to the Father, as well as to the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That is why the Lord says, Thine they were, and Thou gavest them Me. Thus, the Father’s inheritance, is the inheritance of Christ. And, His—Christ’s—inheritance is the inheritance of the Father. We are first of all talking about the members of the Holy Orthodox Church. In order to be God’s inheritance, one must be in the bosom of the Orthodox Church—be not only its member according to the letter, but also but one who is truly united with her and possesses all those treasures of grace-filled gifts which God has bestowed upon the Church—earthly, heavenly, and in netherworld.
Does this relate to all of us? Most likely, yes. Because, when we go to confession we hear the priest’s prayer: “Make peace and unite them with Thy Holy Church in our Lord Jesus Christ.” We cannot have cold hearts and minds when we are in Church.
While preparing for today’s sermon, I came upon one sermon by the ever-memorable Fr. John (Krestiankin). This sermon was delivered, it seems, in the early 1990s, when the [Russian] nation’s condition, the state of its society, was undergoing fundamental changes, and Fr. John was sighing and lamenting, saying that many people who were now coming to the Church, coming to pray, were in fact very far from God’s Church. They do not understand how great is their calling, what a great Divine inheritance they are.
Many of you might ask: “Why is it necessary to gather a Council in order to teach dogmatic truths, canons, and church rules?” So that not God Himself would not be teaching us directly, but fathers who accept them and who, of course, through the grace of the Holy Spirit establish those rules of the Church by which we live. It is not by accident that in the resolutions of the Council we read: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us.” But there are certain explanations to this matter. This explanation is rather categorical: because thus it pleases God.
It must be said that during the Council that were summoned there weren’t the distinctions that we now make from what is now a textbook study of Church history. Many of the fathers were also prophets, martyrs, and holy hierarchs. They possessed the fullness of grace of the Church in the era of persecutions, the grace that lived in the hearts of Christians in the first centuries. The history of the Church knows one instance of a certain priest, who lived a holy life. Because of his purity and guilelessness, there was an angel was who always present with him as he celebrated Divine Liturgy. Once he was visited by a deacon, who heard him pronounce the doctrinal formulations, noticed an inconsistency—a certain distortion of Orthodox teaching. And the deacon informed the priest that he was pronouncing such words in his prayers. The priest was stunned by this correction, and he asked the angel:
“Is it true what the deacon said?”
The angel replied, “Yes, it’s true.”
The priest then asked, “You’ve been with me for such a long time. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“It is pleasing to God,” the angel replied, “that people be instructed by people.”
And here it is very important to draw a distinction between heretics and those individuals who, perhaps in seeking the truth and striving for perfection according to the commandments of God, are involuntarily—like all of us, being human, subject to the weakness of mind and the weakness of flesh—led into error.
As a rule, heretics are hardened, like the devil in their stubbornness and convictions. But people who sincerely sought and strove have often corrected themselves and returned to the bosom of Church teaching.
There is yet another instance in the history of the Church, when a certain elder, who lived during the era of the great Egyptian ascetics, went everywhere preaching that Melchizedek the king of Salem, about whom we heard yesterday [at Vigil service for Sunday] during the Old Testament reading, is the Son of God. We ourselves would do well to study sensitivity and tact from those saints who lived in the first centuries. The great holy hierarch Cyril of Alexandria, when he heard about this, came to him but did not start rebuking him. Instead, he said meekly:
“You know, I have a doubt in my soul. Who was Melchizedek? Was he the Son of God, or a man?”
The elder said, “I will pray, and I believe that God will reveal it to me.”
He prayed for three days and then told St. Cyril:
“Melchizedek was a man.”
The holy hierarch asked him, “How did you know it?”
He answered, I had a vision; I saw all the patriarchs, and among these patriarchs from Adam to the last Old Testament patriarchs, there was one to whom an angel pointed then said to me, ‘This is Melchizedek.’ Be sure that this is so.
After his meeting with Archbishop Cyril the elder returned and started preaching that Melchizedek was a man and not God, not the Son of God. Blessed Cyril was greatly gladdened by this.
We need to learn from the fathers how to talk with people who, perhaps out of weakness or some human circumstances, have erred, and show them meekness and sensitivity. Look at how sensitive the great holy hierarch was. He could have just come and said, “O, child of the devil, you are distorting the teaching.” But he showed meekness and humility, and the truth triumphed. Let us learn this from the ancient fathers who were marked by God’s grace, and let’s believe that by their prayers, God will grant us to abide in the Holy Church, for which they shed their blood. And may He grant us that great striving of man toward perfection, which the holy fathers bequeathed to God’s inheritance, to the chosen race—to Christians. Amen.
