CATECHETICAL HOMILY
AT THE OPENING
OF HOLY AND GREAT LENT
+ BARTHOLOMEW
BY GOD’S MERCY
ARCHBISHOP OF CONSTANTINOPLE-NEW ROME
AND ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH
TO THE PLENITUDE OF THE CHURCH,
MAY THE GRACE AND PEACE
OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST,
TOGETHER WITH OUR PRAYER, BLESSING AND FORGIVENESS
BE WITH YOU ALL
* * *
Most honorable brothers and blessed children in the Lord,
With the good-will and grace of God, the giver of all good things, we are entering Holy and Great Lent, the arena of ascetic struggles. The Church knows the labyrinths of the human soul and the thread of Ariadne, the way out of all impasse – humility, repentance, the power of prayer and the sacred services of contrition, fasting that eliminates the passions, patience, obedience to the rule of piety. And so the Church invites us once again this year to a divinely inspired journey, whose measure is the Cross and whose horizon is the Resurrection of Christ.

The veneration of the Cross in the middle of Holy and Great Lent reveals the meaning of this whole period. The word of our Lord echoes strikingly: “Whoever desires to follow me … let them lift their cross each day and follow me” (Lk 9.23). We are called to lift our own cross, following the Lord and beholding His life-giving Cross, with the awareness that the Lord is the one that saves and not the lifting of our cross. The Cross of the Lord is “the judgment of our criteria,” “the judgment of the world,” and at the same time the promise that evil in all its forms does not have the final word in history. In looking to Christ and under His protection, as the One who permits our struggle, while blessing and strengthening our effort, we fight the good fight, “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4.8–9). This is the experiential quintessence also during the present period of the Cross and the Resurrection. We are on a journey to the Resurrection through the Cross, through which “joy has come to the whole world.”

Some of you may wonder why the Church, in the midst of the current pandemic, would add to the already existing health restrictions yet another “quarantine,” namely Great Lent. Indeed, Great Lent is also a “quarantine,” a period that lasts forty days. Nevertheless, the Church does not aim to weaken us further with
additional obligations and prohibitions. On the contrary, it calls us to give meaning to the quarantine that we are living as a result of the coronavirus, through Great Lent, as liberation from enslavement to “the things of our world.”

Today’s Gospel reading establishes the conditions of this liberation. The first condition is fasting, not in the sense of abstaining only from specific foods, but also from those habits that keep us attached to the world. Such abstinence does not comprise an expression of contempt of the world, but a necessary precondition for reorienting our relationship with the world and for experiencing the unique joy of discovering the world as the domain of Christian witness. This is why, even during this stage of fasting, the approach and experience of the life of the faithful have a paschal dimension, the taste of the Resurrection. The “Lenten atmosphere” is not depressing, but joyous. It is the “great joy” that was proclaimed as good news by the angel “to all people” at the birth of the Savior (Lk 2.10). This is the unwavering “fulness of joy” (1 Jn 1.4) of life in Christ. Christ is always present in our life – He is closer to us than we are to ourselves – all the days of our life, “unto the end of the ages” (Mt 28.20). The life of the Church is an unshakeable witness to the grace that has come and to the hope of the Kingdom, to the fullness of revelation of the mystery of the Divine Economy.

Faith is the response to God’s loving condescension to us; it is the “Yes” of our whole existence to Him, who “bowed the heavens and descended” in order to redeem the human race “from the slavery of the enemy” and in order to open for us the way toward deification through grace. The sacrificial love for the neighbor and the “care” for the whole creation spring from and are nurtured by this gift of grace. If this charitable love for others and the god-pleasing concern for creation are absent, then my neighbor becomes “my hell” and creation is abandoned to irrational forces, which transform it into an object of exploitation and into a hostile environment for humankind.

The second condition of the liberation promised by Great Lent is forgiveness. Oblivion of divine mercy and God’s ineffable beneficence, breach of the Lord’s commandment that we should become “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world” (Mt 5.13-14), and a false transformation of the Christian way of life: to all of these attitudes leads a “closed spirituality” that thrives on the denial and rejection of the “other” and of the world, wipes out love, forgiveness and the acceptance of the different. Yet, this barren and arrogant attitude of life is denounced emphatically by the word of the Gospel on the first three Sundays of the Triodion.
It is known that such extremes are especially prevalent during periods when the Church invites its faithful to spiritual discipline and vigilance. However, the authentic spiritual life is a way of internal renewal, an exodus from our selves, a loving movement toward our neighbor. It is not based on syndromes of purity and exclusion, but on forgiveness and discernment, doxology and thanksgiving, according to the experiential wisdom of the ascetic tradition: “It is not food, but gluttony that is evil … not speaking, but idle speech … not the world, but the passions.”

With this attitude and these sentiments, we join our prayers with all of you, beloved brothers and children, that we may definitively overcome the lethal pandemic and swiftly respond to its social and economic consequences. And we ask for your beseeching supplications, too, for the reopening of the Sacred Theological School of Halki, after a long period of fifty years that has passed since its silence was imposed externally and fully unjustly, as we welcome Holy and Great Lent in the Church, singing and chanting together “God is with us,” to Whom belongs the glory and might to the endless ages. Amen!
Holy and Great Lent 2021

 BARTHOLOMEW of Constantinople
Fervent supplicant for all before God
-------------------

This is a photograph of a planter in our garden. Every time I look at it, I see the eye of an elephant looking at me! What about the car on the right? I bet you see a smiley face. This tendency for the incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning is known as Pareidolia. This ability can be great fun and can be helpful in developing our imagination and creativity. However, as with most things there can be dangers associated with it too!
This is not too dissimilar to reading the Holy Scriptures. One needs only to scan some of the contemporary popular ‘Spiritual/Christian’ books to see how incorrect perceptions and understandings abound.
 
In our Gospel reading for this Sunday we read our Lord’s parable of the Last Judgment. When Christ will come and judge us. When “All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left” (Mat 25v32-33), and how “…He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (v42). These verses can leave us anxious and fearful; they can leave us with the image of a God who judges with a strong belief in retribution and punishment.
 
Equally we can read how “Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:  for I was hungry, and you gave Me food; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and you took Me in; I was naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.” These verses may lead us to think that what God requires of us is social activism. A God who is not so interested in the person but rather the ‘common good’.
 
These thoughts and impressions may have a degree of validity, but if this is all we see then we are missing the point of the parable. This parable is about Christian love – no more, no less. Love of God and love of neighbour. We each have a responsibility to love. It may not be possible to perform great humanitarian acts, to feed or provide drink for the hungry and parched of this world, to house the homeless and destitute, or to visit the sick or those who are incarcerated. But we can all take responsibility for sharing the love we have in Christ with those who share that small part of Gods kingdom for which we have been made accountable. Remembering “… inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’ (v40)
 
As we begin our preparations for the Great Fast, we need also to ensure that our perceptions and understanding of what is required of us as we fast are correct. The Christian life is essentially directed toward three focal points – God, our neighbour, and our soul. Through prayer we orientate ourselves toward God; almsgiving turns our attention toward neighbour and fasting toward self. There are few references to fasting in the New Testament, not because it can be ignored but because it is assumed; ‘Moreover, when you fast,…’ (v40), not ‘If’ but ‘When’! For most, a fast is an extended period of time when one eats nothing. And for the early Church this was what fasting was. However, for us, the practice is (with welcome modifications) a vegan diet with crustaceans permitted. It is not something to be undertaken to show one’s piety,   
“Moreover, when you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting…when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting.” (Mat 6: 16-18). Like prayer and almsgiving, fasting is, in a literal sense, practical; it is something we do; Jesus expects it and the church requires it. Because, as Fr Thomas Hopko teaches us ‘The effort enlightens the mind, strengthens the spirit, controls the emotions and tames the passions.
And so, as we prepare and continue on our journey to Pascha let us stand with Blind Bartimaeus and say “Lord, that I may receive my sight.” (Mark 10 v51).
Let us be sure about what we are looking at. Let us not be deceived or misled by incorrect perceptions or understandings. Let us not live in fear judgement and retribution but rejoice in the God who is love. Let us not focus on what we are giving up but rejoice in what we are gaining.

Father Julian

"“Let us not be taken prisoner by our eyes;

let not our tongue delight in costly food,

for once they have been eaten they are worthless;

let us shun all greed, then we shall not become slaves to the passions which follow an excess of food and drink

(Triodion)