www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology The Last Judgment and Radical Forgiveness

Dear Theophan,

This is a great topic. It is tragic that we are not following the same calendar but are five weeks behind the Western calendar. Thus when you celebrate Easter this year, we will still be deep into Great Lent. You will be greeting each other with, Christ is Risen,� while we will still be fasting and having choir rehearsals to fine tune the Holy Week services, especially those lamentations.

Yet, we are called to repentance every day of our lives whether it is Great Lent or the Pascha Season.

It reminds me when we were celebrating the Feast of St. Thomas Sunday, and our choir director felt dizzy just before the beginning of Divine Liturgy. Our Priest came up to the choir loft to anoint him and the paramedics took him away. When we sang Xristos Anesti, almost all of had him in mind. At the end of our Divine Liturgy, our pastor gathered us together in the hall to announce that Subdeacon Eugene had fallen asleep in the Lord. His funeral service was one of the most joyful events I had ever witnessed as we bid him farewell with repeated singing of "Christ is Risen."

May we die as he did with the prayers and hymns of the Holy Church.

This is so on time. Last night I read a portion of St. maximos the confessor and he addresses this very issue of loving your neighbor by saying (and forgive me if my paraphrasing is off)that there only two reasons we pray for those who abuse us, etc. to put distance between us and the demons responsible for the offender's behavior and to be closer to God. He says that this is the only way a person can truly love those who hate them. I admit that this is the only way I know that can do it. somehow, when I read this I felt that I could finally do it, and not feel that I was being asked to do more than I'm capable of at this time. My trust isn't deep enough yet to forgive solely by command.

(Idon't have the book on hand at the moment, so title and everything useful has flown out of my mind. If you're interestd I'll gladly post book info within the next day or so.)

Peace,
Indigo

Filipe YTOL:

Yes, it will take a long time. No, IMHO, we cannot afford to take a different path.

I think that for too long we have all taken the easier road to wrap ourselves in "righteous anger" against those who hate us and those who maltreat us, but it is so easy in the heat of the anger over being hurt to justify that anger as righteous when it often is not.


The problem here is that the Enemy has conditioned us to believe this lie about holiness. We are called to holiness by our Baptism and Chrismation. Very simply.

I gave a talk at a retreat some 18 years ago about holiness. I started, as I always do, with a root word search--don't you just hate those old English teachers? The root of holiness and "whole" are the same. We are called to "wholeness" from our original "brokenness"--the state we are born in and the state we are healed from in Baptism. We are called to be "whole" in our relationship with God--loving Him above all things with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength--and "whole" in our relationship with our neighbor--whom we are to love as ourselves.

Sometimes it's easy to say we love God. We can get wrapped up in the warm and fuzzy we religious people can get when we establish our private, pious practices. And we can even keep that warm and fuzzy when we absolutely get wrapped up in anger and hate-filled feelings and talk about the person sitting, standing, or living next door to us. We do this because we tend to compartmentalize love of God and religious practice with applying it in our daily lives. The real struggle here is to make this all one seamless garment--to borrow an image from the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. When we say we love our neighbor as ourselves, we must come to the point where we can be glad for someone who is promoted over us at work; or someone who beats us in an athletic contest (Super Bowl Sunday will see rabid reactions among fans--something quite opposite of loving one's neighbor as oneself); or who, in some other way, manages to come before us in some worldly measure.

Radical forgiveness comes together when we understand that

1. God loves us not more and not less than our neighbor. We are loved uniquely and each of us are, in His eyes, a hand-made original, precious beyond any human measure, precious to the last drop of His Son's Most Precious Blood.
2. God has placed the neighbor next to us for our own salvation. Or as the Desert Fathers put it, "With our neighbor there is life and death. If we do good to our brother, we do good to God; but if we scandalise our brother, we sin against Christ."
3. We have put on Christ by Baptism and Chrismation. We are fed with Christ's Body and Blood so that He is absorbed into every fiber of our being. If so, if we really believe this, we must work with His Help, His Grace, and His Strength to be, think, and act like Him in every way, every day. Radical forgiveness is one such way.
4. The Parable of the unforgiving servant should give us pause. Christ tells us repeatedly that the measure we measure out to others is the measure that the Father will measure to us. We all repeat the "Kyrie eleison" or "Hospodi pomilui" or "Lord have mercy," but we rarely take the time to examine our consciences to ask ourselves about the implications when the Divine and Uncreated Light that shines from the Gospel is thrown on us. We ask for mercy for so much and then refuse the mercy of forgiveness to others when they dump on us in one way or another.

No, this is not just for "holy" people. It's for us who are holy ourselves. When the priest calls out "Holy Things are for the holy," he means you and me. Holiness is a process; it is not a static state. St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his book From Glory to Glroy, makes this point: for the Christian, the process of holiness is ongoing and will continue in eternity. Perfection or holiness in pagan thought was something static; for the Christian it is dynamic. We go into eternity on the same trajectory that we start here--either radically committed to be like Christ in all things or not. It means we are focused on Christ and we keep that focus even when we fall into the muck of sin. We pick ourselves up and fight on to reclaim our status as Sons of God by adoption. We reclaim our holiness every time we see the need for the Divine Physician to bind up our wounds and we go to the life-giving Mystery of Confession.

So Radical Forgiveness is something we strive for, just as we strive for every other virtue so as to be pleasing to the Father as Christ is pleasing to the Father.

In Christ,

BOB

Elizabeth Maria:


It is tragic that we are not on the same calendar. But you're not "behind"--just at a different point in examining yourselves. And there are some of us who continue secretly to lengthen our Lenten observance knowing that our brothers and sisters, Orthodox Christians, are laboring in discipline. ISTM that our lives are too short when we compare it to the spiritual work we need to do. So joining another secretly and in spirit is another way to focus on Christ. After all, is 40 days enough to examine our consciences and get ourselves on track--or "whole"? I don't think so. So start now to do your Lenten reading--setting up a period when you definitely take a book that will edify you spiritually and read from it every day until you officially begin the discipline of Great Lent. Maybe St. Matthew's Gospel, especially the chapters where Jesus repeatedly says, "But I tell you . . ."


In fact, given Christian symbolism, 40 is a symbol of a lifetime. So we ought to take a clue from this brief period of the Great Fast to understand that we need a lifetime to struggle toward the Savior and His Kingdom. It doesn't happen in 40 days so we can go back to being and doing what we were before. If we do, we've wasted our time.

In Christ,

BOB

Indigo:

Please do. Please post a section of what moved or edified you so we may all benefit from it.

In Christ,

BOB

Thankyou for this topic. I recall years ago after the Columbine shootings they placed crosses on a hill above the school for each of the dead including the shooters and there was a sign that said "We forgive you." I read a column from someone terribly incrensed at them for forgiving the boys when they had not repented. As I had always understood it we were required to forgive every injury regardless of whether the perpetrator ever repented.

You forgive people their transgressions, preferably personally and face-to-face, in order to heal your own soul, and hopefully to inspire them to repent as well.

Public, impersonal "forgiveness" like the sign you mentioned is tantamount to saying, "it's OK," and I can understand why people were upset about it.

Dave

Dave,
With all due respect, I disagree. This "public and impersonal" forgiveness is not tantamount to saying "it's ok".
First of all, even if it is public, it can't have been an easy decision to make, and definately involved personal commitment and reflection. Secondly, I would say that it is tantamount to saying: "Your hatred will not overcome us. We forgive you, and by doing so, publicly, as a community, we break the vicious cycle of hatred, anger and violence that your act threatened to begin."

Would you say that the reaction of the Amish to the murder of their young children was also tantamount to saying "It's Ok"?

God bless,
Filipe

Thankyou Felipe. I was pondering how to word the exact same questions. I did not see how it was saying everything was ok, either.

Bob,

For me, the most terrifying and inspiring words of the Bible are from Jesus' description of the Last Judgement (in Matthew 25:40).


-- John

I have a question about the Last Judgement.

The Protestants are very active in my country preaching their heresies, especially regarding the Last Judgement and the "final destination" of man after death.

Last week some of these Jehovah's Witnesses came to my house to tell me that "there will be a paradise on earth" and that "God does not torture people eternally in Hell".

It was quite easy for me to prove them that there is a Hell, and that the evil ones will be tortured there (it's everywhere in the Bible), but it was more difficult for me to prove them that there will be no paradise on earth because they take some phrases of the Bible to prove it like "Blessed are the week as they will inherit the earth", and the Apocalypse where it says that there will be a new earth.

I have told them that the Beatitudes each of them actually refer to the Kingdom of Heaven in a symbolic way but my arguments were not as strong as to convince them.

In fact the problem is that these Protestant sects believe that only 144,000 people will go to Heaven with Christ. This is the reason why they say that the other 5 million followers of their sect will live in a Paradise on Earth (otherwise there would be no motivation to join them).

I could, however, prove them that the phrases they took from the Bible to prove that only 144,000 chosen will reign with God in heaven in fact refer to the 12 Tribes of Israel and that the large number of people they say they'll stay in paradise, are in fact the gentiles and that both will go to heaven ("the sheep that are not from my fold").

It is very bad that no one does anyhting to attack these sects, who are nothing but agents of western capitalist interests and cause confusion and division.

Mexican:

That's the problem with literal interpretation of the Scriptures. With the ancients, 12 was the perfect number--see the measurements of the Temple in revelation. So 12 times 12 is perfection and to make it 1000 times means absolute perfection to them. Their number systems didn't make it that high because most people were poor--even the wealthy--by today's standards. So 144,000 is absolute perfection in the total number of people who will populate the Kingdom.

I always ask them what any of us are doing worrying about getting into Heaven if it is literally 144,000 who will be admitted because there were far more martyrs for Christ in the first 1000 years than that. So we'd all be excluded before the founder of their sect was even born.

The other thing that I always use--simple and brutal--is to challenge them by saying if their sect were true then Christ would have to be a liar. He said He would be with His Church to the end of the age--that is, until He returns. Well, He hasn't returned and His Church is still here after 2000 years. And His Church was established long before Luther or any of the others who were the forebearers of his sect were born. So I'll admit they have the truth and join them IF AND ONLY IF they confess Christ to be a liar right there in front of me. While His Church has exhibited human weakness and is in constant need of metanoia, she is still here and the Holy Spirit is still alive and well within her.

Shuts them down and they usually pass the word not to stop at my place to anyone else who might be on the territory.

BOB

BOB

I know my thinking might be flawed and many will find something wrong with it. But on judgment day I would simply say to my Lord thank you. "Thank you for the joy that loving you brings me" "Thank you for everyday you gave me on earth to love your ceation, to serve You and to find you present in the lowest of people, I know that I have sinned and thank you for forgiving me but if I am too unclean to enter into the eternal banquet, grant me only to keep my legs so that I may be able to kneel and worship you in hell"

MAURA:

It is said that the mark of a saint is in being thankful. So I really doubt that the finish of this will be your eternity. That said, why not begin your thanksgiving tonight and make this part of your evening prayers?

BOB