You Fool! This night your soul will be required of you! – Fr. Gavril Galev
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In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
“You Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. (Luke 12:20-21).
This condition is currently one of the biggest misconceptions of humanity. We spend all our time working to earn and enrich ourselves here on earth. We neglect death and do not enrich ourselves in God, that is, we do not work to enrich ourselves with the gifts that God gives unto us ever since we were baptised. For the acquisition of the likeness of God, the promise that God gave us ever since with our creation.
Covetousness is a state of numbness of the soul. And it is not only the sin of covetousness that is a problem, but self-love is more so, as God says to “collect goods for yourself”. Collecting goods for ourselves is when we work for our pride, for our vanity, for our high opinion of ourselves, and that is self-love. Then we are at our worst, then our heart is filled with “self” and we are proud, we despise, we overeat, we fornicate and everything else, and so, we do not even respect God.
We all know how to be proud of many of our supposed “successes”. And yet there is death, of which we do not know the time of its coming and what will happen at that hour when the Lord will say unto us, in our lack of preparedness, “Today, or tonight, you have to lay down your soul.” And what will we take with us then?
It is very rare for God to call someone a fool, and yet He said that to this man in order to show him what a great delusion he is in. That is why we should be careful how we live and how we should direct our life correctly, that is, which direction we should take. God or Mammon? Will we get rich here for ourselves, for the earthly kingdom, or will we get rich in God, for the heavenly kingdom which is eternal. And here, no matter how long we are on earth, it is still short-lived and not eternal, there is a limit.
We should be clever, not foolish. Let us not work for the riches that perish, but for the riches that are for the acquisition of the eternal kingdom of heaven. We will achieve that solely if we live the way God has shown us. As the God-Man Jesus Christ lived on earth. As His Holy Mother lived, as the Saints lived.
Today we celebrate the memory of the family of Saint Gregory Palamas. Not only Saint Gregory Palamas, whom we know was one of the greatest Saints and theologians in Orthodoxy, but his entire family were Saints. Everyone lived a holy life. His father was an imperial adviser. He was the “mind” of the king, as he told the king, so the king acted. However, he never abused his position. He did not harm anyone (and thereby also himself) as many do nowadays. He lived in Christ God and taught others of what it means to be good, that’s why he earned the title of Saint, Holy, and all his family, for which we are all also called to be holy.
Father Gavril Galev
Abbot of the Monastery “St. Kliment Ohridski”,
Kinglake, Melbourne, Australia
03.12.2023
