Meat Fare Sunday – Father Gavril Galev
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“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
This preparatory Sunday for the Great Lent and the Resurrection of Christ, is called Meat Fare, because according to the Typikon, meat is excluded from the daily diet. This day is the last day in which meat can be consumed, from tomorrow (Monday the 11th), that is, in the next week, there is no fasting on Wednesday and Friday, however, meat is not allowed for consumption at all. So that from next week (Monday the 18th) we also exclude cheese (and all dairy produce) and eggs from our daily intake of food and commence strict fasting, the Great Lent begins.
In this week, the Church has preordained that the Gospel about the Last Judgment of Christ is to be read, that is, His glorious second coming. In His first coming the Lord came as a humble man, as a humble servant who did not differ from us in anything, therefore people could not recognise Him and crucified Him. However, out of His great mercy and love, He liberated us from our sins by his actions, crucifying our sin on the cross, and with His Blood He washed away our sins and He opened the heaven to us again.
Sin, which is actually the missing of the target, which our forefathers did, when they led the entire human race in the wrong direction and led them to doom and destruction and the worst of all, to death and hell.
When Saint Basil the Great, one of the wisest of his time, and even to this day in the history of humanity and Christianity, was asked what the greatest wisdom was, he being a philosopher and a wise man, answered simply: “The remembrance of death”!
Any person would anticipate, a sophisticated and wise answer which is to be expected from a person such as Saint Basil the Great, a philosopher, a sage and a scientist, and he only says in short: “The remembrance of death.”
Considering all things, if we stop and think a little more soberly and deeply, we will see that this is indeed the greatest wisdom. Because there is no greater wisdom than to stand at the right hand of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the Kingdom of God and there to enjoy the eternal blessings that God has prepared for us. And the greatest madness, the greatest stupidity, is to be placed on His left, separated from God, and, in eternal suffering.
Remembering death is one of the best means to live a holy and sober life. When we think that every day could be our last, we will be careful how we live and what we do during the day. When we wake up the next day, we will thank God. Most of the time we sin and commit sins because we forget about death; conversely the memory of death prevents us from committing the sin that is offered to us, due to our weakness and persuasion of the devil.
In fact, heaven and hell are, the presence and absence of God. We ourselves know that, even in this life, when we are with God, even if we find ourselves in the most painful, most difficult situation, we are still calm and peaceful. And vice versa, when we are without God, even if we find ourselves in the most blessed community, and the most beautiful place, we will find a reason, some worm, to eat us up inside, and to suffer. This is the lesson of this Gospel reading that one thing is certain, and that is for those who were born, they will surely die and present themselves before God, and they will answer for their deeds, before Him.
And what are our deeds, if not our attitude towards our neighbour? Our neighbour is every, single person. Even the least, the weakest and the most disreputable, he is the image of God and our neighbour. And not only that, each of our neighbours is our Christ, because Christ identifies Himself with each one of them. We should see and recognize Christ in our neighbour and how we treat that person, (whoever he might be), that is how we actually treat Christ Himself, and that is how we treat Him.
God does not divide people on any basis. To Him, all are the same. God does not divide people by nationality or gender, or by beauty, wealth, fame, education, etcetera, but He makes only one division, and that is into good and bad, based in how that person lived their life on Earth. Yet in relation to this division, it is more accurate to say that we divide ourselves according to how we live our life. Accordingly, this is how we will answer on the last day in the terrible judgment.
God has prepared the kingdom of God for us from the beginning. However, not everyone will inherit the kingdom, but only those who have lived a righteous life in this world. All those who did not walk in the way of God and did not do His works, they will unfortunately be in the eternal fire, which has been prepared for satan and his fallen angels. And that is why God separates the sheep from the goats, that is, the good people from the bad. Those who were humble, meek, merciful, good, from those who were defiant, proud, bad, who destroyed more than they built, etcetera. God gives His grace to the first ones, and the others remain graceless and cruel.
As you see, those good ones, who are on the right side, did not recognise their good deeds; “When, Oh Lord did we do this to You?” because, whatever they do, they do in the glory of God. With humility, with pure love, with pure intention, not exalting themselves, not thinking highly of themselves, not thinking of themselves that they are doing something extra ordinary and deserve to be on the right side, etc. So, this is simply pure love. It is the love that obliges me to do good, and simple – I most freely want to do good to the other.
Therefore, the grace of God keeps them from becoming proud. In a way, He hides their good deeds from them so that they do not lose them. And on the other side, you see that the condemned do not even recognize their bad deeds. Why? Because they always have a high opinion of themselves, they are vainglorious and egocentric. They think the whole world revolves around them, they deserve honours and others are obliged to serve them. And do you see the difference between the good and the bad, the humble and the proud? The humble do not recognize their good deeds, the proud do not recognize their bad deeds.
At the Last Judgement, which we all will have to face, we will be judged by the truth. God knows what is in our heart. God knows everything even before the world was created as well as before we were created. He knows the innermost secrets of our heart, bad or good. And, since we are subjective and love ourselves, we always find a way to justify ourselves for our bad deeds, for our sins. But we will be judged by the truth, we will be judged by the king of truth, we will be judged by absolute Truth Itself.
It is the deeds that bear witness for everyone, and not what we think about ourselves. When someone comes before the truth, before Jesus Christ, then there is no bribe, there is no justification, there is no circumvention or biased truth, but simply there is God’s truth and God’s law, and it leads us to this: “If you have done it to Me, or conversely, if you have not done it to Me, then, we will either be worthy, or we will be expelled.
And know well that God does not use the expression: “to one of the least of these” by chance. Because it is easy to do good to the one who does us good, it is easy to respect our parents, it is easy to respect the one who respects us, etc. However, it is more difficult to respect those who, in some way, have left a bad impression on someone, (it doesn’t have to be like that) but the problem arises as to who is inside us, in our projection.
And therefore, God compares Himself to such least ones. Someone who, so to say, bothers us in life, he will stand at the entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven tomorrow, and when we come to be examined, he, himself, his face (appearance) will ask us the question “Do you love me?” and according to our answer, according to the state of our heart, whether we receive him or not, we will either enter or we will not enter in the Kingdom of God. That is, we will stand on the right side or on the left side, that is, in the kingdom of heaven or in hell, that is, the eternal life of eternal joy and happiness or in eternal torment because we simply cannot imagine his face, we cannot imagine his presence, and therefore we will cast ourselves into eternal fire, that is actually hell, in the place where there is not love.
We are simply not ready for the place where we will have to love everyone. That is why we should prepare ourselves to love, we should prepare ourselves to serve, not to be served. We should prepare to forgive, and not ask to be forgiven, we should learn to give and not take…
And in the end, it is more blessed to hear the word: “Come thou blessed by my Father” than the words: “Depart from me thou cursed into eternal fire.”
Let us not fear God. Let us fear the sin within us. God is very merciful and wants everyone to come to the knowledge of the Truth and be saved. The one who came and was crucified for us, cannot but love us, and these His words “depart from me you cursed”, we must understand in the same way as the question towards the one who rejected God, Peter: “Do you love me?” as the last opportunity for repentance and salvation.
God is Love. We cannot even imagine how great His love is. His justice surpasses our justice – according to our fallen nature. When St. Andrei Rublev in the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Most Holy Theotokos was supposed to depict the composition of the “Terrible Judgment”, he drew Christ in His Glory and turned the terrifying scene into a bright celebration of the triumph of Divine Glory.
The depiction of God as a righteous judge who stands sullenly over us and waits to strike us with the sword and cut off our head is a completely wrong depiction of the Terrible Judgment and is not Orthodox at all. Such a representation stems from our wrong relationship and depiction of God. Depending on how we see Him and what kind of relationship we create with Him, as a slave, as a hireling or as a son towards the Father, that is how we depict Him.
And as I said, without further ado, we have to constantly prepare for our death, we do not know when that will happen. Let me repeat, yesterday we were at the cemetery, there were people of all ages, and as the saying goes, everywhere there is a queue, that may be so, but some run faster, some earlier, we do not know when that day will greet us when in fact there will be no tomorrow, when there will be no day. Accidents lurk everywhere, maybe a small poisonous spider will bite us, maybe an invisible virus, a microorganism will disrupt our body function, and lo all of us who have hoped for a long life, everything can disappear in an instant.
That is why Saint Basil says that remembering death is the greatest virtue, the greatest wisdom, which is preparing for this judgment with Christ, with the truth, where there is no lie and deception, and this means living a virtuous life all the time.
Father Gavril Galev
Abbot of the Monastery “St. Clement of Ohrid”,
Kinglake, Melbourne, Australia
10 / 03 / 2024
