ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

The Gathering of All Nations

Sermon preached by Bishop Basil of Amphipolis at the Orthodox Parish of the Annunciation, Oxford

27 July 2008
The Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we are celebrating the memory of the Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils, and I think it is important for us to realise that these Councils extended over more than three hundred and fifty years. The first was called in 325 by the Emperor Constantine, and the sixth in 683, to address the final crucial issue of Christology – the Church’s understanding of the relationship of Man and God in Christ.

We need to realise the scale of what was going on, and the intensity of the reflection that lay behind it. We are dealing with more than seven hundred years of effort simply to understand in human terms what Christ revealed to human beings. And if it took that long, it can be no easy thing.

Throughout that period the Church celebrated its Divine Liturgy, the eucharistic Liturgy, and in that period the Liturgy had clearly an eschatological character to it. If we look at the prayers in the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom the priest says – as you will have all heard at some point – ‘Remembering all those things that have come to pass for us…’ He then goes on to remember the Cross, and all those events that are associated with the death and resurrection of Christ – and then he adds: ‘…and the Second and glorious Coming’. Now, this is a very strange thing to say: the priest is thanking God for something that, in historical terms, has not yet taken place. And he doesn’t thank him for it in anticipation, but as something that is already here. This meaning of the prayer is confirmed in an extraordinary way by the interpretation that Maximos the Confessor gives to the Divine Liturgy at the beginning of the seventh century, not long before that sixth Ecumenical Council.

For Maximos, everything that takes place in the Liturgy after the dismissal of the catechumens takes place in the world to come. In other words, he simply confirms what John Chrysostom has said – that the Second Coming of Christ is already a present reality. For Maximos, the Dismissal of the Catechumens, which we hear during the Liturgy in this church again and again, represents – and somehow is – the separation of the sheep and the goats (cf. Mt 25:31-46) that will take place before Christ’s judgement of all mankind.

What we are living in the Liturgy is, then, an anticipation of the Day of the Lord – that endpoint of human history, the point of transition between this world and the world to come. There is one aspect of the Day of the Lord, however, that we find it very easy to lose sight of, and that is something that goes right back to the Old Testament. It is the gathering of all nations in Jerusalem. This comes up in the prophets and especially in the Prophet Isaiah; and we can ask ourselves: Where is this gathering of the nations reflected in the Liturgy – if the Liturgy is indeed a reflection of those last days?

I would like to read you a prayer from the Didache, which is the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, one of the earliest Christian texts outside of the New Testament. I remember reading almost by chance a review of the first edition of the Didache. It was not discovered by Western scholars until the 1870s – not so long ago – at the back of a manuscript in a library in Jerusalem. A reporter from The Times interviewed the bishop who was in charge of the library, and said to him, ‘This work has revolutionised how we look at the Early Church.’ And the bishop said to him, in effect: ‘Well, perhaps. But this is how we have been living all along.’ In other words, that text reflected what he himself experienced, in the nineteenth century, as a celebrant of the Divine Liturgy. It reflected his own experience of the End. In the Didache, during the prayer over the bread, the celebrant is asked to say, ‘As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains’ [no doubt in the form of wheat], ‘and was brought together to become one loaf, so let thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom.’

‘So let thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom.’ The text takes up this image, which belongs to the prophetic tradition, of all the nations gathering in Jerusalem to worship the one true God. And then, in the prayer of thanksgiving after communion, the celebrant says: ‘Remember, Lord, thy Church, to deliver it from all evil and to make it perfect in thy love. And gather it together in its holiness from the four winds into thy kingdom, which thou hast prepared for it.’ And then he adds, as a final eschatological touch: ‘Let grace come and the world pass away.’ Clearly, the whole thrust of the Liturgy is the gathering together at the End of all mankind – of all nations – in Christ.

We are entitled to ask ourselves, where is this reflected in our Liturgy? It is quite dramatically and very effectively reflected simply in the fact that we gather together in church. This eucharistic celebration, in the oldest tradition of the Church, is called the synaxis. You do not have to refer specifically to the Liturgy. You can simply speak of the synaxis, the Greek word for ‘coming together’. You can use the word synaxis because you know that in the Eucharist people are coming together to celebrate their oneness in Christ.

This ‘coming together’, this ‘gathering’ is itself an anticipation of the Last Day. When the celebrant says, in the Didache, ‘Let grace come and let the world pass away’, we know that he is standing at the edge of the Age to Come

It is so easy to ignore the fact that the Eucharist is meant to be a ‘gathering of the nations’. If all of us who have individually been made perfect in Baptism gather together, we are expressing, as a Church community, a perfection that will not fully take place until all nations come together in one. That is why the Church has always insisted that there should never be more than one bishop in a city: so that, if you want to celebrate with the bishop, you have to come together in one place. And this is true no matter where you came from originally. This early canonical principle is designed to ensure that a gathering of all peoples – of all nations, of all nationalities – will be realised liturgically around the one bishop. In anticipation of the End.

We do not realise sufficiently what we have lost by allowing a multitude of jurisdictions to exist throughout the diaspora. We have lost the liturgical expression of our true oneness – of oneness in Christ as Church. In liturgical reality we are no longer ‘one holy, catholic and apostolic Church’. Nationalism has undermined the very essence of the Church of Christ.

We experience this, of course, in our own life here in Oxford, and yet no one seems to realise the depth of the real problem. At a much broader and a much higher level the Ecumenical Patriarch is actually in Kiev this weekend addressing essentially the same issue – the oneness of the Church in Christ – and we can only pray that his efforts will lead to some sort of success. But here at our local level we need as individual Orthodox Christians to become more and more aware of that eschatological dimension of every liturgical celebration. And we need to become more and more aware of how our behaviour so often as communities contradicts the very nature of the Church, and how it undermines our relationship – and the Church’s relationship – with the Kingdom that is to come.

Amen.