ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

Sermon by Bishop Basil of Amphipolis for the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy

16 March 2008, Parish of the Dormition, London, Holborn

Hebrews 11: 24-6, 32-40; John 1: 43-51

Today we have reached the Sunday which we call, usually, 'the Triumph of Orthodoxy', and to begin with I would like to point out one very important thing, and that is, it is the triumph of Orthodoxy and not of the Orthodox. It is in fact the triumph of truth. And the Gospel which is chosen to be read on this day is one of those marvellous passages from the Gospel of John where you realise that Christ somehow understands more of the situation than anyone around him: he understands the people, he knows their hearts, he knows their destinies.

John talks here about the calling of Philip and Nathaniel, and after they marvel at their dialogue with him, he says ‘Greater things than these, shall you see. Hereafter he shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’ – in other words, ‘on me’.

Why do we read this Gospel today? What we see here is Christ speaking about the link that joins him to God: a ladder of angelic power, like the ladder that Jacob saw in the Old Testament. This time, however, it is not a ladder coming down on a place, but on a specific human being, who is also the Son of God. This, passage, therefore, is about incarnation. It is about God present in the world – and this is also the story of the icon. The icon links what we see, the most prosaic aspect of our created world, with Christ, and through Christ with the Father. There is a hidden ladder in the icon that runs from us to God.

This Feast is also an invitation to look at history, at the events of 843, and in the services themselves mention is made of the Emperor Michael, the Empress Theodora. But what is interesting, and this is especially true for the texts for Vespers, is how the past is viewed. For example, in Vespers in ‘Lord, I have cried...’, we sing, ‘The prophets renounced the whole world for the Gospel’s sake.’ In other words, the prophets themselves look forward to the future. Their gaze is not on the past but what is to come. We see here at once the whole thrust of history, God's history.

Speaking again about the prophets, the next hymn says: ‘In their suffering they were conformed to thy Passion, which they had foretold’. In other words, in their own lives they anticipated the suffering of Christ. Nothing they did or experienced was without reference to what was to come. And, of course, this is the message of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the passage which we read this morning. What we see here is a history that is constantly unfolding, and each forward step tells us more, and reveals more about the meaning of the past. It was impossible to understand the prophets properly until Christ had come and fulfilled what they said.

There is a strange way, then, in which truth, or at least our understanding of it, unfolds over time. This is stressed, again in the last hymn from ‘Lord, I have cried’: ‘The grace of truth has shone forth on us; the mysteries, darkly prefigured in times of old have now been openly fulfilled.’ When we look back, we see that our past is in some sense a mystery. It was a secret to us when we lived it, and its meaning is only revealed with time. In the Lity in Vespers we sing: ‘Advancing from ungodliness to the true faith, and illuminated with the light of knowledge, with due honour, let us venerate the holy icons of Christ’.

‘Advancing’: there is a constant reference to movement, to progress forward towards greater understanding. The thing to remember, however, is that this progress towards true faith is still taking place, not in the sense that anything can be added to the revelation which is given to us in Christ, but in the sense that we can gradually understand and articulate more and more of its significance. We can understand more and more of the implications of the faith. So we see here in this pattern three stages: the stage of creation, in which the Son of God, the Word of God, is intimately involved in the structuring of the created world; the stage of incarnation when Christ appears amongst us, the Son of God becomes the Son of Man; and finally we see the world to come when Christ will be all in all.

How does this apply to ourselves? In our own lives there is a constant movement, a constant movement forward, through time, towards the end, and we can find in ourselves greater understanding with the passage of time, gradual illumination: the light of Christ dawns in our own hearts. This is also true even of our life as community. In our life as community we gradually understand more and more about what it means to be the Body of Christ; what it means to be the Orthodox Church; what it means to make real the Gospel message in our time. That Gospel message tells us that Christ came for all people without distinction. that the body of the Church in its only true representation is made up of everybody, that there is in the Church, no Jew, no Greek, no Russian, no Serb, no British – but simply children of God, finding each other in Christ and finding themselves in the Body of Christ.

Amen.