ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

THE ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD

Reflections for the environment and the new year by Fr Patrick Radley, priest of the parish of the Holy Transfiguration, Great Walsingham, who died on 28 March 2008. Fr Patrick notes the relevance of two texts - James 4:7-5:9 and Luke 4:16-22 - in our relationship to the environment:

To-day we enter the new Church year, and pray for the protection of the environment. 

We would do well if each of us were to experience today as a day of crisis and commitment.  The decisions to be made at the political and social levels concerning global warming and the spiritual resolutions that this community, as part of the Body of Christ, seeks to make at the outset of a new year, are inextricably linked.

Passages from the Letter of St James that we have just heard make this clear.  In part the Letter could be an indictment of what we call ‘the developed world’.  The Apostle warns of the miseries that are coming on those who have become rich, of the destructive rottenness of all that they have thought of as treasure.  ‘You have lived on the earth in luxury and pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter’.  It could be a description of the corruption, greed, violence and overwhelming inequalities of a world in which 20% of its inhabitants devour 80% of the earth’s resources and cause thereby the major part of the global pollution and ecological changes that threaten the lives of all of us.  We are slowly destroying the earth, our home.

And what should be our response?  St James is stern: ‘Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to dejection…..Humble yourselves before the Lord’.  But what, in fact, do we do?  We say: ‘To-day or to-morrow we will go into such and such a town to spend a year there and trade and get gain’.  Whereas, says St James, we don’t know about to-morrow.  ‘What is your life?  For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes….As it is, you boast in your arrogance’.  But, he says, ‘the Judge is standing at the doors’.  And indeed, as we contemplate the world’s present problems, we may feel the presence of a judging God close at hand.

The contrast with the Gospel words from the prophecy of Isaiah read by Jesus in the Synagogue of Nazareth could hardly be greater.  ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor…to set at  liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord’.  Surely we are among those who, knowing the misery and horror of this fallen world and fearing its destruction, will, like the congregation in the Synagogue, fix our eyes upon Jesus.  And our hearts will rise when He says: ‘To-day this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’.  Can this really be true?  We will want to believe it, desperately.  And yet, are we not tempted to ask, with the people of Nazareth: ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’

And this is the moment of commitment, the moment when, despite our crisis-ridden surroundings, we are called to place our absolute trust in – yes, Jesus, son of Joseph – Christ, the Son of God. ’The acceptable year of the Lord’ is that year when each of us acknowledges that the crucified Jesus is also the risen Christ.  The Judge standing at the door is no avenging God but a God of Love.  What we do to the environment and to the poor we do to God Himself.  ‘Christ’, said Pascal, ‘is in agony to the end of the world’.  And we crucify our God whenever, in our arrogance, we forget that our very lives, our breath, the atmosphere that sustains us all, all is gift, the gift of God’s love.

‘The acceptable year of the Lord’ is the year when we permit the risen Christ to take over our hearts.  The form of that resurrection within each of us has to be a constant remembering, a continual recall of a presence.  Let us use the simplest means of remembering: the notes of a Troparion, a phrase from a Gospel text, the words of the Jesus Prayer.  If we forget, we crucify and destroy.  And so our task is to retain continually within our hearts a realisation of the activity of the living God, transfiguring His creation at all times and in all places, renewing, recreating us as the very Body of the risen Christ.

Whether to a world in crisis or to this community entering another year of worship and praise, St James’ words are a call to commitment.  ‘Draw near to God and He will draw near to you’.

Amen