The Path to Sanctity

Asymmetric Synergy

We often hear it said in Orthodox Christianity that the road to salvation is one of synergy - that is to say that the act of salvation is an act that has both a Divine component and a human component. God does not save us without our consent, our cooperation. However, at the same time, we cannot achieve salvation on our own.

We must be careful, however, not to think that the work put forth in this synergy is equal. It is not a 50-50 effort. Rather, this working together, which is the meaning of synergy in the original Greek, is one in which God does most of the work, and it falls to us to cooperate.

Christ, the God-Man, Who had existed with the Father and the Holy Spirit before anything was created, including time, took on our flesh and everything that goes with that - human nature, a human will, human activity - in order to save us.

Though we speak of the divide created between us and God by our sin, and rightly so, the original divide between God and man is that of the divide between the Uncreated, that is, God, and the created world, including man. Though God permeates all of His created works, being “everywhere present and filling all things,” there remained a divide that would be present even had man never fallen. This divide is bridged when the Creator, the Word of God and second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, takes on created nature and becomes man, “for us men and for our salvation.”

This is reflected in today’s Gospel reading. We hear that Christ “went up into a mountain.” Though, for us, to go up into a mountain is to ascend, for Him Who has, from before the beginning of all things, sat at the right hand of the Father, this is to come down. He comes down the incalculable distance - from the heights of the heavens to be near us. Yet, to show this asymmetric synergy, he does not go into the town square and preach, nor into the synagogue. Instead, “His disciples came to Him.”

This is not just the twelve apostles, of whom we may think when we hear the word disciples, but rather it is the wider group of those who followed and listened to Him - the “great multitudes… from Galilee, and from Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.”

Here the Evangelist shows us that though Christ came down from heaven and became man to draw near unto us, we must take those final steps, even if it seems to us a great distance.

Christ does not just come and save us where we are, but requires that we come to Him. We must align our will with His, the will that “all men may be saved and come to the knowledge of the Truth” and that we not experience “the death of a sinner, but rather that [we] turn from [our] way and live.” Coming to Him, we hear the path set out for us to walk to join our will to His, to align our activity, our energy, our operation to His, and through these to partake in our nature, by His grace, the Divine Nature.

Humility

The first step is to be “poor in spirit,” that is, to be humble.

Humility is the thing that the Devil and his demons cannot imitate.

They know the Scriptures, so knowledge of Scripture alone cannot save us.

They do not eat, so fasting alone cannot save us.

They do not sleep, so the keeping of vigil alone cannot save us.

They have no bodies to experience the bodily passions, so ascetic labor alone cannot save us.

They disperse wealth in an attempt to ensnare souls, so almsgiving alone cannot save us.

What is required is humility. We must cast off all pride.

Pride comes to us to bring us to a great fall. The person who falls from a short distance is able to get up, dust themselves off, and continue on. The person who falls from a great height injures themselves badly and risks not being able to get up at all.

This humility is not a matter of empty self-criticism and self-condemnation.

It begins with the understanding that all things come from God. Everything that we have, every gift, comes to us in His providence.

He gives us good to comfort and strengthen us, and give us the opportunity to share the good with those around us.

He allows the evil and temptations to give us the opportunity to show our love for Him in our struggle against those temptations and to grow closer to Him.

When we recognize that every good comes from Him, we do not hold ourselves responsible for any good in our life and become proud for it.

When we see the evil that we do not overcome, and the sins that we fall into, we recognize our distance from God and the need to draw back unto him.

When we thus see our sins, we have the opportunity to repent and seize the kingdom of heaven, which is at hand.

Penitent Sorrow

We must then seize upon that opportunity and bring forth fruits of repentance. The mourning to which we are called is mourning over our sins.

To be sorrowful for our sins can be difficult. Oftentimes when we feel sorrow over our sins, we are actually feeling sad that we were caught or that we must give up some sin we enjoy.

True sorrow over our sins is neither of these things - rather, it is the sorrow that our words, thoughts, or deeds separate us from the God Whom we love. It is sorrow that we, when we sin, reject Him and the love He offers.

There is a danger in this sorrow, however. Even if our sorrow is for the right reason, it must remain rooted in humility. We must never ask the question, “How is it possible that I fell and commited this sin?” When we ask this question, we show surprise at our sinfulness and think that we should be better than to fall into sin. This is a prideful though, however, which we must pray that God will take from us.

If the sorrow for our sin is that it separates us from the God Who loves us, it is natural that we want to turn from our sin and show our love for Him by following His commandments.

Patience

This sorrow and the desire from it to repent should lead us to accepting all things with meekness - that is patience and gentleness.

We should know that we have not acquired all of our sins and our passions overnight, and likewise we will not overcome them overnight either.

Christ says in this Gospels that it is by our patience that we will win our souls. We must be patient as we struggle with repentance, never giving up on it, but always working to move forward.

Likewise, when we see the multitude of our sins and our broken fallenness, our response should be gentle patience with our brothers and sisters who also struggle. We do not judge, but pray for them and seek to aid them in their struggles.

Seeking Righteousness

In our repentance, in our patience, we are called to seek righteousness. Our Lord says elsewhere in the Gospel, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and its righteousness.” Here, our Lord tells us to hunger and thirst after righteousness.

This is part of the reason we fast in the Church - to learn hunger. Very few of us in the contemporary United States know what true hunger is like, unless we take it on voluntarily. Fasting gives us that opportunity.

This hunger, though, also has another dimension. Oftentimes, when we are full, we want more and what we want more of is often that which draws us from God - comfort, entertainment, material possessions.

When we hunger, our mind is fixed on that need to be fed. So when we hunger and thirst after righteousness - that righteousness is our primary desire. It becomes the object of a laser focus.

The righteousness we seek is a right relationship with God, union with Him, and His mercy in reestablishing that union.

Mercy

When we seek that mercy, we become merciful. In seeking to show our love for God in following His commandments, we should recall the words of the Prophet Micah, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

We are called to be merciful to all around us - to share the mercy of God with them.

This mercy doesn’t entail ignoring sin, but showing mercy for sin.

This mercy is not simply withholding what is bad, but helping to turn the bad into good.

Purity of Heart

When we have taken all of these steps, we begin to show purity of heart. Our heart, the seat of our passions, gets cleaned out and becomes a worthy dwelling place of our God. We finally become a temple not made by hands of our God, and can see Him dwelling within us, making His abode.

This is the state that we are seeking, in which we are participating in the Divine Life of the Most Holy Trinity and reach sanctity.

Peacemaking

St. Seraphim of Sarov says, “Acquire the Spirit of Peace and thousands around you will be saved.”

This is the peacemaking that our Lord refers to in the Gospel.

It is not simply a matter of ending conflict between others, but of acquiring peace in ourselves.

It is not simply a matter of ending conflict between others, but of ending the conflict in us between our will and the will of God; of ending the conflict in us between the old man, who is born to the passions of the flesh, and the new man, who is born unto God through the waters of baptism.

Persecution

In all of this, our Lord says that we will be reviled and persecuted. Our model for all these steps is our Lord Himself. But we know that He was persecuted and reviled even to death on the Cross.

If our Christianity is one the world can accept - then we aren’t living Christianity. We are living Anti-Christianity. We have watered down the Gospel and instead of making it a path to sanctity the Lord has laid out for us, we have turned it into an instrument to placate the world.

Instead, we must be prepared for all evil that comes against us from the world for following the Gospel and seeking holiness in sharing the life of the Most Holy Trinity.

Brothers and sisters, if we do all of these things, we shall truly be blessed as our Lord says. Pray for one another as we take those ultimately short steps, though they seem long to us, up the mountain to hear the Word of God speak and proclaim to us the path to sanctity - to life in Him with his Father without beginning and the most Holy, good, and Life-Creating Spirit, to Whom be all glory, honor, and worship, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.