The most gracious and merciful God, my
brethren, has many and various names. He is called light, life, and
resurrection. But God's chief name is, and he is called, love. If we
wish to live well here also and to go to paradise, and to call our God
love and father, we should have two loves: love for God and for our
brethren. It is natural for us to have these two loves and unnatural not
to have them. And just as a swallow needs two wings to fly in the air
so do we need these two loves, because without them it is impossible for
us to be saved.
First, it is our duty to love our God
because he has given us such a large earth here to live on temporarily:
so many thousands of plants, springs, rivers, seas, air, day, night,
sky, sun, etc. For whom did he create all of these if not for us?
What
did he owe us? Nothing. They are all gifts. He made us human beings; he
didn't make us animals. He made us pious Orthodox Christians and not
impious heretics. Although we sin thousands of times an hour he has
compassion for us like a father, and he doesn't put us to death and
place us in hell. But he waits for our repentance with open arms, for
the time when we shall repent, when we shall stop committing evil and do
good, to go to confession, to be restored so that he will embrace us to
put us in paradise to rejoice forever. Now, shouldn't we too love this
sweetest God and master? And if there is need, [shouldn't we] shed our
blood a thousand times for his love as he shed his for our love?
A man invites you to his home and
wants to treat you to a glass of wine. For the rest of your life you
will respect him and honor him. Shouldn't you honor and respect God who
gave you so many good things and who was crucified for your love? What
father was ever crucified for his children? But our sweetest Jesus
Christ shed his blood and ransomed us from the hands of the devil. Now
shouldn't we too love our Christ? But we not only don't love him, we
insult him every day with the sins that we commit.
But whom do you want us to love, my
brethren? Should we love the devil who put us out of paradise and
brought us to this accursed world where we suffer so much evil?
Moreover, the devil is so disposed that if he could this very minute
cause our death and put us into hell, he would do it. Now I ask you, my
brethren, to tell me what we should do: to love the devil, our enemy, or
to love God, our author and creator?
"[God] of course, O saint of God; you speak well."
May your blessings be upon me. I agree
too, but God also needs a couch to rest upon. What is that couch? Love.
Let us, therefore, also have love for God and our brethren and then God
will come and gladden us, and plant in our hearts eternal life. We then
shall live well here on earth and we will go to paradise to rejoice
forever.
But we not only don't have love but
have hatred and malice in our hearts and we hate our brethren. The
cunning devil comes and makes us bitter and plants death in our soul,
and we live badly here on earth and go to hell and burn forever.
....Even if we perform thousands upon
thousands of good works, my brethren: fasts, prayers, almsgiving; even
if we shed our blood for our Christ and we don't have these two loves,
but on the contrary have hatred and malice toward our brethren, all the
good we have done is of the devil and we go to hell.
But, you say, we go to hell despite
all the good we do because of that little hatred? Yes, my brethren,
because that hatred is the devil's poison, and just as when we put a
little yeast in a hundred pounds of flour it has such power that it
causes all the dough to rise, so it is with hatred. It transform all the
good we have done into the devil's poison."
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