Homily One on Saint Demetrios Ancestral Saturday
By Archimandrite Kirill Pavlov
(Delivered in 1961)
By Archimandrite Kirill Pavlov
(Delivered in 1961)
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit!
"God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him" (Luke 20:38), said the Savior to the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead.
Dear brothers and sisters, thanks be to the Lord that He tirelessly cares for our salvation and our attainment of the Kingdom of God and gives us the opportunity to pray and help with our prayers to ease the lot of our neighbors in their afterlife.
God, who created man for a blessed eternal life, by His good will desires for everyone to receive it as an inheritance, and therefore accepts the prayers of the living for the departed until the General Resurrection and Judgment, when they are brought with sincere faith and love for our departed neighbors.
The Church, having received from the Apostles the instruction to pray for the dead from the earliest times, has followed it consistently. Saint John Chrysostom says: "It was not without reason that the Apostles ordained the commemoration of the dead at the Dread Mysteries. They knew that this brought great benefit to the departed, a great blessing." Commemoration of the dead was also practiced in the Old Testament Church. For example, Judas Maccabee offered prayers for soldiers who sinned on the battlefield. The present Ancestral Saturday is called Saint Demetrios Saturday because it was established by Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy, with the advice and blessing of Saint Sergius, as a perpetual memorial to the heroes who fell on the Kulikovo Field.
Dear brothers and sisters, we, the living, must offer prayers for the departed with the firm faith that our relatives live the same rational life they lived in the body while on earth, and therefore they hear us and await our prayers. A person, leaving this world, does not vanish without a trace, for he has an immortal soul that never dies. What we see dying is the visible, gross body, which is dust, for it is taken from the earth and returns to the earth again. The invisible, subtle force, which we call the soul, never dies. The body itself bears witness to its mortality because it is destructible and divisible, while the soul, by contrast, has a simple, indestructible spiritual structure and therefore cannot decay and die like the body.
The body is incapable of independent life and action without the soul, but the soul is immortal and can continue to exist without the body. Therefore, our relatives hear us and, perhaps, greatly need our prayers. No one has lived a life without sinning. No one is pure from the taint of sin, even if they live only a single day on earth. We are all born in sin, live our lives in sin, and die in sin. True, many of us often repent and receive Holy Communion, but as soon as we repent, we begin to sin again, and therefore death always finds us unpaid debtors before God.
Meanwhile, beyond the grave, there is no longer room for repentance. Only in earthly life can a person repent and perform good deeds; beyond the grave, they can do nothing for their salvation or to improve their lot, and one of two things awaits them: pardon or condemnation. Therefore, the Holy Church, fulfilling Christ's commandment to love one's neighbors, calls upon and teaches us to pray for those who have died in faith and piety. Our departed relatives, even though they passed into the next life in faith, not in bitterness, not in utter evil, may have failed to perform the good deeds necessary for salvation. And therefore, now their souls, now in hades, can, of course, deeply repent of the sins of their earthly life and strive for the good to which they were sometimes so indifferent on earth. However, they cannot free themselves from the bonds of hades by their own efforts. Christ, the Destroyer of hades, has the power to open and close the gates of hades, and therefore the living members of the Church are left to pray to the Lord for their mercy.
The Holy Fathers affirm that before the General Judgment of God, the fate of the dead can be changed through the prayers of the Church. Saint John Chrysostom speaks of this: "It is possible to alleviate the punishment of a deceased sinner. If we offer frequent prayers for him and give alms, then, even though he may be unworthy in himself, God will hear us."
While we commemorate the departed, we ourselves must think more seriously about the afterlife, becoming more and more convinced of the truth of this belief, because the structure of our life on earth and the affirmation of our moral principles depend on this.
Our earthly life is precarious and vain. Its clearest course is often unexpectedly darkened by the dark clouds of life's storms. Our joys are intertwined with sorrow: wealth is not far from poverty, health is in no way protected from illness, life itself can be cut short by death at any moment. And it becomes sad when you see and experience the fragility of its blessings. But it becomes even sadder when you remain inconsolable. Where else can we find consolation if not in the firm hope that our life does not end in death, that we must await the future, the afterlife?
Speaking of this, the Holy Apostle Paul writes to the Christians of Thessaloniki: "Now I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, lest you sorrow as others which have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Only those who have no hope for a continuation of this present life after death mourn and grieve all their days and find no consolation in anything. A believer, on the contrary, hopes for an afterlife, and this hope and the expectation of an afterlife serve as a source of true comfort and peace. Thus, the thought of our fate in the future life should be in all of our hearts and minds and should occupy us more often than any other questions. Nevertheless, this living truth is completely denied by some, while others treat it with indifference, completely ignoring their future fate.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
