In the name of the Father, end of the Son, end of the Holy Spirit, amen. We live in a time when most Christians are being lulled to sleep by the world. Even those who go to church and appear to be active, St. John of crunch that talks about this.
That many people go to church and approach the Holy sacraments, but they are still far from the Father’s house because their hearts are still far from Him. They’re just going through the motions. This morning, we read the parable of the prodigal son. After leaving his Father’s house and squandering away his inheritance on loose living and finding himself feeding the pigs and even desiring their food, the gospel tells us that he came to himself and then the parable ends with the prodigal son repenting and returning to his Father’s house.
Brothers and sisters, it’s really easy for us to think that we are in the Father’s house simply because we attend church, but the reality could be much different. Satan is so deceptive. He uses the world and its desires and its pleasures to keep us from coming to ourselves, to keep us distracted. He even convinces us that sin is normal and that we don’t have to change.
We’re so blinded that we become unaware of our sins. We are spiritually asleep. St. Paisius of Athos once said, “Today is such a time when we know a lot about prayer, but we pray little.
We eat fasting food, but do not fast. We confess sins, but do not repent. We go to church, stand through the service, yet our soul does not humble itself before the Creator. All this is because the heart is closed.
It needs to be open so that Christ can dwell in it. In other words, we may physically be in church, but spiritually we’re still in the pig pen wallowing in our passions and sins.“ True repentance is a turning away from the passions that control our lives. We haven’t truly come to ourselves if we don’t understand that. We cannot embrace God and sin at the same time.
We have to let go of one for the other. The only thing far away from God is evil. The more we sin, the farther we remove ourselves from the Father’s house. This realization is the beginning of coming to oneself.
I want to come back to the parable and ask, “How did the prodigal son eventually come to himself?” He remembered. He remembered his father’s house and all the goodness that he had abandoned. He remembered that no one loved him more than his father, no one desired him more than his father, no one took care of him better than his father. He remembered all that he had and realized how far he had fallen from that goodness and now he had betrayed all that love.
He remembered, according to Saint John Chrysostom, “It is in the remembrance of God and his love and his mercy that we begin to see our sins and come to repentance.” So it’s important that we cultivate the remembrance of God. This is done through the ascetical life of the church, through prayer, fasting, spiritual reading, confession, holy communion, watchfulness, guarding our thoughts. But we often go about our day not thinking about God. We waste our time in idleness.
We skip our morning prayers. We don’t do any spiritual readings. We don’t fast. When we wonder why we’ve become so angry, so bitter, so judgmental, so lustful, we wonder why we can’t guard our thoughts or our tongue.
If we don’t cultivate the remembrance of God, we become lazy and forgetful. Elder Justin Paravu once said, “The greatest sin today is carelessness. We pray carelessly. We repent carelessly.” So the prodigal son, after remembering his father’s house and recognizing the filth that he was living in, left the pig-pen of his passions and began his journey home.
This movement away from sin and towards God is the essence of true repentance. The holy fathers tell us that the best way to fight the passions is not by engaging them head-on, but by turning away from them and abandoning them altogether. We must instead pursue Christ and cultivate virtue. We must empty ourselves of passions and fill ourselves with what is holy.
St. Porphyrios once said, “Don’t occupy yourself with rooting out evil. Christ does not wish us to occupy ourselves with the passions, but with the opposite. Fill the water that is all the strength of your soul to the flowers, and you will enjoy their beauty, their fragrance, and their freshness.
You won’t become saints by hounding after evil, ignore evil, look towards Christ, and He will save you.“ So like the prodigal son, we leave our passions behind and set our sight on Christ. We don’t engage directly the demons, but fall into the loving embrace of Christ, because He has already conquered Satan, and He will shelter us, and He will protect us, and He will fight on our behalf. And as a prodigal son approaches his father’s house, he’s rehearsing in his mind everything that he plans to say. He’s wondering, “What will my father say when he sees that I squandered away my inheritance?
Will he receive me or not? Will he forgive me or not? What will become of me?“ His mind was racing, and what happens while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom commenting on this says that the reason the father saw him coming is because from the day his son left, he gazed into the distance every single day awaiting his son’s return.
My beloved family, our Heavenly Father’s house is open to all who wish to return. He’s gazing into the distance, yearning for our return, but he wants us body, mind, and soul, not just showing up to church and going through the motions while at the same time giving into the passions. We must give our whole life to God, St. Paisius once said, “If we take one step towards God, he takes a thousand steps towards us.
All it takes is one step, and when he sees that, he will run to us and he will embrace us and he will kiss us like he did the prodigal son. There’s nothing more that God desires than to embrace each and every one of us. There’s no sin, no secret that he will not forgive if we come to him in repentance. And how does the father in the parable respond to the repentance of his son?“ He tells the servants, “Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him.
Put a ring on his hand, shoes on his feet, bring the fatted calf and kill it and let us eat and make merry. For this, my son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found. And herein lies the great mystery of God’s love that no matter what we’ve done, no matter how far and how hard we have fallen, no matter how much we’ve squandered of the riches he gave to us, God will give us even more than what we squandered away when we returned to him in repentance.“ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.