Great and Holy Monday

At Presanctified Liturgy today, we read from the 24th Chapter of the Gospel of Saint Matthew.  It is here that our Lord is taken aside by His Apostles, and they ask Him, "Tell us, when will these things be?"  The question is in response to the teaching that our Lord has just given to the Pharisees in Chapter 23, where the Lord repeatedly says to them, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees!  Hypocrites!"  At the end of that monologue, Jesus proclaims the fate of Jerusalem (Mat 23:37-39)

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!  See, your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!'"
Saint Nikolai Velimirovich wrote a wonderful sermon on the content of Matthew 24 in his "Prologue."  In it, he says:

Who is this "other" who will come in his own name and whom sinful men will prefer to receive rather than Christ the Lord?  It is he who does not carry the cross and does not walk the narrow path; he who is not a lover of man but rather a hater of man; he who does not struggle against sin but rather struggles for sin; he who loves impurity and spreads impurity; he who is a soldier of eternal death and not of eternal life; he who flatters the godless and loves every passion and vice: he is Antichrist. He will come in his own name and not in the name of God, and all those who did not receive Christ will receive him. He will be more dear to them, for he will embrace all their crooked and sinful paths. He will be more dear to them than Christ, for alongside the difficult path of Christ he will build a path smooth as ice, over which men will easily slide, not thinking about the abyss to which it leads them. The Lord Jesus Christ came in the name of the eternal salvation of men, eternal life, eternal truth and eternal justice. Antichrist will come in his own name, that is, in the name of eternal destruction, death, falsehood and injustice. When the Antichrist comes among his own, his own will gladly receive him. In fact, all those for whom Christ is difficult will gladly receive Antichrist, for he and his path will appear easy to them. Only when it is too late will the foolish see that they were deceived, but there will be no salvation for them. When they begin to slide into eternal night, into the jaws of the fetid serpent, then it will be too late; repentance will not be accepted and there will be no salvation. The foolish banquet of earthly sinners and Antichrist will be over quickly, in the blink of an eye, and the house of impure joy will turn into a hopeless prison of remorse and misery. Then it will be too late.


In our world, we know the expression "Antichrist", and we've come to embrace the person as a fictional character, brought to us in movies that excite us by portraying world-wide destruction.  What many fail to recognize is that the person is real.  He will come.  The prophecies of the end times issued by our Lord in today's Gospel reading from Matthew 24 will come to pass.  Those who deny such reality place themselves into the perilous position outlined by Saint Nikolai above, as those who will "gladly receive him" because of the ease of life his policies will present.  


Here in Holy Week 2012, let us not ignore our Lord's words.  We began the Great Fast by celebrating before it a number of preparatory Sundays.  Among these were the Sunday of the Last Judgment.  This too is a real event, which will be precipitated at the fulfillment of all prophesied by our Lord in today's Gospel lesson.  


We celebrate for the first three evenings of Holy Week the Bridegroom Matins.  Within these services, we also remind ourselves of our Lord's parable of the wise virgins:  


"Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight.  Blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching, and again unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless.  Beware therefore, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep, lest you be given up to death and lest you be shut out of the kingdom.  But rouse yourself, saying 'Holy, Holy, Holy are You, O our God!'  Through the prayers of the Theotokos, have mercy on us!"


Let us pray for this watchfulness and this focus as we walk with our Lord toward His Holy Passion!