St. Botolph’s Parish, Publican and Pharisee, 24 January 2010

Standing far off, [he] would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me the sinner!’ (Luke 18.13)

Would you eat a roast dinner on Holy Friday? How about a fillet mignon, all wrapped in bacon, smothered in a sauce of the finest Bordeaux wine, blended with Norman cream? It’s not really fasting fare, is it? Great and Holy Friday, the strictest day of fasting in the entire Orthodox year. A steak in wine and cream sauce. You couldn’t go much further in breaking the fast, could you? What would you deserve for breaking the fast? There are priests who would bar you from Communion for eating an olive on Holy Friday. We don’t eat or drink anything on Holy Friday. Doesn’t it say so in the how-to manual, the manual with all the rules? All real Orthodox keep the rules – how else are you going to buy your way into heaven? You’re not like everyone else nowadays, in this self-indulgent society. You’re Orthodox. You don’t swear, or tell lies, or cheat, or steal. You don’t drink, smoke, look at pornography. You don’t sleep with your girlfriend or boyfriend. You fast on every Wednesday and Friday. You come to church every Sunday. You read all the prayers in the Prayer Book, every morning and evening. That’s what makes you Orthodox, isn’t it – keeping all the rules? So, when you stand in front of your icons in the evening, you can thank God: ‘I’m not like the sinners’. Eat steak in Lent? ‘I’d rather starve’. Or would you rather starve someone else?

An Orthodox priest once rushed to a hospital in Holy Week. A little girl, about a year old, lay in intensive care, burning with fever. Debilitated, dehydrated. Abnormally low level of iron and protein in her body. He asked her father, one of his parishioners, what in God’s name had happened. During the whole of Lent, it seems, the father had imposed a fast on his baby daughter. According to the ‘how-to’ manual, the strictest monastic rules: no meat, fish, eggs … or dairy. He deprived the child of milk. When she cried from hunger, he restricted her to one meal a day – just like the monks, according to all the rules. The priest ordered him to come to confession. ‘If you want to receive Holy Communion ever again’, the priest told him, ‘on Holy Friday, on the most solemn day of prayer and fasting in the year, you will sit in front of me … and eat a steak’. ‘But that’s against the rules of the fast!’ the man shouted. ‘Your fast’, the priest said, ‘is the fast of demons. They never eat anything – except human souls’.

It’s not a parable. It really happened in Montreal, years ago. The priest made his point to that recent convert, loud and clear: Orthodoxy is not a set of rules. What is the use of a fast that hardens your heart? A fast that makes you angry and irritable, harsh and cold, eager to punish others or punish yourself? What use is a fast that hardens you against your fellow man – even against your own child? What is it, if not the fast of the demons? Does that mean, then, that we should ignore the fast altogether? By no means. Fasting is not a law; it is only a means to an end. ‘Why do you Orthodox fast?’ an Anglican once asked a Russian philosopher. He answered perfectly: ‘It helps us to pray’. Fasting melts your heart. Fasting takes your heart of stone and melts it into flesh. Try clearing out the animal fats, the heavy drink and oil from your body, and something changes inside you. You feel joy and pain more sharply than before. Your eyes fill up with tears. Old wounds long covered with scars re-appear and you realise: we are all wounded. We are all only frightened, hungry children, stumbling in the dark. When every mask of meat and wine falls away and lays bare the real you, the frightened, wounded you, hidden behind your stiff upper-lip, the only prayer you have left is: ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner’.

Two men went into a church to pray. The religious man prayed: ‘Thank God, I’m not like those sinners. I keep the fasts to the letter. I donate ten percent of my income to charity. I don’t cheat or steal or extort money; I don’t swear or lie or sleep around. Thank God, I keep all the rules’. The religious man stands there, praying with himself, listing virtues to himself. And that’s exactly where his prayer remains. Hidden back there in the shadows, a sinner – a dirty, corrupt extortionist, the kind who gambles with other people’s savings; the kind you’d like to spit on if you met him in the street – stands there in the dark, with his eyes nailed to the floor. He won’t lift his eyes, in case someone catches his gaze. He is alone and afraid. Who hasn’t he cheated, stolen from, or deceived? He hasn’t given a coin to the poor; and you can be sure, he doesn’t fast at all. But he who has deceived all others, can no longer deceive himself. ‘Lord, have mercy’ is the only prayer he has left. ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner’. The righteous Pharisee has only a list of virtues, of rules to tick off; and the prayer turns in on himself. The sinful publican keeps no rules at all; and his prayer turns him away from himself to God.

Brothers and sisters in Christ: this day, we open the Triodion, the book of the services of Great and Holy Lent. With the forty-day fast only three weeks away, our Holy Mother the Church teaches us not how to fast but how not to fast. Let it be the fast of God, she tells us, not the fast of demons. May it soften your heart, not harden it. May it prove you, not strong but weak; not a self-declared saint, but a self-confessed sinner; not your Creator, but his creature, always in need of his great and rich mercy. Orthodoxy, real Orthodoxy, is not proclaiming: ‘Lo, I have kept all the rules, fall down at my feet and worship me’. It is the cry uttered in the dark: ‘Lord, have mercy’. It is the cry that reverberates inside us with every Lord, have mercy. It is not a cry of despair to a cruel Judge – but a cry of love to the heavenly God we dare to call our Father.

Are we then a Church of rules, or of mercy? Here in the front, on the wall in front of you, you see no wooden plaque inscribed with the Ten Commandments. You see the sacred image of Christ our true God, who died for love of you, and his most pure and holy virgin Mother, who felt a sword pierce her heart, and has prayed for you ever since. You see the faces of mercy and you pray, with me: God, enlighten my darkness. God, drown my sins in the ocean of your mercy. God, be merciful to me, the sinner.