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You Have Wronged No One. Orthodoxy Disagrees — Transcript

by Father Evdokym · 2,481 words · 360 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00A man came to confession on a Friday
0:03evening late, very late when uh when the
0:07church was almost empty. Two candles,
0:10two candles were burning near the icon
0:12of the mother of God and the wax had run
0:15down over the stand and hardened there.
0:18He stood in front of the priest for a
0:20long time without speaking. Then he
0:23said, "I have wronged no one." He said
0:26it calmly, the way a man reports the
0:29weather.
0:30The priest did not answer him right
0:33away. He let the silence sit there
0:36because the sentence had come out too
0:39easily. A man who has actually examined
0:42his life does not arrive at that
0:44sentence quickly. He arrives at it
0:47slowly and usually he does not arrive at
0:50it at all.
0:52I want to tell you something before we
0:55go any further because I have said that
0:58sentence, the same sentence myself and I
1:02said it with a clean conscience and I
1:04was wrong. So this is not a video about
1:08people who are worse than you. It is
1:10about a sentence that feels like
1:12innocence and works like a door quietly
1:15closing. The Lord said, "Blessed are
1:18those who hunger and thirst for
1:20righteousness, for they shall be
1:22filled." That is Matthew chapter 5. I
1:26want to show you why that beatitude
1:28cannot reach a man who believes he has
1:30already settled his accounts. You may be
1:33thinking that in your case it is simply
1:35true. You have not stolen. You have not
1:38struck anyone, not cheated a partner,
1:40not betrayed a friend. I believe you. I
1:44believe you. But the problem is not that
1:47you are lying. The problem is that you
1:49are measuring with an instrument
1:52far too crude for the thing being
1:55measured. St. John Christo in his on the
1:58gospel of Matthew says that the word
2:00righteousness in scripture carries two
2:03meanings. Sometimes it means the
2:06particular virtue that stands opposed to
2:09greed. The refusal to take what belongs
2:12to other to another.
2:14And sometimes it means virtue as a
2:17whole. The entire shape of a life lived
2:19rightly. Most of us hear only the first
2:22meaning. And so we check ourselves
2:25against a short list of crimes. Then we
2:28pass the test and we stop looking. The
2:31archimandritas
2:33in his on the beatitudes presses this
2:36further and he presses it exactly where
2:39it hurts. Righteousness, he says, is not
2:43a category of behavior at all. It is the
2:46state of being in right relation. And
2:49there are only three relations available
2:52to you. There is what stands between you
2:55and God. What stands between you and
2:58your neighbor and what stands between
3:00you and yourself. Injustice is not an
3:03event. It is a relation bent out of
3:07shape.
3:08The apostle Paul gives you all three in
3:11one line. He writes that grace teaches
3:14us that denying ungodliness and worldly
3:18lusts, we would live soberly,
3:21righteously, ungodly in the present age.
3:25That is Titus 2. Soberly toward
3:29yourself, righteously toward your
3:31neighbor, ungodly toward God. Consider
3:34the first of them. Righteousness before
3:37God simply means doing his will. And
3:40injustice before and injustice before
3:44God means keeping for yourself what
3:46belongs to him. Your time belongs to
3:49him. Your attention belongs to him. When
3:51David prays, "Blessed are you, O Lord.
3:55Teach me your statutes." In Psalm 119,
3:59he is asking to be taught what he owes.
4:01because he assumes he does not yet know.
4:06The second relation is the all the the
4:08the one nobody counts. Righteousness
4:11towards yourself means treating your own
4:14soul and your own body as things in
4:17entrusted to you rather than things you
4:20own. You can wrong yourself. You do it
4:23when you exhaust the body for money.
4:25When you feed the soul nothing for
4:27months. when you keep yourself in a
4:31state you would not tolerate in someone
4:33you loved. So no one will ever accuse
4:38you of this at a trial. The third
4:41relation is where the scripture becomes
4:43almost uncomfortably concrete.
4:47In Leviticus the Lord commands, "You
4:49shall have honest scales, honest
4:52weights, an honest epoch and an honest
4:55h."
4:57And Proverbs says, "The dishonest scales
5:00are an abomination to the Lord, but a
5:02just weight is his delight." Notice that
5:06God legislates about weights. He does
5:09not begin with grand principles. He
5:11begins with the thing in the American's
5:13hand. And he goes farther than the
5:16market. In Deuteronom Deuteronomy
5:215 24 he says that you shall not oppress
5:25a a hard servant who is poor and needy
5:28and that each day you shall give him his
5:31wages and not let the sun go down on it
5:34lest he cry out against you the Lord to
5:37the Lord and it be seen to you. sit with
5:41that for for a moment not withholding
5:44the age delaying it one night that is
5:47name in sin the lord himself the
5:51obligation runs in both directions which
5:53is why St. Paul tells servants to work
5:56not with eye service but as bounds bound
6:01servants of Christ doing the will of God
6:04from the heart.
6:07Father Atanasu draws the picture
6:08plainly. There is a man who says my
6:11employer is watching so I work. My
6:14employer is not watching so I do not
6:16work. He calls that a soul in slavery.
6:18And he notes that the man has never once
6:21thought of it as theft.
6:24I want you to stop here and be honest
6:27with with me because I am not building a
6:30case against strangers. You are probably
6:32not American with false weights. But you
6:35do hold skills. You hold them every time
6:38you decide how much attention someone
6:41deserves, how quickly you will answer,
6:44how much of the the truth you will be
6:47you will give them, and how much of
6:49yourself you will withhold and call it
6:52being tired.
6:54Then there is the tongue and here father
6:57atio is unusually sharp. He observes
7:01that when that when you visit a doctor
7:03one of the first things you are asked is
7:06to show your tongue because the tongue
7:09re reveals the condition of the whole
7:12body. The apostle James says and the
7:15tongue is a fire a word of iniquity in
7:20James 3. So the tongue is the mirror of
7:23health and it is also the mirror of
7:25righteousness. The man who is careless
7:27in his words, who exaggerates, who
7:30repeats what he has not verified, is not
7:33merely impolite. He is unjust and he is
7:36unjust dozens of times a day without a
7:40single accusation ever reaching him.
7:43Now let me give you the image that
7:45fatherio places at the end of his of
7:48this homaly because it explains why none
7:52of this had has ever troubled you. He
7:56says that the man who tries to to
7:58satisfy his desire in this present life
8:01is like a man trying to quench his
8:05thirst with salt water. Picture him. He
8:09is surrounded by what? By water. There
8:11is no shortage. He drinks and every
8:14mouthful makes the thirst worse. He does
8:16not stop because he has no category for
8:19a drink that increases thirst. That is
8:22what selfjustification does to us all.
8:25The fathers have a name for it. And
8:27Abadio of Gaza returns to it again and
8:30again in his discourses warning that
8:33self justification is the root that
8:36keeps a monk in the place for 40 years.
8:40It is not a small fault. It is a
8:44counterfeit of the very thing the
8:46biatitude promises. You are not refusing
8:49righteousness. You are manufacturing a
8:51cheap version of it at home and drinking
8:54it. Drinking drinking it. And you have
8:58felt the effects even if you never trace
9:01them to this compassion that becomes
9:04thinner every year until it is three
9:06items and apology for their vaguess.
9:10Prayer that goes flat as though you were
9:13speaking into wool. Arguments in which
9:16you are always somehow the reasonable
9:18one. A general unspecific
9:22heaviness that no amount of reading
9:25seems to lift. You have probably tried
9:28to fix it and the attempts failed for a
9:31reason. You resolved to be better and
9:33the resolution had nothing specific to
9:35grip. You read more and the reading
9:38became another possession. You made a
9:41list of things and the list and the list
9:44was made of actions. So it stayed short.
9:48Every one of those attempts audited your
9:51behavior. And the disorder was never in
9:54your behavior. It was in the three
9:57relations St. Mark the Atheetic wrote an
10:00entire treatise on this
10:04preserved in the Philoia and and its
10:08title alone should stop you. He called
10:11it on those who think they are made
10:14righteous by works. His argument is that
10:17a man can perform every required action
10:19and remain entirely unrighteous because
10:22he has turned obedience into a
10:24transaction and now believes God is in
10:27his death. There is a line in the wisdom
10:31of Cyra that uh gifts and presents blind
10:35the eye of the wise. The most effective
10:38bribe you will ever receive is the one
10:41you hand to yourself. St. Isaac or the
10:45Syrian says in his aesthetical home that
10:47the man who has seen his own sin is
10:51greater than the man who raises the dead
10:54by his prayer. That sounds like
10:56exaggeration until you understand what
10:59he's measuring. Raising the dead is a
11:03work. Seeing your own sin is a relation
11:06coming back into focus. And of them can
11:09be done by a man who is still asleep. or
11:12that the another cannot.
11:15Now return to the batitude because there
11:17is a detail in the Greek that father
11:20Atonius refuses to let pass. The Lord
11:22does not say blessed are the hungry and
11:25the thirsty. He says blessed are those
11:27who hunger and thirst in a continuous
11:30form an ongoing condition rather than a
11:32completed one. Hunger is not a state you
11:36graduate from. And this is precisely why
11:40the sentence spoken in that church on
11:42Friday evening is so dangerous because a
11:46man who believes he has wronged no one
11:49is a man who is no longer hungry.
11:52Look at how scripture handles the
11:55genuinely righteous and you will see
11:58they never sound like this. Of Zacharia
12:01and Elizabeth St. Luke writes that they
12:04were both righteous before God, walking
12:07in all commandments and ordinances of
12:09the Lord, blameless in you find it in
12:12Luke 61.
12:15And nowhere in that account does either
12:18of them announces announce it. The the
12:22people the people scripture calls
12:24righteous are consistently the ones
12:27still asking. Whereas the man who did
12:30announce it when went away sorrowful he
12:34came running and asked God teacher what
12:36shall I do to inherit eternal life in
12:39Luke 18 and when the commandments were
12:42listed he said he had kept them all from
12:45his youth he was probably telling the
12:48truth he had the list he had passed and
12:52he was still standing there empty
12:55because the list had never once touched
12:58the three relations. That is the lonely
13:01loneliest sentence in the gospels and it
13:04belongs to a man with a clean re record.
13:09There is one more thing father Atanasio
13:11says and it is aimed at people exactly
13:15like you and exactly like me. He takes
13:18the four cardinal virtues, wisdom,
13:21temperance, courage, and righteousness
13:23and he observes that a man can hold the
13:26first three in badly in un unwe unequal
13:31measure.
13:33A man can be brilliant and cowardly. He
13:36can be chased and shallow.
13:38Righteousness, he says, is the virtue
13:40that brings the others into proportion.
13:44And when it does that work, it takes
13:47another name, discernment, which St.
13:50John Clemacos treats in step 26
13:54of the ladder of divine ascent and
13:57defines in beginners as true
13:59self-nowledge.
14:01He then names the danger directly. The
14:03man who is Christian in his reading and
14:05his speaking and his writing and who
14:07lacks courage in the ordinary hours of
14:10his life. So here is the the one thing I
14:15would ask you to begin and it is small
14:18enough to actually do tonight before you
14:21sleep. Do not ask what sins you
14:23committed today because that question
14:25will return the same short list. It
14:28always returns. Ask instead what you
14:31withheld. Take the three relations one
14:35at a time. God, then the person nearest
14:38to you, then your own soul. And in each
14:41one name a single specific thing you
14:43owed and did not give. Not a category,
14:48one thing with a name and a time
14:50attached to it. And do this inside
14:53prayer rather than beside it. Because an
14:55examination made alone becomes either
14:58despair or accounting. And neither of
15:00those is repentance. If you do not yet
15:03have a settled way of praying, that is
15:06not a failure and it is not unusual. And
15:08I and I have put together a short guide
15:11called learning to pray the orthodox way
15:14which walks through how the church
15:17actually teaches a person to stand
15:19before God without either performing or
15:21collapsing.
15:23It is linked below in the commentary. So
15:26use it or do not use it. The examination
15:30matters more than the guide. What
15:33matters is that you are speaking to
15:36someone while you look because the
15:38promise attached to this beatitude is
15:41not is not that you will become
15:43impressive. It is one word and it is a
15:46physical word. They shall be fililed.
15:51Isaiah the prophet Isaiah says that when
15:53your judgments are in the in the earth
15:56the inhabitants of the world will learn
15:58righteousness. You find it in Isaiah 26.
16:02And St. Peter tells us, "We look for new
16:05heavens and a new earth in which
16:07righteousness dwells."
16:10Peter second, "Righteousness has an
16:13address and it is not here yet, which is
16:15why St. Paul could count all things as
16:18rubbish. Then I may gain Christ in
16:21Philippians 3 and not feel that he had
16:25lost anything."
16:27This is the fourth of the batitudes and
16:29each one of them treats a different
16:31sickness of the soul. So if you want to
16:34walk through the others slowly, they are
16:38gathered together in a playlist here on
16:40the channel.
16:41So the man in that church came back some
16:44some weeks later on another Friday with
16:46the same two candles burning down the
16:49same stand. He was quiet again, but the
16:51quiet had a different quality to it.
16:55And when he finally spoke, he did not
16:57have a list and he did not have a
17:00defense. He said one sentence about one
17:03person he had failed in one specific way
17:06and then he stopped talking.
17:09If you have been carrying the other
17:11sentence for years and it has kept you
17:13dry, unreasonable and slowly farther
17:16away, then put it down tonight and go be
17:20thirsty. Be thirsty again. God bless
17:24you.

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