EGO stands between us and God
Sunday Sermon.
The Apostle Paul writes about his grief for the Israelites, "who are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. Christ is the culmination of the law ..." (Romans 10:1-4). These words are read on the Sunday of the fifth week after Pentecost. How do they relate to us? Directly.
The paradox of Judaism is that, in accepting God's Law, people managed to distort it so that they began to consider their own invented regulations as part of the biding divine commandments. Thus, the Jews turned their "righteousness" against God, crucifying their own Lawgiver. The disputes with Christ, which always ended in shaming the law-keepers, did not lead to repentance. They only strengthened their determination to remove Him. This phenomenon can be called "zeal not based on knowledge", as described by the Apostle Paul.
I have often observed manifestations of anger and hatred towards those who deviate from accepted norms and break established rules. Let's set aside for a moment all the ideas and prejudices we've absorbed from religious literature and return to the foundation of all teachings—the commandment of Love, to which all sermons, customs and rules essentially boil down.
All the large sets of precepts, teachings and norms of spiritual life are reduced to one simple truth – we must have love, first for God, and then for people.
Thus, everything written and spoken is merely a means to achieve this single and primary goal. Due to the multiplication of lawlessness, in the end times, there will hardly be a place left for selfless Love on earth (Matthew 24:12). If the word "love" is the key to salvation, then we must ask ourselves, what is it? The problem is that our understanding of Love as a spiritual quality remains an enigma to us.
Typically, our concept of love is limited to emotional and psychological experiences related to feelings. However, Christ teaches us not about sensual, familial or friendly love, but about sacrificial love. That is, not love that exists "due to" but love that exists "despite everything" and "against the odds". Our thoughts about love are usually limited to abstract sentimental ideas. Therefore, the sayings of the Holy Fathers about love as a spiritual quality are as understandable to us as musical theory to the deaf.
Love is a fruit of certain spiritual efforts, not the result of mental or emotional influences on the heart. Love is not a feeling but a quality of personality. Moreover, it is such a quality that "neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, …. nor anything else in all creation" can oppose it (Romans 8:38-39).
The beginning of the path to achieving this quality is related to confession and sincere repentance. However, it is essential to distinguish this spiritual process from simple self-deception and self-complacency when we superficially pretend to repent.
Instead of a deep internal change, we can turn confession into an empty formality, repeating the same sins over and over, trapped in a dead cycle of life.
True repentance is, in essence, an act of burying one's "I", breaking with a sinful life not only in actions but also in feelings. Only by putting the old self to death within us can we be born into a new, renewed life. Refusing this process means missing the opportunity for salvation, and agreeing only to cosmetic changes in our inner world. True repentance requires a readiness for the radical destruction of one's egoism, a deep transformation of the personality that is similar to death, not only symbolically but also literally. Renouncing sin means renouncing a wide range of feelings and reactions that define our daily lives.
A penitential turnaround, without which it is impossible to move forward, should be a refusal to judge others. This is because the first trait, the first manifestation of sin that man acquired immediately after the Fall, was his constant readiness to judge. "The woman whom You gave to be with me..." is to blame.
As long as an unwavering readiness to judge (condemn) lives in our soul, not even a drop of Grace can enter it. If we pay close attention when reading the Gospel, we will see that the Saviour spoke more often and diversely about the sin of judgment than about any other sin. This same sin led the Jews to deicide: "Crucify Him"—for such is our judgment, and such is our decision.
"You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else...," the Apostle Paul warns us (Romans 2:1-4). Renouncing the judge's chair is the first condition for the return of the paradise of love to our soul.
When we stop monitoring the behavior of people and events around us, constantly giving our evaluative judgment, we will begin to see more clearly what is inside ourselves.
All the passions that reside in our soul are indirectly connected to the external world. Passions are a reigning hell within us, and our life is merely a feeding ground for these passions. Gluttony is not a mere desire for food, as it might seem on the surface. It is primarily an inner state of the psyche, dependent on the pleasure experienced from eating.
Gluttony parasitises on the simple relationship to food as a necessary energetic quality of life. The passion of lust is an exaggerated experience of the importance of nerve sensations related to the sexual organs. Similarly, greed is a mere distortion of the existential norm of individual life. Essentially, it is a sick love of oneself.
Anger is a demonic state of a person, constantly simmering in the internal flames of Gehenna. Sadness and despondency are the consequences of an inner emptiness caused by a lack of God, a loss of hope in God and His providence. Pride and vanity are idol-making, an elevation of oneself above all else.
Looking at all these passions as a whole, it becomes evident that they all stem from the idol of egoism, self-love and self-pity. We have made ourselves the object of our own worship. In the name of this idol, we are willing to sacrifice everything, including our immortal soul. The destruction of egoism, the dethroning of it from our heart, is an act of true repentance, initially felt as an inner death, the destruction of the "I" and the complete loss of all previously important and fundamental life values.
Only when we destroy this idol can we achieve the state that the Holy Fathers call sobriety. But until this happens, we will live in a mist, intoxicated by passions, hardly understanding what God, the Church and the Holy Fathers teach us. And if we do understand something, it will be as a drunk person understands, through the lens of distortions, incoherence and loss of orientation.
When the idol of self is cast down, we must not immediately erect another in its place. It is crucial to realise that we cannot save ourselves independently. Under no circumstances can we become holy on our own. Our holiness is created only by God's mercy. All we need is to allow God to act in our lives, to let Him into our hearts.
The philosophy of the divine plan states that the salvation of man is a divine miracle, accomplished in our world through His love for humanity. Without this intervention, no one would be saved. When we fully realise that we are, in essence, nothing, created by God from nothing, and begin to live in accordance with this understanding, then God, the only One who truly possesses Life in Himself, will begin to form His likeness from our dust.
However, for this to happen, our soul must transform from a proud and hard stone into soft, humble, and obedient clay. This is the foundation of salvation, which the Holy Fathers call humility.
