Zacchaeus Sunday - New Martyrs of Russia

It seems to happen every year… when I hear the Gospel story of Zacchaeus, I am shocked… can it really be Zacchaeus Sunday already? Zacchaeus Sunday is the first of the preparatory Sundays leading us toward the Great Fast and this Gospel is our first call of the approaching season of fasting and repentance.

Over the course of the next several Sundays we will be presented with different themes which spiritually prepare us for the season of fasting and repentance… today we hear of Zacchaeus, and then in the following Sundays we shall hear of the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, and the Final Judgment of all mankind. Our holy mother Church is guiding us through these Sundays to warm our hearts and set our minds upon the proper context for us to approach the fast in the right spirit, so that we can reap the greatest benefit from the blessing of the Great Fast.

Today we read the Gospel account of Zacchaeus, a despised tax-collector, a man who came to get a glimpse of Jesus as He was passing by, but because of his short stature and the great crowd of people, he could not have a clear view. So Zacchaeus, in his zeal and single-minded thirst for God, climbed into the branches of a sycamore tree to get a view of our Lord as He passed by. When Jesus came along this way, He made a point of stopping and looking up to Zacchaeus, calling out to him to ‘make haste and come down – for I desire to stay in your house this day’.

Zacchaeus is an example for us of courage and determination, born out of love, which allowed Zacchaeus to lay aside any concerns for conformity with this world, to take the risk of becoming foolish in the eyes of those around him, separating himself from the distractions which blocked his view – climbing up the sycamore tree in order to simply get a glimpse of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ… let us ask ourselves: do we have this same courage and determination? Do we have such love for Christ our Lord that we will lay aside any concerns for conformity with this world? That we will take the risk of becoming foolish in the eyes of those around us? Of separating ourselves from the distractions of this world which eclipse our view of Christ and His heavenly kingdom?

In a world which is becoming more and more alien to the Christian way of life, where Christians are being marginalized as narrow-minded and antagonistic to the ways of the world - we need to be willing to be different, to have the courage of Zacchaeus to appear foolish in the eyes of the world, to stand with Christ no matter what the cost may be.

The saints whose memories we commemorate today – the holy new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church – stand as examples and heroes as those who consciously lived out their faith and who stood firm in that faith even when all was changing around them. Like Zacchaeus, they had the courage and the determination to lay aside any hopes for conformity to this world, to accept the risk of being foolish in the eyes of those around them and to set their vision on Christ and His heavenly kingdom, rather than on the things of this world.

I strongly encourage all of you to read the lives of the new martyrs of Russia. There you will see examples like the humble yet steadfast Patriarch Tikhon, Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd who stood before his accusers with such nobility and graceful assurance in Christ, Metropolitan Cyril of Kazan who epistles from the gulag helped guide and ground Christians in such chaotic times, and so many others who through their own spiritual maturity understood the peace which passes all understanding in Christ our Lord and who were able to stand firm in their faith even in the face of martyrdom.

We might ask, how could it be that a Christian nation could be so quickly overthrown and descend so sharply into outright persecution of the Church? Well, the process wasn’t as quick as it might seem… there had been decades of decay in the faith of people and decades of systematic unraveling of the foundations of piety and morality.

We here in the west need to wake up. We may very well be like the proverbial frog in the pot of water… If you drop a frog in boiling water, he will immediately feel the heat and jump out to save himself. But if you place a frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly turn up the heat, he’ll sit there, not perceiving the ever-increasing heat, and will eventually boil to death. God help us from such a fate!

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ… We need to realize that the time of our religious freedom cannot be taken for granted. It may be eroding faster than we know. We should be grateful to God and take advantage of the fact that we can gather here in Church and that we still have the freedom to pray and to receive the Sacraments of our Lord. Let us never take this for granted, we should treasure our Church and make every effort to support her and to live by her precepts.

The alarm being sounded is not for us to get caught up in conspiratorial thinking, to be fearful or reactionary or to lose hope. The alarm being sounded is for us to increase our prayers, for us to treasure and defend our freedom while we have it. Our focus does not need to be in constant reaction to what is happening externally, we must work to transform what is happening to us internally. The best defense is a good offense – and our offense is not to become more clever, but to become more holy. We should immerse ourselves completely in the life of our Orthodox faith so that it seeps deeply into our soul so that no one and nothing can separate us from it.

Let us indeed take courage, for as the holy Apostle writes in the book of Romans:

‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: For Your sake we are killed all the day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Yet in all things we are more than conquerors, through Him Who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

Through the prayers and intercessions of the holy martyrs, let us make sure that we are clinging to and living our lives in that love of Christ Jesus our Lord!