Obey God. A Sermon by Fr. Konstantin Korepanov on the 18th Sunday after Pentecost (October 8, 2023)
Transcript of the sermon (expand)🔻
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18th Sunday after Pentecost.
Sermon by Priest Konstantin Korepanov.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
God created man; man was well in the world God created for him. Man dwelt in paradise as in a royal palace, and all was well. The only thing man had to do was to maintain his stay in paradise; he had to obey God. And there wasn't much to obey—just one commandment: "You shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the day you eat from it, you shall surely die." Man simply had to remember this commandment and not eat; and believe that he shouldn't—and believe that if God said you would die, then you would die. We all know that man didn't do this. Again and again, attentive people, learning about this story, turn their attention to it and say, "How is this possible? How could man take and eat the forbidden fruit?" although, in fact, there is nothing surprising about this. But man asks, "How can this be? After all, man was sinless, there was no sin in him, he should have obeyed God! After all, there is no sin!"
Man is still sinless – why didn't he obey? Surely there must have been some flaw in him if he couldn't fulfill this commandment. Although the very formulation of the question suggests that man completely misunderstands, at least – himself. He doesn't understand that man, like Adam once did, constantly tries to justify his actions with some external reason: "Well, I'm weak! Well, I'm feeble; well, I'm sinful! Well, what can I do?" After all, that's how we justify ourselves. All our countless confessions are a sophisticated exercise in self-justification: "Of course, I sinned, but..." "Of course, I couldn't help but sin, because... I'm weak, or demons entangled me, or man tempted me... But I'm generally a good person, and I want good things—it's just that this happens to me for some reason I don't understand"—and so a person constantly justifies himself. And because he gets used to justifying himself in everything and always: "It's not my fault! It's not my fault, it's something from outside, something God didn't think through, didn't do, didn't protect enough; of course, if God had worked properly, I would never have sinned. But something went wrong in Heaven, and I'm not doing what I want."
That's what Adam did when he sinned: he began to justify himself—he couldn't help but justify himself. And we, his children—his daughters and sons—can't help but justify ourselves. This is our sin. Why did Adam do it? What compelled him? It's so simple: just follow one commandment, nothing more! But he wanted to do it his way, not as God said. He had a choice: do what God commands, or what I want. Every person has this choice; a person simply makes a decision: what to do, and for Adam, it is not determined by anything. Nothing pushes him to this decision; he can even respond easily to the serpent's words, for truly, he is still sinless: "God said not to do this, and I will not do it."
But he believed Satan because he wanted to believe, because he wanted to insist on his own will; because he wanted to, because he placed himself above God, his own will above God's will. He did not yet understand that God's will is life, and everyone who falls away from God's will dies, for self-will is death. Adam didn't understand—and he sinned. And having sinned, naturally, he began to justify himself, emphasizing in every way that he was not to blame, but knowing that he was: for he wanted his will, not God's, to be done.
Existence exists because God created it; His will once brought everything into being: the cosmos, the universe, the earth, animals, people—all of this by His will. Both man and angels, as rational and free beings, can choose whether to live by this will, which created everything, or to live by their own will. And when they choose their own will, they thereby come into conflict with life, with the will of God, which lies at the foundation of all existence; they become opponents of God, God-fighters, since their own will is higher than God's will for them.
And therefore, every person who simply wants their own will to be done is already a God-fighter and a rebel; they are already rebelling against God. Therefore, the Lord calls all humanity a stiff-necked, stubborn, disobedient, rebellious humanity. This in no way diminishes His love; He is not angry with us—He saves us. He saves us by becoming Man Himself and fulfilling God's will, even though this is unbearably difficult and mortally dangerous. But He remains faithful to God to the end, fulfilling only His will until the very end, until His dying cry on the Cross. He remains faithful to God even when He abandons Him...
... Continued in the first comment to this video.
Video recording made on October 8, 2023, during the Divine Liturgy at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Yekaterinburg.
Author: Konstantin Korepanov
Video recording: Andrei Serafimovich
Text re...