Those of us who were reared in Anglican or Protestant circles will often find it precious and valuable to draw deep from the wisdom of those in rich Catholic and Orthodox traditions who have loved and served our Lord Jesus so faithfully. Here are insights from Metropolitan Antony’s publication ‘God and Man’ concerning the way in which John the Baptist, who he calls ‘The Forerunner,’ became the message and the vision God needed to share to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah. His stand in sharp contrast to the spirit by which either Herod or the Pharisees of his day conducted their lives or directed others. 

Near the end of this post you will come across two exceptionally moving accounts of people who laid down their life to serve others. They make me think of courageous priests and deacons in the Russian Orthodox Church today who bravely seek to remain faithful to Christ, and who refuse to kowtow to the highly politicised line dictated by the Russian Patriarchate, courageously opposing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They are paying a very high price for taking this largely unpublicised stand.

No one can receive anything except what is given him from Heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before Him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice; therefore this joy of mine is now full. He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3:22-33 )

Too often when we bring a message, people can perceive us . . . because we are not sufficiently identified with what we have got to say. In order to be identified we must so read the Gospel, make it so much ourselves, and ourselves so much the Gospel, that when we speak from within it, in its name, it should be simply – whatever words we use and I am not speaking of quotations – it should be simply the Gospel that speaks and we should be like a voice – God’s voice.

To attain to that state in which John could speak and not be noticed, in which all that people could perceive of him was a man who had been completely transformed into a message, into a vision, into a proclamation, meant he was a man who accepted to lay aside all that was selfish, grasping, all that was delighting selfishly in whatever he wanted to have. He had a pure heart, a clear mind, an unwavering will, a trained body, a complete mastery of self, so that when the message came, fear would not defeat him and make him silent; promises would not beguile him and make him silent, or simply the heaviness of the flesh, the heaviness of the mind, the heaviness of the heart, should not overcome the lightness and the lightening power of the spirit. This is something that is also our task.

. . . We must learn to be free, and to be free, we must acquire mastery over ourselves. This is terribly important, and to achieve that, we must learn to look, learn and hear – not only at people and situations but at God.

Obedience is vital. To obey the will of God requires a training. The will of God is madness, the will of God is paradoxical. You cannot adhere to the will of God for good reasons. More often what He often asks is an act of folly which we would not otherwise dare to commit. Remember Abraham: God promised him a son, and the son was born. He promised that the son would be a beginning of a generation of people more numerous than the sands of the shores; and Abraham believed Him. And then God commanded him to take his son and to bring him, a blood offering, to Him, and Abraham did it. He did not tell Him. ‘That contradicts your previous injunction; this is contrary to Your promise.’ He trusted the Lord and did what the Lord said at that moment, leaving the Lord to fulfil promises the way He knows.

This happens to us also. We are called to act day after day, moment after moment, according to the will of God revealed within that moment when the difference between Christian action and just action resides in the fact that action must planned, action must not contradict action. There are no returns and moves back and sideways; it must be a straight course. If we want to act within the will of God, we must be like Christ who listens and proclaims the word, who gazes attentively at God who is at work, and when he has seen, performs the action which is implied in the willing, in the thinking, in the rich creative imaginings of God. This we must learn, but to do this, we must learn to master ourselves and become capable of acting not only when we agree, not only when we understand, but when we disagree somewhere within the old Adam in us, or when we cannot understand but say ‘I trust you, I will act with folly.’

The forerunner has another quality. Remember what he said: ‘I must decrease in order that you should increase.’ Our role is to cut straightways; our role is to make rough ways smooth, to help people find a way straight to the Lord.

When speaking about himself, the forerunner says that he is the friend of the Bridegroom – the one . . . whose vocation is to bring together bride and Bridegroom – the living God and the living soul.

At the same time we must also be prepared to face, in the name of the bride and groom whom we serve, in the name of this mystery of love, the coming of the Kingdom; the conquest by God of all that is death, evil, sin, separation, meanness which is too small for the measure and the stature of man. We must be prepared to speak to man the truth, God’s own truth, not our own. Remember the way in which the forerunner spoke to Herod, the way in which he spoke to the multitudes. To do this we must have authority, and authority is not gained either by rank or by social standing. Authority is gained by this fusion between our own will and God’s own life, us and Him; then we can speak, and then our words, however hard, sharp, and deep they go will also be words of love, because God’s word is always the word that gives truth and light, love and life.

And then we must be prepared not to see the results of what we have done. The forerunner died before he had seen Christ . . . He died of his message, he died for the truth of God, he died because he had become identified with the message, and because he was a friend of the bridegroom that had to decrease so that the bridegroom should have all the field. We must be prepared for that.

We must be prepared never to be remembered, because what has been sown by the word is so rich, so overwhelming, that the forerunner, the one that has prepared the way, the one that has ploughed, the one that has sown can be forgotten. This is joy. It is joy to see Christ the Lord grow to His full structure, to occupy His real position, to be the King and the Lord and the Master and the Brother and the Saviour and the joy and the freedom of those to whom we have come and said, ‘He is coming, open yourself to Him.’ That is what the scriptures call repentance or conversion.

But when we have done this, we must step aside, and allow the Lord of life, He for whom we are preparing the way, to come like a king, or with the humility of Christ in the simplicity of His entry into Jerusalem. And we must be forgotten because as long as we loom large, people will not see Christ.

There is a way in which our absence is as necessary to the glory and action of God as our presence is at another moment.

What you have acquired, you will never lose as long as you remain faithful. Go now, and if truly you have discovered joy, how can you not give joy to others? If truly you have come nearer to truth, how can you keep it for yourself? If truly something has been kindled in you which is life, are you going to allow anyone not to have a spark of this life? It does not mean go round and tell everyone specifically religious things or use clerical phrases. It means that you should go into the world which is yours with a radiance, with a joy, with an intensity that will make everyone look at you and say ‘He has something he hadn’t before. Is it that truly God has come near? He has something he never had before and which I do not possess – joy, life, certainty, a new courage, a new daring, a vision, where can I get it?’

People will also say to you, ‘You are mad’. I answer in those cases, and they are many, I say, ‘

I am mad, but one thing I find strange. You who are wise call to the mad man, and the mad man is happy, alive and you feel dead; let us share my folly, it is God’s folly.’

. . . With God you go now, with him on all the ways, on all the roads . . . May God bless you in it with joy . . . Go with joy, bring joy, and then you will have brought everything else, because God is joy, he is life, he is intensity.

And may God bless you, and not only you but everyone, your family, you friends, those who have been, those who have not been here, those whom you will meet throughout your lives – bring them a spark.*

Choosing the way of God at the most important moments in life

Seeking the prophetic word of God is not in the least like the oracles of the Sibyl, whom Romans of every state in life sought out for advice and warnings in order to discern the will of the Pantheon of Roman gods during times of crisis, war, or personal distress. God does not dispassionately ‘dole out’ His words and wisdom: everything about Christ speaks of His profound identification with the world He made – with sinners as well as with the righteous.

Because Jesus is for everyone many mistakenly think that everything should work out smoothly – for is He not the God of peace and order and harmony? We have forgotten the warnings the prophet Nahum reminds us of that ‘His way is in the whirlwind and the storm.’ (Nahum 1:3)

Even apart from the external storms of life, we bring storms with us from our own fears and hurts. From the twin accounts of Jesus in storms on Lake Galilee we must learn to trust His presence with us in them, whether He comes to us as He came to the disciples walking on the water to them, or waking up to rebuke the storm they were so afraid would drown them. May the Lord give us faith to trust that when need is greatest He will give us grace to do what is right – and, if need be, to tell us what to do.

Metropolitan Anthony closes God and Man with a powerful episode from the Civil War that raged like a storm in Russia in 1919 as the Bolsheviks swept to power. A young mother, whose husband was an officer on the losing side (the White Army) hid in a cabin on the outskirts of the city. On the evening of the second day, a neighbour, a young woman of about her age, knocked at her door and told her, ‘You must flee at once because you have been discovered and betrayed; you will be shot tonight’. The mother pointed to her children and said, ‘How can we flee? We would be recognised at once, and they can’t walk far.’ this is where her neighbour grew to the full stature of the Gospel, as Bloom puts it, and said, ‘They won’t look for you, because I shall stay behind in your place.’ And the mother said, ‘But they will kill you.’ ‘Yes’, said the woman, whose name was Natalie, ‘but I have no children, so you must go.’ And the mother went.*

When the soldiers came, they did not drag Natalie outside; they shot her where she was.

When World War II broke out, just over twenty years later, Maximilian Kolbe turned his monastery into a makeshift hospital. For this he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where he was beaten for giving the sacraments to his fellow prisoners. When a prisoner escaped, the guards decreed that ten others should starve to death in retaliation. One of the ten selected cried out, “But my wife! My children!” Promptly declaring that he had no wife or children, Maximilian offered to take his place. In isolation with the others, Maximilian led the prisoners in prayer. Within two weeks, with no food or water, everyone was dead except Kolbe. The guards finally finished him off with a lethal injection.

God does not pass such sacrifices over in silence, but finds ways to honour them in yet greater ways that anyone could imagine. Who knows what prophetic and heroic acts of faith and sacrifice are being performed now in the course of Russia’s war with Ukraine? May God hear and answer from Heaven as only He can.

Pray for the power of God to be at work in the heart of the Orthodox Church 

• The Eastern Orthodox Church has approximately 260,000,000 members, with about 75% of Russians and 60% of Ukrainians professing to be Orthodox Christians (though for many that is a matter of cultural identity rather than a sign of an active relationship with the Lord). One third of Russian Orthodox parishes were in Ukraine, before they broke away from the Moscow Patriarch a few years ago by refusing to pray for Holy Rus to win its war with Ukraine.This article shows the way in which the Orthodox Church is being transformed by Putin and Kyril into ‘a neo-imperial ideology with nationalist overtones . . . The Christians resisting this coercion understand what’s at stake. As one suspended priest, Fr, Sergei Rybakov, wrote: “This war has distorted the face of the Russian Orthodox Church and transformed it into a ‘grimace twisted by anger and malice.'” Yet he continues his ministry online, hoping the church might eventually “regain its human face.“
• Pray for priests who are seeking to find ways not to go along with Patriarch Kyril – who tells his followers enthusiastically that those who fight for Russia ‘wash away all their sins.’
• Pray for priests and deacons who have been sent into exile, or who are being persecuted in other ways.
• Life is very hard for most priests who emigrated to the West, because of their lack of transferable skills. Lord, we cry to You: let the true gospel of Christ come in saving power to many in Russia we pray.

*Quotations from God and Man Anthony (Bloom), Metropolitan of Sourozh (1971 Darton, Longman and Todd). https://iconandlight.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/like-a-sheep-among-the-wolves-like-the-son-of-god-among-men-metropolitan-anthony-bloom-of-sourozh/