A Burning and Merciful Heart - Homily for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost (2024)

"And what is a merciful heart?  It is the heart burning for the sake of all creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every created thing…" The heart of a merciful man "burns without measure in the likeness of God." Thus St. Isaac expands upon the mercy that today’s Gospel is exhorting us to have.  This is one of the shortest Gospel readings for the year.  There is so much that we need to reflect and meditate on.  If the mark of God’s mercy is to be kind to the unthankful and evil, then if we want to be recognized as His children, we must do likewise.  Do we resemble God?  Are we merciful? 

Again, St. Isaac tells us that a harsh and merciless heart will never be purified.  So if we want to be purified, we must cultivate mercy most of all.  Mercy is the remedy for so many of our problems.  If we struggle with lust, Abba Dorotheos tells us that acts of mercy, especially to those who are ill, is one of the best remedies.  If we are angry with someone, forcing ourselves to be merciful to him is what will heal us.  If we are spiritually negligent, acts of mercy will reignite the fire for God in our hearts. 

Once more, St. Isaac writes, “Mercy is opposed to justice.  Justice is equality on the even scale, for it gives to each as it deserves... Mercy, on the other hand, is a sorrow and pity stirred up by goodness...; it does not requite a man who is deserving of evil, and to him who is deserving of good it gives a double portion.  If, therefore, it is evident that mercy belongs to the portion of righteousness, then justice belongs to the portion of wickedness." If mercy is opposed to justice, then one of the first steps in becoming merciful is letting go of our desire for human justice.

It’s hard to be merciful and to love our enemies—actually without God’s grace, it’s impossible. We have to struggle to be merciful and to do our part, but God is the one who gives us love for our enemies.  It’s a gift.  We have to struggle to prepare our hearts to receive it, but love for enemies is not payment God gives us in exchange for our labors—it’s ultimately and truly a gift.  How do we prepare our hearts to received this gift?

We can see this in the life of Nicholas Sakharov, who was another saintly offshoot of a pious family.  The younger brother of St. Sophrony, he lived the life of a confessor in the godless soviet regime.  Once, when he was still young and his brother was still in Russia, they were walking along the streets of Moscow. As they walked past a house where one could hear screaming and yelling, Nicholas turned to his brother and said, “Do you know how these fights start?” His brother asked, “How?” “Someone only has to say, ‘And don’t I have any say in the matter?’ and bang on the table with his fist.”  So in youth, Nicholas recognized that our desire for human justice is the source of so much conflict and evil in our world.

We have to let go of our desire that things should be the way that we want them.  So often our conflicts with others are simply because we insist on our way and understanding and resist our brother’s.  St. Sophrony says, “In order to live peaceably among men, we must yield to them.  Since it’s usually insignificant what they ask, it is always possible to act in this way”.  This is something totally counterintuitive to our culture.  Our culture’s constant demand for justice and fairness insists that we should get our way.  If we can’t get it our way, then we should at least fight for compromise. But our constant striving for “what’s right” is usually the ego’s refusal to be crucified and die.  However, St. Paul chastises the Corinthians for desiring their rights and exacting justice against one another.  He writes, “Now therefore, it is already an utter failure for you that you go to law against one another. Why do you not rather accept wrong? Why do you not rather let yourselves be cheated?  No, you yourselves do wrong and cheat, and you do these things to your brethren” (1 Cor. 6:7-8).  We let so many opportunities pass us by to be merciful in small and simple ways because we refuse to yield to the requests of others, we insist on our way, we refuse to be wronged or inconvenienced.

This refusal to yield in these matters leads to mercilessness.  In the life of St. Paisios, we read that once when he was younger, an elderly monk who asked him to bring him some soup.  Another brother saw this and said, “Do not spoil him, for he will constantly ask favors from you and will not let you rest.  Do you know what happened to me?  I went to help him once, when he had a cold, and then, he never let me alone; he would knock on the wall every few minutes, ‘Show me your love…make me some tea; Show me your love, come and turn me over a little; …come and place a warm brick on my body’ With his constant requests, I couldn’t attend to my spiritual duties”.  Although he first offered to help, it became too much for him.  He stopped yielding to the requests of the sick monk.  He became hardened and justified himself—he had spiritual duties to attend to and he was distraught seeing his time frittered away by someone else’s (in his mind) petty demands.  He refused to be “wronged” by this needy monk.  He would insist on his “rights” to be left alone, to say his prayers and “be spiritual”.

St. Paisios could not consent to such worldly reasoning.  He later reflected, “It is a terrible thing that an elderly monk should be in pain, should suffer, and should have to ask for a little relief, and that I should be unwilling to minister to him lest I interrupt my spiritual duties!  Such thinking is dry and dead.  For God, providing ‘the warm brick, the warm tea’ for the needy counts for more than doing prostrations and prayer ropes”. (St. Paisios the Athonite p. 115).  One becomes a saint through small acts of mercy.  By yielding to the requests of others, even by sacrificing our “spiritual life” for the sake of their comfort, we can make progress toward Christ.    

In fact, we will never love our enemies, we will never be kind to the ungrateful and evil—the truly evil, not just our brothers on a bad day, if we can’t be bothered to show mercy to the people we are with.  If we see our brothers and their plans and behaviors as obstacles, we will find ourselves fighting him and saying, “don’t I have any say in the matter?” and angrily insist on our way.  We will throw away peace that we so desperately need in order to pray for the sake of our justice.  We will not just throw our peace away, but our whole spiritual life as well.

Yielding to others in small things, not insisting on our way, helping even when it’s inconvenient and incessant, these are the seeds we sow that God may grow love and mercy in our hearts.  This is how we become sanctified.

Nicholas was meek and merciful his whole life and St. Sophrony believed he had the characteristics of a staretz.  And yet he was a family man who worked at the State Bank and served in WWII.  He was a faithful follower in the circle of Fr. Alexei Mechev.  But his faithfulness landed him in prison time and again.  He endured grueling interrogations and torture, but his merciful heart preferred that agony than to testify against any of his fellow parishioners.  Sometimes being merciful to others means for us to suffer instead— even grievously.  Christ surely knows that mercy and that suffering.   

When he was arrested and interrogated the second time, this time in 1949, he again remained faithful.  During the interrogation, the interrogator picked up the phone and said something fairly innocuous, hung up and continued talking with Nicholas.  All of sudden, the interrogator was in distress, he was having a heart attack.  In his genuine heartfelt mercy, Nicholas yelled for help.  Nicholas yelled for help on behalf of his persecutor.  He yelled for help for his enemy.    This is what it looks like to have a merciful heart that burns for all creation. Medical aid came in time, and the interrogator was saved.

Shortly after he recovered and found out that Nicholas saved his life, the interrogator confessed to him, “I had, you know, already given the order to have you shot”. When he had picked up the phone, he actually gave the secret command that Nicholas was to be shot as soon as he left the office. “You saved my life.  Now I will save yours”.  Even his hardened heart was touched by the mercifulness of a believer, someone he believed was his enemy.  In exchange for sparing his life, the interrogator made sure Nicholas got the lightest sentence possible and could return home without having to go into exile.  As Christ says elsewhere in the Gospels, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”.  This promise is not just for the next life, but even in this life as well.  In sparing his enemy, Nicholas spared his own life.

Worn out by long years of suffering, Nicholas, although younger, preceded his brother in death and reposed in 1980.  In writing to his niece, St. Sophrony wrote, “Always remember that your father was a saint on earth, and that he is now in heaven in great glory.”  Such is the reward God bestows upon the merciful, those who are kind to the ungrateful and evil. Amen.