Christian Hope
Zacchaeus Sunday
1 Timothy 4:9-15; Luke 19:1-10
The Apostle Paul, in a letter to his spiritual son Ap. Timothy wrote:
“For to this end we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, especially of those who believe." (1 Timothy 4:10).
The faith of Christ is, first of all, the faith of hope for the best, for the light, for the victory of good over evil. No matter how difficult the circumstances, moments in life, no matter what setbacks, no matter how many hardships we experience, we always have the light of hope before us.
A person who loses hope is doomed to defeat, to loss of faith. A person who has lost hope no longer has faith. Christians, however, cannot live without faith, and, therefore, they cannot live without hope.
In all of life’s affairs, people can live and work only with hope: a farmer must sow grain in the ground with hope, a builder with hope to build, a student -- with hope to learn, and a priest - with hope to preach the gospel teaching, hoping that it will reach the conscience, the hearts of the faithful, sprout and the shoots will eventually bear the fruits of faith.
A doctor who himself does not believe in what he prescribes, in his methods, is not able to treat. But in recent times, many doctors testify that treating people who have lost faith and have no hope is a very difficult matter. Despite great assistive technical aids and successes of pharmacology - the invention of new drugs – faithless people, doctors say, are difficult to treat.
In people without faith, the body has no internal strength to fight disease, and wounds heal with difficulty.
There are still diseases that people cannot treat with their present means, but this does not imply that there is no hope: God is able to help even when there is a lack of human means and knowledge to overcome the disease.
We often forget that in our human existence, beyond the material body, we are filled with spiritual power, for our bodies, according to the testimony of the Apostle Paul, are “temple[s] of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19), into which God has instilled in us faith and the gift of prayer to Him.
Dr. William S. Reed (MD) recounts how God returned his son to him, whom he found one morning in bed, not breathing, without a pulse. But what was particularly striking happened a few weeks later: Dr. Reed was making his rounds with patients in the hospital when, through the intercom, he heard a request for any doctor to come to the Pediatric Department. Since there was no doctor there in the afternoon, Dr. Reed went in.
The nurse informed him that a little girl had just died and that a doctor needed to formally certify it by signing the death documentation. In the corridor stood the child’s mother, sobbing... Oxygen and all medical stimulants and devices had already been disconnected. The doctor listened to her chest with a stethoscope—there was no heartbeat. The child was clearly dead.
But the doctor asked the nurse to bring a cardiac stimulant to restore her heartbeat.
“After the nurse left the room, and prior to my saying anything to the mother, as I listened to the child's chest, I placed my hand upon her head and was led to pray, asking God who had given my little boy back to me, if He would give this little girl back to her mother. Such was my silent prayer. Before the nurse had returned to the room with the hypodermic, the child's heart had begun to beat and she began to breathe.” (Surgery of the Soul, W.S. Reed, M.D., pp. 69-70)
When Dr. Reed telephoned the doctor who had treated the child and told him that the girl was alive, he said it was impossible -- she would either die soon, or there would be something wrong with her mind. But the girl survived and grew up normal and healthy.
Imagine if, instead of this deeply believing Dr. Reed, there had been an ordinary non-believer or an agnostic--the child would have actually died.
Orthodoxy is a faith of hope, a faith in resurrection and rebirth, a faith that no one will separate us from the Lord. Even when bodily death inevitably comes, we know that God has not abandoned us, and Christ is with us.
“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” (John 5:24).
In the Orthodox church, we do not display Jesus Christ crucified on the mountain, but Christ the King, who, having risen from the dead, ascended to heaven and sat on the throne of glory “at the right hand of the Father”. (Mark 14:62; Acts 7:55).
Orthodoxy is the faith of hope. That faith of hope saved our people from decline and pessimism in the most difficult times of Ukraine's enslavement by various occupiers. That faith of hope in a brighter future made it possible to endure the Tatar troubles, the ruin of the state, and the violence of those of different beliefs, and that faith is still with us during the severe terror and persecution by the atheists.
That faith of hope is always with us; it is not in man-made churches, but in the hearts, minds, and thoughts of the people. It is indestructible - we are always with Christ.
Therefore, we work, preach, and live, and as St. Paul testifies, with faith and “trust in the living God”. (1 Timothy 4:10)
Amen.
Very Rev. Fr. Taras Slavchenko
Taras Slavchenko was born on March 8, 1918 in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine. After graduating from school and the Pedagogical College, he entered the language and literature faculty of the Scientific Pedagogical Institute. Having successfully completed it in 1938, he served as a teacher in a secondary school.
