Beloved in Christ,
In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's famous novel The Brothers Karamazov, we are introduced to the character of a monk named Father Zossima. When he was a young man, Father Zossima lived a life that was focused on himself and his own ego. While he was in his military service, he instigated a duel with a man who he considered to be his 'rival.' The night before this duel was to take place, the future Father Zossima went into a rage and struck a servant of his. The next morning, he found himself unexpectedly overtaken by a feeling of repentance for the sin that he had committed. Experiencing this sudden change of heart, he remembered words that he had heard from his dying brother many years before:
"In truth we are each responsible to all for all, it's only that men don't know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once."
The Christian life is not one in which we are able to exist as isolated individuals pursuing only our own self-interest. A Christian cannot accept the modern idea that a person is a kind of atom that can exist on its own, without reference to its neighbor. The modern Greek word atomo expresses this view of personhood. But a Christian must insist on the older conception of that a person is a prosopon (a 'face')-- that we come to realize the personhood both of our neighbor and of ourself only by meeting with one another face to face. This is why the early Church insisted on the truth of the phrase "a lone Christian is not a Christian."
Instead, a Christian life is one in which we are called to bend ourselves down to meet the needs of our fellow human beings who are suffering. A Christian is always called to respond to the needs of the person who God has put in our path by taking those needs on our own shoulders. This is the meaning of humility-- that we lower ourselves to our neighbor out of our love for them, knowing that one day we will need them to bear our burdens in return.
Since we are "each responsible to all for all," we can only fulfill our humanity as it has been revealed in Christ when we leave behind our individualism. Our love for our brothers and sisters is our path towards love for God, and only through that love can we be saved. We can only truly become persons when we are willing to live out the words that we hear in today's Epistle reading:
"Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ," (Galatians 6:2).
In Christ,
Fr. Jeremy
