The hidden flock

Protopresbyter Nikolaos Manolis

 

It is certain that, while we are traversing the 21st century, walling-off is charting a martyric course! This, indeed, is evident from the fact that the choice of a conscious path of mockery, persecutions, and slanders seems, for the modern era, like a deceptive dream!

However, we—all the walled-off Orthodox Christians—are experiencing the wrath of our Bishops, as they have driven us out of our churches and even led us to ecclesiastical courts. At the same time, we have been cast out from our social environment and our parishes. Indeed, we have reached the point of being threatened daily! We were not afraid to make those decisions that would keep the Orthodox spark burning in an age where the cauldron of pan-religion is boiling. We even preferred to belong to those Orthodox Christians whom the world mocks and considers extreme and dangerous!

So then, who are we? We are only a handful of the faithful of Christ and of His Orthodox Church! One could easily describe us as the smallest flock of our days, but not the smallest that ever existed…

Reading the life of our Father among the Saints, Gregory the Theologian (329–390 A.D.), the brotherly friend of Saint Basil the Great, we encounter there a case of a flock that preserved the Orthodox Faith in Constantinople. What is of particular significance is that this flock journeyed alone at a time when the official Church with its faithful had joined the heresy of Arius. The few remaining Orthodox—the people of God—truly had no place to stand. The persecutions and executions by the Arians posed a great danger to the lives of the confessors. However, the Lord, in their time of need, sent Saint Gregory the Theologian to Constantinople to strengthen the faithful. It is clear that this support was intended neither for the Patriarch, nor for the archimandrites, nor for the priests and their people. On the contrary, it was a gift from God for the persecuted, the disgraced, the outlawed faithful who carried within their hearts the genuine Church of Christ. This is the people of Truth who bear the Holy Church!

If we make a retrospective to the 7th century, we will identify exactly what another great Confessor of the Faith and defender of the canonically lawful Walling Off expressed—Saint Maximos the Confessor: “The Church, as our Christ said, is neither the buildings, nor the walls, nor the clergy, priests and hierarchs, nor anything else. But what is the Church? It is Christ Himself and His Truth, His Gospel, the Right Faith, the right glory. This is the Church! And wherever this truth, this right glory exists, there is also the Church of Christ. Where this right glory, this right confession and the truth do not exist, there is not the Church of Christ either.”

Then, in the 14th century, the greatest Saint of the second millennium of Christianity, Gregory Palamas, wrote: “For indeed, those who are of the truth of the Church of Christ belong to it, while those who are not of the truth are not of the Church of Christ either.” That is, “Those who are within the truth are also within the Church of Christ. Whereas those who are outside the truth are not within the Church of Christ, but are outside of it.”

What then did Saint Gregory the Theologian observe during his visit to Constantinople in the year 379 for the support of the few remaining Orthodox in Constantinople? He himself describes the desperate situation: “This flock was once small and incomplete, as far as appearances were concerned. In reality, it was not even a flock, but merely a small trace or remnant of a flock, disorderly, without a bishop, unprotected. It had no suitable place for ‘pasture’ nor a fold to enclose it, and for this reason it wandered ‘in mountains and caves and the holes of the earth’ (Heb. 11:38). Its members were scattered and cast, some here and some there, and each, as it found, sheltered itself, grazed, and attained its salvation with great difficulty.” (Oration 42, PG 36, 460A)

Additionally, the holy Dositheos adds: because the Orthodox did not even have a single church (they were all Arian), he (Gregory) converted a certain house into a place of prayer (he turned a house into a church), which he named Anastasia… But who is able to tell or write down the toils and struggles he endured for piety? The commonly sung saying suffices, that he found a thousand churches of the Arians, and not even one Orthodox, and after his resignation (in 381), there were a thousand and one of the Christians, and not a single one of the Arians. (Dodekabiblos, book III, chapter 2, p. 15).

Therefore, my brethren, from this story here let us be consoled! The antichrists who today hold the reins of the Church in their hands will not prevail in the end. Rather, they will be utterly overthrown, and Christ and His faithful will be victorious! The little flock, the holy handful of Christ! Be strong!

 

Greek source: https://katanixi.gr/poimnio-poy-den-to-pianei-to-mati/