Are You Ready to Approach Holy Communion?

Metropolitan Augoustinos (Kantiotes) of Florina | March 26, 1961

 

 

Fifth Sunday of Lent (Mark 10:32–45)

I begin, my beloved, with a question to all. My question is this: are we here, are we here in the church? For apart from the body, our spirit also must be here.

Did a minute pass? We sinned. That is why I say: are we here? Are we following the Divine Liturgy?

Did we hear the divine words, which breaks rocks and hearts? Did we feel the event that today’s holy Gospel describes?

The Church in these days conveys the loftiest messages. And the prelude to these messages is what we heard today: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem…” (Mark 10:33).

These words, which Christ spoke to His disciples shortly before the Passion, the Church also addresses to us.

Next Sunday, when the services of Holy Week begin, this is exactly what we shall hear in a troparion: “As the Lord was coming to His voluntary Passion, He said to the apostles on the way: Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem…” (Doxastikon of the Praises, Holy Monday).

Let us go, He says; let us go up to Jerusalem; let us ascend noetically, spiritually.

A person must always be prepared, because we do not know at what hour the Lord will call us to Himself. But above all let us prepare ourselves during these holy days, all the more since we are about to partake of the immaculate Mysteries. “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem…”

Every time we draw near to commune, we hear this voice of the Lord: Forward, let us go up to Jerusalem! But how many, I wonder, commune worthily? All year long we sin; yet I fear, my brethren, that we commit the greatest sin precisely during Holy Week, when we approach the Holy of Holies with an impure heart.

I fear lest out of a hundred Christians there may not be even one worthy to commune. It is not enough to open your mouth and receive Holy Communion; you must also prepare yourself, and thus approach the holy Mysteries.

What is the reason that young and old alike approach the immaculate Mysteries unconsciously, formally, and mechanically? The reason is that we have never sat down to study, to examine, what this mystery is, the Divine Eucharist.

There are important books. I recommend to each of you, before communing, to open the Horologion of the Church or the Synopsis or the Synekdemos, and to read that service which every Christian ought to read before Holy Communion.

This mystery is the mystery of mysteries. The unbeliever sees nothing. But the believer has spiritual eyes; he enters the church and sees. The believer believes. First and foremost, he believes in the words of Christ. And Christ told us: “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life,” that whoever eats the body and drinks the blood of the Lord has eternal life (John 6:54).

Christ told us that this is necessary: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves”; that a man has no life if he does not commune of Christ (ibid. 6:53).

The believer in church feels a spiritual tremor. He feels that at the hour of the Divine Liturgy, at the moment when upon the holy altar the priest has the bread and the wine and says, “Thine own of Thine own…,” at the moment when we have all knelt and the chanters are singing, “We hymn Thee…,” at that very moment a miracle takes place, the greatest miracle in the world.

The Holy Spirit descends, and the bread becomes the body of our Christ and the wine becomes His blood, blood that steams upon dreadful Golgotha.

Oh, what mysteries, my brethren! Whoever does not believe, it is better for him not to enter the church; let him remain outside. Has he entered the church? Then it is over; man no longer treads on the earth, upon the stones; he is aloft, on the wings of angels and archangels; he is above. “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem.”

These are the things he believes, and so it is. The unbelievers, however, and the heretics, the Chiliast or the Protestant, you hear them say: But is it possible for the bread and the wine to become the body and blood of Christ?…

I do not understand it, I do not feel it… What are we to answer them?

You do not feel it? But is this the only mystery in the world? There are so many others. Do you want examples? How does coal in the earth become a diamond? How does grass become meat in the sheep? How does the bread that we eat every day become bones, muscles, nerves, brain, heart, lungs, the life of man? How even does the mother’s blood, which departs from her heart, become milk and nourish the child?

Let them first explain these things to us, and then let them ask us also to explain to them how the bread and the wine become the body and blood of our Christ.

We believe, therefore, in the mystery. And this mystery, my brethren, is the greatest benefaction to man. We thank God for the sun that gives us light, for the water that we drink, for the bread that we eat, for the air that we breathe, for all the good things of the earth.

But above all we thank God—why? Because He counts us worthy, us the worms of the earth, to partake of the body of Him whom the heavens cannot contain. He fits within the heart of a sinner. O grace, O blessing, O great gift!

***

And now I ask you: Brethren, are you ready to approach the immaculate Mysteries? Have you examined yourselves, lest perhaps you have some hidden sin which stings you like a scorpion and which until now you have not confessed to your spiritual father?

Have you committed some injustice and not set it right? Are you at odds with someone, do you have enmity with anyone, and have you not yet tried to be reconciled?

Examine all these matters. And if your conscience is clean, then you may approach. Otherwise, no.

Some say: Well, now that it is Pascha, let us commune…

They also asked the holy Chrysostom:

“How often should we commune?” And he spoke the wisest word:

“Are you ready, is your heart clean? Commune every day! Are you not ready? Not even at Pascha!”

For at Pascha Judas also communed and was condemned.

Therefore, we too say: Christians, you who intend during these holy days to commune of the immaculate Mysteries, take heed. Are you ready? Approach. Are you not ready? Keep away!…

Keep away, because Holy Communion is fire! Are you straw, an unrepentant sinner? Holy Communion will burn you. But if you are gold, then however many times you enter into the fire of Holy Communion, you will come forth more radiant, more holy.

These are the things our holy Church teaches. And today she cries out to us: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem…”

***

I pray, my brethren, with all my heart, that no one may approach like Judas. It is better for him to remain far from Holy Communion. The right thing is for him to go and find a venerable priest, an elder confessor, a spiritual father with white hair, to kneel before him, to tell his sins, to ask for the mercy of God, to perform his penance for one year and two and three years, and then to commune of the immaculate Mysteries.

Go and read today’s synaxarion of our venerable Mother Mary of Egypt. Did she commune immediately after her repentance? No. She crossed the river Jordan and went into the desert. How many years did she perform her penance, tell me? She performed penance for 47 years, and then she communed.

And she died “on the day on which she communed of the immaculate Mysteries.” O my God, O my God! May we too be counted worthy in this way! I do not want money, I do not want palaces, I do not want treasures, I do not want wisdom, I do not want anything; I want God to count me also, and you, worthy to have her end.

On the day when we depart from this vain world, may He count us also worthy to commune of the immaculate Mysteries for the last time, saying, “Remember me, Lord, when Thou comest in Thy kingdom” (Luke 23:42).

 

Greek source: https://katanixi.gr/mitropolitoy-florinis-p-aygoystinoy-2/