The Gospel today from the sixth chapter of St Matthew concludes with the words of Jesus Christ: “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness;” and then everything you need “shall be added to you.” I find those words from Jesus Christ quite challenging. What is the Kingdom of God and how can we seek it?

A note about this verse in The Orthodox Christian Study Bible suggests that Jesus Christ is “calling us to be free from anxiety about earthly things,” and He “directs us to look to heaven, secure in the faith that God will provide needed earthly blessings.” However, that still leaves open the question of precisely which “earthly blessings” do we need. What does the Lord want us to have on earth? I don’t know precisely which blessings the Lord wishes me to have now in my life on earth. Moreover, perhaps I don’t need to know. In fact, it’s best if none of us know precisely what the Lord has in store for us. The more important question is: How should we behave if we wish to receive whatever blessings the Lord has for us in His Kingdom?

Psalm 23 (24 in the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament Hebrew into Greek) reads in the Septuagint translation: “Who shall ascend onto the mountain of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? One who is guiltless in hand and clean in heart; he who did not occupy his soul with what is vain and did not swear deceitfully to his fellow: He it is that will receive the blessing from the Lord and mercy from His Divine Saviour. This is the generation of people who seek Him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.”

The God of Jacob—the God of the Jewish people—is also the God of us as Christians. Every generation over thousands of years seeks the Lord, so we today are indeed “the generation of people who seek Him.” Great! But how do we find the Lord? We can seek Him in our behaviour and in our prayers, but as St Augustine pointed out in that 15th chapter of his book, On the Trinity, cited by Father Gregory last week: “We wish, but have not [the] strength, to raise ourselves to behold that highest Trinity who is God.” In order to gain that strength to draw closer to the Holy Trinity, we need to reflect further on those “three basic aspects of the human mind, namely: memory, understanding and will” identified by St Augustine and explained by Father Gregory last week.

The reflection from St Augustine that I find most helpful is his quotation of St Paul’s insight in First Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood….” [end of quote] Our memories make mistakes; we are all forgetful to some extent. It is good then to recover our memories of being a Christian, as we seek to understand who we are and how we can best seek the presence of God in our lives. 

St John Chrysostom wrote of this Biblical text from St Paul: “God does not have a face, of course. Paul uses this image to denote greater clarity.” St John continues: If we are “sitting in the darkness of night [we] will not run after the light of the sun as long as [we] cannot see it. But when the dawn comes and the sun’s brightness begins to shine on [us], [we] will eventually follow after its light” [end of quote]. That’s us: the Light of Christ is beginning to shine on each of us; and we are starting to follow that Light—at our own pace, in the various directions in which Christ leads us.

Now St Augustine in that 15th chapter of On the Trinity, also sets out a model for us from Second Corinthians chapter 3, verses 16 to 18, that when someone “turns to the Lord,” and I quote: “There is freedom. And we all … beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into His likeness from one degree of glory to another.” That’s quite something. However, we can-  not claim that glory; the Lord gives it to us in freedom. But we can consider the glory of the Lord and the possibility that we can draw closer to the Trinity. I find it helpful to look into this mirror in which the Lord can be seen dimly, but first I need to see myself dimly.

I was helped by a book featured a few weeks ago on BBC’s Book of the Week, Henry Marsh’s Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery. As a young man, Dr Marsh worked as a hospital operating theatre porter; and that led him to decide to become a brain surgeon. However, he later became very confused and depressed. He felt, and I quote, that “I was completely and utterly alone. I cried and cried, but even as I cried I felt something frozen in my heart thawing…. I had been fighting myself for so long, and for so long I had viewed other people only as mirrors in which I tried to see my own reflection (I am, alas, still prone to this),” he concluded.

Perhaps many of us, certainly me, are prone to seeing our own reflection and needs when we relate to other people. Metropolitan John Zizioulas makes the same point in the opening pages of his book, Communion and Otherness. He writes: “Communion with the other [that is, another person] is not spontaneous; it is built upon fences which protect us from the dangers implicit in the other’s presence. We accept the other only in so far as he or she does not threaten our privacy or in so far as he or she is useful for our individual happiness,” he writes. Yet, as Metropolitan John continues, although we are at times threatened by others, we can also reach out to them. He reflects: “If the Church wants to be faithful to her true self, she must try to mirror the communion and otherness that exists in the [Holy Trinity]. The same is true of the human being as the ‘image of God’…. Otherness is inconceivable apart from relationship.” That is very important: “Otherness [that is, relating to other people] is inconceivable [that is incomprehensible, impossible to understand] apart from relationship.” Metropolitan John continues: “Father, Son and [Holy] Spirit are all names indicating relationship. No person can be different unless he [or she] is related [to others]. Communion does not threaten otherness; it generates it.”

I was thinking about how we can best relate to each other, when I was sent a reflection from a friend of mine—a Roman Catholic Carmelite nun. She and I shared a friendship with another Carmelite nun, Sister Liza, who died a few years ago from Motor Neurone Disease. Sister Liza had often insisted that “we are all in it together, and she used the image of rock climbers roped together, climbing the same cliff face.” I find that image helpful: we each climb the same cliff face that is life itself, finding different places to hold on to the rocks and to climb higher. It is good that we remember that we are roped together, both to help others if they fall, and to help ourselves if we suddenly begin to fall. That is an honest relationship, in which we can offer and receive help from others.

To conclude, we are each different people. It is good that we should each know ourselves—our strengths and our weaknesses—in order to relate honestly to others and to appreciate God’s love for each of us. As Father Gregory said last week, St Augustine is essentially right. We integrate into a whole our memories, as well as our understanding of ourselves and of each other and of God—that’s three different kinds of understanding—of ourselves, of each other and of God. Then we can will—we can choose, we can decide—to reach out to the Lord, as did each of the saints. But as we reach out, we also wait for the Lord to reach out to us with His special and different blessings for each of our lives, as He draws us into His Kingdom, on earth and in heaven.