A HOMILY FOR THE SUNDAY OF THE HOLY FATHERS OF THE FIRST OECUMENICAL COUNCIL
About Our Truest Earthly Fathers
Brothers and sisters!
Today the Church of Christ commemorates the Holy Fathers of the First Oecumenical Council, and so my word to you this morning will be about these Holy Fathers and all the Holy Fathers who, with Christ’s apostles the divine apostles, are our truest earthly fathers.
In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Saint Paul says, I write not these things to shame you, but as my beloved sons I warn you. For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel. Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me. For this cause I sent unto you Timothy, who is my beloved son.[1] From this passage we see, dear brothers and sisters, how Saint Paul regarded himself as a true father to Saint Timothy and the other early Christians. We see also how misleading is the interpretation of the Protestant sectarians who distort the sense of Christ’s well-known words in the Gospel of Saint Matthew about calling no man father. In that passage, Christ is warning his disciples against the Pharisees, bidding the disciples to humility, and making it clear that He is the very chief of fathers, teachers, and masters. He is not prohibiting the giving of honor to parents or to our spiritual fathers, or forbidding that we call them parents or fathers. For if Paul is spiritually the father of many, how can it be that Christians are absolutely forbidden to say that anyone is their father? How, indeed, are Christians to address their own fathers according to the flesh?
If, brothers and sisters, the holy Apostle Paul was a true father to his spiritual children and his flock, then just who are our spiritual fathers after Christ, our spiritual fathers who have begotten us through the gospel, besides Saint Paul and the other apostles who first delivered the gospel to the Church? After all, many centuries have elapsed from the time of the apostles till ours. During that time, who was it that safeguarded the deposit of Christian truth passed down from the apostles and ensured that it reach us intact, so that we might be born according to the Spirit?
Today the Church of Christ extols and magnifies those guardians and heralds of the faith who, with Saint Paul and the other apostles, have begotten us through the gospel. They are the Holy Fathers of the First Oecumenical Council – the foremost of all – and the other Holy Fathers of Christ’s holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church, to whom the entire world owes an incalculable debt, and to whom we the Orthodox owe our very lives as Christians. Were it not for the Holy Fathers, divine truth would long ago have vanished from the earth, the way to salvation would have been lost, and we would in some ways be in a worse situation than were men before the coming of Christ. Because of the Holy Fathers, this world is not solely a realm of darkness, error, and heresy, but a place of light, truth, and life.
Alexander the Great used to say that he owed his physical being, his physical life, to his natural father, King Philip of Macedon, but to his teacher and mentor, the great philosopher Aristotle, he owed the “good life”; that is, it was from Aristotle that he learned to live as a real human being, with higher ideals. How much more than this do we Orthodox Christians owe to the Holy Fathers, who have showed us the true Christian life by living it perfectly themselves! How much more do we owe the Holy Fathers, who tirelessly expounded the Scriptures so that we could be initiated into Gospel truth and avoid pernicious, soul-destroying heretical error! How much more do we owe the Holy Fathers, who defended the one, original, blameless faith of Christ unto blood, delivering it undiminished and undefiled unto every generation of the Orthodox and enabling the salvation of our souls!
Acknowledging the enormous debt we owe all the Holy Fathers and particularly the Holy Fathers of the First Oecumenical Council, the Church of Christ on this day with love and sweet devotion chants: “Ye [are] most brilliant stars of the spiritual firmament, impregnable towers of the mystical Sion, fragrant flowers of Paradise, all-golden mouths of the Word, the boast of Nicaea, and the adornment of the whole world.”
Dear Christians, in the passage I quoted from First Corinthians, the Apostle Paul enjoined his readers to be followers of him, their holy father. May today’s commemoration of the Holy Fathers of the First Oecumenical Council -- who upheld the central dogma of our faith, the Orthodox teaching regarding Christ’s full divinity as true God, consubstantial with the Father -- reminds us always to be followers of these and the other Holy Fathers. For with the divine apostles, the Holy Fathers are our trustworthy and certain guides to the fullness of Christian truth and thereby to the eternal salvation of our souls. Amen.
[1] I Cor. 4:14-17
