He is not in church. And he doesn’t seem to have any connection with the life of God. So why don’t you care?
Don’t you ask yourself, where is your brother? Doesn’t his spiritual and physical condition concern you?
– Could he have left home and now be caught up in illegal activities?
– Perhaps he is in despair?
– Perhaps he is caught in the traps of heretics, of error, of sorcery or Satan worship?
– Perhaps he frequents places of vice and cannot get away from them, and is wasting all the vitality of his youth there?
– Perhaps he is influenced by some atheist philosophical current, or involved with mafias?
Where is your brother?
A convicting and embarrassing question for those of us who live the religious life self-satisfied and arrogant.
Where, then, is your brother?
– He is always absent from the house of God. And we don’t see him on the straight path.
– Perhaps he is very far away, dead to the faith?
– Perhaps you are responsible for his spiritual death?
What fault is it of ours that the other is in a bad state and has drifted away?
– Certainly, we are very much at fault.
– We are at fault as long as we do not have love.
– We are at fault because we are lazy in spreading the Gospel.
Our shortcomings, our inertia and our spiritual laziness are, at bottom, hardness of heart and inhumanity.
This is what the divine Chrysostom teaches:
“That is why everything is in turmoil: because of our indifference, our inhumanity and our negligence.”
– The guilty one is not only the person who raises a knife and kills another.
– The guilty one is the one who arms the criminal’s hand. What fundamentally arms the hands of evildoers and criminals is the indifference of those called good and the sluggishness of those regarded as Christians. The absence of love opens the way wide to crime.
The guilty one is also the one who deals the final blow to the victim. In the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan, the guilty ones were not the robbers, but those two men, the priest and the Levite, both of them religious figures. Through their indifference, their self-sufficiency and their boundless selfishness, they in effect dealt the final blow to the dying traveller.
We have our share of responsibility for every injustice that happens in the world.
We are even more at fault when we act, indirectly, against our brothers; when we insult others, who are the image of God.
But what can we do? Are we to stand guard over our brothers? Are we to be their keepers?
Yes, you are your brother’s keeper, since his problem is your problem. You are your brother’s keeper, because your brother is not a stranger; he is you. If your brother is lost, you will be responsible, because you were not a watchful guard at the lookout post of love.
The woman in the Gospel parable turned her house upside down to find the lost coin. We don’t turn the world upside down; we don’t even bother to make the smallest move to find our lost brother, our brother whose personal worth is beyond price, since Christ was crucified for him. So we ask:
What can we do?
Christ praises the woman who lit her lamp and searched diligently until she found the lost coin (Luke 15:8-10).
– So let us eagerly light the lamp of love.
– Let us move with zeal through the whole house and society, with an unexpected gesture of care.
– Let us search earnestly and with fervent prayer.
And when we have worked hard to seek the other and reaped a good result, then we can rejoice and invite others to share our joy.
For there is no feast in the Church like the feast of finding lost people and their salvation.
And it is celebrated together with the feast of the angels.
From the book “Do You Know What Love Means?”
by Archimandrite Daniel Aerakis
