SUNDAY OF THE LAST JUDGMENT

February 15, 2026

1 Corinthians 8.8-9.2

Matthew 25.31-46

In the outer world of space and time, we are now one week from the Gates of Great Lent. But, in the Church, we enter the timeless world of the soul. This morning’s Gospel reveals that when we stand before the Altar of the Church, we are standing at the invisible Judgment Seat of Christ on the Last Day.

The Bible is the real history of salvation as theosis, of God becoming flesh and partaking in our death so that we can become partakers of Christ [Heb 3.14]. Receiving His Heavenly Spirit [Jn 1.12], we now can become communicants of the divine nature [2 Pt 1.4]. This is our theosis, our salvation. The Scripture readings in the Church’s daily lectionary make visible this invisible history of the soul that worldly eyes cannot see. Note, then, that this morning’s Gospel of the Last Judgment stands in the middle of our readings from St Mark last week that brought us to the LORD’s death on the Cross, and our readings from St Luke next week that will take us to the LORD’s burial with the Myrrhbearers observing how He is placed in the Tomb.

When, therefore, we stand before the Holy Doors at the Vespers of Forgiveness next Sunday, we will be standing with the Myrrhbearers before the LORD’s Tomb. When we enter Great Lent at the conclusion of that service, we can, if we so choose, follow them into the mystery of God’s Sabbath Rest to prepare ointments and spices in the stillness of prayer, the prayer of the heart that is in the Name of the LORD Jesus Christ, according to the commandment [Lk 23.56].

Our readings from St Mark last week of the LORD’s trial and crucifixion have brought us to this morning’s Gospel of the Last Judgment on the Last Day. In our readings from St Mark last week, we were brought to stand before the LORD crucified on the Cross. This morning, we stand before the LORD as the Judge sitting on His Judgment Seat. Can you see that the LORD Jesus Christ is judging the world from the Cross, and that the Cross is His Judgment Seat? As the world is judging God and crucifying Him, God is judging the world from the Judgment Seat of His Cross; but whereas they are crucifying Him, He is interceding the Father ‘to forgive them for they know not what they do.’

So long as it is Today [Heb 3.13], the LORD, having become our kinsman, sharing in our flesh and blood [Heb 2.13-14], is not judging us from outside of us, but from inside our heart. He is judging us not to condemn us [Jn 3.16] but to open our eyes so we can see in His Light that shines in the darkness that we are not like Him. We have become like our idols, the gods we live for that are not gods. Are they merciful? Do they forgive the enemy?

This morning’s Gospel may be very hard not because it’s judging me as a sheep or a goat, but because I see what it means to unite myself to Christ in Holy Baptism in the likeness of His death. It means to renounce my idols, my self-esteem and vainglory, and to become like Christ; and that means to become merciful as God is merciful, to forgive as God forgives. ‘Behold, the judge is at the door,’ says St James. Therefore, grumble not against one another lest ye be condemned.’ (Jas 5.9).

Great Lent begins next Sunday evening, at the conclusion of the Vespers of Forgiveness. Who of us is able to stand before the Judge on His Judgment Seat of the Cross if we are not merciful as God is merciful if we are not willing to forgive as God forgives? And so, next Sunday at the Vespers of Forgiveness, all of us, hierarchs, clergy, and laity, will be standing outside the closed Holy Doors of the sanctuary with the Myrrhbearing women, standing mystically with them before the LORD’s Tomb, the LORD’s Body inside the Tomb, sealed off from us by a ‘very large stone.’

Understand that the LORD’s Tomb is the mystery of my heart where I am deep beyond all things and where I open onto the Kingdom of Heaven. And that very large stone may be an image of the wall of enmity that I have built brick by brick by not forgiving as Christ God forgives, and by not being merciful as Christ God is merciful.

The LORD’s Tomb is the entrance into the Garden of Eden [Jn 19.41]. Christ is the Tree of Life, and He is inside the Tomb, sealed off from me by that very large stone. But Christ is also the Path that leads into His Tomb. Even as He is in the Tomb with His Body, in His ‘soul’ He is invisibly present with us in hell, here where we stand outside the gates of Eden, here in the tomb of our heart like Lazarus in his tomb, the initial destination of our Lenten journey.

And, the same ‘great voice’ of His command, ‘Come forth!’ to the dead Lazarus inside the tomb four days dead on Lazarus Saturday at the end of Great Lent we heard last Friday. For, we read in St Mark’s Gospel: ‘As He breathed out [from the Cross], He sent forth a great voice!’ [Mk 15.37] Might the LORD’s command to Lazarus at the end of Great Lent, ‘Come forth!’ from the tomb be what’s hidden in His WORD from this morning’s Gospel to us today as we prepare for the beginning of Great Lent: ‘Inasmuch as you showed mercy to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me’? And in His WORD to Peter in next Sunday’s Gospel when we begin Great Lent: ‘If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you…’?

We read in St Mark’s Gospel: ‘As He breathed out [from the Cross], He sent forth a great voice!’ One hears the word of the Psalmist being fulfilled: ‘He sends forth His Spirit and they are created. He renews the face of the earth.’ ‘His WORD ‘flows’ from day to day; night proclaims knowledge to night. The ‘melody’ [of His command] goes forth into all the earth, for, it says, He has placed His Tabernacle in the sun [His Body, incarnate of the Virgin and the Spirit in the movement of time, in history]. From His Bridal Chamber, He goes forth as a Bridegroom. His Exodus is from the far end of heaven, and His setting is to the other end, and no one is hidden from His warmth,’ the warmth of His command to ‘Come forth!’ [Ps 104.30 &18.1-5]

The LORD breathes out His great voice after He cries out: ‘My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ Is this the moment when He dies, when He is separated from the Father and He becomes one with us? The command of His great voice, then, is breathed out onto all those in the tombs.

Does St Mark mean to show that the prophecy of Isaiah is now fulfilled? ‘With the breath of His lips shall He destroy the ungodly one’ [Isa 11.4]. For, when the LORD sends forth His great voice as He breathes out His Spirit, it says that the temple of the curtain was split in two from top to bottom. Is this the wall of enmity, that large stone that seals us off from God inside our heart, that was already being rolled away when the LORD prayed on the Judgment Seat of His Cross: ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’?

That means that when we unite ourselves to Christ as we swore we would do at our Baptism, we are uniting ourselves to the better and changeless Path that ascends to God, and that revealed Himself in the depths of the Jordan, when the LORD bore all of creation down with Him into its depths, and the heavens were split open. Entering the Gates of Great Lent, then, we are following Him with the myrrhbearing women into the tomb of our heart. In the ascetical disciplines of Lent, His Spirit is carrying us with Ezekiel into the Valley of ‘dry bones’ that we will read at the Matins of Great and Holy Saturday [Eze 37.1-14]. There, in the tomb of our heart, we will find the steps of the Ladder, the Cross, that ascends into the LORD’s Tomb beyond that large stone, and into His Holy Spirit who carries us through the Door that is Christ Himself, through the outlet of the sea [Eze 47.9] and into the Land of our Inheritance, which is Christ Himself [St Makarios the Egyptian & St Isaac of Nineveh].

In the outer world of time, Great Lent is a period of six weeks. But in the inner world of the soul, Great Lent is at the heart of a timeless descent with our mind into our heart as into the tomb of Lazarus on the Path that is Christ God. Great Lent is about submitting ourselves to the judgment of the LORD on the Judgment Seat of His Cross. He judges to diagnose, not to condemn. He judges me, like a Great Physician, to show me what’s putting me to death – and this morning, I am shown that it is my choosing not to forgive as God forgives, not to be merciful as God is merciful – that I may repent and unite myself to Christ in the likeness of His death and put to death my unforgiving heart in the life of His Resurrection.

I am a spiritual corpse; I cannot raise myself to life. By my own strength, I cannot forgive as God forgives; I cannot be merciful as God is merciful. I need the Church for She is the mystery of Christ risen from the dead. I need Her sacramental mysteries for through them I receive the power of the Heavenly Spirit to become a child of God in the likeness of Christ. In the prayers of the Church, in Her divine services, the LORD Jesus Christ risen from the dead is working His salvation in the midst of the earth of my body and soul. The prayers, the ascetical disciplines, and the services of the Church are the incarnation of Christ, the better and changeless Path leading me inward into the tomb of my heart, and bringing me forth into His Tomb, into the Fountain of our Resurrection. Through the visible liturgical and sacramental rites of His Church, He sows in my soul the invisible Seed of His Heavenly Spirit who gives me the power to forgive as God forgives as I put on Christ who is risen from the dead, destroying death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life! Amen! Glory to Jesus Christ! Most Holy Theotokos, save us!

Matthew 21.18-43

Shortly, we will venerate the Icon and sing the beautiful Hymn of Light: ‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; and I have no wedding garment that I may enter! O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’ What is the Bridal Chamber? What is the wedding garment?

Do you know that your Holy Baptism, when you were united to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection, is the Spiritual Marriage of the Church? Raised from the Font, the heavens were opened to you. You were clothed in the Robe of Light, which was Christ Himself. This is the ‘wedding garment.’ When you drew near the Chalice in the fear of God, with faith and love, you partook of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb.

From the moment of your baptism, when heaven was opened to you, have there not been moments in the worship of the Church when the beauty of the Church’s hymns and prayers, the fragrance of her incense, the serene countenance of the holy icons gazing down on you, the spiritual nobility and majesty of the Divine Liturgy, seized your soul and opened to you, if only for an instant, a spiritual Beauty not of this world, and there stirred within you, as it did in Solomon, a visceral love for that Beauty and a longing to make the Wisdom of God your spouse? (Wisd 8.2)

Might this be a vision of the bridal chamber that was opened to you at your baptism?

‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior! And I have no wedding garment that I may enter!’ As Lazarus was clothed in grave clothes, soiled and stinking from his being four days in the tomb, do we not see, if ever a vision of the bridal chamber is opened to us, that we have no wedding garment? Our garments are soiled and stinking grave clothes.

The wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism is Christ the LORD. The LORD, says the Psalmist, is my life and my salvation. And St Paul says, Christ is my life. Christ Himself says to Mary and Martha: I am the Resurrection and the Life.

From this, we can see that the garment is an image of the life we are living; and there are two garments, two lives we may choose to live or choose to put on as we choose to put on a garment. There is the garment of the life of this world that is passing away, sewn with threads of corruption spun from the passions, from the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, from covetousness, which is idolatry. Its patterns and designs are cut out from the lustful thoughts and impure images, the fantasies and desires that occupy the mind.

Then there is the life of Christ, the wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism. If I have no wedding garment that I may enter the sacred bridal chamber of the Heavenly Bridegroom, can you see that it’s because I have given my soul to many husbands; I have chosen Caesar to be my king; I have given myself to the idols of the passions—gluttony, lust, greed, anger and the rest—and that the garments I have chosen to wear are the grave clothes of the corruption that is in the world through lust and covetousness?

‘Despising the divine commands, my soul,’ Mother Church calls out to us at Friday Matins of last week, ‘by thine own choice, thou hast surrendered thyself to corruption. Sunk in slumber through thy many trespasses, thou hast covered with filth the garment that God wove for thee, and made thyself unfit for the wedding of the King. Therefore, cry to the Savior: Tear in pieces my sackcloth and clothe me with gladness.’ (LTS 306)

You have chosen to come to this Bridegroom Matins service. You have chosen to come into the presence of the Bridegroom. You have chosen to draw near the Bridal Chamber; and the Bridegroom comes to us in our filthy grave clothes as He came to Lazarus in Bethany. I think we may say that in the beauty of these Bridegroom Matins, we hear Him crying to each one of us: ‘Come forth!’ Rouse yourself in the tomb of your heart. Hear, feel, the Bridegroom’s voice calling to you. Leave the grave clothes, the garment of this worldly life behind you. What keeps us from putting on the garment of the Savior’s divine commandments? Is it not our own choice to keep wearing the grave clothes of this life? I love those who love me, says the Bridegroom. Those who seek me diligently will find me! Nothing prevents us from choosing to heed the Bridegroom’s call, to rise up and come forth in the repentance of a broken and contrite heart, that the Bridegroom may illumine the vesture of our soul and save us and receive us, clothed again in the wedding garment of our baptism, into the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Resurrection. Amen!

Behold the Bridegroom comes at Midnight!’ Midnight is that ‘instant’ when, ‘in the twinkling of an eye,’ (1 Cor 15.52) the old passes away and the ‘dead are raised incorruptible, and we are changed.’ This change doesn’t just happen. It happens because the Bridegroom comes at Midnight and consummates His union with us, the children of flesh and blood, in the ‘bridal chamber.’ But the Church shows the Bridegroom consummating His union with us in the tomb. For there, having shared in our conception and birth through His Virgin Mother (Gal 4.4), He now shares in our death (Heb 2.14) in the flesh He received from Her, and it is in that instant that ‘we are changed.’

We find the divine mystery of Midnight, then, in the bridal chamber; and we find the bridal chamber in that ‘point’ in our inner man where we are dead. The bridal chamber, that is to say, is found in our heart, ‘for the real death is within, in the heart, and is concealed, and it is the inner man that perishes.’ [Macarius Hom XV.39, 125]

If the bridal chamber is in the heart, then it is in our true ‘self’; for ‘the heart is deep, beyond all things, and it is the man.’ [Jer 17.9] In the bridal chamber, then, we come upon our true self as the image of God. In this image, we yearn to attain to the likeness of God. And this character of the imago Dei which, as Origen wrote, constitutes our very essence, itself reveals that, by nature, we yearn to be one with the Bridegroom in the bridal chamber of our heart; but if Christ is Himself the Image of God in whom we came to be and in whom we move and have our being, then we are given to see that the bridal chamber of our heart comes to be and has its essence and movement from outside itself, in ekstasis, in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD Jesus Christ our God and Savior.

Illumined by the light of this doctrine of the Church, we begin to know ourselves. We see that the essential movement of our heart is the erotic yearning to belong not to ourselves but to the Bridegroom who comes at Midnight.

And so, when the mind that has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom in its heart learns that the Bridegroom is coming at Midnight, it rouses itself. It hastens to descend into the bridal chamber of the heart to cry out: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, O God! Through the Theotokos, have mercy on me!’ For the soul, if she only knows about God in her head, she is still dead and her heart is still stone. The soul who longs to live is the soul who longs to know God directly; but ‘there is no direct knowledge of God without an exceedingly great love, and such love does not come from the head. It must come from the heart.’ [Art of Prayer 20] And so the soul hastens to descend with her mind into the bridal chamber of her heart, for she longs to receive Him and to cleave to Him, to become bone of His bones and flesh of His flesh, so that it is no longer she who lives but the Bridegroom who lives in her.

And the Bridegroom comes. He comes to us in our own flesh and blood through the woman [Gal 4.4]. He comes to us in the Bridal Chamber of the All-Holy Virgin’s sacred womb, in the inmost sanctuary of His Living Temple. Knitting Her pure blood into the ‘schema,’ the ‘garment’ of man [Phil 2.8], He clothed Himself in our flesh and blood and was no more ashamed to call us ‘brethren.’ [Heb 2.11]

And when the soul darkened and weighed down by her many sins, learns that He has come into the ‘house’ [Lk 7.37ff.] of her own flesh and blood [Heb 2.14], she comes to Him with an alabaster jar of perfume, and she stands behind Him weeping. She wets His pure feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair. She kisses them, she pours perfume on them, and through her tears, she prays to Him softly: ‘Thy bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; but I have no wedding garment that I may enter. O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’

And the Savior, ‘spellbound as it were by goodness, love and longing, relinquishes His utter transcendence’ [St Maximos Philo 281] to the point of death on the Cross. Partaking of our death, the Bridegroom breathes out His Spirit on the Cross [exepneusen, Lk 23.46] and destroys the death that separated us from His love in the bridal chamber of our heart;’ [Heb 2.14-15, Rom 8.39]. His Body was ‘placed in the tomb,’ the Tomb was ‘changed’ into the Bridal Chamber, ‘and the Sabbath dawned,’ says St Luke [epephosken, Lk 23.54]. And in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD’s Tomb, the soul was enlightened, and the heart that before was a tomb sealed off by a stone was ‘changed’ in that instant into a bridal chamber and into a heart of flesh, a living heart!

The wedding garment? It is Christ Himself, whose Light we put on when we were raised from the Font, having united ourselves to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection. Can you see, then, that the Baptismal Font is the bridal chamber? And can you see that the Bridal Chamber is the Church? For the Church is Christ’s Body that He received from the pure blood of the Virgin, and in this Body, we are fashioned anew as children of God in the mystery of His Sabbath Rest, in the Tomb of our death that has received the Body of Him Who Is the Resurrection and the Life. When we pursue the Bridegroom in the baptismal Font, we receive His Seed into our dead, stony heart, and in that instant, our heart is ‘changed’ into a heart of flesh, a living heart; and we are ‘changed’ from children of blood born of the desires of the flesh into children of God born from above in the Love of the Holy Spirit.

From an ancient Christian text, we come upon this ancient biblical rubric of the Church: ‘By striving in the visible Church, we enter the invisible Church of the heart and the invisible Church of Heaven.’ (Liber Graduum XII) In the coming week, on the loom of this biblical rubric, we will weave the sights, sounds, movements, smells, all the elements of creation, both visible and invisible, into a wedding garment that can be seen, heard, smelled, and touched with the bodily senses. Who would not want to be clothed in this wedding garment who has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom? For ‘He is the Beautiful and the Good whom all things seek at every opportunity, and there is no being who does not participate in Him, and He attracts the [erotic] desire of all who are drawn towards Him, and He thirsts to be thirsted for, He longs to be longed for, and He loves to be loved!’ [Philo II 280-81]

And if we would clothe the hidden man of the heart with the death of Christ made visible for us in the rites of Holy Week, then would we come invisibly into that ‘Midnight’ when the Bridegroom comes, and we are changed. We become like the children with the palms of victory. They are the emblems of the Cross of Christ our King. And on Pascha Night, we follow, mystically, our King who goes forth from the Tomb like a Bridegroom in procession. He is raising us from our graves and bringing us to our own land into the Jerusalem on high as His prophets foretold. [Eze 37.13-14]

For, if we have received into the bridal chamber of our heart, in the sacramental mysteries of the Church, the Seed of the ‘heavenly man,’ then we carry the Bridegroom’s death in our mortal body. [2 Cor 4.10] That is, we carry the Bridegroom’s love in our body—for His death is the supreme manifestation, the final Incarnation of His extreme humility and compassion in which He created the world, and in which He recreated it when we had fallen. And if we tend that Seed and cultivate it through the ascetical disciplines of the Church, the Cross of Christ the Church gives us to take up if we want to follow Him—for they are the ‘flower of abstinence that grows from the wood of His Cross’ [LT 231]—then yearning for the Bridegroom begins to grow in us into a tree of life, and love for the Bridegroom begins to reign in our mortal bodies. We tend that Seed by taking up the ascetical disciplines of the Church, our cross, our ‘palm of victory.’ By the Grace of the Holy Spirit that shines in them, we strive to be obedient to sin and its carnal desires no more. We strive to lose our life for His sake; that is, in our love for the Bridegroom, we now present our bodies to Him as instruments of righteousness and no more to sin as instruments of unrighteousness. [Rm 6.12-13] Now the Bridegroom’s death is swallowing our death; now our mortal and perishable bodies are putting on the immortal and imperishable ‘wedding garment’ of the Bridal Chamber; now the Life of the Bridegroom begins to manifest itself even now in our mortal bodies [2 Cor 4.10]. It manifests itself in the hope that begins to form in us from the Seed of God’s love poured out into our hearts in the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Church. This is a real and living hope; and it is the pledge of our inheritance, which is our own land that is not of this world. It is the kingdom of heaven with all its glorious riches, found through the doors of Midnight in the deep, beyond all things, in our deep heart, in the mystery of the bridal chamber. Amen!