Homily on the Sunday of the Last Judgment - St. John Maximovitch

On the second Sunday before Great Lent the Church commemorates the Last Judgment when all will be judged according to their love and faith. The great Wonderworker of the latter times, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, offers a message ever timely and sobering, with the sole purpose of rousing our sleeping souls to watchfulness, to stand worthily before the dread judgment seat of Christ at the end of time.  

“Under Antichrist, there will be an immense falling away from the faith. Many bishops will change in faith and in justification will point to the brilliant situation of the Church. The search for compromise will be the characteristic disposition of men. Straight-forwardness of confession will disappear. Men will cleverly justify their fall, and gracious evil will support such a general disposition. There will be the habit of apostasy from truth and the sweetness of compromise and sin in men.”  

“‘The end of the world’ signifies not the annihilation of the world, but its transformation. Everything will be transformed suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye.” 

“When ‘the books are opened,’ it will become clear that the roots of all vices lie in the human soul. Here is a drunkard or a lecher: when the body has died, some may think that sin is dead too. No! There was an inclination to sin in the soul, and that sin was sweet to the soul, and if the soul has not repented and has not freed itself of the sin, it will come to the Last Judgment with the same desire for sin. It will never satisfy that desire and in that soul there will be the suffering of hatred. It will accuse everyone and everything in its tortured condition; it will hate everyone and everything. ‘There will be gnashing of teeth’ of powerless malice and the unquenchable fire of hatred.”  

Text: https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2010... 

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