"And thus, having patiently endured, he obtained the promise" (Heb 6:15). Some think that a lack of patience and constancy in works undertaken for eternal salvation is an ordinary defect, due to human weakness, and therefore not very serious.
Unfortunately, it is perhaps true that this defect is ordinary. But it is by no means true that it is not very serious. Many souls fail to attain salvation because of this defect. Can this be unimportant?
Who would not agree to enter paradise if anyone could enter it by a few steps, in a few minutes or hours? Even a thief and a robber would more willingly go after such easy and certain gain than after the dangerous and uncertain gain of theft and robbery.
But when people see that they must walk long toward eternal salvation on the narrow way, and must pass with difficulty through the strait gate, then constancy is needed, patience, and longsuffering. Then many turn aside to the broad way in search of temporal pleasure.
And since the way of lawful and permitted pleasure is also not broad enough, and its means are limited and constrained by legality itself, they pass, through the same lack of patience, to unlawful, corrupt, and lawless pleasures. Without noticing it, they approach eternal destruction.
Therefore the holy Apostle beneficently teaches us constancy and patience for the attainment of eternal salvation. For this he points to the example of Abraham, who "having patiently endured, obtained the promise." Let us follow his indication with the eye of the mind. Let us enter into his teaching.
God commanded Abraham to leave his fatherland and go into an unknown land. As a reward for faith and obedience to this command, He uttered a promise: "I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, and you shall be blessed. I will bless those who bless you, and those who curse you I will curse; and in you all the tribes of the earth shall be blessed" (Gen 12:2-3).
Abraham believed and obeyed. He went out from Ur and came to Haran. There he lost his father, perhaps not only from old age, but also from the hardships of the journey. Yet the promise was not fulfilled.
Abraham came into the land of Canaan and learned that this was the land promised to him and to his seed. But famine drove him from this land into Egypt, a land still more unknown and still more dangerous for him. The promise became almost impossible to fulfill. Nevertheless Abraham continued to believe and endured.
After he returned to the promised land, a quarrel between the shepherds of Abraham and those of his nephew Lot forced them to separate. Consequently Abraham became weaker, and was exposed to greater danger from the neighboring foreign peoples. Soon after this, because Lot was taken captive in Sodom, Abraham was drawn into war against four kings.
Melchizedek blessed him as victor by word. Yet the blessing of God, which was to make him a great nation, did not appear. Abraham still did not have the promised son when the enslavement of his descendants for four hundred years was already foretold to him. Longsuffering was needed to behold such prolonged calamities, when even the beginning of the blessing was not yet visible.
Abraham hastened to have a son by Hagar, but this was a mistake. Ishmael was not the son of promise. The son of promise had to be born from Sarah. But Sarah was barren, and Abraham and Sarah were both old. What longsuffering was needed still to believe, and still to hope for the fulfillment of the promise.
At last the promised Isaac was born and grew up. The event of God's promise had begun. The hope of blessed offspring shone forth. Was this the end of Abraham's longsuffering? Not yet. Suddenly God required Isaac as a whole burnt offering. The father had to slay his son, and in him all his offspring, and abolish God's promise.
One cannot sufficiently marvel that even in this case the father of believers had faith and longsuffering enough. Yet he did. Isaac was offered in sacrifice in the heart of his father, obedient to God. By this very act he was secured for life, and for universal and eternal blessing.
At that time, through the distance of the ages, Abraham saw the day of Christ, offered as a living and saving sacrifice on the Cross, "and he saw it and rejoiced" (Jn 8:56). He rejoiced not only over his promised offspring, but also over his own promised eternal salvation. "And thus, having patiently endured, he obtained the promise."
Perhaps some will think: What is the Patriarch to us? Who can be another Abraham? These thoughts cannot be approved. They are evasions and excuses from good struggles of longsuffering in faith. They belong to that very impatience, inconstancy, faintheartedness, and laziness against which the Apostle wishes to arm us by the power of Abraham's example.
It is true that Abraham is a unique man, a Patriarch, and the father of believers. But you, children of faith, are you not children of this same father of believers? Is it fitting for children not to imitate a good father? Is it fitting to say, "What is our father to us?"
Why then does Scripture speak to us of Abraham and the other ancient saints, if this does not concern us? No, the same Scripture says of their paths and destinies: "Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come" (1 Cor 10:11).
It does not matter that we live almost at the other end of the ages from the Old Testament Patriarchs. Their examples are not as far from us as their times. Their experiences were guided by Providence in such a way that, while they were moving toward the fulfillment of temporal and eternal promises given to them, they showed us the paths to our eternal salvation. For this very reason their experiences were described in the sacred books.
The point is not to repeat literally and visibly what we see in them. God "made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit" (2 Cor 3:6). We must notice in the Old Testament saints the spirit of faith, which from afar brought them near to the coming Christ. We must receive this spirit as an inheritance lawfully belonging to us who believe in Christ who has come.
Therefore we must look to Abraham's longsuffering in faith. We must move ourselves to practice the works of faith and salvation constantly and patiently, as far as our weakness allows, and still more, as far as grace grants.
Of course, Abraham alone does not give an example here. Many, if not all, who pleased God do so. Isaac, the direct son and heir of Abraham's promise, did he not also, like his father, "having patiently endured, obtain the promise" of blessed offspring?
Without wavering in faith, he had to endure Rebecca's barrenness for twenty years, dangers and injuries from the men of Gerar, and finally blindness. This blindness prevented him from giving the blessing, as he wished, to Esau, the firstborn by nature. Yet at the same time, with his longsuffering in faith, it helped give the irrevocable blessing to Jacob, the chosen firstborn of grace.
And blessed Jacob, whom God Himself promised "not to forsake" (Gen 28:15), had to endure much. He endured for a long time the deadly hatred of his elder brother, twenty years of labor in the house of ungrateful Laban, dangers of attacks, and many family griefs. He endured the loss of Joseph, the son of his love and hopes. Finally he endured the burden of famine and a difficult migration in old age to Egypt, a land not promised. There his descendants were to suffer, and the prophecy given to his grandfather could not have been unknown to him.
Who does not know how much Joseph had to endure in order to attain salvation for himself and for his tribe? He endured the enmity of his brothers, slavery, slander, bonds, and prison. Moses, in order to accomplish the temporal salvation of his people, as a figure of our eternal salvation, likewise had to endure throughout his whole life. He endured forty years of voluntary exile, a difficult struggle with Pharaoh's hardness, and an almost uninterrupted struggle with the obstacles of nature and with the inconstancy and unfaithfulness of his own people.
But let us hasten from distant figures to nearer examples. The Apostles, martyrs, and venerable ones endured so much in preaching the Gospel, in sufferings for the faith, and in the struggles of the spiritual life. Let us hear even one of them, Saint Paul, speaking of himself: "From the Jews five times I received forty lashes less one," that is, on five different occasions he received thirty-nine blows. "Three times I was beaten with rods; once I was stoned; three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I spent in the deep. In journeys often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils from my own countrymen, in perils from the nations, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren. In toil and hardship, in vigils often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness" (2 Cor 11:24-27).
Finally, let us remember the longsuffering of the man of God who has gathered us today into this church. Wondrous Alexius left home, wealth, parents, and bride, choosing the narrow way of salvation. He spent seventeen years without a dwelling, among beggars in the church porch. Still more difficult, as the account of his life says, the ever-memorable one "remained unknown in his father's house, so wretched and worn down, assaulted by the enemy, inflamed by love for his kin, and mocked by his own servants, not for ten days or a hundred, but for seventeen whole years."
What decisiveness in the intention of salvation. What constancy in its fulfillment. What patience in temptations.
Our laziness is unwilling to look at such examples of longsuffering in faith. It more willingly seeks examples of how one might be saved more easily and quickly. It is true that the infinitely merciful God has made even this possible, so that no sinner, in any circumstances, should have cause to despair.
In the Gospel we see how a few words of repentance and faith opened paradise to the thief. Yet in this we must also notice that this example is without parallel in certain circumstances. By fate the dying man was placed in an unexpected nearness to the Savior, with no possibility of moving away from Him, being nailed to the cross, and at miraculous moments of grace.
We should also note that the repentance which was not too late for the thief on the cross was too late for the other, in the very same circumstances and at the very same grace-filled moments. The saved thief turned to Christ alone, in contrast to the impenitence of the chief priests, rulers, Pharisees, scribes, elders, and all Jerusalem.
Who will dare to say that this swift, irresistible rising from destruction into salvation is easier and more reliable to accomplish than attaining salvation by gradual progress along the way of repentance and self-correction, with patience and longsuffering?
To comfort our laziness and inconstancy, we say that God also receives those who often fall. Yes, He receives such people too. But first He sees why they fall: whether from weakness, ignorance, temptations, and involuntary stumblings; or, on the contrary, from negligence and attachment to the vices into which they fall, despite the witness of conscience against the iniquities into which they fall.
There are those who fall, and the help of grace hastens to them. There are also those who fall, to whom the wisdom of God, despised by them, sends the word they deserve: "Then I also will laugh at your destruction. It will come to pass that when you call upon Me, I will not hear you. The wicked will seek Me and will not find Me" (Prov 1:26-28).
Suppose you were testing a man whom you intended to receive into your house. Suppose he spent a few minutes doing what you entrusted to him, and then for a whole day, or more, turned to what pleased him, to what was contrary to you, and to what did not agree with the order of your house. Would you receive him?
THEOSIS