Another very symptomatic sign of our times is the next
one mentioned in this chapter of Matthew: that the love of many grows
cold. This seems to be a definite characteristic of our times, to a quite
greater degree than at any time in past history. One can see this in what
can be called nihilism. People commit crimes for no particular
reason, not for gain but just for a thrill because they do not have God inside
them. In all kinds of places now, one can see the lack of normal human
relationships in families, which produces cold people. It is this kind of
people who, in a totalitarian society, are used as slave drives, working in the
concentration camps and so forth.
Recently we had the tragedy in Jonestown, which was composed
of American citizens. The people there were idealists who devoted
themselves utterly to a cause. Although it's come out now that it was
actually a communist commune, still the people were supposed to be
Christians. The leader was a minister of the so-called Church
of Christ, one of the mainline
denominations. And yet these people, supposedly having some awareness of
God and Christianity, coldly killed each other. Those who drank and
administered the poison to their children did so with calm faces. There's
no problem: that's just your duty, that's what you're told to do. This
kind of coldness is what Christ is talking about. Any kind of normal
human warmth has been abolished because Christ has gone out of the heart; God
is gone. This is a frightful sign of our times. In fact, they very
thing that happened in Jonestown is a warning because it looks as though much
worse things are going to come. This is satan's
work, quite obviously.
Just a year or two before that occurred, we heard of what
happened in Cambodia.
A small party of men—some ten or twenty altogether—took a whole country in
their hands and killed off at least two million people quite ruthlessly, based
on some abstract ideas. We're going to get back to the country, they
said; therefore, everybody is to leave the cities. If you can't leave the
city, you die. People in the hospitals had to go from their operating
tables, and if they couldn't go, they died—they were shot and left in a
ditch. Corpses were piled up in the cities—it was frightful.
This was the same kind of thing as what occurred in
Jonestown: coldness based upon the idea—which looks idealistic—of brining communism
to earth. It turns out that Dostoyevsky was right. In his book The
Possessed, written in the 1870s, there was a Russian character named
Shigalov, a theoretician, who had an absolute theory of how communism could
come to earth. He believed that the ideal state upon earth will be true
communism. Unfortunately, he said, in order to make sixty million people
happy, you have to kill a hundred million people. But those sixty million
people will be happier than anyone else has ever been happy, and the hundred
million people will be like fertilizer for the future world paradise. It
so happens that in Russia there have been exactly a hundred million people
missing since 1917, of which at least sixty million were killed by the Soviets
themselves.
So this sign is very, very present in our times: that love
grows cold. This occurs among Christians also, not just in the world at
large.
Then another sign, which in our times has reached greater
dimensions than every before, is that the Gospel is being preached in the whole
world. This, of course, is true in that the very text of the Gospel is
being spread in almost all the languages which are spoken on the earth now—at
least a thousand languages, I think. Moreover, the Orthodox Gospel is
being preached all over Africa now. We send our
magazines to Uganda
and Kenya, and
receive letters back—very touching letters from young African boys who are
converts to Orthodoxy. They have the utmost respect for their bishop;
they go to seminary. It's obvious that a very Orthodox feeling is being
given to these people in Africa. They are very
simple people. Orthodoxy does not have to be complicated if there are
very simple people to preach the Gospel to. It's only when others come in
to challenge it and to say that the Scripture means something else, trying to
give over-literal interpretation which mean doing away with priests and
bishops, etc., that the people begin to get mixed up. If they're preached
the Orthodox Gospel, simple people respond now in the same way that they've
always responded in the past. The problem is, rather, with complicated
people.
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