The Evergetinos: Book Two - Chapter XXXIX, Part II and XL, I

The Evergetinos gathers these stories around a single, unsettling truth:
those who endure injustice with gratitude and refuse to avenge themselves become truly rich, and God Himself becomes their defender.

Abba Mark says it simply and without comfort: “He who is wronged by someone, and does not seek redress, truly believes in Christ, and receives a hundredfold in this life and eternal life in the age to come.” The measure is not whether we suffer wrong, but what we do with it. Injustice is assumed. The question is whether we turn it into a weapon or an altar.

Gelasios endures theft and humiliation at the hands of Vacatos. He stands his ground about the monastic cell for God’s sake, but he does not pursue his abuser, does not drag him to court, does not stir up others to defend him. He lets God see. And God does see. Symeon unveils Vacatos’ hidden intent, and the man’s own journey to prosecute the “man of God” becomes the road of his judgment. The Elder does nothing, yet everything is revealed. His stillness becomes the place where the truth about both men is made manifest.

Pior works three years without wages. Each time he labors, each time he is sent away empty-handed, and each time he returns quietly to his monastery. His silence is not cowardice; it is poverty of spirit. The employer’s house, not Pior’s heart, collapses under injustice. Only when calamity has broken him does he go searching for the monk, wages in hand, begging forgiveness and confessing, “The Lord paid me back.” Pior will not even reclaim what is his. He allows it to be given to the Church, because his life is no longer measured by what he is owed. He has stepped out of the economy of recompense into the freedom of God.

The Elder whose cell is robbed twice endures in an even more piercing way. First he leaves a note: “Leave me half for my needs.” Then, when all is taken, he still does not accuse. Only when the thief lies dying, tortured in soul and unable to depart, does he confess and call for the Elder. As soon as the Elder prays, his soul is released. The one who was wronged becomes the priest at the threshold of death. The one who stole cannot die in peace until he passes under the mercy of the man he robbed. Here judgment is revealed as truth entering the heart, and God’s “avenging” consists in turning the wound of the innocent into medicine for the guilty.

In Menas, this same mystery ripens into martyrdom. Menas stands literally on bones, his flesh cut away, and chants, “My foot hath stood in uprightness.” His body is mutilated, but his praise is whole. The attempt to silence him only reveals where his life truly rests. In the end even his persecutor becomes a believer and shares his martyrdom. In Menas, injustice is not merely endured; it becomes the final gift by which God crowns His friends.

Peter’s discourse with Clement names the inner logic of all this. Those who wrong others, he says, actually wrong themselves most deeply, while those who are wronged, if they endure with love, gain purification and forgiveness. Possessions become occasions of sin; their unjust loss, when borne rightly, becomes the removal of sins. Enemies, for a brief time, maltreat those they hate—but in God’s providence they become the cause of their victims’ deliverance from eternal punishment. Seen this way, those who harm us are, in a hidden manner, our benefactors. Only the one who loves God greatly can bear to see this and respond with love instead of resentment.

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Text of chat during the group:

00:03:52 Fr. Charbel Abernethy: Page 310 Volume II - Section B

00:08:56 Fr. Charbel Abernethy: Page 310 Volume II - Section B

00:10:20 Fr. Charbel Abernethy: Philokaliaministries.org/blog

00:18:09 Fr. Charbel Abernethy: Page 310 Volume II - Section B

00:18:15 Fr. Charbel Abernethy: http://Philokaliaministries.org/blog

00:21:46 Bob Čihák, AZ: P. 310 section B

00:32:59 Bob Čihák, AZ: P. 312 # 2

00:34:19 Anthony: Witholding wages is one of the few sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance.

00:36:12 Forrest: Perhaps in 3 years, God may have given the monk 100 fold already for those lost wages. So when wages were offered, the wages would have been due back to God, not the monk.

00:49:52 Anthony: I believe St Minas was a soldier, no? I think if yes that adds a layer of poetry to the story, he was an athlete greater than his former profession.

00:53:45 Anthony: Synaxarion?

00:55:37 Myles Davidson: Father, can you recommend a good bio of St Philip Neri?

01:06:40 Sheila Applegate: There is a fine line between Christian counsel and judgement of others.

01:09:44 Maureen Cunningham: Your enemy is hammer and chisel t form you to Christ

01:14:31 Erick Chastain: How can one benefit via Christ's medicine of edification those that persecute you if they do not know they are doing so, instead believing that they are doing the good?

01:16:30 Jerimy Spencer: Aloha Father, a Protestant author John Eldredge, described one of the spirits of this age as the age of the offended self, and I think there is something to this, whether solely cultural or also of diabolical, the temptations I find often is to take anything personal or be reminded of some offense and thereby be seduced by the passion of anger, instead of praying for them.

01:33:03 Jerimy Spencer: C.S. Lewis I think, uses the language of “the hammering process”

01:34:18 Maureen Cunningham: Thank you  Blessing to  all

01:34:19 Rebecca Thérèse: Thank you🙂

01:34:35 Janine: Thank you Father