“The more believing you get, the more daring you become.”
The Preacher’s Workshop is a semimonthly blog showcasing homilies that exemplify excellence in rhetoric, exegesis, narrative, and imagery. This new resource for preachers is part of St. Vladimir’s Seminary's Compelling Preaching Initiative, which is generously sponsored by the Lilly Foundation.
Our second featured homily is “Fear and Trembling,” delivered in 1994 by Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko (March 28, 1939–March 18, 2015). This homily was recently published by Ancient Faith Radio (AFR) as part of a collection titled Fr. Thomas Hopko: The Cassette Lectures. Read this beautiful homily in its entirety, along with a summary of what makes it so compelling.
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What to look for
- Invitation to Encounter God - The homily opens by talking about when people encounter God. Choosing “when” over “if” serves as a profound confession that these encounters are real and challenges listeners to seek out their own encounters with the divine.
- Redefining Fear - The homily presents a compelling idea of fear of God as a lifegiving posture of faith that overcomes all other kinds of fear, even the fear of death. Unlike an either/or argument in which the hearer considers two equally plausible options, an argument based on redefinition presents the good option—godly fear—as being vastly superior to other kinds of destructive fear. This tends to lead the hearers to desire godly fear as the lifegiving and empowering option; to say to themselves, “I want to have the courage that comes from godly fear.”
- Biblical Imagery: While the central biblical imagery is drawn from the lectionary text for the day with the hemorrhaging woman and Jairus and his sick daughter, the homily includes other biblical examples of fear and trembling: the Nativity narrative where Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds all encounter the divine with fear and trembling and are told by the angels the leitmotif, “Do not be afraid”; and a passing reference to the Centurion who asks Jesus to heal his servant.
- A Call to Action: The concluding images of boldness call the hearers to faithful, boldness before God. This is particularly evident in the statement, “The more believing you get, the more daring you become,” and especially in the last line of the homily which asks God to grant us the right kind of fear and the right kind of boldness so that God’s power can work in and through us.
“Fear and Trembling”
by Fr. Thomas Hopko
When human beings, who are real human beings, know who they are before the face of God—knowing that they and we are creatures, and that we are sinners—when such a human being comes into touch with the real God, and when the real God encounters a human being, and the God is the real God, not some idol or someone that we have produced in our own minds; when you have the encounter between God as God really is, and human beings who really know their humanity and their creaturehood, then there are several things that always result.
And everywhere through the Bible and the history of the Church and the Scriptures and the saints, we always see this: What you see happening is that the creature who really comes into touch with the real God always has the reaction of fear and trembling, of a sense of awe, a sense of wonder, a sense of the fear of God, godly fear. This always happens, that when there is a real encounter with God then the person has a sense of awe and fear and even terror.
We see this in the Gospel today when the woman with the flow of blood discovers that she has been uncovered in her touching of God, and it says that she was with fear and trembling before him. That fear and trembling is always there when it’s the presence of the real God.
Those who would think of God simply as some kind of smiling face on a bumper sticker, “God is love,” “God is the friend in the sky,” “God is just the one available that I’m supposed to order around with my prayers and tell him what to do,” and so on, then that’s not yet an encounter with God. When there is an encounter with God, it’s always as they say in textbooks mystérium treméndum, mystérium treméndum et fascinans. It’s awesome, it’s inspiring, and it is creating in the sense of the creature, a sense of creaturehood, then the sense of sinfulness.
But when that encounter is real, and when the godly fear is the right kind of godly fear, because there's also a wrong kind of godly fear. There’s a wrong fear where people only are in terror before God. They think of God as some kind of cosmic cop out to catch us, to watch us, to see what we do. Can’t wait to see that we are doing something wrong so that we can be punished or thrown into hell or something. There are people who have that view of God, too, and that's not the real God either.
But when the godly fear is the right kind of godly fear, and awe in the presence of the majesty, the glory, the splendor, the power, the total holiness of God, in fact, even in the presence of the love of God, the kindness of God, the compassion of God, then there really is this sense of awe, but there is also at the same time a sense of attraction. A sense of being drawn. A sense of saying, “Lord, it is good to be here,” like the apostles on the Transfiguration who couldn’t look at the face of the shining Christ, but at the same time said, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let's stay here.” And so, with the godly fear, when it’s the right kind of fear, there's also an attraction, a drawing, a beauty, a sense of goodness. In fact, it is that goodness itself that is part of the awesomeness.
St. Teresa of Ávila, a great Christian mystic, said, “When I think of the judgment of God and the justice of God,” she says, “I tremble with fear." But then she went on and said, “But when I think of God’s mercy and His love and His compassion and His kindness,” then she says, “I really tremble.” Then I really have fear because the love of God goes together with His attraction. That quality is a word, there’s a word for it in Greek, there always is. It’s the word parrhesia. And that word is usually translated in English as boldness, a kind of courage, sometimes translated as confidence in the presence of God. It’s that word for example that is used in the Liturgy before we say the Lord’s Prayer, the priest says, “And make us worthy, O Master, make us worthy, Lord, that with with boldness and without condemnation we may dare to call upon Thee as our Heavenly God, as Father, and say, Our Father…” So we say “with boldness,” and another translation may be daring.
You have just the opposite of human fear. You see, when you have godly fear, then human fear disappears. When you have godly fear, then you are not afraid of anyone or anything, except God. You know who[m] to fear. And when you know who[m] to fear, then you know who[m] not to fear. You know who[m] not to be afraid of. And so those who really know God and have this godly fear, they are not afraid of anything. They are certainly not afraid of people. They’re not afraid of devils and they are not even afraid of death. They’re not afraid of anything because they know that when God is there, there is literally nothing to be afraid of.
And how many times in the Gospels do you hear this expression, “Don’t be afraid?” “Fear not. …” You have the expression “Fear not,” “Don’t be afraid,” or some such thing, sixteen times. You have it when the angels come to the shepherds, and then Mary from the angel, and then Joseph, and then all these people coming. And we had it in this morning’s Gospel: “Fear not. Only believe, and I will be with you, and I will be there.”
And so, in the Gospel today, that woman with the hemorrhage, she was in fear and trembling. She didn’t know what to do about her illness. And on one level, she was really afraid of Jesus. She was afraid of His power, His awesomeness, His glory. She certainly was afraid to go near Him, not only because she was a woman, but because she was hemorrhaging. And if she was a hemorrhaging woman, she shouldn’t have been out on the street in the first place, according to the law, and she certainly shouldn’t go around touching people, and she certainly shouldn’t go around touching the Messiah.
But at the same time with that fear and trembling that she had, she had boldness. She dared to get out there. And she dared to get into that crowd, and she even dared to go up and touch Him.
And then, when she was found out, it says, you know, that she came shaking in front of Him. And then He came to her, and said to the woman, “Great is your faith. Great is your boldness. Great is your daring,” because it’s the right kind. And then she was healed from that very moment.
And then the same thing with Jairus and the dying child. When they said that the child was already dead, then Jesus said, “Fear not. Only believe.”
And of course, we have that, you know, “I am not worthy. I cannot have You come, I cannot have You come in under my roof.” Nevertheless, the very attraction of God produces this boldness. And a person who is really a believer is a very bold person. And the humbler you get, St. John Climacus says, “the bolder you are.” The more believing you get, the more daring you become.
And that kind of boldness is not arrogance. It’s certainly not presumption. Fr. Sophrony, who was a famous elder who died a couple years ago, who made St. Silouan so famous, he has a prayer to be said each morning, and in the prayer it says to God, “Remove from me the presumption of Thy grace, but grant to me the right boldness before Thee.”
It was said of St. Basil the Great, a very great theologian, “[He] was more tender and gentle than any woman, and yet he said he walked with such a boldness that you would swear that he owned the world.”
And as a matter of fact, those who believe in God not only own the whole world, they own the whole universe. The 100,000 million galaxies with 100,000 million stars, they’re all ours, because God says to us, “Everything I have is yours.” It’s ours. And this is the boldness that we have.
So, the more we trust God, the more godly fear we have, the more we know that we are unworthy, the greater our boldness. And there’s even the prayer before Holy Communion that says exactly that. It begins, “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter into my house. Nevertheless, I come.” And then it says, “And grant me the boldness to approach.” The boldness, the daring, to approach and to know that You are the one who is doing this work, not me.
So, the more we know our weakness, the more we know our powerlessness, the more we know our helplessness, the more we know our creaturehood, the more we know our sinful character, the greater our boldness. The greater our boldness in the right way, because we know that without that boldness before God, we are lost. We’ve got to approach Him. We have to come to Him. He is inviting us. It’s an awesome and fearful thing.
There should be fear and trembling.
If there’s no fear and trembling, then it’s not God. But if it’s only fear and trembling, and not this parrhesia, this boldness, then it’s the wrong kind of fear and trembling. So, just as there’s the right kind of godly anger and the wrong kind of anger, the right kind of grief and the wrong kind of grief, so there’s the right kind of fear and the wrong kind of fear. There’s the right kind of boldness and the wrong kind of boldness.
So, let’s pray to God that He would give us the right kind of fear, which produces at the same time the right kind of boldness. Then we’re not afraid of anything, because it’s the power of God and not our own power that’s acting in us—the power that stopped that hemorrhage, and the power that raised Jairus’ daughter, and the power that raises all the dead, and gives God’s life, God’s majesty.
A link to the audio recording on Ancient Faith Radio can be found here.
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Illustration by James O’Brien
