Preface

This is the story of the greatest life ever lived, as told and expounded by one of the great spiritual teachers of our time. The study of the life of Christ is surely one of the most instructive and fruitful endeavors a believer can undertake, and any Christian’s bookshelf would be sadly deficient without at least one very good book about our Lord’s life on earth. I would not have undertaken the translation of such a voluminous work had I not thought that it would profoundly affect my life, and I would not have offered it up for publication if I had not believed that it would be a great boon to its readers.

The works and teachings of Jesus tend to float about in the average believer’s mind without any plan or method to unite them into a coherent system. When exactly did Christ meet with Nicodemus? What was the significance of the Transfiguration in relation to the unfolding events of that year? Why did our Lord visit Bethany on the night before Palm Sunday? What parables did our Lord teach during Holy Week, and how did they relate to the Cross? These are all seminal questions; and unless a Christian comes to grips with them and studiously tries to find answers to them, the logic and meaning of Jesus’ life in Palestine will remain a hazy mystery to his or her mind.

It is my strong belief that a real study of Jesus’ life is prerequisite to

the inner life of a Christian. There is a reason Christians are cold in their faith these days. There is a reason we have lost our first love—to use the dramatic language of Revelation—and why it is so fashionable now for people to say that the Church has failed them. We have grown distant from Christ. His heart, spirit, compassion, and countercultural (sometimes shocking) views of society and the world— these are things we have too often forgotten or taken for granted. Complacency has set in among us, like a colorless and odorless gas that fills our nostrils and sedates our thinking, and has stolen from us the rich fruit of the Gospel.

Each generation thus needs to return to Christ. Each generation—just like the generation of the first century ad—must abandon its paganism and rediscover the Lord Jesus. We twenty-first-century believers must restudy and reevaluate the Gospels for ourselves. Athanasius and Augustine and Chrysostom may help us by the light of their marvelous theology, but they cannot live that theology for us. The Church Fathers may help us on our way to repentance by their wisdom, but they cannot repent for us. We must walk along the way with our own footsteps; and the way is begun by learning about Christ’s own life.

There was an old English clergyman named Farrar who wrote a Life of Christ that became a wild success in the nineteenth century. As he described the cleansing of the temple, he asked a very simple question. Why was it that the temple guardians, the Jewish leaders, and all the people stood by watching in frozen bewilderment as Christ overturned the tables and threw the money-changers out of the temple court? They were many, and He was but one. The answer Farrar provides is compelling: because sin is weakness. Their consciences were stricken, he notes, and their moral fiber was withered to nothing. They were powerless to raise a finger against the righteous indignation pouring forth from the Prophet from Nazareth.

Reading the life of Christ should be challenging. If it feels easy, then it is not being understood. There is a real toughness to Christ’s message, and it should motivate the reader to learn that virtue is strength. A good deal of sappy, lukewarm spirituality has been injected into the minds of Christians, and they are taught that Jesus wanted us to be docile like sheep. But to act sheepish today is to be a failure. The world is not kind to sheep, and it tends to crush them. No—Christ commanded us to trust Him like sheep, but to be wise as serpents in the world. Jesus is the Lamb of God, but He is also the Lion of the tribe of Judah. He sacrifices, but He fights too. He comforts, but He also roars. He was gentle as a lamb to the weak (a sinful woman, a tax collector), but fierce as a lion to the mighty (Caiaphas, Herod, Pilate). The Gospels ought not to make us weak and vain but humble and strong.

Matthew the poor’s life reflected this type of meek but bold Christianity envisioned by the Gospels. Born at the end of World War I as the last of seven children to a poor family, he was nursed in all the precepts of the Faith from as early as he could remember. As he grew to early manhood, he developed a keen interest in certain aspects of worldly living, such as education, career, art, and social life. But the overarching passion that quickly eclipsed all other interests was his love for the Bible, prayer, and spiritual living. In consequence, he felt irrevocably called to the monastic life. How else was he to dedicate every waking moment to the contemplation of God and His word? That was the incessant question that burned in his heart. So he sold everything he owned—his business, his villas, his automobiles—and bought a one-way ticket into the Egyptian desert.

The following six decades of his life form a saga that can rival the stories of the most interesting wonderworking saints of church

history. He spent years living in some of the oldest and poorest monastic sites in the world, ever receiving the adulation of admiring disciples and ever haunted by the spite of unreasonable opponents. He would meet with penniless believers who needed a word of direction as well as with powerful presidents who sought his advice on civil affairs. It was all the same to him. To establish one of the most famous monasteries in the world, or to write some of the most famous books in the Middle East, were incidental tasks for one who saw his central vocation in life to be the study of God’s word and reflection on its majestic Author.

Matthew the Poor’s commentaries on the life of Christ and the Gospels stretch to eight enormous volumes. His favorite sources are the wisdom contained in the Church Fathers, as well as the ground-breaking scholarship generated by eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century English and continental scholars. The thoroughness and depth of his work are staggering, and the labor involved in reading, sifting, selecting, and translating all this material seemed at first a task too daunting to pursue. But the great value of the commentaries demanded that they be brought within the reach of the English-speaking Orthodox world, and I felt that the aid of divine grace would propel the project forward when mere human effort would fail. It is my prayer that the reader will find as much joy and wisdom in these pages as I have for many, many years.

James Helmy The Holy Fifty Days of Resurrection 2019