“Christ’s teaching cannot be reduced to morality (“do this because it’s good”). Rather, His teaching is ontological. If God, in His divine energies, is cruciform, then we (who exist as His image) are to be cruciform if we are to be what we were created to be. We love because He loves. To love, even to the death, is to live in the image of Christ. “Greater love has no one than this – to lay down his life for his friends.” (Fr. Stephen Freeman)
“As many of us know from personal experience, those who are recovering from injuries must cooperate with their physicians and therapists in order to become well. They have to take their medicine, exercise, and accept other inconvenient and sometimes painful disciplines in order to regain health and function. In order to grow in our ability to receive the Savior at His birth and to manifest His compassionate love to our neighbors, we must embrace the practices of the Christian life with even greater dedication. This is not an exercise in self-righteous legalism, as though we somehow worked the healing of our souls merely by following a set of rules as individuals or members of a society. The point is not to attempt to satisfy a legal requirement or to try to earn something for ourselves from God. It is, instead, to be so fully united with Christ that His merciful love becomes characteristic of us in the greatest test of all: how we treat the people we are inclined to disregard.” (Fr. Philip LeMasters)
“Christ didn’t set up hard and steadfast rules to govern the minutiae of life, rather He taught wisdom and He modeled love. We are to imitate His love and allow His wisdom to shape our hearts and minds. Following Christ’s Gospel teachings do create difficult moral issues for us, and the Scriptures do not give us exact rules for every situation in life. Rather, they offer broad ideas of wisdom and love which we are left to figure out how to implement…There are many aspects of daily life that we do not have exact rules to govern how we should respond. The New Testament clearly states that all we do is to be done in love (1 Corinthians 16:14), but exactly what that might look like in every situation is not spelled out. We need wisdom to know when, how and to what extent we apply the Gospel lessons to our daily lives.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“…the claim that something is truly evil implies an ultimate moral reality. If real evil exists in the world and is identifiable as such, that means there has to be an ultimate or absolute moral standard for reality. The existence of evil, therefore, is actually an argument in favor of the existence of God, not against… He [God] is reality itself. To draw closer to God, therefore, is to draw closer to reality—not as we think it is, but as it really is. When we sin, however, we move away from God, which means moving away from reality itself. Consequently we become less real and are less in touch with reality.” (Zachary Porcu)
“The shame that we experience in confession must be directed toward eros for Christ, not toward increased self-reliance and self-obsessed moral effort. It should be a shame that leads gently upward and outward to worship, and not inward and downward to despair.…salvation in the Church comes not from moral perfection but rather from union with Christ.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)
“God is love and His love is not merely one of His moral properties. The whole of history demonstrates that He has never abandoned us….He’s love and acts out of love. He entered the womb of the Mother of God, who was able to accommodate Him when heaven itself is unable to. And He became incarnate. Not in order that the Son of God could be punished in our stead…God doesn’t punish the sinful human race, nor His Son…God became incarnate in order that we might be sanctified.” (Iraklis Filios, St. Gregory the Theologian)