Judgment / Meat-fare Sunday
1 Corinthians 8:8–13; 9:1–2
“Therefore, if food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to fall.”
— 1 Corinthians 8:13
Oops!
Today is Meat-fare Sunday. Starting tomorrow, we begin our fast from meat — a fast we will keep until after receiving Holy Communion on Pascha morning. It is a time of sacrifice.
But let’s be honest: we don’t always fast with joy. Sometimes the fast feels like a punishment. We give something up and wonder, What good does this do?
The Christians in Corinth were wrestling with something that felt just as frustrating. Some believers were eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Others were scandalized by it. Now, Paul knew perfectly well that “an idol has no real existence.” He could have simply said, “Eat what you want. You are free.”
But he doesn’t. Instead, he asks a harder question — not, “What am I allowed to do?” but, “What does love require of me?”
That question — what does love require of me? — turns out to be one of the hardest questions human beings ever face. We feel it in our families, in our parishes, in our own hearts. And sometimes, entire nations must face it too.
Ugh!
Paul’s question — “What does love require?” — is not just about food. It’s about freedom. He knows the idol is nothing, that he is free to eat. But he also knows that love sometimes calls us to sacrifice our freedom for the sake of another’s healing.
And that question — what does love require? — is one that the people of South Africa faced on a national scale in 1994.
After decades of apartheid — a system of brutal, legally enforced racial oppression — the white minority government collapsed. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and elected president. And now the new nation had to decide: What do we do with those who tortured, murdered, and disappeared their neighbors?
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, described the two most obvious options — and neither was good.
The first was the way of Nuremberg: retributive justice. Put the perpetrators on trial. Punish them. Let the victors impose justice on the vanquished. It feels satisfying — they did terrible things; they should pay. But in South Africa, this was not really possible. The military and police still had their weapons. A Nuremberg-style tribunal risked tipping the fragile new democracy back into violence. And even when it is possible, retributive justice doesn’t heal wounds. It only adjudicates them.
The second option was the way of amnesia: simply forgive everything, move on, grant blanket amnesty, and never speak of it again. It sounds peaceful — comfortable, quiet — but it’s a lie. As Tutu argued, no genuine reconciliation can be built on silence. The victims would still carry their wounds, unacknowledged and unseen.
Two roads — and both led to dead ends.
Aha!
South Africa chose a third way. They called it the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The principle was simple — and radical. Those who wished to receive amnesty could come forward, but only if they made a full, public disclosure of what they had done. Not a private confession behind closed doors. A public accounting: I did this. I was there. Here is what happened. Families could finally hear the truth about how their loved ones died.
Some objected: There’s no real remorse. They’re only confessing to save themselves.
Tutu’s reply is striking. He doesn’t deny the concern. But he points out that the very act of standing before the nation — before victims, journalists, cameras, and neighbors — and naming your sin is an act of deep humiliation. To confess publicly strips away the protective cover of secrecy. Whether the heart is truly changed is between that person and God. But at least the truth, at last, is free.
And the victims? They weren’t asked to pretend nothing happened. They were heard. Their suffering was named and acknowledged. Reparations were offered — not enough to make anyone “whole,” but as a public recognition of the wrong that had been done.
They, too, had to give something up: the satisfaction of seeing their oppressors punished. But in exchange, they received something rarer — the truth spoken aloud.
This is what Tutu called restorative justice: not punishment, but restoration. Not a verdict, but a return. The goal was not to humiliate forever, but to bring both victim and perpetrator back into the same human community — a community torn apart by violence and healed only through truth.
And this, brothers and sisters, is precisely the spirit of St. Paul’s words.
He is not talking merely about meat — he is talking about love that renounces its rights for the sake of another’s salvation. That is what the Corinthians struggled to understand, what the South Africans had to learn, and what we must live.
Whee!
What happened on a national scale in South Africa is something each of us must face in miniature — in our own hearts, our own relationships, our own communities. The work of truth and reconciliation begins not with governments, but with souls willing to love more than they demand to be right.
Next Sunday is Forgiveness Sunday. We will stand before one another, bow low, and ask forgiveness. And for some of us, that will be hard — because some of us are carrying real wounds, real wrongs. To forgive, in some sense, is to “give up the meat” — to let go of the satisfaction of seeing someone who hurt us get what we think they deserve.
There is someone in your life — and you know who it is — for whom you’re still holding out judgment. Part of you is still waiting for them to suffer as you suffered. The Gospel doesn’t deny your pain. It doesn’t say the wound isn’t real. It is real. But it asks you to lay down the verdict — to give up the meat — and to trust that God’s justice is larger and truer than ours. Not pretending the hurt away, but releasing the sentence you’ve been holding, so that you, too, can be free.
And this is important: the Orthodox Church does not ask us to forget. Forgiveness Sunday is not Amnesia Sunday. We do not say, “That thing you did doesn’t matter.” We say, “God forgive both of us.” We tell the truth. We stand in the light. Because forgiveness is not about erasing the past — it’s about opening the future.
Some of us are carrying a secret. There’s something you’ve done — a wrong not yet named, a hurt not yet acknowledged — and it sits inside you like a stone. The Gospel isn’t asking you to bear it forever. It’s asking you to do what those men and women did before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: to come into the light. To say, “I did this. Forgive me.” The humiliation is real — but so is the freedom that follows. Once the truth is spoken, it no longer holds you captive.
And some of us already know whose face just came to mind. Someone doesn’t need your judgment — they need your presence. A door has been closed, maybe for years, and you hold the key. What is required is not that you be proven right, but that you love your brother or sister more than you love being right.
Because what God is after is not punishment. What God is after is restoration: the return of the lost son, the healing of the breach, the rebuilding of communion.
This, too, is the work of Great Lent. We do not fast to punish ourselves. We fast to make room — room for God, and room for one another.
So, next Sunday, come for Forgiveness Sunday and make the gospel effective in your life today.
Amen.