From Vespers:

O Righteous Judge of all mankind,
You will come, enthroned in glory and escorted by Angels,
to judge the living and the dead.
Every man will stand in fear before You,
trembling at the river of fire flowing past Your throne,
as each one waits to hear the sentence he deserves.
On that awesome day have mercy on us as well, O Christ;
count us worthy of salvation,
for, worthless as we are, we turn to You in faith,
O compassionate and merciful Lord!

For with the Lord there is mercy and with Him is plenteous redemption, and He will deliver Israel from all his iniquities.

Next week we will enter into the forty-day Great Fast in preparation for the Pascha of the Lord. Today is the Sunday of the Last Judgement, often called Meat-fare Sunday, because it is the last day on which we will eat meat until Pascha.

Western Christianity has Shrove Tuesday, pancake day, sometimes called Mardi Gras or Carnival (From the Latin for “Meat, farewell!” — Carne, vale!) It is the day before Lent begins in the West, and the purpose of the pancakes is to use up all the eggs and butter before Lent. Today is the Orthodox Carnival, Meatfare Sunday, the last day we will eat meat before Pascha. But instead of a Pancake Day, we have a whole week: During Cheesefare Week, eggs, butter, fish and cheese are permitted. So it is the week of macaroni and cheese, omelettes and fish & chips, which we will say farewell to next Sunday.

But these external preparations for Lent are outward signs of an internal preparation. The last judgment, as St Symeon points out above, is the point at which all self deception ends — when God reveals to us what is really in our hearts.

St. Symeon the New Theologian wrote:

God is truth and light. God’s judgment is nothing else than our coming into contact with truth and light. In the day of the Great Judgment all men will appear naked before this penetrating light of truth. The ‘books’ will be opened. What are these ‘books’? They are our hearts. Our hearts will be opened by the penetrating light of God, and what is in these hearts will be revealed. If in those hearts there is love for God, those hearts will rejoice in seeing God’s light. If, on the contrary, there is hatred for God in those hearts, these men will suffer by receiving on their opened hearts this penetrating light of truth which they detested all their life.

So that which will differentiate between one man and another will not be a decision of God, a reward or a punishment from Him, but that which was in each one’s heart; what was there during all our life will be revealed in the Day of Judgment. If there is a reward and a punishment in this revelation – and there really is – it does not come from God but from the love or hate which reigns in our heart. Love has bliss in it, hatred has despair, bitterness, grief, affliction, wickedness, agitation, confusion, darkness, and all the other interior conditions which compose hell.

This Sunday sets before us the eschatological dimension of Lent: the Great Fast is a preparation for the second coming of Christ, for the eternal Passover in the age to come. But the judgment is not only in the future. Here and now, each day and each hour, in hardening our hearts toward others and in failing to respond to the opportunities we are given of helping them, we are already passing judgment on ourselves.

Another theme of this Sunday is that of love. When Christ comes to judge us, what will be the criterion of His judgment? The parable of the Last Judgment answers: love. Not a mere humanitarian concern for abstract justice and the anonymous “poor,” but concrete and personal love for the human person — the specific persons that we encounter face-to-face each day in our lives.