On the Eve of the Great Fast – the Fall of Man & the Pre-Eternal Council

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

On this Forgiveness Sunday when we commemorate the casting out of Adam and Eve from Eden, we reflect on the fall and exile of the first-father and the first mother through their disobedience and rebellion against God, yet we do so on the threshold of the wonderful journey that leads us from this annual commemoration of the sorrow of banishment to the wonder of Pascha: the great sign and celebration of our salvation, and of our reconciliation with God through the Saviour’s life-giving passion and third-day resurrection.

We embark on this penitential-journey with the foreknowledge of the economy of salvation, of the Victory of the Cross, and the message of the empty Tomb, already knowing that Christ is risen and has conquered death by death.

Though this Sunday is a lamentation for the world-changing effects of the disobedience of the first-Adam and first-Eve, in the imminent penitential-season we will journey to Golgotha and the empty Tomb to rejoice in the saving and life-giving obedience of the Saviour, the second-Adam, born of the Theotokos who is the second-Eve: the Son of God obedient to the will of the Father “even to the death of the Cross”, and the Mother of God obedient to the will of the Most High, announced to her by the archangel to whom she obediently submitted: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”

Through this redemptive obedience, beyond the season of the Great Fast, at Pascha, the three signs of the fall identified by St John Chrysostom – the woman (Eve), the tree and death – will be negated and cancelled out by the Woman (the Theotokos), the Tree (of the Cross), and the new life of the resurrection!

The signs of the fall and the bitter fruits of pride and disobedience were destroyed by humility and obedience, as the Lord born in the flesh, entered the world through the selfless obedience of the Mother of God, redeeming humanity through His own obedience to the Father, even descending into Sheol/Hades to harrow it and lead Adam and Eve and all of His exiled forefathers and mothers on an exodus journey from the slavery and imprisonment of death to the freedom of the life of the heavenly kingdom.

So… as we mourn the bitter fruits of the tree of disobedience in Eden, we already anticipate the end of the Lenten journey, looking to reap the wondrous life-giving fruits of the tree of obedience, which is the Cross – looking forward to celebrating Christ’s victory over death and the harrowing of hell, through the wood of the cruciform Tree of Life set up on Golgotha.

Yet as we remember the exile of Adam and Eve from paradise, we must not fall into the mistake of thinking that the mystery of the Cross was something centuries away from them, after the Old Testament centuries, or that the Lord had to come up with a plan B, having to figure out how the fall would be remedied and fallen humanity restored.

There is an old Slavic icon, (of western inspiration, and not without controversy), the “Pre-Eternal Council – Prevechny Sovyet” which reminds us that even as Adam and Eve fell, even as the effects of their disobedience were pronounced, and even as they were banished, God as all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful ALREADY had the remedy – already had the answer, and already looked forward to the unfolding of the mystery of salvation in the fullness of time.

Without entering into iconographical and canonical arguments, this icon possesses a powerful message because of the salvific reality it expresses.

The Father, with the dove representing the Holy Spirit upon His breast already presents the Tree of the Cross, upon which the Son is nailed, often with angelic wings covering His body and showing that this is not in the fulfilled event of the crucifixion, but as a pledge and a sign of the sacrificial love and obedience in which the Saviour – met in the Old testament as the angel of Great Council – will enter creation and human-existence to look for and find Adam and Eve, and seek out their children from the beginning of the ages to the end of time.

It is an iconic representation of the council of the persons of the Holy Trinity, the perfect community of love and self-offering, giving and directing love one to another, and manifested in this salvific-plan to be realised and fulfilled Saviour’s future passion, and the Victory of the Cross.

In this icon, in the already conceived economy of salvation, the Father has already raised up the Cross, and the the Only-Begotten Son and Word of God has already accepted its inner meaning and taken it up in His obedience to the Father, and through the centuries of the Old Covenant, God-in-Trinity has already set in motion the journey to Golgotha and the Arimathaean’s Tomb through the generations of the sons of Adam.

In the Old Testament, through their human generations recorded in the ancestral genealogies in the Gospels, Christ-Yahweh is already on the highway seeking out the Prodigal Son, journeying toward his exiled heirs

The encounter with them in His earthly, incarnate-life, His Passion, and the Mystery of the Cross is already unfolding through the Old Testament centuries, not just as a historical and temporal event in Jerusalem centred on an ignominious wooden gibbet, but as the self-emptying, sacrificial-love through which God’s remedy for the fall and its bitter fruits is made real to broken and fallen humanity.

In the vigil service, we hear the words, “Taking up the armour of the Cross, let us make war against the enemy”, so in this season of the Fast, let us imitate Christ, and take up our own Cross, renouncing our self-will, selfishness and the earthly shackles that enslave us, knowing that the Mystery of the Cross in our lives will lead us from death to life, from slavery to freedom and from darkness to light, led forward by the Saviour to Whom we cry, “Glory to Thee, Who hast laid Thy Cross as a bridge over death, that souls might pass over upon it from the dwelling of the dead to the dwelling of life!”

This stark contrast of bitterness, exile and death with sweetness, reconciliation and life runs through this day, and is represented powerfully by the fact that it is traditional for Paschal Hymns to be chanted during the rite of forgiveness at the end of vespers, so that even as we are lamenting the fall and asking forgiveness of one another we are already singing of “a Pascha which has opened for us the gates of paradise’, and even as we embrace one another asking forgiveness and reconciliation, we hear the Paschal words, “Let us embrace each other! Let us call ‘brothers’ even those that hate us, and forgive all by the resurrection!”

Knowing that obedience is at the heart of the Paschal Mystery, let us seek to follow the Saviour from death to life through our repentance and transformation by the Saviour in Whom all things are made new, and Whose Cross and Tomb call us to journey with prayer, fasting and spiritual watchfulness through the season of the Great Fast to the radiant night of Pascha, starting as we now celebrate the vespers of forgiveness, performing the rite of forgiveness as we hear the quiet invitation of the Pascal greeting: Christ is Risen!

Amen.

Greetings For the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord

“At that time, the parents brought the child Jesus to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord; (As it is written in the law of the LORD, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;) And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons. And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Symeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Spirit, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law, Then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel. And Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things which were spoken of him. And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity; And she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem. And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth. And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.”  (Luke 2:22-40)

Dear brothers and sisters,

Greetings to you all on the after-feast of the Meeting of the Lord, and the Synaxis of St Symeon and Anna.

In the ancient west, the present feast marked the end of the festive season that began at the Nativity, sealed at the Presentation of the Christ-Child in the Temple with St Symeon’s words confirming the Infant as the “Light to enlighten the gentiles, and the glory of Thy people, Israel…”

Both Israel and the Gentiles, had already paid homage to the Saviour – Israel in the shepherds and the Gentiles in the magi – but this feast marks the recognition of the long awaited Saviour of both Jewry and ‘the nations’ in the heart and centre of Israel and the Jewish faith, in the courts of the Temple in whose sanctuary the Mother of God had been prepared for her role in the Incarnation by prayer and divine-communion, and where she was now purified on the fortieth day after the birth of the Saviour.

The festal hymns remind us that the seemingly mundane outward appearance of the presentation of just another first-born son in the Temple, was in fact the entrance of the Only-Begotten Son and Word of God, the Ancient of Days, God of God and Light of Light: the Creator, the Giver of the law, and the promised Messiah, spoken of by the prophets. 

“Tell us, O Symeon: Whom bearest thou into the temple in thine arms, rejoicing? To Whom dost thou cry aloud: “Now have I been freed, for I have beheld my Saviour! ” “He is the One Who is born of the Virgin! He is God the Word, Who from God became incarnate for our sake and saveth man! Let us worship Him!

Receive, O Symeon, Him Whom Moses beheld in the gloom on Sinai giving the law, and Who hath become a babe, submitting to the law. He is the One Who speaketh through the law; He is the One spoken of by the prophets, Who for our sake hath become incarnate and saveth man. Let us worship Him!”

Let us come and greet Christ with divine hymns, and let us receive Him Whom Symeon perceived as our salvation. He is the One Whom David proclaimed beforehand; He is the One spoken of in the prophets, Who for our sake hath become incarnate and speaketh through the law. Let us worship Him.”

(Vesperal stikhira on “Lord, I have cried…”)

In solidarity with the children whom He had created, Jesus the Great High Priest and New Passover Lamb, was brought into the Temple so that the Levitical priests could “redeem” Him, as the one Who had first opened His mother’s womb. 

In spiritual terms this could be seen as going beyond the ironic to the ridiculous – the Redeemer needing redeeming, as though He was just any other child and not the Lamb of God by Whom all would be saved, and through Whom all sacrifices would become obsolete, needless and abolished. 

Yet, this must be appreciated as a further sign of the condescending love of God, Who thought it not robbery to hide His Divinity to be clothed in human flesh and dwell among His sons and daughters, to save them as flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone: God-Incarnate for Whom no self-effacing, humble action was too much or too demeaning in seeking out His lost children.

As if the incarnation was not in itself a sufficient sign of the salvific and self-giving love of God, the Saviour allowed Himself to be circumcised in the flesh in obedience to the covenant and law, even though He was the giver of the covenant to the Patriarch Abraham and the Torah to Moses the God-seer. 

Even as a child only eight days old, in circumcision, He deigned to suffer the shedding of blood in a prophetic foretaste of His suffering and bloody-passion on Golgotha, showing the reality of His Incarnation, and the Church Fathers remind us that all of things which the Saviour deigns to endure for our salvation are to show us that He is trulyGod-Incarnate in the physical-reality and not just the appearance of flesh: a point borne out by the sessional hymn on the polyeleos of matins –

“Thou didst become a babe for my sake, O Ancient of Days, and didst partake of purification, O most pure God, that Thou mightest assure me of the flesh Thou didst receive from the Virgin. And Symeon, taught thereby, recognised Thee as God appearing in the flesh, and the elder kissed Thee, our Life, and, rejoicing, cried out: “Release me, for I have seen Thee, the Life of all!”

After His Nativity and circumcision, the God-Man further assured humanity of the reality of His flesh in His encounter with Symeon, who not only saw and held Christ – God-Incarnate – but kissed the Word made Flesh.

The ancient tradition of the Church is that Symeon was not simply a righteous elder, but one who had lived what seems to us an impossibly long life, like the forefathers of the Old Testament, living for centuries in anticipation of the Divine promise that he would see the Messiah before leaving this world.

However, having joyfully exclaimed “…mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all people…”, he was not one who simply saw God Incarnate, but held the Messiah and Saviour in his own arms, as the culmination and fulfilment of the long life He was now content to leave behind as his life now had meaning and resolution, and his vigil had been fulfilled.

Having seen and held the Saviour, there was no more need for his old heart to beat, his bones to ache, or his weary flesh to struggle in life day by day. The crowning zenith of His life was to hold the Lord, and that moment task was done.

It is strange for us to imagine what it must have been like for him to hold the Christ-Child, knowing through the Holy Spirit, that this was the Saviour of the world. Yet, without ever denying the unimaginable magnitude of this wonderful moment, we need to recognise that whilst Symeon held the Saviour, he was of the Old Covenant and not called to the Divine encounter that we are granted through the sacramental life of the Church.

We refer to St Symeon as the God-Receiver, but in the waters of baptism each of us is called to be initiated into the death and resurrection of the Incarnate God, whom he held in his arms, and to put on Christ; by the operation of the Holy Spirit through Holy Chrism, each of is called to become His living temple, Whose seal and gift we are granted as the completion of the baptismal rite; in the wonder of the Holy Liturgy, each of us is also called to become a God-Receiver, receiving the Lord’s Body and Blood. Through the grace of the Holy Mysteries in the Church, we are called to become God-Receivers in ways that even Symeon, so holy, venerable and righteous, was not afforded.

St Symeon had waited year after year, decade by decade and perhaps even century after century for the moment in which he would behold the Messiah. Seeing child after child, generations born and generations dying, those long years would have been filled not only with expectation, but with prayer, fasting, and communion with God, in a long life of preparation for the brief moment in which he beheld and held Salvation as a person in his aged arms.

How do we struggle to become God-Receivers, called to receive and bear the same Christ that Symeon held at the Table of the Lamb, at which the Saviour continues to invite us to partake through His words, “Take eat; this is my body… Drink this, all of you; this is my blood… which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins…”?

It is no accident that the only place we liturgically read the Song of Symeon apart from vespers or great compline is in the prayers of thanksgiving after Holy Communion. Having received the Saviour in the Mysteries of His Body and Blood, we pray that, we may depart in peace, recognising that in Holy Communion we have received the same Lord Who was born in the Cave and laid in the manger; Who bled in His circumcision on the eighth day; Who was “redeemed” according to the sacrifices of the law on His fortieth day, as the “Light to enlighten the gentiles and the glory of His people, Israel.”

But, without prayer, fasting and repentance, how can any of us ever expect that it is possible to truly become a God-Receiver? Without continually striving to consecrate ourselves as holy temples to receive the Christ Whom Symeon met and received in the Temple, how can He be received and dwell in us.

Whilst the “Light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of His people, Israel” is the Light Who desires to enlighten all of humanity, dispelling the darkness of the fallen world, we must be desirous of everything He promises and brings in order to welcome Him, to spiritually embrace and hold Him as we receive Him as we confess, “I believe, O Lord, and I confess that thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who didst come into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.”

One of the stikhira of the litia at vespers says that,

“Symeon bore the preëternal Word of the Father incarnate, and revealed to the nations the Light, the Cross and the Resurrection…” 

but this revelation can only be meaningful in us if we desire to embrace the Light, the Cross and the Resurrection, expressing this desire by the spiritual direction and impetus of our lives: only then will it be possible for us to even come close to being God-Receivers, as was the righteous Symeon.

The prophecy of Isaiah, the second reading of vespers, contains a warning, heard from the pre-incarnate Saviour –  dramatically contrasted to the Child held in the arms of Symeon in His appearance as…

 “the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne, and the house was full of His glory. And seraphim stood round about Him: each one had six wings: and with two they covered their face, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one cried to the other, and they said: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts! The whole earth is full of His glory!”

Isaiah is charged to –

“Go, and say to this people: ‘Ye shall hear indeed, but ye shall not understand; and ye shall see indeed, but ye shall not perceive.’ For the heart of this people hath become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.”

We can so easily become like the Israelites in the time of Isaiah, through our carelessness, lack of attentiveness, laziness, and the continued postponement of spiritual labour and repentance. Despite the calling of our baptism, we do not embrace the Light, the Cross and the Resurrection… or somehow, mistakenly think that we can put things on hold. The reality is that there is no spiritual dormancy, only action or inaction. There is no neutral spiritual state of suspended animation.

Soon, the season of the Great Fast will be the yearly call to rise from our stupor and laziness, to awake and recognise that it is later than we think, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”

The words of the kontakion of the Great Canon of Repentance will challenge us,

“My soul, my soul arise! Why art thou sleeping? The end is drawing near and thou wilt be confounded. Awake then and be watchful, that thou mayest be spared by Christ God, Who is everywhere and fillest all things.”

…but this call to action is not to be put off until then.

As well as being the after-feast of the Meeting of the Lord, this coming Sunday is the Sunday of Zacchaeus, on which we will hear how the tax-collector’s repentance made it possible for him to become the friend of Christ, and to receive the Saviour, Who entered his home and more importantly transformed his life.

May our repentance become the means through which we welcome the Saviour and become God-Receivers, like the righteous Symeon, with Christ the Light of the World shining through our every thought, word and action, touching those around us and shedding the Light of Christ upon His world.

In Christ – Hieromonk Mark

 

Greetings for the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord

“Today creation is enlightened! Today all things are glad, those of heaven and those on earth! Angels and men mingle together! For where the King arriveth, there doth order prevail. Wherefore, let us all hasten to the Jordan and see how John baptiseth the sinless head which no man fashioned. And, chanting the cry of the angel, let us exclaim together: The grace of God hath appeared, saving all men, illumining and granting mercy unto the faithful!”

(Sticheron from the litia)

Dear brothers and sisters, S prazdnikom!

Greetings on this most joyful and wonderful feast, which for our forebears far outshone the Nativity, in which the humble Saviour quietly came into the world with few witnesses, hidden in the cave to which only the shepherds were called, until the arrival of the magi who bowed down before Him in the house in which He and His parents dwelt before their exile in Egypt.

There was no such hidden-ness in the Lord’s Baptism, in which we see not only His revelation to the world as Saviour, but also the revelation of the Holy Trinity, as the heavens opened and the voice of the Father was heard, “This is my beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased…”, with the Holy Spirit descending like a dove and confirming the Father’s words.

Heaven and earth, humanity and divinity, angels and men were united as they came together for the Theophany in the River Jordan: God the Creator Himself plunged into the waters, not to be cleansed by them but rather to cleanse them; not to be blessed by them, but rather that they should be blessed by His condescension and Presence; hallowing them by humbly accepting baptism – descending into the waters which He Himself had made in the beginning.

The God-Man descended into the Jordan manifested to those around Him in His humanity, but ascended from the waters proclaimed and revealed as God, in the manifest Presence of the whole Trinity, as He was glorified together with His Unoriginate Father and the All-Holy, Good, and Life-Creating Spirit.

Though He needed neither baptism nor cleansing, by His humble example and express command the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve were called to receive new birth and renewal in the Name of the Trinity revealed on this feast, cleansed in baptismal waters and receiving the gift and seal of the Holy Spirit, to become sons and daughters of light, emerging from their own Jordan having put on Christ, as heirs of the promise of His Resurrection.

As children of the Resurrection, who have followed the Saviour into the baptismal waters, we keep this feast with joy, as the memorial and renewal of that first Theophany, joining with the saints and angels to celebrate, and uniting ourselves with all creation in joy, lifting up the world in thanksgiving.

Through this great act of the humility of God, not only the Jordan, but all creation was sanctified, cleansed and renewed by its own Creator, as even before His Divine Passion and Life-Giving Resurrection, the Saviour descended into the waters bringing sanctification and restoration to the world whose original perfection was His making and very reflection.

And, as we celebrate the Lord’s Baptism, and the Theophany of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we beseech our Triune God to send the blessing of Jordan upon the waters wherever we are, that through the gift of the Holy Spirit, through them we may be cleansed, renewed, refreshed and sanctified, and that our homes and the world around us may be blessed as we celebrate these wonderful events anew, not as onlookers, but as participants through our own baptism and through the celebration of this solemn and glorious feast.

“Today is the time of feasting, and the ranks of saints and angels have joined us in celebration; today the grace of the All-Holy Spirit in the likeness of a dove comes down upon the waters; today shines the Sun that never sets, and the world sparkles with the light of the Lord! Today the moon is bright, together with the earth in the glowing radiance of its beams; today the brilliant stars adorn the universe with the splendour of their twinkling; today the clouds from heaven shed upon the human race a shower of justice; today the Uncreated One willingly permits the hands of His creatures to be laid upon Him; today the Prophet and Forerunner approaches the Lord and, standing before Him in awe, witnesses the condescension of God towards us; today through the presence of the Lord, the waters of the river Jordan are changed into remedies; today the whole universe is refreshed with mystical streams; today the sins of the human race are blotted out by the waters of the river Jordan; today paradise has been opened to all, and the Sun of righteousness has shone upon us; today, at the hands of Moses, the bitter water is changed into sweetness by the presence of the Lord!”

(From the Great Sanctification of the Waters)

 

 

Greetings for the Nativity of the Saviour

“And there were shepherds residing in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks by night. Just then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid! For behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people: Today in the city of David a Saviour has been born to you. He is Christ the Lord! And this will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. And suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying:

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favour rests!”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.”

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph and the Baby, who was lying in the manger. After they had seen the Child, they spread the message they had received about Him. And all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, which was just as the angel had told them.”

(Matthew 1: 8-20)

Dear brothers and sisters, greetings for the feast of the Nativity of our Lord, and God, and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and His wonderful coming to dwell among us in the flesh.

As we celebrate His birth, we again hear the song of the angels, coming to the shepherds in the darkness of night, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill among men.”

Peace on earth is the ardent prayer and dream of so many Christians as they celebrate the birth of the King of Peace in a world so beset by darkness, uncertainty and terror: in war-torn Ukraine, where the Church also faces spiritual war; in bombarded, flattened and starved Gaza, and in other parts of the occupied Palestinian territories; in suffering Kosovo-Metochia, where Orthodox Serbs still face discrimination, persecution, uncertainty, violence and even death – never knowing what tomorrow will bring; in Africa, where Christians are routinely kidnapped, tortured or killed, churches set ablaze and their homes, businesses and schools ransacked. The homicidal rage of Herod is a reality Christians in all of these suffering places know and understand.

The world is dark and desperate for peace, but this peace will not come around negotiating-tables in the United Nations, or from governments whose geo-political strategies, economic goals and foreign policy precipitates, supports and maintains armed conflict in their own national interests.

No! True peace cannot and does not come from politicians, governments, military commanders and international-agencies.

This peace will only come when the “peace from above” enters the hearts of men and women, high and low, powerful and powerless.

How and whether this can ever happen in a world so set against God, the message of the Gospel, Faith and Truth is a mystery beyond us, and not a seemingly believable prospect, but as we celebrate the feast of the Nativity, we should each be challenging ourselves to be peace-makers, knowing that the Lord promises beatitude to those who strive for peace:

“Blessed are the peace-makers; for they shall be called the children of God.”

We see the horrors of war and we grow indignant at the actions of governments and their armed forces, and yet if we honestly examine our own hearts and minds, the anger, rage and destructive potential tearing the world apart is also with in us.

We harbour resentment, intolerance, jealousy, anger, argumentativeness and so many dark and destructive passions and powers within us, with the alarming potential to destroy and sow seeds of pain and sorrow.

We harbour grudges, we remember past arguments and wrongs, we refuse to forgive, we remind ourselves of the past actions, words, and intentions of others. We cause division; maintain divisions that already exist; we militate against the very peace that we are called to make and maintain.

We too hurt people; we also do destructive things, even if only on an emotional or relationship level; we too bring distress and pain to other human beings – often those who are closest to us; we too seek to conquer, dominate and rule at the expense of others; we too seek to supersede rivals and to be the victor – making decisions, calling the shots, being in control, having the last word; we too pick arguments, precipitate conflict, argument and cause rivalries and division.

As people who chant about being peace-makers, on our individual, localised, human level, we are agents of conflict and division, who yet have the audacity to come to the services of the Church, and begin worship with the challenging words of the Great Litany: “In peace, let us pray to the Lord…”

At this glorious feast, even as we hear the song of the angels, do we come to celebrate the Nativity as peace-makers?

Do we come with peace in our hearts – at at peace with God, at peace with our own consciences, at peace with the Church, before we even begin to talk about peace with other human beings and ask for peace for the world?

As we come to the Saviour’s birth, we are challenged to examine our own hearts, and ask whether they are places of peace.

How can God come and dwell in us, and our hearts become the spiritual-manger and dwelling place of the Prince of Peace if they are filled with jealousies, divisiveness, anger and a mirror of the divisions of the world?

Christmas must be a reminder that the coming of Christ into His world is an perpetually-unfolding reality, and that each of us must become Christ-Bearers, with the Saviour within us, as lowly, humble and decrepit as we are in the weakness of our humanity: the very same humanity that He put on in the Incarnation.

And… if we are to claim, with any real conviction that we are Christ-bearers, then we must also be peace-bearers, battling with ourselves to banish all that makes for division and conflict, so that we may then become peace-makers, knowing that Christ does not dwell in lives where peace is refused and rejected.

Then, though we may not put an end to wars and international conflict, at the lowliest and most basic human level, we will be changing the world, and bringing peace, and that peace will not be the fragile, often-failing worldly peace – which is often only a lull between conflicts – but the “peace from above”, which is the peace of Christ, which will only know its fullness in the reality of the new heaven and the new earth, where

“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.”

(Isaiah 11:6-8)

But though the fullness of the Peace of Christ will only be known in the eternity of Kingdom, we must still labour for it now, even as we now labour for the Kingdom itself.

Through the peace and light of the new-born Saviour, the people who sit in great darkness may still see a great Light, even though the world still does not comprehend it, or even want it, and when individual human hearts become the dwelling of the Prince of Peace, and when individual human lives labour for peace, then the Light of Christ begins to break through the darkness.

Flame by flame, the radiance of Christ’s birth in each of us will then begin to bring light to those in darkness, hope to the hopeless, love to the unloved, comfort to those in distress and sorrow, calm those in turmoil, soothing those in pain and warming cold and frozen hearts.

Hearkening to the message of the angels, let each of us struggle to make ourselves worthy dwellings for the Prince of Peace, so that the message of His Gospel may be realised in our lives, and through us may touch others, so that the message of the angels in the darkness of the first Christmas night may be felt by those in our suffering and war torn world.

May we always struggle be people of the goodwill – blagovolenie – of which the angels sing, and in Christlike love, may Christ live in us, love through us, work through us, and shine through us as the Light of the World.

And, like the shepherds, let us spread the message, glorifying and praising God.

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace! Today Bethlehem receiveth Him Who is ever seated with the Father. Today the angels glorify as God the Babe Who was born. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will among men!”

Wishing you a happy, holy, and blessed feast of the Nativity and the blessing of the King of Peace.

In Christ – Hieromonk Mark

Homily on the Sunday of the Fathers

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

On this Sunday of the Fathers of Christ, we have heard His genealogy from the Gospel of Matthew, the family-tree springing from the Patriarch Abraham, in a succession of forty one generations.

Though it reflects Jewish patriarchal tradition in ending with Joseph the Betrothed, it also records the ancestors of the Mother of God, who, like her betrothed-spouse was of the tribe of Judah and a descendent of King David, sharing her ancestors with Joseph, the guardian and protector of her and her Divine Son.

Though today’s Gospel may seem tedious, even boring to some, one thing that it is NOT, is pointless. In its intricacies, its generations, its succession from father to son, this Gospel is a sign and record of God’s love, mercy and compassion in His redemptive plan, which was not rushed, but unfolded in His time and according to His will.

Generation by generation, individual by individual, God prepared to put right the fall of the first-father and first-mother, and today’s long and complicated Gospel is a testimony of the fact that God would not redeem humanity as a distant ‘outsider’, but would rather save humanity from within. He would not simply save humanity as God, but scandalously and shockingly, He would save humanity as Man.

The physicality and creatureliness of human nature would be central to the person of Jesus; not only part of of Whom the Jesus of the Gospels was, but of Whom Jesus still is, now worshipped in heaven not only as God, but also in His Humanity.

Divinity and humanity, united in the person of Jesus, was laid as a newborn-child in the manger, as the supreme expression of God’s saving love that voluntarily unfolded and drew closer in the lives of Abraham and his descendants celebrated in today’s Gospel.

When Abraham was called from Ur in Chaldea, leaving his homeland, his culture and people, it was because the All-Knowing, All-Wise and All-Merciful God, had chosen him to not only be the father of a multitude, set apart and chosen by God, but to be the ancestor of His own Saviour and Redeemer.

In reading the Old Testament in a truly Orthodox Christian way, we have to put aside historical linearity and the sequences of time, to understand the Old Testament in the light of the Gospel and the mind of the Church, and to see and understand the calling of Abraham from the perspective of the end of today’s reading.

“Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.”

God-with-us as the Word-Made-Flesh: the precious crown and joy of Abraham, and his descendants.

God-with-us as the Child of Bethlehem, having received His humanity not only from Mary, but from all of the ancestors who came before her.

The very meaning of the calling of Abraham, the first name in the genealogy was that God would and could be with us, which is why we honour and celebrate the Patriarch and the other ancestors of Christ, according to the flesh.

In Christ-Emmanuel, the promises made to the Patriarch were supremely fulfilled, and the Incarnation was the ultimate purpose of Abraham’s life; of the promises God made to him and the very meaning of his Seed.

In the Epistle to the Galatians, St Paul identifies the ultimate meaning of God’s references to the Seed of Abraham.

“Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as of many, but as of one, “And to your Seed,” who is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16)

Christ-Emmanuel, God-with-us, was conceived and born as that wondrous Seed.

For the Hebrews, the Church Fathers and the ancient Christians, the future generations of Abraham’s descendants, Christ’s ancestors, were already within his loins as the father of a multitude.

Thus, according to God’s plan and the economy of salvation, not only all of the Saviour’s ancestors according to the flesh, but even Christ’s humanity were already in Abraham, to be passed down the centuries from generation to generation – from Abraham to Mary of Nazareth.

God Who is ceaselessly worshipped by the angels, would become the Seed of Abraham and his descendent, even though He testified to His own Divinity when He said, “Before Abraham Was, I Am” (John 8:48).

As the Seed of Abraham, He would enter the world in the poverty of a stable to be worshipped by the shepherds,

As the Seed of Abraham, He Who created the stars would become a small and fragile child, Who would lead the magi to Himself by the very stars He had made.

As the Seed of Abraham, Christ the Only-Begotten Son and Eternal Word of God would hide His Divinity beneath His human flesh, choking and conquering the devil who so greedily rushed to swallow Him at His death on the the Cross.

As the Seed of Abraham, voluntarily dying on the Cross, He would become the Conqueror of Death and Author of Life.

This is why it is this genealogy that is read today as a genealogy of vocation and election, setting a people apart for God’s plan to be realised in time and space; unfolding in history; in real individuals with stories, personalities, relationships and families – and through the wonder of the Incarnation and the Nativity, Christ became a relative of all of those whose names we have heard.

Christ became one flesh with them, becoming one of their own even as they became His own. Through becoming Man, the Son of God not only embraced them, but as Saviour laboured for them, suffered for them, sacrificed Himself for them in the the ultimate sign and realisation of God’s love on the Cross.

This Sunday is a great celebration of that love, in that He allows the offender – humanity – to play its part in the economy of salvation, contributing to the Incarnation, undoing the disobedience of Eden through lives of Faith, as so clearly stressed by the joyful words of the Epistle that remind us that all the patriarchs and fathers of Christ achieved was BY FAITH.

Not only did God reach out to them, but they reached out to God. They followed him, were guided by Him, putting their lives in His hands, giving us an example to follow in abiding in God, so that God is not only with us, but we are by our own volition with God.

Through their lives and examples, their personal faith, their relationships with God, we are brought to the Cave of Bethlehem, to the moment in which the Virgin gives birth and the Christ-Child is laid in the manger.

It is only by such personal faith that we too are brought to Christ, and that we become heirs of the promise and the spiritual children of Abraham, as children of the New Covenant, but the New Israel of Christ’s Church.

As St Paul wrote to the change in Galatia, “And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:29)

As the New Israel, we joyfully celebrate those who have been the ladder through which God descended to earth, and humanity ascended to heaven, knowing that is through the generations of Abraham that the gates of heaven are opened to us.

So, today, we rejoice with the patriarchs and matriarchs, prophets and prophetesses, not only from Abraham onwards, but from all generations of the Old Testament righteous ones who were God’s bridge from heaven to earth, and whose memory and example bring us to the approaching glory of the Nativity Feast.

“Rejoicing today, Adam is adorned with the glory of divine communion, as the foundation and confirmation of the wise forefathers; and with him Abel doth leap for joy and Enoch is glad, and Seth danceth together with Noah; the all-praised Abraham doth chant with the patriarchs, and from on high Melchizedek doth behold a birth wherein a father had no part. Wherefore, celebrating the divine memory of the forefathers of Christ, we beseech Him, that our souls be saved.”

(Stikhiron on “Lord, I have cried.”)

Amen.

Preparing For the Nativity: Drawing Near to Bethlehem

Dear brothers and sisters, warmest greetings to you as we celebrate the memory of St Spyridon the Wonderworker, as so many of you are also marking the western Christmas celebrations with non-Orthodox family and friends.

We also greet them as they celebrate the Lord’s Nativity, and hope and pray that this will be a time for reflection upon eternal values and truths, far from the ephemeral frippery that sums up what has become little more than a mid-winter festival for many people.

As a youth I loved –  and continue to love – the homely poems of Sir John Betjeman, particularly appreciating his poem ‘Christmas’, now rather old-fashioned, but with eternal questions that must still challenge us to today…

And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

As we continue our Advent journey, when the baubles and tinsel of western Christmas are put away, we will hopefully have a little space and time to reflect upon the wonder beneath the questions that Betjeman asked – “And is it true… that the Creator of heaven and earth and all that is was born and laid in the manger, and that each time we celebrate the Divine Liturgy, the God-Man, our Saviour Jesus Christ continues to be Emmanuel – “God With Us” – in His self-sacrifice and self-giving of the Holy Mystery of His Body and Blood?

In our Orthodox liturgical culture, we are reminded of this by the melismos icon in which it is the Christ-Child Who is worshipped on the diskos of the eucharist, with either angels or St John Chrysostom and St Basil the Great in supplication on each side – for it is the very Christ-Child laid in the manger in the Cave of Bethlehem, and who received the gifts of the magi Who gives Himself as His Gift to us.

We are reminded of this at the covering of the Holy Gifts at the end of the proskomedia, as the priest takes the metal star-cover, and placing it over the Lamb (and the commemorative particles) says the words,

“And the star came and stood over the place where the Young Child was.”

At the melismos of the Liturgy – the fracturing and dividing of the Lamb before communion – it is the One Who was the Young Child Who is divided for the Communion of His children with His Most Pure Body and Most Precious Blood:

“Broken and distributed is the Lamb of God: broken, yet not divided; ever eaten, though never consumed, but sanctifying them that partake thereof.”

With this in mind, as we enter the last fortnight of the Nativity Fast, culminating in the Nativity Liturgy on Sunday 7th January – according to the Civil Calendar – we should seek to partake of that great wonder – that He Who is equally the Child of Bethlehem and the Risen Saviour and Victorious Conqueror of death and hell calls us and invites us to His supper:

“Take, eat, this is My Body which is broken for you for the remission of sins… Drink of it, all of you; this is My Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins.”

In today’s Gospel for the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, we hear of those who were to busy to come to the supper that a certain rich man arranged, and to which they were invited…

“The first said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it: I pray thee have me excused. And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them: I pray thee have me excused. And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.”

Though our prime understanding of this is the refusal of the Old Israel to respond to God’s persistent and determined call for their return to Him, through His servants, the Holy Forefathers and Prophets, we should not be complacent as the New Israel and children of the Resurrection, but also see it as a cautionary warning to us.

Christ has given us the feasts of the Church and the perpetual feast of His Mystical Supper as a foretaste of the Kingdom, as a token of His love, and as the Banquet of His Church, to which all are called, regardless of age, social status, learning or knowledge, as the very ones who were called from the highways and hedges by the servants seeking new guests to bring to their master’s supper.

Like the Passover lamb of the Exodus, we cannot partake of Christ the New Passover UNLESS we partake of the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world: the Lamb of God worshipped by the shepherds in the cave, Who is the Word Who became flesh and dwelt among us on that first Christmas night.

In these last days of the Fast, we prepare to meet the New Born Saviour as that very Lamb of God, Who was born and laid in the manger, to take away the sins of the world; clothed in Adam’s flesh to carry the Cross and to defeat the power of death and hell through the very flesh which He had put on; and in the coming feast of the Nativity He calls us to Himself, to each of us to worship and adore, but also to be joined to Him and have Him abiding in us through the Holy Mysteries.

As we approach the coming feast, we do not travel as magi, with costly gifts, but in our journeys of Faith many of us have travelled a very long way; far from the people we once were; far from the ideas we once held or the lives we once led; far from the things that we once thought to be the priorities of life, signs of success, well-being or achievement; far from the attachments and earthly things that once held us; and during that journey we have encountered much, perhaps changed much, and hopefully learned much – but not in terms of intellectualism and worldly knowledge, but in the simple and true wisdom that Christ has revealed and gives us, for we know that “God is the Lord, and has revealed Himself to us”

This revelation is the great gift of Christmas – God’s salvific gift of Himself to us and for us – and for those of us who preserve and live the Orthodox, Catholic and Apostolic Faith, this gift is one which is never exhausted as the Holy Mysteries of the Church are continually given to us, for our renewal and transformation, with the Eucharist as the greatest sign of Christ’s Gift to each of us, as precious individuals Whom He loves and cherishes.

To return to St Spyridon – his life as a simple rural shepherd, turned shepherd-of-souls after the death of his wife, when he was chosen and consecrated as bishop of Tremithus in Cyprus, reminds us that it is God “Who hast revealed the fishermen as most wise by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit.” It is in God that all Truth and all Wisdom is to be found, and that Truth and Wisdom was incarnate, and entered the world as a Person.

St Spyridon could almost be one of the simple shepherds who were in the hills tending their flocks by night. Unlike the Cappadocian Fathers, this simple soul did not receive a great classical education; he did not study grammar, logic, or rhetoric… mathematics, philosophy or theology; he did not know the classical Greek educational traditions or the great places of learning – and yet he was enlightened and made not only a TRUE theologian (who knows God rather than only knowing about Him), but also a wonder-worker, whose innumerable miracles never cease.

In him, divine-love, truth and wisdom made their dwelling, because his heart became the cave and the manger in which Christ found a home.

We are each called to approach the coming feast of the Nativity, like the simple shepherds, and with the simplicity and faith possessed by St Spyridon, knowing that the human heart and even the most complex and complicated lives, opened and surrendered to the New-Born Saviour in humility, faith, hope and love, can be transformed and the greatest of places, in which all things become possible through the love and mercy, and the in-dwelling of the Grace of God.

Let us approach the coming feast with awe, faith and love, desiring the Saviour to change us, banishing darkness, confusion and fear, and bringing us light and life.

In seeking Him as Light and Life, let us fast and pray, beseeching the Lord 

”…as Thou didst consent to lie in a cave and in a manger of dumb beasts, so consent also to lie in the manger of mine irrational soul and to enter into my defiled body.”

– daring to approach when we see the Deacon present the Holy Gifts at our Nativity Liturgy, hearing those familiar but ever awesome words,

“With the fear of God and faith, draw near – Со стра́хом Бо́жиим и ве́рою приступи́те.”

And, we know that our drawing near is only possible because the Love of God and God of Love did not simply draw near to us, but came searching for us when we were lost, reconciling us with Him, making peace between earth and heaven by becoming like unto us in the scandal of the Incarnation, in the seeming impossibility of the birth of the God-Man in the Cave of Bethlehem, in the shocking dereliction and suffering of the Cross, and in the glory and victory of the Life-Giving Resurrection.

This is the promise of the coming feast, hiding within the New-Born Child, the whole economy of salvation.

Troparion of the forefeast, Tone 4: Make ready, O Bethlehem! Be thou opened unto all, O Eden! Adorn thyself, O Ephratha! For in the cave the Tree of Life hath sprung forth from the Virgin. Her womb is shown to be a noetic paradise, in the midst of which is the divine Tree, whereof eating, we shall live, and not die as did Adam. Christ is born, that He might restore His image which fell of old!

Greetings For the Exultation of the Cross – the Tree of Life

The Cross is the guardian of the whole world! The Cross is the beauty of the Church! The Cross is the strength of kings! The Cross is the support of the faithful! The Cross is the glory of the angels and the wounder of the demons!”

(Exapostilarion)

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Dear brothers and sisters,

Greetings for the feast of the Exultation of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross of the Lord.

Contrary to the logic of the world and the mockery of the modern day equivalent of the Jews (for whom the Cross was a stumbling block) and the Greeks (for whom the Cross was foolishness), today, we joyfully celebrate the feast.

In our temples, we surround the Cross with herbs and flowers, venerating it as a precious treasure and source of sanctification, blessing and healing.

Prostrating ourselves and venerating it, we chant, “Before Thy Cross we bow down, O Master, and Thy holy Resurrection we glorify.”

In our cathedrals and monasteries, hierarchs and abbots bless the four corners of the earth, with the Cross as the sign of victory by which the demons are conquered, the powers of evil put to flight, and the world consecrated through God’s grace. We know that the powers of hell fear this very sign and painful reminder of their own defeat and impotence.

But, how can it be that a the Church came to recognise a Roman gibbet, a shameful tool of torture and death to be the sign of victory and the Tree of Life?

The early Christians and Fathers of the Church saw many types of the Cross in the Jewish scriptures: in the wood with which Noah built the salvific ark; in the the wood carried for Isaac’s intended sacrifice; in the rod of Moses, which divided the Red Sea, opening a path from slavery to freedom; in the cruciform raising of Moses arms, by which Israel defeated Amalek; in the bronze serpent set cross-wise on a pole for the healing of the Israelites bitten by the fiery snakes.

In all of these, the meaning and vision was of healing, deliverance, freedom, salvation, victory and restoration.

As inheritors of the early Christian understanding of the prophetic and prefigurative voice of the scriptures in image and symbol, and as heirs of their spiritual approach to the Cross, we celebrate and honour it in its glorious, life-giving fulness.

Like the early Christians, seeing beyond the Saviour’s pain and suffering in His accepting, embracing, carrying and enduring the Cross, we see life, liberation, the restoration of humanity and the redemption of Adam and Eve, and of all humanity with them.

Thus, over twenty centuries after an instrument of torturous death was transformed and consecrated by the Saviour’s sacrificial love, obedience, humility, and His total outpouring of self, we Orthodox Christians hymn and venerate the Life-Giving Cross as the Tree of Life, the destruction of hell and the death of death.

Whilst some heretics are loathe to even acknowledge the reality of the crucifixion and the form of the Cross, we embrace it with enthusiastic devotion and deep love – having been sealed with its precious image in Holy Baptism and Chrismation; wearing it around our necks; being signed with it upon our heads in confession as we are assured of Christ’s forgiveness for the penitent; anointed with its form in Holy Unction; tracing its image upon ourselves in prayer and divine worship, and being blessed with that same figure.

In the hymns of Paschal matins, we boldly declare that “through the Cross, joy hath come to all the world…”, and exulting in this joy, we are mindful that at the heart of the meaning of the Cross is the reckless and limitless love of God, of which the sacrificial-love of the Cross was sign of the absolute nature of that love in which God held His Creation from its very beginning.

Desirous for the redemption and restoration of His children from the very moment of their fall, in that love, in the economy of salvation, He sought to heal like by means of like, entering into creation itself to effect the healing and salvation of the fallen.

Just as sin, disobedience and death entered the world through wood – by the Tree of Knowledge – so righteousness, obedience, and restored life would be effected through the Wood: the Tree of the Cross, which has become for us the Tree of Life.

He Who was raised up on this Tree, of His own will, was the very Immortal Word of God and Creator of Whom St John tells us, “All things were created through Him, and apart from Him not one thing was created that has been created…”

As the first Adam fell through approaching a tree in disobedience, and the fruit of that tree was death, so the second Adam approached His Tree in obedience, and the fruit of that Tree is life!

This is proclaimed by the Church’s hymns for the feast, in which we reflect that the tree was healed by a Tree, chanting in matins,

“Of old, in paradise, a tree stripped me naked, the enemy bringing about mortality through eating; but the Tree of the Cross, bearing for men the vesture of life, hath been planted in the ground, and the whole world hath been filled with all manner of joy.”

From the height of that Tree, Christ, the Wisdom, Word and Power of God created anew: making of humanity and the world a new creation, whose conception is signalled by the words of the sacrificed Lamb of God, “It is done.”

As the earth quaked, the sun was eclipsed, the Veil of the Temple was rent from top to bottom, and the bodies of the saints rose from their graves, the awesome, life-giving and world-changing power of the Cross was first manifested in the labour pains of a new world born and created from the height of the Cross.

Year by year, we celebrate this wonderful mystery in this feast of the Exultation, knowing that those who love the Cross of Christ, embracing its message of sacrificial love, selflessness and obedience in their lives are themselves exalted by the Cross just as much as we exalt the Cross on this joyful feast.

St Ephrem the Syrian poetically speaks of the Cross as a bridge spanning the jaws of death, and leading to ‘the land of the living’:

“He who was also the carpenter’s glorious son set up his Cross above death’s all-consuming jaws, and led the human race into the dwelling place of life. Since a tree had brought about the downfall of mankind, it was upon a tree that mankind crossed over to the realm of life. Bitter was the branch that had once been grafted upon that ancient tree, but sweet the young shoot that has now been grafted in, the shoot in which we are meant to recognise the Lord whom no creature can resist.

We give glory to Thee, O Lord, who raised up Thy Cross to span the jaws of death like a bridge by which souls might pass from the region of the dead to the land of the living. We give glory to Thee who put on the body of a single mortal man and made it the source of life for every other mortal man.”

On this feast, we glorify the Lord and His Life-Giving Cross, by which hell was defeated and stripped bare as the Risen Lord led our first-father and first mother with the saints of the Old Israel across this wondrous bridge from death to life. 

In labouring to follow Him, Who wishes to exalt and raise us up by His Cross, let us rejoice and celebrate in the radiant joy of the feast.

“Come then, my brothers and sisters, let us offer our Lord the great and all-embracing sacrifice of our love, pouring out our treasury of hymns and prayers before him who offered his Cross in sacrifice to God for the enrichment of all.”

(St. Ephrem the Syrian, 306-373 AD)

As the Tree of Life, and the sign of selfless cruciform-love, let us live with the Mystery and meaning of the Cross, as the centre of our lives: our axis mundi stretching from earth to heaven.

Amen.

J

The Nativity of the Mother of God


Greetings on this glorious feast, so joyfully lauded by the Church Fathers as the beginning of the renewal of creation through the birth of the Virgin, from whom the Creator would be born and come in the flesh to restore fallen Adam and make creation new.

The hymns of the feast boldly declare that today is the great day of the beginning of our deliverance, liberation and salvation, triumphantly declaring in the first stikhiron of the vespers litia that –

“Today is the beginning of our salvation, O ye people! For, lo! the Virgin Mother, who was foretold from generations of old as the receptacle of God, cometh forth to be born of a barren woman…”

St John Damascene, calls all of humanity to celebrate this wonderful event, saying, “Come, all nations, every race of men, every language, every age and every rank! Let us joyfully celebrate the nativity of joy for the whole world!”

But, as we celebrate this long-past Nativity through which the economy of salvation was put into motion upon the face of the earth, he also calls renewed creation itself to join in the joy and wonder of the momentous birth of the Mother of God: “Let the whole of creation make festival and sing of the most holy birth-giving of the holy Anna. For she bore for the world an inviolable treasury of blessings. Through her the Creator transformed all nature into a better state by means of humanity.”

And, today is the joyful prelude to the Creator’s transformation of our humanity by means of the very humanity that He received from His Virgin-Mother. In her Nativity, the Mother of God rises like the day-star which announces the bright dawn of the Sun of Righteousness, after the long and deepening spiritual darkness of the centuries before the coming of Christ.

The rising of this day-star was foreordained by God from the very moment of the fall of the first-father and the first-mother, and the children of the old Israel advanced towards it through the long night of the Old Covenant, with the continuum of the successive generations of the forebears of the Mother of God as the ascent and rising of her as the morning star, growing closer – century by century – to her rising and shining in the darkness before the dawn of the Light of the World in His Nativity in the cave of Bethlehem.

In the Old Testament scriptures the Church Fathers and early Christians saw many prefigurings of the Mother of God: in Jacob’s Ladder, in the Burning Bush, in the Tabernacle, in the Ark of the Covenant within the Holy of Holies, in the stem from the root of Jesse, in the sealed gate of Ezekiel.

In such a manner, St Andrew of Crete wrote that the Theotokos is “the vision which was mystically foreshadowed of old in Moses’ burning bush – the fleece of Gideon – David’s divinely embroidered purple robe – the  cherubic throne, supremely great, fiery and lofty, holding in its womb the Lord King Sabaoth… The gate of heaven, through which the Master of the Heavens alone passed, having granted the entrance to no one before Him.”

In this rich typology, the Church Fathers saw prophetic images leading Israel towards the momentous day on which types and figures would be fulfilled in the birth of the Virgin, when symbols and shadows would pass away in the arrival of the foreordained Mother of the God-Man, Messiah and Saviour of the world.

Thus, according to the Faith of the Church, there was nothing random or accidental, no element of chance or coincidence in the birth of the Mother of God, but the foreordained council of God and His redemptive love working through the generations of the ancestors of the Theotokos, right down to the Forebears of God, Joachim and Anna, and – through prophecies and foreshadowings – God spiritually prepared Israel for the coming of the Mother of God.

To show God’s sovereign will and the workings of grace, nature was stalled in the conception of the Mother of God, as observed by St John Damascene in his festal oration:

“Nature has been defeated by grace and stands trembling, no longer ready to take the lead… But why has the Virgin Mother been born from a sterile woman?… Nature has been defeated by grace and stands trembling, no longer ready to take the lead. Therefore when the God-bearing Virgin was about to be born from Anna, nature did not dare to anticipate the offshoot of grace; instead it remained without fruit until grace sprouted its fruit.”

Her Nativity, though a natural one of human seed, was nevertheless only made possible through grace, after the parents of the Theotokos had been prepared for this unique birth by years of waiting, though it seemed mad and fruitless to the eyes of the world.

In those years of waiting in patient hope, they were transformed by God’s grace, and their long-awaited child was the fruit not only of their humanity, but also of their humility and patience, born after years spent in contrition, fasting and prayer, in which Joachim and Anna never abandoned hope in the All-Merciful God – as observed by St Gregory Palamas:

“See, all of you, how chastity, fasting and prayer, linked with contrition, made Joachim and Anna the parents of a divine vessel, a vessel chosen not just to bear the name of God, like Paul who was to be born later, but to bear Him “Whose name is Wonderful..”

The Church is clear in seeing the birth of the Mother of God, this divine vessel, as a moment of return, yet to be brought to fruition in the Saviour’s works of salvation through the cross, passion and resurrection, but still a cosmic turning point in which humanity turns back to its ancient dignity, inasmuch as the Mother of God represents all of humanity.

The great hymnographer, St Andrew of Crete, observed that,

“Today the pure nobility of humankind takes back the gift of the dignity of the first divine creation and restores it to itself… And in a word, today the reshaping of our nature begins, and the world, which had grown old, takes up a most God-like composition, receiving the beginnings of a second divine modelling.”

Each of us is called to participate in this very reshaping and remodelling, not simply by joyfully celebrating this event as passive onlookers, happy but untouched by its message, but by constantly labouring for the realisation of its inner-meaning in our lives, conforming our will to God’s will for each of us, exemplified by the parents of the Theotokos, and that of the Virgin, herself.

Living blameless lives like Joachim and Anna, we are called to constant vigil in watchfulness, prayer and spiritual labour, so that our spiritual barrenness and sterility may be overcome by God’s grace, which we must actively struggle to attain, day by day.

As their God-pleasing humility, contrition and patience was rewarded with the blessed answer to their prayers, so our perseverance and persistence will be rewarded by God. The cultivation of these virtues in our lives will transform us, and make us receptive to the grace of God. Through the struggle to acquire them, our hearts will be softened, our souls cleansed, and through this purification we will become vessels ready to receive spiritual treasures through the work and operation of the Holy Spirit.

However, we are not simply called to emulate Joachim and Anna, but above all to emulate the Mother of God, who is the apex and crown of creation, seeing in her the perfect example of of holiness, selflessness, obedience, total dedication to Christ and creation transfigured, exalted and glorified: the greatest living temple of the Holy Spirit, whose life shows what is possible when our will is perfectly conformed to the will of God, leading us from earth to the heights of heaven. 

In using Old Testament typology and symbolism, St John Damascene wrote,

“Today the “Son of the carpenter” has prepared for himself a living ladder whose base has been set on earth and whose top reaches to heaven itself. God has come to rest in her; the type that Jacob saw was of her; God descended without change through her, or in other words, having accommodated himself, he was seen on earth and lived along with humankind… The spiritual ladder, the Virgin, has been established on earth, for she had her origin from earth.”

As the Hodegetria – the one who shows the way – the Mother of God is indeed a spiritual ladder, and by emulating her wonderful example, we may climb towards the Kingdom of Heaven, but no-one will make us climb: the choice is ours, and this calling may be heeded or rejected, accepted or refused.

May this feast inspire us, to embrace its meaning with our hearts and souls, translating its joys and promises into action – spiritually, physically and mentally – loving God with our whole heart and with all our soul, with all our mind and with all our strength, as did the Mother of God, whose Nativity calls us to embrace the Gospel and respond actively and positively to the wonder of God’s love, manifested in the birth of the child who would become the Virgin-Mother through whom the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Let us who love God love the Mother of God, who is a sign of His love for mankind, and the chosen instrument of the Incarnation and salvation, and in loving let us struggle for holiness, even as she shows us the way to holiness.

Let us mirror our festal joy with action, offering our lives as a spiritual offering to the Virgin who offered herself for us, bearing the Saviour for each and every one of us, who in our humanity “makes it bloom again, grants it to flourish for ever, brings it up to heaven, and leads it into paradise.” (St Gregory Palamas: Oration on the Natvity of the Mother of God)

Most Holy Theotokos, save us!

Greetings for the Dormition

“Today the living ladder, through whom the Most High descended and was seen on earth, and conversed with men, was assumed into heaven by death. Today the heavenly table, she, who contained the bread of life, the fire of the Godhead, without knowing man, was assumed from earth to heaven, and the gates of heaven opened wide to receive the gate of God from the East. Today the living city of God is transferred from the earthly to the heavenly Jerusalem, and she, who, conceived her first-born and only Son, the first-born of all creation, the only begotten of the Father, rests in the Church of the first-born: the true and living Ark of the Lord is taken to the peace of her Son.” 

St John of Damascus: Third homily on the Dormition of the Mother of God

Dear brothers and sisters,

Festal greetings on our joyous and radiant Summer Pascha, the feast of the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God.

This feast is the consummation of the life of the Mother of God, whose events are renewed and transfigured in her Dormition and Assumption into heaven.

Having received the good-tidings of the Incarnation through the message of the Archangel, the Mother of God received the new good-tidings of her own imminent birth into the eternal life of the Heavenly Kingdom.

Her distant earthly nativity was crowned by her nativity into eternal life, and in the icon of the feast, we see her all-pure soul borne into the heavens in the hands of her own Divine Child in the symbolic likeness of a new-born babe wrapped in swaddling clothes.

In her Dormition, the presentation and entrance of the three year-old Mother of God into the temple and her entrance into the holy of holies in Jerusalem was superseded and crowned as she entered beyond the veil, not into the earthly ‘haikal’, but into the heavenly sanctuary of her Son, our Great High Priest.

Whilst her parents Joachim and Anna rejoiced at her childhood entrance into the temple, the whole heavenly host, and the ranks prophets and other Old Testament saints, raised in the Saviour’s harrowing of hell – and including her own parents – rejoice, as her pure soul is borne into the heavenly courts by her Son, to be followed by the translation of her incorrupt body.

Having given birth to the Saviour in the cave, where He was wrapped in swaddling bands and laid in the manger, and having seen Him once more laid in a cave wrapped in the linen swaddling bands of burial, she herself was laid within a cave, shrouded in the linen wrappings of the dead. But, like the cave of Bethlehem and the Arimathean’s rock-hewn tomb, so also, her sepulchral cave in Gethsemane became a place of new life, as she was translated from death to life.

And, in this passage from earthly life through death to eternal, heavenly life, the Mother of God enters into the promise of the resurrection, to be glorified and transfigured as she is set at the right hand of her Son, as our intercessor and mediator, the Queen of Heaven – who not only shows us the way, but desires that all of her children should partake in the blessings of eternal life, and be co-sharers in the eternal glory of her Son.

In the glorification and transfiguration of the risen and ascended Mother of God, raised to the right hand of her Son, all of creation reaches its zenith and apotheosis, with the daughter not only of Joachim and Anna, but also of Adam and Eve, foretokening God’s desire for the whole human-race to be raised up and transfigured, to share in the Eighth Day – the Age to Come, when there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and Christ will reign in peace and glory.

The Mother of God, in her obedience and sinlessness, was born into this heavenly glory without death-pangs, with neither suffering, distress nor pain, just as her own bearing Christ in Bethlehem was without birth-pangs and pain.

Despite its harshness, pains and trials, the life she led between her own earthly nativity and nativity into heaven, was one in which she remained sinless and stainless through her freewill, striving for holiness and rejecting evil, even whilst suffering and seeing so much that tested her.

In her, the seeds of the passions found no ground, as she preserved her holiness; in her life of prayer from her tenderest childhood years, temptation was rebutted and rejected; but, despite the grace of God that overshadowed her, we need to remind ourselves that the Mother of God was not exempted from the tests and trials of humanity.

She was not set in some sort of protective spiritual-bubble that magically preserved her from temptation and sin. How could she be one of us and gift Christ our humanity if that was the case? No. The life of the Mother of God was one of prayer, podvig/askesis: the struggle for holiness, and he conscious rejection of temptation and sin, with the core of this remarkable life at the side of her Son – her own personal Way, Truth and Life.

At the marriage in Cana, before the turning of water into wine, the Mother of God instructed the attendants at the feast to listen to the Lord, and to do whatever He told them. This was clearly the guiding principal in her own life, stamped with the openness of the obedience of her response to Archangel at that first Annunciation: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”

If we can but emulate her in these respects, by listening to the Lord and doing what He has told us to do, and how we should live in the Holy Gospels, and if we can say “Here I am, your servant, may your will be done and accomplished in me”, then we have at least started on our journey to our spiritual Gethsemane, where the Mother of God made herself ready for her death and her passing from the world.

She, no doubt, looked forward to the future and passing from this world, to be reunited with her Child, positively focussing her life and orienting it to that moment of reunion and meeting.

This degree of anticipation and preparation possessed the apostles, who saw not only the Lord’s Ascension, but how he received His mother’s all-pure soul and witnessed that she had physically risen from her tomb, and we encounter it in the lives and sufferings of the holy martyrs, ever ready to meet their Lord.

But what of us, living as though tomorrow will always come, as though there will always be time for what we need to do in the future? How deluded and foolish we are.

As we hear in Great Lent, “Arise my soul. Why art thou sleeping?” Like the foolish virgins, we are lazy, lax and inattentive, neither ready nor prepared, but in a spiritual coma.

The reality is that our passing from this world into life beyond the grave could be at any moment, yet we fail to make ready.

Each of us will have our own dormition, but unlike the Mother of God and some chosen among the saints, we will not have an angel to forewarn us and tell us to prepare, and even if we did, how would we possibly make ready for our leaving the world and facing the journey ahead?

What could we do in a few days, or even hours?

We will, God willing leave the world fortified by the Holy Mysteries – having confessed, received Holy Unction, and communion of the Holy and Life-Giving Mysteries of the Saviour’s Body and Blood – but, we will leave the world with the burden of the wrong actions, inactions and omissions, wrong decisions and rebelliousness of our lives weighing us down. There were no toll-houses where the angels examined the spotless soul of the Mother of God, but there will be for us.

So, whatever we have done so far in life, however ill-advised, however foolish, sinful and rebellious, let us wake up, turn life around and heed the hopeful, beautiful and joyful calling of this feast, to purposely, positively and actively look to the future and what the All-Merciful and All-Loving God wills for us, wishes for us and desires for us: to be translated from earthly life to heavenly life in the wake of the Mother of God

For us, as children of the resurrection, baptised into the Saviour’s Life-Giving third-day Resurrection from the dead (already enjoyed by the Mother of God, three days bodily in her sepulchre) the festal words of st John of Damascus should ring true:

“O wonder surpassing nature and creating wonder! Death, which of, old was feared and hated, is a matter of praise and blessing. Of old, it was the harbinger of grief, dejection, tears, and sadness, and now it is shown forth as the cause of joy and rejoicing.”

… but though death in Christ should be a reason for praise and blessing, and a cause of joy and rejoicing, this can only be true if we LIVE in Christ, each hour, each day, each week, month and year.

In this challenge, the Saviour has given us His Mother, as our intercessor, mediatrix, refuge, comforter and protector – and we gratefully turn to her as the Joy of All Who Sorrow, the Consolation in Afflictions, the Seeker of the Lost, the Rescuer of the Perishing, and the Surety of Sinners.

Being the Hodegetria, she shows us the way, so let us follow her life, her example, her obedience, her submission to the Lord, her struggle for holiness, and the way in which Christ was the whole meaning, purpose and focus of a God-centred, heavenward earthly sojourn, before her pilgrimage took her from Gethsemane to the right hand of the Lord of Glory.

Imitating the Mother of God, following in her footsteps is our sure way to at least be touched by her shadow, to receive the smallest crumbs of grace, and to know that we are heading in the right direction.

Just as Gethsemane was the place of her making ready to meet the Saviour, strengthened by her prayers, inspired by her holiness, given direction by her example, and following in her footsteps, let each of us make our own place of sojourn – whether South or West Wales, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire or Somerset… wherever – a spiritual Gethsemane, where we prepare for the end of our earthly days, in the hope of the future heavenly life, to which the Mother of God has already passed and arrived in great glory and majesty.

Happy feast!

In Christ – Hieromonk Mark

On the Feast of the Transfiguration

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Greetings on this glorious feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord – a feast of not just symbolic or metaphorical glory, but of both the physical and spiritual manifestation, in time and place, of the uncreated glory of the Creator Himself.

Mount Tabor became the place where the glory the Only-Begotten and Pre-Eternal Son of God was revealed to the disciples, as far as they were able to bear it.

The Saviour revealed that which had not been seen by the men and women of the Gospels: not by the magi, even though they fell down and worshipped Him as they laid their gifts before Him; not by the shepherds, even though an angel revealed the new-born Lord to them; not by Symeon the God-Receiver, even though he took the Infant-Saviour into his arms and recognised Him as the Light to enlighten the gentiles; not by the many sick, disabled and possessed people whom He healed and set free, even though He, as their Creator made them into new creations through the miracles He wrought.

Peter, James and John beheld the Saviour in a way that none had so-far beheld Him, as Christ the Eternal Logos revealed His divinity on Mount Tabor, and yet the Transfiguration represented a restoration of the glory in which Adam and Eve were clothed before the Fall, as we chant in the aposticha of vespers

“Thou wast transfigured, and didst cause the darkened nature of Adam to shine again, imparting to it the glory and splendour of Thy divinity.”

The glory that radiated from the Saviour and enveloped Him in the Transfiguration was not something in which He was clothed on the occasion. Rather, as the Church Fathers made clear, when Jesus was transfigured He did not take upon Himself something new that He did not formerly possess, or change into something or someone else. Rather, in the radiant splendour of the godhead, He showed Himself to His disciples as He already was, and as He always had been, though His divinity was temporarily hidden when He was incarnate, as the Saviour of the World.

In the words of St Gregory Palamas,

“We believe that at the Transfiguration He manifested…  only that which was concealed beneath His fleshly exterior. This Light was the Light of the Divine Nature, and as such, it was Uncreated and Divine.”

The Saviour revealed what His humility, His love and compassion had hidden when He was obedient to the Father’s will in the incarnation, clothing Himself in Adam and hiding what the Prophet Ezekiel had seen and struggled to describe when the Lord-Yahweh, the pre-incarnate Saviour, appeared on the heavenly chariot-throne in

“… a likeness with the appearance of a man high above it. Also, from the appearance of His waist and upward I saw, as it were, the colour of amber with the appearance of fire all around within it; and from the appearance of His waist and downward I saw, as it were, the appearance of fire with brightness all around. Like the appearance of a rainbow in a cloud on a rainy day, so was the appearance of the brightness all around it. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”

The uncreated-light of Christ’s divinity on Mount Tabor echoed the glory that Ezekiel could only approximate in words and images, and also the glory that Moses encountered when he ascended Mount Sinai: glory that was such that Moses himself was transfigured by his encounter with Christ-Yahweh, as St Gregory Palamas reminded his listeners:

“Even the face of Moses was illumined by his association with God. Do you not know that Moses was transfigured when he went up the mountain, and there beheld the Glory of God? But he (Moses) did not affect this, but rather he underwent a Transfiguration.”

On Mount Tabor, Moses, present in spirit, again reflected the divine-glory, whilst Elias who had bodily ascended into heaven reflected the light of the Transfiguration both physically and spiritually.

And, the Saviour appeared in glory, not simply to show the glory of His divinity to the disciples, but to give them a glimpse of the radiant promise of the resurrection, preparing them for the necessary suffering which would lead Him from Gethsemane and the Praetorium to Golgotha and the Arimathean’s tomb, as He went to His voluntary passion like a lamb to the slaughter, in the brokeness of the suffering-servant foreseen by the Prophet Isaiah, and Who…

“hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him… He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief… brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”

The Transfiguration pre-empted His suffering, so that the necessity of the Cross and the sacrifice of Christ, as the Lamb of God and New-Passover, could be understood by those closest to Him, so that they would not be scandalised by the Cross of Christ, and His crucifixion.

Behind this voluntary and sacrificial-suffering, self-emptying and selfless giving was the same Christ who was transfigured to show the certainty of the glory which lay beyond the Cross and tomb: the glory of the Pre-Eternal Word made flesh for us men and for our salvation.

As St Ephrem the Syrian preached,

“He led them up the mountain and showed them his kingship before his passion, and his power before his death, and his glory before his disgrace, and his honour before his dishonour, so that, when he was arrested and crucified by the Jews, they might know that he was not crucified through weakness, but willingly by his good pleasure for the salvation of the world.”

Paths of suffering would also be the lot of the disciples, given courage by a glimpse of the glory of the Kingdom and the Master’s divinity, to shortly be reinforced by their experience of His resurrection, His glorious ascension, and the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The Saviour sought to share His glory with them, so that they – and every generation of faithful – might be partakers and inheritors of His glory, called to be transfigured like Moses and Elias, radiant in His light.

Similar paths have been trodden by the Saviour’s followers throughout the history of the Church, from the Roman persecutions to the trials of the new-martyrs and confessors of the Communist Yoke in the 20th century, and the suffering of the persecuted Ukrainian Church, today.

Through this suffering countless believers have been spiritually transfigured, finding great strength and joy even in their sufferings – encountering God, with their endurance and courage buoyed by the promise touched upon by St Leo the Great in his homily for the feast,

“About which the Lord had Himself said, when He spoke of the majesty of His coming, Then shall the righteous shine as the sun in their Father’s Kingdom (Mat. 13:43), while the blessed Apostle Paul bears witness to the self-same thing, and says: for I reckon that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the future glory which shall be revealed in us (Rom. 8:18): and again, for you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. For when Christ our life shall appear, then shall you also appear with Him in glory (Col. 3:3).”

… and in this he reminds us that most will have to wait for the life of the age to come to behold God’s glory, when the righteous shall shine like the sun, when the elect will be sharers in the light which shone upon the mountain of the Transfiguration.

Few will have the worldly foretaste of this glory, like St Symeon, St Seraphim or St John the Wonderworker, but we live in hope of the promise of the glory of God manifest on the mountain.

To attain to this promise, glimpsed on Tabor by the disciples, we must take up our Cross and follow the Saviour in selfless love and obedience: thoroughly, faithfully, and maximally.

This is the only way each of us can even begin to climb the mountain, even its lowest and gentlest slopes: embracing spiritual life as askesis/ascetic labour – praying, fasting, struggling for purity, through repentance and by making the Gospel and the Law of God the entire rule of our lives, day by day.

Above all, let us be fervent in prayer, as our communion with the Living God joins time and eternity, and our finite and transient human lives with the changeless eternity of the life of God who always IS.

In prayer there is a certain transcendence of time and place, as there was when the Lord was transfigured on the mountain, and pure prayer is at the centre of our metamorphosis and transfiguration.

St Gregory Palamas, (taking the Transfiguration Gospel from St Luke) observes that

“That same Inscrutable Light shone and was mysteriously manifest to the Apostles and the foremost of the Prophets at that moment, when (the Lord) was praying. This shows that what brought forth this blessed sight was prayer, and that the radiance occurred and was manifest by uniting the mind with God, and that it is granted to all who, with constant exercise in efforts of virtue and prayer, strive with their mind towards God. True beauty, essentially, can be contemplated only with a purified mind.

Let us raise up our hearts and minds to God, as even in wordlessness, this is prayer.  And, through prayer – sometimes easy, often a struggle – let us labour to purify our intellect, thoughts and senses, so that we may contemplate things divine and eternal, and join ourselves to things heavenly and changeless: racing to the mountain in this prayer, eager to behold and experience the glory of the Lord.

“Arise, ye slothful thoughts of my soul, which have ever been dragged down to the earth! Be ye upborne and rise aloft to the summit of divine ascent! Let us make haste to Peter and the sons of Zebedee, and with them let us go to Mount Tabor, that we may see the glory of our God with them, and may hear the voice which they heard from on high; and they preached that Thou, in truth, art the Effulgence of the Father.”

(Ikos of the Matins Canon)

… and let us not simply rise up to go, to seek, to hear, but to spiritually labour and struggle to be clothed as partakers in that very glory that shone forth upon the mountain, so that Adam’s darkened nature in us may shine once more.

S prazdnikom! Happy Feast!

Amen.