March 22, 2020
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We have reached today the midpoint of the Fast. Half of the struggle is behind us, and the second half still lies ahead. And seeing our weakness, seeing our faintness of heart and the ease with which we can tire and grow despondent, on this Sunday our mother the Holy Church mercifully offers us hope and refreshment, comfort and consolation. But the form which this takes is not at all what “common sense” might imagine. Of the events yet to come, of the prizes which we are running to obtain, the Church does not offer a prefigurement of Pascha and the resurrection, but rather of Holy Friday and the Cross.
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March 08, 2020
Our present feast is not just a feast of the victory of truth over falsehood in the abstract—but of truth’s triumph in public sphere, of its open proclamation, its universal acknowledgment, and its sanction by the earthly authorities. Orthodoxy, we see, is a thoroughly public affair.
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March 01, 2020
There is no one who comes to Christ in repentance, who will not receive forgiveness, therefore how can it be amongst us that if we have been forgiven that we cannot find the ability to forgive others?
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February 15, 2020
Today is the fortieth day since we celebrated the Nativity of Christ. On this day, we celebrate the Meeting of the Lord. In the book of Exodus, the Lord gave the command to Moses: “Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether human or animal.” (13.1-2, cf. Luke 2.23). Today, we celebrate this event, as Christ is brought into the Temple by his parents and we note their obedience to the Law, and this particular law which acknowledges God’s beneficence.
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January 07, 2020
The carnal and Jewish-minded man, says St. John of the Ladder, prepares for Feasts by arranging what foods he can enjoy on them; but the spiritual Israelite, the true Christian, seeks the spiritual recompenses which are bestowed on the Feast Days. The Jewish-minded man paints within his mind with great expectation all the dishes he can glut himself with and all the dainties he can gulp down; but the spiritual man seeks how he can slake his spiritual thirst and sate his spiritual starvation.
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January 05, 2020
Last week, we commemorated the ancestors of Christ which helps us to understand the earthly lineage from which Christ came and through which it was prophesied that He would come. Today, they are included along with those others who have found favor in the eyes of the Lord, showing that grace overflows the bounds of the lineage of the Messiah to engulf not only the Jews but the Gentiles also. Soon that grace will flood the earth, and we will hear the angels speak to the shepherds, and say, “I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people (Luke 2.10) and understand that the love of God was and is, not only for Christ’s ancestors or the righteous of the Old Testament, but for all people.
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December 29, 2019
Even as we are falling into sin, cutting ourselves off from God, slaying ourselves with spiritual death; even amidst this, God speaks hope into our heart, reassuring us that there is a Savior for those who repent. This is proved to us by our Fore-Parents, Adam and Eve. For, after they sinned, they heard the Lord’s words of condemnation of the serpent-devil, but mixed with this there was the first prophecy of the coming Messiah, Christ, the Savior of the world.
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December 08, 2019
The account, which we have just heard, is found only in the Gospel of Luke. It speaks of Jesus, being in the Temple on the Sabbath and encountering a woman who was bent over forwards for eighteen years. This ailment is described as a “spirit of infirmity”(vs. 11) under which she was unable to straighten herself up.
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November 24, 2019
God is not a monster; He is not a tyrant; He is not unjust. Instead, He is a father; He is a mother; He deals mercifully with His creation, and acts with love towards us who are created in His image. This is the picture that the Apostle Paul paints in today’s Epistle reading; that God is not abusive, nor does he exact justice upon us, but instead He conducts Himself with compassion and mercy.
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