Sermons & Homilies
The parable of the Prodigal Son is the most touching and poignant image of the Christian life of repentance. That is why the Fathers chose this parable to frame the service of monastic tonsure. Because monastic life is the Christian life of repentance in its fulness and perfection. For those of us whom God has vouchsafed the mystery of monastic tonsure, it is impossible to hear the troparion for this day without a feeling of deep compunction.
We all have a choice before us: will we willingly accept suffering and death for the sake of the love of God, and so behold those very things being transformed into joy and blessedness and life eternal? Or will we run and hide from suffering and death — only to find, at the end of all things, that we cannot run and hide any longer, and that having refused to meet Christ in them, we are left with suffering and death alone, forever stripped of Christ and of all meaning? To suffer and to die are inevitable. Our only choice is for what we will suffer, and to what we will die.
Today, we enter the period of the Lenten Triodion, which includes the three weeks before Lent begins and continues up to Holy and Great Saturday. The purpose of everything that takes place during this period is to remind us of the entirety of God’s benevolence towards us.
“Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” With these words our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ begins His public ministry. “Repent” is the word the Church gives us at the beginning of the year. This Gospel is placed here not just because it takes place chronologically after Christ’s baptism (which we are still celebrating), but also because it signals the approach of Lent.
