Sermons & Homilies
Today during Matins we heard for the third and final time this year the singing of the beautiful and haunting psalm “By the waters of Babylon.” This psalm tells us a story, the same story that comprises all of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. It is the story of our home, and of our exile from it. The psalm tells the story of the Israelites taken away captive into Babylon, weeping for the Jerusalem that was lost. This story is mirrored also in the Gospel readings of the three Sundays on which it is sung: it is the story of the Prodigal Son, “coming to himself” in the far country and remembering the Father’s house. It is the story of the Last Judgement, that great day on which all of us will return home, whether we will it or not. And above all, it is the story of Adam, weeping outside the gates of Paradise.
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Today’s feast has many meanings, many aspects, and even many names. It is sometimes called the Meeting of the Lord, sometimes the Purification of the Virgin, sometimes the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, and finally, especially in the West, it is known as Candlemas – the Feast of the Light that shown upon St. Symeon and which we remember by blessing candles on this day. This multiplicity of names and meanings is an indication that today’s feast is situated at a crossroads: between the Law and the Prophets, between the infancy and the adulthood of Christ, between the Old and the New Covenant. Today, for the first time in history, God Himself enters bodily into the Temple which was made for Him, carried in the arms of Her who is Herself the true Holy of Holies, the Tabernacle more spacious than the heavens. He enters not in a cloud of glory, but in humble poverty, in meekness fulfilling the Law which He Himself gave. And She enters to be purified, She who alone is spotless and undefiled. Here the Righteous Symeon prophecies over Him who is the fulfillment of all the Prophets.
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Today, we see heaven and earth passing away. We see them rolled up like a scroll. We see the elements melting on account of the divine fire of Christ the most glorious God-Man Who has come again to His creation in the same manner as He ascended from it. However, now He is seen by every eye. Now the veil of time and space, of heaven and earth, the veil of spiritual blindness, and of willful ignorance, all of these now are taken away, and every eye sees Christ.
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In the life of a martyr, the greatest of all virtues is seen – love - love for Jesus Christ. “Greater love has no man than this, than to lay down his life for his friends” (cf. John 15:13-14). And who is our supreme friend if not Christ? As He himself says, we are His friends, and not His servants, if we keep His commandments.
It is only through the lens of love that we can see that all things work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to His purpose. For God’s love and His purposes are less apparent to us in a life of pleasure and ease than they are in a life of hardship and suffering.
Where does this love begin? When we come to ourselves.
Today, as we stand at the threshold of Great Lent, the Holy Church gives to us in the Gospel story of Zaccheus an icon of the Lenten journey which lies ahead. It is precisely an icon, because everything happens as it were in a flash, in one single image passing before our eyes. We hear nothing of Zaccheus’ past, and after these few short verses he never again appears on the pages of the New Testament. In fact, it is only in St. Luke’s Gospel that we hear of him at all. Yet for all its brevity, this Gospel passage contains within itself the entire narrative of salvation.
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