Yes, Lord — Scriptures, Church, Christ

The holy scriptures—Christ’s Church—Christ himself: how incredibly fortunate we are!

First, the scriptures. John Chrysostom says this:

Great is the profit of the holy Scriptures, and all sufficient is the aid which comes from them…for the divine words are a treasury of all manner of medicines. Whether it be needful to quench pride, to lull passion to sleep, to tread under foot the love of money, to despise pain, to inspire confidence, to gain patience—in the Scriptures we find abundant resources. For what man—of those who struggle with long poverty or who are nailed by a grievous disease—will not, when he reads the passage before us, receive much comfort? This man had been a paralytic for thirty eight years, and he saw others delivered each year, and himself bound by his disease… “Yes, Lord, he says, but I have no man…to put me in the pool.” What can be more pitiable than these words? …Do you see this heart crushed through long sickness? Do you see all violence subdued?…He did not curse his day…but replied gently … Yes, Lord. (Homily 37 on Jn 5)

“Great is the profit”, he says. “All sufficient is the aid which comes” from the scriptures. Let us seek (as St. John put it) the medicine for our pride, our love of money, our fear of pain. And instead, through the reading of the scriptures, find confidence and patience in our long sickness—maybe we are not sick of body, but we are certainly so in soul.

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The Holy Spirit is the Answer to Our Prayers

Today’s daily gospel reading ended with the Lord saying, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” What does it mean that he will give us the Holy Spirit? Some leftover influence from our Protestant past made this line stick out to my wife and me, which, in turn, started a conversation about what Christ means here.

Yesterday, in the daily gospel reading from Luke 11, in response to the question of how to pray, the Lord shared “Our Father…” and then some direction to remain persistent in prayer: Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

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The Monk Who Never Judged Anyone and Died Joyfully

Coming up on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, we might feel a stirring of some of those fears we have, deep down, of that Judgment Day. But there is a trick. We actually have a large amount of control over how we are judged.

Christ says, Judge not, and you will not be judged. And, he adds elsewhere, with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Meaning, if I am incredibly lenient with my judgment of others, the Lord will also be incredibly lenient with me. There is a beautiful entry of an unnamed monk in the Prologue of Ochrid:

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Zephaniah – Zechariah – same difference

In the process of preparing text to be sung in our services, I often run across questions about the meaning. I try my best to reword unclear passages so they will make sense to the hearer, who, in almost all cases, will only get one chance to hear that particular text, and that, sung by the choir, no less. It is a bit of a musical, poetic, biblical, historical puzzle.

Sometimes the unclear passage is a reference to something in the saint’s life: “thou didst offer an incense of sweet savor with thy martyr’s hand” (Barlaam, 19Nov). We understand the words, but it raises questions in our minds. Sometimes, it is an unclear combination of the saint’s life and and a particular scripture passage; the irmos portions of Matins do this fairly often.

This coming Sunday, we will be celebrating the prophet Zephaniah. Something about the kontakion hymn for him, and the quote from the prophecy included in it, caught my eye and I looked it up. I just copied the words into the search engine, and was a bit surprised to find the results listed as Zechariah…a different Z-prophet. This is a problem I have not seen before.

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Apply Wine and Oil

I just love the interaction between Christ and the lawyer that we see in Luke 10. Christ asks: “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” The lawyer replies: “You shall love the Lord your God from all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Christ says: “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”

This man is an expert in the Law; he knows his stuff, and more than that, he has a right understanding and a good interpretation of it. He understands that these two “laws”—neither of which come from the Ten Commandments, nor even from sections that we would usually consider law—that these two truly encompass the whole law of God. “Do this and you will live.” The parable that Jesus tells is to re-emphasize the rightness of what the lawyer said, but also to lead him to a full understanding of those two “laws”.

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