Пятница

(Col. 2, 1–7; Luke 9, 12–18) The miraculous feeding of the people in the desert is an image of the feeding of believers in Holy Communion with the Most Pure Body and Most Pure Blood of the Lord. The Lord sits separately; the people are seated “in groves” *17; the apostles mediate, receive bread and distribute. So it is now: believers are all divided into groups - small private churches, in which the Lord, invisibly present, distributes His Body and Blood through the apostolic successors. As then to the apostles, so now He says to their successors: “you give them something to eat” (Luke 9:13). As then, so now are the believing people relentlessly faces the Lord in fasting, listening to the word and prayerfully seeking healing from sins, when preparing to begin the Divine Mysteries. Thus, the sacrament intended in the appearance of the Lord continues to this day and will continue until the end of the age. And in the next century there will be a kind of communion, for the Lord promises to give us to taste “from the hidden manna” and “from the tree of the living” *18 (Apoc. 2:17, 7). And in the earthly paradise, their first parents had their own mysterious communion - eating from the tree of life; in the Old Testament church, his image is the eating of the Paschal lamb. Thus, mysterious communion began with the human race, has been and will be with it forever and ever, in different forms, but with one meaning - sincere communication with the Lord; for “in Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4) Created in the image of God, we must be in such communion with Him who is “the radiance of glory and the image of the hypostasis of the Father” (Heb. 1:3) Luke 9:14: “in heaps” - “in rows.” You might be interested in: