To the words: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 17:5)

Our loving father, due to his disposition towards us, gave me the floor, and responded to the gratitude you brought to him for me with a real action, considering the benefit of his children as his own benefit. I gladly accepted this assignment from him, and again I raise my voice among you and readily undertake the continuation of my previous conversation. Last Sunday I showed you Christ coming to be baptized together with his servants; He also showed the Baptist, who recognized the Lord who had come and refused him baptism, but then, at the command of the Savior, fulfilled his service to the cause of salvation; finally depicted the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, proclaiming from heaven: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 17:5) - and, having reached this testimony, I left this pulpit, since it was time to stop the conversation. And today I wish to resume what I was forced to leave behind due to lack of time, and to reveal the meaning of these words, so that, having understood them, through them you will rise to the Author of them, that is, the Son. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” This is My Son, who together with Me sent down the Holy Spirit upon Himself and at the same time received the Spirit whom He sent; This is He, who was born of Me before all ages, and not created, God, the only one born of Me, the only begotten, as I alone know and as He alone knows; this is the image of My perfection, this is the imprint of My Divinity in Himself; here He is, a clear image of My Hypostasis. This is My Son, who shone forth from My being incorporeally, immutably, timelessly, and did not receive his beginning from another hypostasis. This is My Son by nature, and not by grace, My Son is co-eternal with Me, co-eternal, and not the youngest, who did not come into being later; My Son is Consubstantial with Me, as light is from light, as life is from life, as truth is from truth, as strength is from strength, as God is from God. I gave birth, He is born; there is nothing in between Me and Him. I gave birth as it was fitting for Me, God by nature, to give birth; He was born, as it was fitting for God the Word to be born. The name of birth is human, but the eternal birth is mysterious. Time does not know the secret of My birth; the cherubim and seraphim, many-faced and many-eyed, do not know it (after all, they happened later); Covering their faces with their wings like hands, they incessantly cry out: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of hosts” (Isa. 6:3)! They do not say: “holy, very holy, most holy”; they do not establish a descending and again ascending order in the Divinity; they do not dissect a single essence into unequal principles; they do not search for what they do not see; they praise without being curious; they revere and worship without challenging the unity of the Holy Trinity; They offer the same praise to Me and My Son and the Spirit; their life is an incessant singing and this endless melody itself becomes life for them. “The heavens will tell the glory of God” (Ps. 18:2), the glory of God who created them. They do not explore the beings of the Creator: “The heavens will tell the glory of God,” by their appearance, and not by the sound of their voice. The prophets could not comprehend the incomprehensible; human nature is powerless to understand Him; the mind cannot contain the incontainable; the word is not able to depict the Word made man: faith alone embraces the immensity, faith alone gives the concept of the invisible, faith alone brings us closer to the unattainable, brings us closer as far as it can contain. “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” He is My fellow worker, but not my servant; He created the heavens and the earth; He established the vault of heaven above the earth; He spread the sky like skin; He made the stars look like eyes; He made the sun the leader and ruler of the day; It combined with the darkness of the night the radiance of the moon, giving the night a shade of sadness; He gave the air a gentle elasticity, thanks to which it is easily inhaled by all those living in it, easily parting in the face of those walking and closing again behind their backs. He hid the roots of plants in the depths of the earth, using his command instead of seeds, and crowned the face of the earth with countless herbs and flowers; He miraculously separated land and sea with shifting sand, in front of which the sea remains within its boundaries, not daring to go out and rush to the land adjacent to it. He established the turn of the clocks and the change of the seasons and the pleasant succession of years; He created the visible and invisible creation, without needing the assistance of time, without requiring tools for work, without sweating, but only by wishing and easily carrying out everything. He gave a sign, and His wave gave existence to the existing; He only thought, and His command was fulfilled; He called the non-existent as the existing; as if it had already existed before, and obedient to the Master’s call, it tremblingly hurried to this call. He is the One with whom, consulting, I said: “Let us make man in Our image and likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Together with Me, He created man, and He then became man for man’s sake, without changing into what he became, becoming man through the perception of the firstfruits of humanity, and without losing the splendor of the Divine, becoming man and remaining God. It is He who did not depart from My bosom and dwelt in the bosom of Mary; this is He, both abiding in Me inseparably, and dwelling in her indescribably; This is He, who is persistently present in heaven, and who passed through the virgin’s womb without restraint; just as He did not defile Himself by creating this womb, so, having lived in it, He remained unsullied. He came from Mary's womb like a shining bridegroom from a brideless chamber; With His birth He honored the birth and sealed the virginity of the one who gave birth to Him; He passed through the virgin gates into this world, from which He never departed, keeping intact the enclosed gates of innocence; He was carried in the womb of His Mother and at the same time he himself carried everything. He, like a baby, fed on his mother's milk, and he himself nourished all of nature, as its nourisher; He, like a child, was wrapped in baby swaddling clothes, and he himself, like God, tore away the veil of sins; He reclined in a manger and was designated by a star as the Creator of the stars; He was persecuted by Herod and hailed as Lord by Simeon; He fled to Egypt and overthrew the Egyptian idols there, and my prophecy was fulfilled in Him: “Out of Egypt I called My Son” (Matthew 2:15); He excelled in physical age, but not in His Divine nature - and how could He, who is omnipresent and fills everything, grow? This is He, who received baptism from the Baptist and enlightened his creation. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Not two different persons - My Son and the Son of Mary; not two different persons - the one who bowed down (before birth) in the cave and who accepted worship from the Magi; not two different persons - this one who was baptized and that one who was never baptized, but precisely “This is My Son.” He is both imagined in the mind and contemplated by the eyes; He is the one invisible and visible to you, eternal and temporary; He is consubstantial with Me in Divinity, and consubstantial with you in humanity - in everything except sin. Do not look for His father according to the flesh on earth: here He is without a father; do not look for His mother according to the Divinity in heaven: there He is without a mother. Do not separate His Divinity from His humanity; do not be evil separators of the inseparable; do not separate His humanity from His divinity, because by union with Him it is inseparable and unmerged. Do not separate what is united in Him, but recognize what is in Him. Do not divide the one face of Christ into two faces; in the place of the one Only Begotten, do not put two Only Begotten ones; Do not put My Son and the man He assumed separately; do not dare to violate the unmerged unity, which cannot be dissolved; do not honor the incarnate Lord either simply as God or simply as a man, but believe that He is both God and man, that the same He always remains a man and is always God; He was not always a man, but from that time He was and became a man, when He voluntarily joined the seed of Abraham. If you see this My Son hungry, thirsty, sleeping, walking, tired, scourged, or crucified voluntarily, or nailed to a cross without resistance, or killed by His own will, or after death guarded by guards at the tomb where His body lay - attribute all this to His flesh. On the contrary, if you see that this My Son cleanses leprosy with a word, heals the blindness of the eyes with clay, replenishes nature with one word, feeds five thousand with five loaves, and from the hands of his disciples, as if from a field, gathers unsown native bread, the angry sea, raising waves like the tops of mountains, pacifies with his voice and walks on water as if on dry land - attribute all this to His Divinity. Do not think that the highest of deeds belongs to one person, and the low of what is observed in Him to someone else, but consider both of them to belong to the same thing: everything Divine belongs to Him, everything human belongs to Him, His miracles, and His sufferings. One and the same Son of My creates the works of His Divinity, and assimilates all the works of His flesh to Himself. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” He is both a vine and a door for lost sheep, a vine that has its root in heaven and spreads its branches on the earth, a vine that branches in the trunk and not in the root, a vine that, after three days of vegetation, produces the grapes of resurrection. He is the door, because through Him the believer comes to Me; He is a mediator between Me and My servants, because He connects with Me those who knock on Me. “This is My beloved Son,” and at the same time the lamb, the priest and at the same time the sacrifice, one and the same, offering and being sacrificed, and performing the sacrament and accepting the sacrifice.” However, you already know and understand that these words were spoken by the Father after baptism about the Only Begotten. And when Christ was transfigured on the mountain before His disciples and His face emitted a radiance before which the rays of the sun disappeared, then the same words were heard again: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” This means that the Father more than once called His Son son, as the only Son, and with these words, as if with a hand, he indicated His Only Begotten, obviously for the sake of those who attempt to separate Him from the Father, who claim that the timeless was born in time, who classify the Creator of creation among the creatures, who enslave the liberator, who invent a second son. That is why it is constantly confirmed: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: listen to him” (Matthew 17:5; Mark 9:7; Luke 3:22, 9:35). If He says: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30); if He says: “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9); if He says: “I am in the Father, and the Father in Me” (John 14:10, 11, 10:38), listen to Him. If He says: “He who sent Me” (John 12:49) “The Father... is greater than Me” (John. 14:28) - marvel at His watchful condescension. If He says: “This is My body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19), and: “This is My Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28) - listen to Him. Not as if separating His flesh from the deity, He says this, because the flesh is not separated in these words, but the bodily is assigned to the Divine and the Divine is assimilated to the body, and neither belongs to anyone else besides Him. If He says: “My soul is sorrowful unto death” (Matthew 26:38); since He has appropriated to Himself our mental states, which in themselves are not shameful, listen to Him. After all, there is no division in Him between flesh and divinity; We confess and elevate everything that is divine and human to one person and one hypostasis and nature of our incarnate God Jesus Christ. We have been taught this from God and the Father; this was taught by the only begotten Son of God; in this we are confirmed by the Holy Spirit; this is proclaimed by the sacred scriptures, this is preached by the holy fathers. So, we accepted this, we learned this, and we will maintain this. Why are we fighting each other in vain? Why do we defeat each other - we, who have been taught to love, and those who hate us? Why, forgetting to believe, do we compete about faith? “Born, not born; hurt, but not harmed; resurrected, but not resurrected." Why are we judging the liberator? Why do we demand an account from the benefactor? One day He wanted - and, just as He wanted, He came, and suffered, and died, and was resurrected, and ascended into heaven, and will come to judge the living and the dead - in our image, in which He came that time, because He did not part with that flesh that He loved so much, did not throw it away, which He treasured so much, did not leave the shell of His body in the tomb, but in the same form He will come again as the Judge of the living and the dead, so that Judas could see whom He sold. to the murderers of God, so that the Jews would see which head they crowned with a crown of thorns; and when they see Him seated on the throne of the Judge, and the cherubim and seraphim standing before Him with fear and trembling, they will say; “We did not crucify this one, we condemned another - some Jesus of Nazareth from Bethlehem,” then He will show them His side, and they will see whom they pierced, and even against their will they will worship Him. So, why, without caring about believing, do we compete about faith? Why do we fulfill the desire of our common enemy? After all, of course, the devil, this ulcer of the entire human race, judged that the cause of piety flourishes when silence reigns among us, that the good order of life grows stronger when faith shines, and that when the God-loving course of life prospers, then those who live thus approach bliss and we become pleasing to the Creator, we hasten to our Beloved in order to ascend to where he (the devil) fell - and look what he did, how cunningly and insidiously he aroused war among us, a skillful inspirer of evil, wise in deception, inventive in intrigues, inexhaustible in all kinds of evil plans. He incited some to fight under the guise of piety, and armed the desire for faith against faith itself, instilled in all the pious a soul-destroying passion for disputes, he turned the members of the church body against each other in order to laugh a lot, seeing how those who followed his advice suffer defeats from him, give him pleasure with their mutual strife, and even from such bitter experience they do not guess who is the culprit of this evil. So, let us deprive this head of evil of the pleasure it brings and turn its triumph into sadness and unspeakable grief; Let us love the world, which is so hateful to him; Let us leave the expressions of dogma to be weighed and measured; let us give up the desire to be teachers of our mentors; let us hate verbal disputes, which only corrupt the listeners; Let us believe as our fathers betrayed us. We are no wiser than our fathers, no more accurate than our teachers; We are not shepherds of shepherds, but of sheep. It is not the sheep who herd the shepherds, but the shepherds of the sheep. God called us in peace, not in battle; Let us remain in what we are called to do. Let us fear the mysterious meal at which we become partakers of the heavenly mysteries; Let us not, sharing the same meal, deceive each other; Let us not be friends here, but enemies beyond the threshold; Let us not be of the same faith here, but beyond the threshold of different tribes, so that Christ does not say about us: “I raised and elevated sons and nourished them with My Blood, but they rebelled against Me” (Is. 1:2). May the Savior of all, the Organizer of the world, drive out the troublesome and battle-loving devil from you, may he himself give silence to His churches, may he himself protect this sacred flock, may he himself keep its shepherd, may he himself preserve our pious and Christ-loving king, may he himself gather the lost sheep into his fence, “let there be one flock and one Shepherd" (John 10:16), in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. Creations attributed to St. John Chrysostom, and classified in the Minya edition as Spuria. The paragraphs in the text were arranged by us. – Editorial staff of “ABC of Faith” You might be interested in: