Поучение на Богоявление

“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matthew 3:17, 17:5). Such was the voice of the eternal God the Father to people about the eternal God the Son, when the Son, by the will of the Father, by the action of the Spirit, became man from the Virgin, and accomplished the salvation of lost humanity. Brethren! Let us show obedience to the Son of God, as God desires from us, so that Divine favor may rest upon us. Perhaps someone will say: I would like to listen to the Son of God, but how can I achieve this when about two thousand years have already passed since our Lord Jesus Christ dwelt on earth in the flesh and preached His all-holy teaching? It is very convenient for us to be able to constantly be with Christ, to constantly hear His sweetest voice, to feed on His life-giving teaching: the Lord Jesus Christ remains with us to this day. He abides with us in His holy Gospel, abides with us through the holy sacraments of the Church, abides with His omnipresence and omnipotence, abides all-abundantly, as befits an unlimited, all-perfect God to abide. The Lord clearly proves His presence with us by the liberation of souls from sinful captivity, the distribution of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and many signs and wonders. Those who wish to approach the Lord and join Him in all-blessed union forever must begin this holy work with the most careful study of the word of God, must begin with the study of the Gospel, in which Christ is hidden, from which Christ speaks and acts. The words of the Gospel “The spirit is the essence, and the life is the essence” (John VI, 63). They transform a carnal man into a spiritual one, and revive the soul, killed by sin and worldly vanity. They are “the essence of the spirit and the essence of the life”: beware of explaining the great word of the Spirit with your mind, creeping on the earth, beware of explaining the word, filled with terrible Divine power, in the way that it can easily appear to your dead soul, your dead heart, your dead mind. The Word spoken by the Holy Spirit is explained by the Holy Spirit alone. Those who wish to approach the Lord in order to hear His Divine teaching, to be enlivened and saved by Him, come, present yourself to the Lord with the greatest reverence and the most holy fear, as His bright angels, His cherubim and seraphim stand before Him. With your humility, make the earth on which you stand a heaven. And the Lord will speak to you from His holy Gospel, as to His beloved disciples! and may the Holy Fathers, who interpreted the Holy Gospel through the gift of the Holy Spirit, be your guides to an accurate and infallible understanding of the Holy Gospel. It is disastrous to approach the Gospel, to the Lord Jesus Christ who lives in the Gospel, without due reverence, with impudence and arrogance. The Lord accepts only the humble, filled with the consciousness of their sinfulness and insignificance, filled with repentance, but turns away from the proud. The turning away of the face of the Lord from the impudent tempter—that’s what I call the irreverent, frivolous and cold listener—strikes the tempter with eternal death. The God-inspired elder Simeon announced the incarnate God - the Word. “This is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and is a sign that can be reproached” (Luke II, 34). The Word of God is a “stone,” a stone of immeasurable size and weight, “and he who falls on this stone will be crushed” with incurable contrition (Matthew XXI, 44). Brethren, let us be reverent and active hearers of the Word of God! Let us show obedience to the Heavenly Father, Who today proclaimed to us from the Holy Gospel about His all-holy Word: “This is my beloved Son; Let's listen to him! Let's listen to him! and the favor of the Heavenly Father will rest upon us forever and ever. Amen. You might be interested in: