Heavenly Father, help me this day to truly understand that You freely became a human in order to not only reveal Your great love for me but to show me how to live as Your child. I beg You to increase my insight so that I might truly realize that You continue to make Yourself known to humankind – that You are manifesting Yourself in my world right now. Help me to be Your true messenger. Help me to love unconditionally as Jesus did. Help me to treat all others as I want to be treated. Curb within me any desire to be judgmental of others, even if they do not live in the manner that I have chosen to live. Also, help me to never hold a grudge or refuse to forgive others that I may feel have hurt me in some way. Help me, Heavenly Father, to live this way so that I can truly merit being Your Child. Help me, O Lord, to truly understand why my Church declares: Christ IS Born – why we do not celebrate a past event but, rather, something we believe is happening right now in God’s Kingdom. I ask this in Your name, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever and forever. Amen.
Almighty God, we have just remembered, through our liturgical celebration, that You promised to send a Messiah to help us understand the meaning and purpose of life, I beg you to enlighten my mind so that I might truly see Jesus as the Messiah. This promise was kept alive for centuries and was fulfilled by His birth. Help me to be truly thankful to You for fulfilling this promise. Help me to truly celebrate Your Manifestation by embracing the Way of Jesus. Help me to understand that He is truly Your revelation to me on how to live this earthly life. I ask this of You Who I call Father, Son and Holy Spirit not only now but forever and ever. Amen.
Through faith, O Christ, You justified the Patriarchs,
for through them You made a commitment to a church with gentiles.
These Saints are glorified because from them descends the Virgin who gave You birth.
Through their prayers, O Christ our God, have mercy on us.
As we get ever closer to the Feast of the Nativity of our God and Savior Jesus Christ, the Church reminds us of all those who kept alive the hope and promise of a Messiah, namely the Holy Forefathers of Jesus. This not only reminds us that God became incarnate as a man in history but also that it is extremely important that we attempt to maintain our hope in the promise of God to us through Jesus that He will be with us until the end of our days. Our Gospel reading for this weekend is a parable about a king giving a dinner party. He invites many, but none come to the party. He then has his servants go out into the countryside and invite any and all to come to his party. Those who were invited did not taste of the dinner that the king prepared for them.
We have been invited to partake in a celebration of God’s incarnation as a human. He has prepared a banquet for us during which we will receive, in exchange for our thanksgiving, an enriched life. Will we refuse the invitation because we think we have something better to do?
We have an opportunity to put real meaning into this coming holiday, which is really a holy day. Our modern society has distorted the meaning of this feast for the sake of making money. It was never meant to be a holiday! It is a holy day since it shares with us a truth which can only be know if we believe that God actually became a human in order to show us His love for us and to help us understanding the meaning and purpose of this earthly life.
How will you celebrate this holy day? Will it be a holiday or a truly holy day when you will discover the love God has for you? You will not discover God’s love in presents, a special dinner or special television programs that highlight the tradition of Santa Claus. You will only know the true meaning of Christmas if you worship God and thank Him for the gift of life.
I would exhort and encourage you to make this Christmas truly a holy day and not allow our society to influence the way that you spend the day. Gift-giving is nice but it is no substitute for thanking God for the gift of human life.
Jesus is the only gift worth receiving and giving!
Although it is not evident from the proper prayers we use for the Divine Liturgy on this weekend when we remember the Forefathers of Jesus Christ, the prayers of Vespers highlight in particular the Prophet Daniel and the Three Holy Children who were miraculously saved from the fires of a furnace and were said to have been companions of Daniel. In one of the prayers we say: Faith can accomplish great things. Through it, the Three Holy Children rejoice in the flames as if they had been in refreshing water and Daniel, in the midst of lions, is like a shepherd among sheep. Through their intercession, O Christ God, save our souls.
As another Vesper prayer states, the Three Holy Children are believed to have prefigured the mysteries of the Holy Trinity and of the Incarnation of Christ. They were, the prayer state, a prefigure of Your coming from the Virgin, which enlightened us without burning us.
Tradition has maintained that Daniel prophesied, especially in the seventh chapter of the Book of Daniel, the coming of the Son of Man. As we all know, it is said that Jesus chose to use this title during His public ministry.
Daniel is one of the great prophets of the Old Testament. The biblical account of Daniel begins as he and other young men from Judah were taken captive by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon around the year 604 BCE. This captivity of citizens of Judah in Babylon lasted for 70 years, as God had foretold through the prophet Jeremiah. During this time, Daniel served in prominent positions in the governments of several Babylonian and Medo-Persian rulers, which included Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius and Cyrus.
In the first year of the reign of Darius, Daniel came to understand the prophecy of Jeremiah that predicted a 70-year captivity of the people of Israel. The Book of Daniel was written primarily for the purpose of encouraging the Jews to remain faithful to their ancestral religion at a time when they not only felt the allurement of the worldly culture of Hellenism but were suffering a bloody persecution. Daniel was concerned in particular with demonstrating the superiority of the wisdom of Israel’s God over the merely human wisdom of the society. Difficult given the fact that they were in captivity. His message, which has true meaning for us, is that God is the master of history, who uses the rise and fall of nations as preparatory steps in the true establishment of his universal reign over all men.
It is not by chance, I believe, that our Church, following the Byzantine tradition, integrates these ideas into our preparation for the winter feasts which celebrate God’s Manifestation of Himself to the world. As Daniel called his people to reject the allurement of the world of their time, our Church does the same. Christmas can be anything but a Holy Day. Don’t get caught up in the materialism of our society!
In the last issue I suggested that it can be difficult for some people to meet God through the formal religious ritual which is ours during our communal prayer. That is why I have suggested that we truly come to know the Divine Liturgy and make the prayers of the Liturgy our personal prayers. This, of course, means learning the true meaning of the prayers that we offer and making them our own personal prayers. We must learn that the formal ritual of the Church offers something much greater – it offers us an encounter in which the living Lord and us reach out to one another in love, in care and in trust. (I don’t know if if you have ever felt this during the Divine Liturgy. The goal of the Liturgy is to put us in touch with our living God).
Besides formal religious moments, the prayer of encounter happens in other settings – for example, when friends gather and share life. When people simply gather and are attentive to one another in love and compassion, they experience the presence of God. But friendships can also be moments of disclosure of God’s love for them and of their reaching out to God. Wrapped in the human and limited experience of love is the ground of all love – God. Many-to-one prayer has to be cultivated in the same way as one-to-one prayer. We need to reflect on the meaning of the words and actions of the formal rituals. We have to learn how to be open and ready to meet other people so that in less structured and more informal ways we can reach out to God. We must ever remember that the only real way that we can have a relationship with God is by having true relationships with others.
We must remember that we reach out to God in many different ways. We do it by reaching out to others and also to join with others in communal prayer. God sees all humanity as one family. Therefore the more times we have a sense of being in community – in family – with others, the more opportunity we have to establish a true and genuine relationship with God.
Ask yourself, how do I have a relationship with God.?
I have been focusing, in this article, on the Church’s understanding of Who Jesus is. The idea of Jesus being completely and fully both God and man is a very difficult idea to express. It took years for the Fathers to find the right words and then to understand exactly what those words mean. In Christ, the union of the two natures (i.e., divine and human) is hypostatic: that is they concur into one person and one hypostasis”, according to the Fathers of Chalcedon. (I purposely put in these exact expressions since I believe that it is very important that we Christians understand exactly what the Church calls us to believe about Jesus).
The controversies which naturally arose from the Chalcedonian formula led to further definitions of the meaning of the term hypostasis. While Chalcedon had insisted that Christ was indeed one in His personal identity, it did not clearly specify that the term hypostasis, used to designate this identity, also designated the hypostasis of the pre-existing Logos (i.e., Word – Son of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity). The anti-Chalcedonian opposition in the East so built its entire argument around this point that Byzantine Christology of the age of Justinian committed itself very strongly to excluding that interpretation of Chalcedon which would have considered the hypostasis, mentioned in the definition, as simply the hypostasis of union” of the old Antiochian School (i.e., the new synthetic reality resulting from the union of the two natures).
I’m not sure whether this is clear. The idea that the Fathers were dealing with is this: since the God-man Jesus is a union of two different natures (i.e., divine and human) in the personhood of Jesus, is the personhood of the combination a new entity because it is a combination or is the personhood still the Divine Personhood of the Son. You can see that this is a very important point since the Fathers believed that there must be a real balance between the divine and human nature of Jesus, the divine nature not dictating the action of the human nature of Jesus.
The Eastern Fathers affirmed, following Cyril of Alexandria, that Christ’s unique hypostasis is the pre-existing hypostasis of the Logos, meaning that the term is used in Christology with exactly the same meaning as in the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian Fathers: one of the three eternal hypostases of the Trinity took flesh, while remaining essentially the same in its divinity. Therefore the hypostasis of Christ, pre-existed in its divinity but it acquired humanity by the Virgin Mary.
Again I would assert that it is important that we Christians understand what we believe when we say that Jesus was both God and man. It is a mystery, obviously, but we should know how to express it.
During the past several weeks I have been sharing some thoughts about the struggles of Life’s Journey. I shared with you that anxiety about the future is one of the first struggles we face. The second struggle that we face, I believe, is the negative and irrational ideas that we have, especially from our childhood. These ideas, I find, paralyze people, making them incapable of truly enjoying life and the journey.
There are still other struggles that we must face on the journey. Enthusiasm and Discouragement can both be struggles.
Excessive or inappropriate enthusiasm is rooted in the insensitivity of the soul. Enthusiasm for the things of God is obviously not a bad thing It generates life and energy and leads people to do God’s work in the world. Many may think that enthusiasm is always a good thing. It can be a real obstacle in some instances. Sometimes a person is so captivated by particular emotional religious experiences that the pain, the need, the longing for the fullness of redemption is forgotten. Enthusiasm then becomes an obstacle on the journey. The struggle to maintain a balanced enthusiasm, one that celebrates the presence of God and at the same time is in touch with the elements of life that speak of God’s absence and of a longing for the God still to come. Listening to the experience of others, both past and present, getting in touch with oneself and acknowledging one’s limitations are helpful in giving balance to one’s enthusiasm.
There is a Latin phrase via media – the middle road – which many use to express this idea of spiritual balance. We have to be in balance to be in the presence of God.
Perhaps the most sacred portion of our communal worship (i.e. Divine Liturgy) follows upon the recitation of the Creed of our faith. It is called the Anaphora (Greek ἀναφορά for offering up or carrying back). In the sacrificial language of the Greek version of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, προσφέρειν (prosphora) is used for the offerer bringing the gifts to the altar and ἀναφέρειν is used for the priest offering up the selected gifts upon the altar. It is by no coincidence, I believe, that the loaf of bread we use in the Liturgy is also called the Prosphora. (As I shared in the last issue, we, together with Jesus, are the bread on the paten and the wine in the chalice since they are, being food, truly the symbols of life. We join with Jesus in offering our lives and praise and worship to the Father).
The Anaphora begins with the special exhortation for all present to stand aright and be attentive since all present must be focused on the mystery that is about to be performed. In years past, when choirs (or at least a small group of select singers) typically responded to the priest, people were not as intimately involved in the action of the Liturgy. Therefore the priest or deacon would draw their attention to the important parts by declaring: Be Attentive!
After getting everyone’s attention, the priest imparts the blessing of God, that is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so that the action of worship can proceed.
After the blessing the priest exhorts all to do something very important, saying: Let us lift up our hearts. All present confirm their willingness to do this by responding: We have lifted them up to the Lord! This is a very important action and it behooves all of us to think about lifting up our hearts so that what we do together, namely worship God, might be beneficial to all of us. This prayer is a direction/exhortation.
The next action in the Liturgy is the priest’s exhortation to give thanks to the Lord. The response designates exactly to whom we give thanks, namely the Trinity, one in substance and undivided.
These few simple actions and words set the stage for us truly remembering what the Lord did at the Last Supper, making it real for us at the very moment of our own worship.
The way we typically worship, the priestly prayer that immediately follows the declaration of our intent to worship God as Trinity, is only said partially out loud. I would encourage all to take time to read the beginning of that prayer. It is truly a beautiful and powerful prayer and further explains who we see the God that we worship to be. The prayer states that God is ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever-existing yet ever the same. The God we worship is all of this and He is with us and in us!
St John the Baptist
O Heavenly God, I join my voice with the Church and pray: “The holy sayings of the prophets have been fulfilled in the city of Bethlehem within a cave. The whole creation is made rich; let it rejoice and be of good cheer. The Master of all has come to live with His servants and from the bondage of the enemy He delivers us who were made subject to corruption. In swaddling clothes and lying in a manger He is made manifest as a new Child being God from all eternity”. I beg You, my loving God, to open my heart and mind so that I may truly celebrate Your Manifestation of Yourself as something that is happening right now in my life and in my world. I ask Your help and offer praise to You, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever and forever. Amen.
We have been considering the Gospel of St. Matthew, the first book presented in the New Testament (NT) but definitely not the first book to be written by the early Church. I shared with you the fact that Matthew’s Gospel is an unique Synoptic Gospel in-so-far-as how it deals with the scribes and Pharisees. His language is stridently condemnatory of them because of their hypocrisy. Although this attitude is attributed to Jesus, it may be more the attitude of the early community as they began to struggle with the Jewish community and were even forbidden to worship in synagogues.
Matthew also interprets what happened in 70 CE when Rome destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. This appears in a detail in Matthew’s version of the parable of the wedding banquet. The destruction of the city of those who rejected the invitation to the wedding banquet – which occurs in the midst of gathering people for a wedding feast that remains ready, presumable still hot – is a detail added by Matthew to an earlier form of the parable. For Matthew, it refers to the destruction of Jerusalem, a decade or so before he wrote his gospel.
Most seriously of all, with regard to its effects on subsequent history, a text in Matthew assigns primary responsibility for Jesus’ death to the Jewish people. To Mark’s story of Jesus before Pilate, the Roman governor, Matthew adds an episode. After Pilate concludes that Jesus is innocent, he washes his hands and declares, I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves. Then the people as a whole take responsibility for the death of Jesus. And not just Jews back then, but also their children – presumably forever. They are Christ-killers, a phrase used during the frequent and often fatal Christian persecution of Jews for many centuries. In fairness to Matthew, that term does not appear in his gospel. But some of his language did become the scriptural basis for Christian violence against Jews.
Why does the most Jewish of the gospels include such heightened hostility toward Jews? Historical contextualization provides the answer. Matthew wrote during a time of growing conflict between Christian Jews and non-Christian Jews in the last decades of the first century. His community, composed mostly of Jews who had become followers of Jesus as well as perhaps a few Gentiles, was very much affected by it.
By this simple example we see how very important it is to not literally interpret the NT and demand that it be historically accurate, conveying the exact words of Jesus. The writers of the Gospels were believers in Jesus who were struggling to find their place in society. The intent of the Gospels: to stimulate belief in Jesus!