Interpretation of the Gospel for every day of the year. The week before the Nativity of Christ, Holy Father
Matthew, 1st credit, 1, 1—25
Genealogy of Jesus Christ, Son of David, Son of Abraham. Abraham gave birth to Isaac; Isaac gave birth to Jacob; Jacob begat Judah and his brothers; Judah fathered Perez and Zerah by Tamar; Perez begat Hezrom; Hezrom begat Aram; Aram gave birth to Abminadab; Amminadab begat Nahshon; Nahshon begat Salmon; Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab; Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth; Obed begat Jesse; Jesse begat David king; David the king begot Solomon from Uriah; Solomon begat Rehoboam; Rehoboam gave birth to Abijah; Abijah begat Asa; Asa begat Jehoshaphat; Jehoshaphat begat Joram; Jehoram begat Uzziah; Uzziah begat Jotham; Jotham begat Ahaz; Ahaz begat Hezekiah; Hezekiah begat Manasseh; Manasseh begat Amon; Amon gave birth to Josiah; Josiah begat Joachim; Joachim gave birth to Jeconiah and his brothers before moving to Babylon. After moving to Babylon, Jeconiah gave birth to Salathiel; Shealtiel begat Zerubbabel; Zerubbabel begat Abihu; Abihu begat Eliakim; Eliakim begat Azor; Azor begat Zadok; Zadok gave birth to Achim; Achim begat Eliud; Elihu begat Eleazar; Eleazar begat Matthan; Matthan gave birth to Jacob; Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, from whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the migration to Babylon to Christ there are fourteen generations. The Nativity of Jesus Christ was like this: after the betrothal of His Mother Mary to Joseph, before they were united, it turned out that She was pregnant with the Holy Spirit. Joseph, Her husband, being righteous and not wanting to make Her public, wanted to secretly let Her go. But when he thought this, behold, the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said: Joseph, son of David! Do not be afraid to accept Mary your wife, for what is born in Her is from the Holy Spirit; She will give birth to a Son, and you will call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins. And all this happened, that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled, saying: Behold, a virgin is with child and will give birth to a Son, and they will call His name Immanuel, which means: God is with us. Rising from sleep, Joseph did as the Angel of the Lord commanded him, and received his wife, and did not know her. [How] at last She gave birth to Her firstborn Son, and he called His name Jesus.
On the Sunday before Christmas, during the Divine Liturgy, we hear the book of the kinship of Jesus Christ. This is the memory of God's chosen people, the memory of humanity. Every nation and every person has its own pedigree, which we do not preserve. The memory of God's chosen people is preserved by eternal memory - the Holy Spirit. The entire genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ is divided in the Gospel of Matthew into three parts of fourteen genera in each. The first part tells the history of the people before David, the greatest king of Israel: David was the one who turned Israel into a glorious nation, the Jews became a powerful force in the world. The second goes to the Babylonian captivity, which was the shame of the nation and its downfall, the third - to Jesus Christ, Who saves His people from slavery and destruction.
This is the genealogy of all humanity in the person of its chosen ones and each of us. On the eve of the Nativity of Christ, each of us is called upon to realize with renewed vigor our human dignity. God created man in His image and likeness, man was created for communication with God. We have a relationship with God Himself, we are His race, each of us is born to be a king, to belong to the royal race of Christ. And each of us, before the bright holiday comes, must deeply realize our sinfulness, our falling away from God, because our Lord comes to save not the righteous, but sinners. And because God becomes a man, in Him there is strength and invincible love, and nothing is impossible for Him to restore those who have fallen into the devil’s captivity - to the dignity that grace gives.
This genealogy reveals to us that Jesus Christ did not burst into the history of the human race like a meteor. Christmas is not an accident, an unforeseen mercy of God. Jesus Christ is the One Whose roots, Whose ancestors are completely human, namely human. Jesus Christ is the One whose coming was prepared throughout all the centuries, until the fullness of times came and until such a pure Being was found in the human race, capable of becoming the receptacle of God, like the Blessed Virgin Mary. And we see how the entire history of God’s chosen people, especially from the day when God called Abraham, is directed towards the Nativity of Christ.
The Gospel of Matthew was written primarily for the Jews - it contains more than the other Gospels quotations from the Old Testament that announce the end of the world, the Kingdom of God. Through this genealogy, the holy Evangelist Matthew, as it were, appeals to God’s chosen people. He is from us, but are we included in His genealogy, do we belong to His family, because He had to come into the world this way?
This genealogy ends with the name of the righteous Joseph, “the husband of Mary,” as the Gospel says, “of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” And then we hear what place righteous Joseph occupies in the genealogy of Christ. “The birth of Jesus Christ was like this. After the betrothal of His Mother Mary to Joseph, before they were united, it turned out that She was pregnant with the Holy Spirit. Joseph, Her husband, being righteous and not wanting to make Her public, wanted to secretly let Her go, but when he thought this, behold, the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to accept Mary your wife, for that which is born in Her is of the Holy Spirit.” So simply and miraculously it is shown to us that this genealogy of righteous Joseph is not in the full sense the genealogy of Christ. However, the Lord accepts righteous Joseph and all the people whose names we have heard as His ancestors.
Moreover, we are not His inheritance by blood. However, He calls us His relatives and His children. This is done by the gift of His grace. As the election of His Most Pure Mother, Chosen from all generations, and as the election of the righteous Joseph to be Her betrothed. We cannot compare ourselves with any of the great chosen ones of God, but with the Nativity of Christ we all enter into kinship with God.
These names of the genealogy testify that Christ wanted to accept all the ancestors of the righteous Joseph, those from whom He was not born, but whom, by His Divine grace, He elevates to the dignity of His ancestors, the ancestors of Christ the Messiah. In this genealogy we meet the names of the most worthy holy people who loved God and God’s goodness more than anything else. Such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Boaz, Hezekiah and Josiah. And the names of people about whom, essentially, nothing is said, because nothing is known about them. People who did not leave any bright mark on history - neither good nor bad. These are the majority. Most of these people are in the history of the human race. And in this pedigree most of them are like that. There follows a series of unknown people about whom the Holy Scriptures say nothing except their names. We know that these Eliakim, Azor, Zadok, Akim, Eleazar, Matthan are people from any environment and from any origin.
But the most amazing thing is that in the genealogy of the Savior we find the names of people who committed the grave, shameful sins of adultery, murder and idolatry. However, they, too, because God was the only meaning and hope in life for them, despite their falls, continued, falling and rising in repentance, and with them all of humanity, their path to God. Here is the beginning of the Gospel, truly good news for all people. God, who became man, accepts them into His kinship. From whatever environment, with whatever sins. Everyone, without a single exception, is accepted by Christ. And we know that He will constantly call Himself the Son of David, not only for David’s love for God and for His meekness, but also because David did not protect himself from terrible sins. Woe would it be for us if in the genealogy of Christ there were only people impeccable in purity and faith, if our God were only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We would understand that His life is not our life. But this is not so, and our hope is great.
How good it is that the Church reminds us of this on the eve of the Nativity of Christ! He is flesh of our flesh, He is of us, He takes upon Himself the sins of His ancestors and our sins. With tears of love and gratitude, let us approach the source of our joy. Let us read and re-read in the Bible the stories of the husbands and wives described in this book, and find our life in them. This is the story of our adoption to God, the story of our forgiveness. To prepare for the Nativity of Christ means to prepare to receive a gift from God - His love, His forgiveness, His kinship. Accept Him whom no man frightens, no sin repulses, no sinner drives into despair. And only by this love of His can our repentance be measured. Having come into the world, He took upon Himself the destinies of all people, the sins of all people, the life and death of all people. Let us bring to the newborn God-Infant, as the Church continually sings in her stichera, gold, incense and myrrh - our faith, hope and love. And our thanksgiving and praise for His genealogy on behalf of all those with whom He chose to be in eternal kinship.
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On the difference between Law and Gospel and on preaching
The following material is a translation of paragraphs 520 and 521 of Bavinck's Gereformeerde Dogmatiek (third unmodified edition, volume 4, Kampen, J. H. Kok, 1918, pp. 489-498). Punctuation, sentence length, and paragraph sections have been changed by the editor for ease of reading. Bavinck's footnotes are included in the text, placed in parentheses, in the form of a condensed paraphrase.
The schism that divided Christians into Orthodox and Catholics sharply contrasted East with West, Greeks with Romans, and Latin with Greek. Ancient Greece and Rome have long been a part of ancient history. But in church life they - quite recognizable in Orthodoxy and Catholicism - continue to exist to this day.
And this is not at all connected with the language of worship, for the Greek language in the Christian East throughout the past millennium was preserved only by the Greeks, and Latin in general almost ceased to be used by Catholics and is not even studied now in most seminaries. This is due to the very type of culture that modern Christians inherited from their ancestors.
We want to pose a very simple, almost primitive question... Is this really justified by the facts - to consider the image of Christ the Wonderworker in the canonical Gospels as the sum of continuous “narratives”, “stories”, “short stories”, behind which a clearly established genre identity is a priori assumed?
The greatest power of antiquity, spread over three continents, incorporating a variety of nationalities and cultures, the Roman Empire was a huge cauldron in which old and new, eastern and western, traditional and exotic religions and cults were boiled, mixed with each other, transformed and modified . In the last centuries of the existence of the Roman state, its religious life was an extremely motley mixture of all kinds of traditions, beliefs and customs. In this gigantic melting pot, the Christian Church turned out to be the most resilient organization, which ensured its eventual victory and turned Christianity into the dominant religion. However, Christians came to the triumph of their religion along a long and difficult path. Even at the time of the victory on a national scale, in the first quarter of the 4th century, Christians made up no more than 10% of the Empire’s population. Around them the “pagan” population was still thick, having behind them three centuries of active rejection of the new religion.
Fasting is the establishment of new values of the human person. However, there are few new things to say; I must say: the most perfect. Everything that is low before God becomes low for man. Everything that is high before God becomes high for man.
It is not difficult to see that a person is tuning into the tone, the mind, the spirit of some higher life, which he does not yet fully comprehend. And entering into the tone, into the mind, into the philosophy of higher life, he comprehends it better and better. It is impossible to know the ocean of divine life without entering it. In this, true religious wisdom differs significantly from abstract philosophy. There is no need to change the hearts and inner aspirations of the spirit with a careful and honest study of Hegel, Fichte, Kant, Schopenhauer. You can perfectly study and remember all the philosophical systems of the world while remaining in your previous life. These systems and reasonings of the most contradictory philosophers will be imprinted on the periphery of your consciousness and intellect, without touching the depths of the life of your heart, your conscience. These systems and reasonings will slide through the intellect, go through memory and slide into the same abstract region from which they came. A person will remain himself, no matter what system, clothing of human thought he puts on himself. Clothes will not change his essence. And this clothing, that is, any abstract philosophical thought will not demand more from a person than what its own essence consists of. But a completely different area of religious knowledge
Christian in a secular school
Report at Dartmouth University (USA) at the Symposium on the relationship between the state and religious organizations, within the framework of the Collaborative Research Network on “Identifications” program, November 2001;
Report “The Religious Situation in Russia and in the World” at the V Russian Conference for teachers of humanitarian universities “Methodology and methods of teaching religious disciplines in higher education”, Moscow, VGBIL im. M.I. Rudomino, November 26-27, 2003">
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