But God is patient, with all the patience of love. The evil that he cannot prevent, because it is born of the freedom in which his omnipotence is at once fulfilled and limited, God will use to open us to his love. Thus death, ‘the wages of sin’, paradoxically becomes a remedy for sin. Precisely because it is against nature, it makes us aware, if we do not run away from it, of our true
GOD’S KENOTIC LOVE St. Paul had grasped the essence of God’s self-giving love as a kenosis, an emptying. That Greek word contains a great mystery for us. God’s outpouring did not begin only on the Cross when He, whose state was divine, did not cling “to His equality with God but emptied Himself to assume the condition of a slave … even to accepting death, death on a cross…” (Ph 2:6-8). God’s kenosis began when
MARY THE WOMAN TOWARD OTHERS It was at Pentecost that Mary received an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that enabled her, more than any of the Apostles, to understand the universal love of her Son and Savior for all human beings. By the Spirit of Jesus Christ she burned to surrender herself even more completely to serve His Body than she had done at Nazareth or at the foot of the Cross. With new awareness
Saint Paul has always been a hero of mine. Unfortunately, Christians have often misunderstood Paul, seeing him as a moralist rather than a mystic. Yet Paul has so much to teach us. He never knew Jesus in the flesh, so Paul’s experience of the Risen Christ is much closer to what our own could be. For the next two weeks we are going to focus especially on Paul’s teachings on love, which is the theme
Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko In the Old Testament, Pentecost was the feast which occurred fifty days after Passover. As the passover feast celebrated the exodus of the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt, so Pentecost celebrated God’s gift of the ten commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. In the new covenant of the Messiah, the Passover event takes on its new meaning as the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, the “exodus” of men from this
Made in the Image of the Trinity we can attain to his Likeness The image of God is revealed in us by means of the threefold division of our internal make-up. The Godhead is adored in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Similarly, three parts can be seen in the image formed in accordance with this model, namely in the human being who adores him, who has made everything from nothing, with soul, mind
Just as some Eastern fathers saw Christ’s human/divine nature as one dynamic unity, so they also saw the Trinity as an Infinite Dynamic Flow. The Western Church tended to have a more static view of both Christ and the Trinity–theologically “correct” but largely irrelevant for real life, more a mathematical conundrum than invitation to new consciousness. In our attempts to explain the Trinitarian mystery, the Western Church overemphasized the individual “names” Father, Son, and Holy
The desert tradition offers a rich teaching of surrender, through contemplation, to the wonderful and always too-much mystery of God. The desert fathers and mothers are like the Zen Buddhist monks of Christianity; their sayings are often like koans that cannot be understood with the rational, logical mind. The desert mystics focused much more on the how than the what. Note that this is very different from the primary emphasis of Christianity in recent centuries–the
The New Testament gives us the following vivid example of the power of her mediation with motherly boldness before the Lord. When the Savior attended the marriage at Cana, the time had not yet come according to the divine plan for His public miracles to begin. Therefore, replying to His mother’s mediation to Him because the host’s wine had been exhausted, He said, “Woman, what hath this to do with Me and with thee? For
The real difficulty with modern technology is not technical but spiritual; what would humankind or nature need to be like, to feel at home in this ‘wild revolution’, as Edgar Morin called it? Left to itself, technical progress becomes the tool of the rich and powerful in their struggle for profit and mastery, while the real need, that hunger for bread and for truth to which we keep referring, is ignored. What we lack, in
© 2020 Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral
