Category: Saints and Blesseds

Saint Moses, the great and holy prophet

Today we liturgically recall the Holy Great Prophet Moses, revered as a saint in the Catholic Church. His commemoration is mostly recalled by Eastern Christianity though he is list among the holy people in the Latin Church. Moses died sixteenth centuries before Jesus Christ, having lived for some 120 years.

The Troparion for Saint Moses reads:

O prophet Moses, you reached the summit of virtues. By this you came to see the glory of God. You received the tablets of the grace-giving Law and became the crown of prophets and a mystery of piety; for you carried grace deep within you.

The Prophet Moses, whose name means “one who draws forth,” or “is drawn from,” that is, from the water –was known as the one who spoke to Spoke, and even saw him. Moses also has the very rare and interesting title of “God seer.” Many scholars will say Moses is the model for people of faith: he “was the pinnacle of the lovers of wisdom, the supremely wise lawgiver, the most ancient historian of all.”

Fr Petras writes,

On Mt. Horeb the great prophet Moses saw God in the bush that burned without being consumed, and God revealed his Name to him, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). It is this Name of God that we invoke in the Anaphora of St. Basil the Great, “O Eternal Being ….” On Mt. Sinai God revealed a portion of his glory to Moses when he gave him the ten commandments. On Mt. Tabor, Moses stood with Elijah to witness the glory of God revealed though Jesus. Today we honor this Great Prophet who has led us into the presence of God, who led his people into the land promised by God, who today leads us to an understanding of God, essential Being, the Creator of all that is, the Cause of all that is good and the Lover of each and every person, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Three Holy Hierarchs

Happy Feast – Three Holy Hierarchs

To settle a dispute in the 12th century over whether Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzus or John Chrysostom was the preeminent church father, it was decided to show the senselessness of such argument by celebrating all three together. Emperor Alexius Comnenus chose this date.

Circumcision of the Lord and St Basil the Great

Today on the Byzantine calendar, the Church commemorates both the Circumcision of the Lord and our father among the saints Basil the Great, Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia.

Our Lord was circumcised on the eighth day after His Nativity in accordance with Jewish law as a sign of God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. The significance of this is manyfold; in emptying Himself, He who wrote the Law submitted Himself to it, which He came not to destroy but to fulfil. This submission also demonstrated that Christ was truly incarnate, truly robed in flesh, and not simply appearing to be a man.

Saint Basil the Great was born to a wealthy yet pious family at Caesarea in 330. Highly educated in philosophy, philology, oratory, law, naturalist, astronomy, mathematics and medicine, he developed a close friendship with Saint Gregory the Theologian in Athens. He later returned to Caesarea, where he became an ascetic and laid the foundations of Eastern monasticism, later being joined by Saint Gregory.

As the heresy of Arianism spread through the Empire and even to the imperial throne, Saint Basil arose as one of the principal defenders of Orthodoxy, being consecrated Archbishop of Caesarea in 370. He died on 1 January nine years later, shortly after blessing his friend Saint Gregory to accept consecration as Archbishop of Constantinople, and was immediately acclaimed as a saint. The Church continues to celebrate the Divine Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great today and on nine other occasions during the year. (SSC)

Holy Prophet Haggai

The Holy Prophet Haggai

The Holy Prophet Haggai. whose Feast is today, December 16th, was the tenth of the Twelve Minor Prophets. Little of his personal history is known to us. What we do know is that Haggai was of the Tribe of Levi and he prophesied during the times of the Persian emperor Darius Hystaspis (prior to 500 BC). Haggai was concerned for the authentic worship of God, especially need for the purity of Temple worship and promised the people that God would bless His people with fruitfulness and prosperity, overthrow the Gentiles. Upon the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity, he persuaded the people to build the Second Temple at Jerusalem, and he proclaimed that the Messiah would appear in this Temple in the last times. Hence his importance for Christians.

Some scholars say that Haggai was buried with the priests at Jerusalem, since he was descended from Aaron.

The Kontakion for this holy prophet reads:

Enlightened by the Spirit, your pure heart became the dwelling place of most splendid prophecy; for you saw things far off as if they were near. Therefore, we honor you, blessed and glorious Prophet Haggai.

St Savva

Today our Church recalls one the important saints, Our Venerabe Father Savva (Saba or Sabbas) the Sanctified.

St Savva first entered a monastery near his home in Cappadocia, but in the year 457 he travelled to Jerusalem and sought out St Euthymius. After spending some time under his instruction, Savva spent several years in seclusion in the Kedron wilderness. He was soon surrounded by followers. He organized them into a semi-eremitical community known as a lavra, which consisted of caves in a wild gorge in the wilderness between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. The reputation he gained for wisdom and holiness earned him an unsought role in ecclesiastical history. The patriarch of Jerusalem ordained Savva priest and made him his vicar, or archimandrite, over all the eremitical settlements in Palestine.

St Savva, together with St Euthymius, was responsible for keeping the vast number of monks in Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine loyal to the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon concerning the two natures of Christ.

Savva was 93 when he died on this date in 532. The Typicon of St Savva, while probably not his actual composition, had enormous influence on the shape of worship in orthodox churches (who pray the Divine Liturgies of St John Chrysostom and St Basil).

In 1256 the Crusaders removed the body of St Savva to Venice, where it was enshrined until 1965 when Pope Paul VI returned it to the lavra that is today known as Mar Savva. This lavra has a history of nearly fifteen hundred years, which makes it one of the oldest inhabited monasteries in the Christian world today. (NS)

St John Damascene

Also, today we liturgically recall St John Damascene on the same day we commemorate St Barbara.

The feast of Christmas is a theological feast. It is a celebration of God incarnate, taking our nature to perfect it. Jesus commanded us poor mortals to “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:47). How can we do this – only by imitating our Lord Jesus Christ, who is perfect God and perfect man, as we see in this passage from the Damascene:

“For the divine Word was not made one with flesh that had an independent pre-existence, but taking up his abode in the womb of the holy Virgin, he unreservedly in his own subsistence took upon himself through the pure blood of the eternal Virgin a body of flesh animated with the spirit of reason and thought, thus assuming to himself the first-fruits of man’s compound nature, himself, the Word, having become a subsistence in the flesh. So that he is at once flesh, and at the same time flesh of God the Word, and likewise flesh animated, possessing both reason and thought.

Therefore we speak not of man as having become God, but of God as having become Man. For being by nature perfect God, he naturally became likewise perfect man: and did not change his nature nor make the dispensation an empty show, but became, without confusion or change or division, one in subsistence with the flesh, which was conceived of the holy Virgin, and animated with reason and thought, and had found existence in him, while he did not change the nature of his divinity into the essence of flesh, nor the essence of flesh into the nature of his divinity, and did not make one compound nature out of his divine nature and the human nature he had assumed.” (On the Orthodox Faith, 3.2, www.Orthodox.net).

As a result of his theology of the Incarnation, John was able to defend with strength the importance of icons. If, in Jesus, God took a human face, then we can make images of him. We pray, holy Father John, make our Christmas a feast of perfection, for “God is with us.”

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St Barbara

St Barbara is commemorated today in the Church’s prayer of the Divine Liturgy and the Hours.

There is little doubt that the legendary story of the Holy Martyr Barbara was embellished a bit by early hagiographers. There is no reason for this, since the mere fact that someone who comes to faith in Christ is willing to lay down their life for him. For this reason, the more plausible facts of her life are a beacon for us who struggle in and for the faith. Her story tells us that she was a philosopher, a “lover of wisdom.” It was her love of wisdom, guided by grace that brought her to faith in the one true God in the Holy Trinity.

It is a reminder that our faith is not blind, it is rational, based on an authentic consideration of reality. Clement of Alexandria was one of the first Christians to see the value of Greek philosophy for the Christian faith, and on this same day, December 4, we celebrate the memory of Our Holy Father John Damascene, who wrote a massive work, the Fount of Wisdom, reasoning about our faith.

St. Barbara, however, shows that once we believe in the true God, it becomes more than just an intellectual exercise, but it changes and transforms our whole life, so that we cannot live any other way, and so she gave up her life for her faith. The story also tells us that it was her very own father who executed her. This is plausible. We know, as Christ told us, “From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three; a father will be divided against his son and a son against his father, a mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother, a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Luke12:52-53).

What does family truly mean in our faith? What does it mean to be a father? Should not a father encourage his daughter to become her own person, and not simply to imitate his way of life? A beautiful idea, but how do we carry it out in practice? What if the roles had been revered and the father was a Christian and his daughter would want to revert to paganism? Would he then be justified in his actions? I think some of us might say yes. We have difficulty, I think, separating sin and sinner. We say, “Hate the sin, but love the sinner,” but we have difficulty distinguishing the two, and we end up hating the sinner double. The father would not be justified in killing his daughter, even if she was wrong, and even less, of course, because she was right.

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St. Andrew

The feast of St. Andrew is the beginning of a new relationship of God with his people. He is the first-called, the first follower of Christ particularly as Rabbi, as Messiah and Savior. What does it mean to be Christian? It means to follow Christ without hesitation and without selfishness. This feast is truly a reflection of Christmas. Jesus is the first-born of the Father, the first-born of all creation, the new Adam, the re-Creator of the human race.

Andrew is the first-called, but he is simply the forerunner of all who choose Christ, in a world that is hostile to Christ and his renewal. On this feast, we also begin the singing of Christmas stichera. At Psalm 140 of Vespers, we see that Bethlehem is filled with the fire of the Godhead, “Isaiah, dance for joy: receive the word of God. Prophesy to the Virgin Mary that the bush burning with fire will not be consumed by the radiance of our God.” At the Apostichera, we question the righteous Joseph, “Tell us, O Joseph: How is it that you bring the Maiden which you received from the Temple to Bethlehem pregnant?” Through divine intervention, the sending of an angel, he sees through to the holiness of his wife. The stichera at Vespers tells us that the Light that never sets has come into the world in the town of Bethlehem, and is worshiped by the angels, the shepherds and the Magi, a theme to be repeated frequently in the Christmas feast.

For us to recognize Christ, we must follow the first-called Andrew, whose first question was, “‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” [Jesus] said to them, “Come, and you will see.” This is Christ who was to say later, ““Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head. (Luke 9:58)” We have no comfortable place in this world. On Christmas, we “come and see” the Word of God in poverty, in a cave, rejected and persecuted by the world.

Meditation by Archpriest David Petras