St. Nahum
Beloved brothers and sisters in Christ Our Only True God and Our Only True Savior,
CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST! HE WAS AND IS AND EVER SHALL BE. Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ. ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ.
PRAYER TO CHRIST THE TRUE LIGHT
Christ our God, the True Light Who enlightens and sanctifies every person who comes into the world: Seal us with the Light of Your Countenance that we may perceive Thy Unapproachable Radiance. Direct the footsteps of our life in the way of Your Commandments. Through the prayers of Your All-Pure Mother and of all Your Saints. Amen.
TODAY'S SYNAXARION:
On December 1st (Kalo Mena! May we have a good and blessed Month) Our Holy Orthodox Christian Church commemorates, honors and entreats the holy intercessions of the following Saints, Forefathers, Fathers, Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Preachers, Evangelists, Martyrs, Confessors, Ascetics, Teachers and every righteous spirit made perfect in Our Holy Orthodox Christian faith: Nahum the holy Prophet; Saint Philaret the Merciful of Amnia; Saint Ananias the Persian.
THE HOLY PROPHET NAHUM. Born of the tribe of Simeon in a place called Elkosh, on the further side of the Jordan, he lived seven hundred years before Christ and foretold the fall of Nineveh two hundred years after the Prophet Jonah. The people of Nineveh had repented after hearing Jonah's preaching, and God had protected them and not destroyed them. But, with the passage of time, they came to forget God's mercy and turned again to evil. Prophet Nahum foretold their doom, warning them that, if they showed no repentance, they would receive no protection. The entire city was so utterly destroyed by earthquake, flood and fire that its location is no longer known. Holy Nahum lived for forty-five years before going to his rest in the Lord, leaving us a small book of his true and genuine prophesies.
+By the holy intercessions of Your Saints and Holy Prophets, O Christ Our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.
TODAY'S SACRED SCRIPTURAL READINGS ARE THE FOLLOWING:
Holy Epistle Lesson: Galatians 3:8-12
Holy Gospel Lesson: St. Luke 12:32-40
FOR YOUR PERSONAL REFLECTION AND CONTEMPLATION
"We are called to be 'imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises" (Hebrews 6:10-12). Without patience, we might fail to allow God to work through us. God has placed the seed of His Word in us, which we must water and let grow. As we hear in the Parable of the Sower, we must be careful and allow the seed to bear fruit. So we must become the good soil, hear the word of God, 'keep it bring forth fruit with patience" (St. Luke 8:15)
THE MYSTERY-EVENT OF CHRIST
by His Grace, Bishop Athanasius Yevtich [source: Christ: The Alpha and Omega]
This Mystery-Event of Christ consists both of the fact that He is truly God and truly Man, and of the fact that He is the one and unique God-man, assembled from His two natures, and eternally remains in His two perfect natures, wills, and energies, as the One composite Hypostasis (μία σύνθετος υπόστασις) of the one unique God-man, but not "one composite nature" (μία σύνθετος φύσις) as is mistakenly taught by the heretical Monophysites, for in that case our human nature is lost in Christ and thus also our actual and eternal salvation.
This interpretation of Saint Cosmas in his hymns of the Mystical Supper of Christ and our participation and communion in it--that is, in the Holy Eucharist of Christ Himself incarnate--is based on the well known interpretation of Saint Athanasius the Great, when the great Alexandrian archbishop and patriarch, one of the greatest witnesses of evangelical Orthodoxy in the heretofore two-thousand-year history of the Church, interprets Solomon's expression in Proverbs 8:22: "The Lord created me as the beginning of His ways for His works," and says that the expression "created me" shows and proves that Christ, as the Preeternal Wisdom of God, as the Eternal Only Begotten Son of God, the Almighty Creator and Artist of the entire creation, the Same who by His voluntary and saving Incarnation and Becoming Man, became "creation--man," for the salvation of man. His creation, and of all His creation. That is why Saint Gregory the Theologian says (as repeated by Saint Damascene in the divine hymns of our Church): "The One Who is (exists) from eternity, now comes into being ( ο "Ων γίνεται) by becoming); man; the Unoriginate One now begins ('αρχεται--receives beginning); the Fleshless One is incarnate, the Logos of God is embodied."
In a word: the interpretation of Saint Athanasius on Christ as the Wisdom of God, Whom God the Father possesses as Son of God, but Whom He also creates at the time of Christ's Incarnation as man, witnesses to the faith of the Church, that by His Incarnation the Son and Word of God, the Wisdom of God, "came to that which is His own" (St. John 1:11). Thus He came into the world--in the world and in the man whom He created and who belongs to Him, because God is Father, creating the world and man through the Son and for the Son" (St. Paul's δι' αυτού και είς αυτόν--Col. 1:16), everywhere and in everything sealing and signing His Name, so that when the Son comes into the world and becomes man, everywhere He will find His Words--His Logoi and "logos-ness", according to Father Justin Popovich...according to the God-inspired words of the Holy and Great Photius, "The unity of the Holy Trinity made the Church (εκκλησιάσασα) by the decision of Their singular will" in Their Preeternal Great Counsel and thus the Trinity created the whole world and the human race, intending it to become in Christ the Body-Church-Council of all the children of God and of all things created by the Holy Trinity.
This is that Gospel of God, the "new, all-joyful Good News" of the salvation and deification (theosis) of all men and all creation in Christ the God-man, and this is that which we today, as the Orthodox Catholic Church of Christ, the Church of the Holy Trinity, witness and preach before the world and humanity at the end of the second, and beginning of the third millennium of Christianity. This is that well-known Orthodox Christological cosmology and anthropology, soteriology and eschatology, of which we have testified these twenty full centuries through numberless constellations of Saints: Apostles, Martyrs, Hierarchs, Confessors, Ascetics, Faithful disciples and followers of Christ, all those "clouds of Witnesses," as they are called by the Holy Apostle Paul and John, all those who faithfully follow after Christ, all those who have as their Head, in their midst, and as their End the "Author and Perfecter of the faith" Jesus--the Preeternal Lamb of God." (Heb. 12:1-2; John 1:29'; Rev. 5:6; 7:13-17). Saint Symeon the New Theologian writes: "Christ is the First, the Middle and the Final Perfection, because He is everyone: the first ones, the ones in the middle, and the ones at the end. For in Him there are no differences among them, there is no Barbarian or Scythian Greek or Jew, but Christ is all and in all (Col. 3:11)".
With sincere agape in His Holy Diakonia,
The sinner and unworthy servant of God
+Father George