23 Ιουλίου 2017

I am a Christian. I believe in God, the Creator from nothing of heaven and earth and of everything visible and invisible. This Creator-God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is also identically the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. There was a man, born in Bethlehem of Judea, born of a virgin whose name was Mary, a virgin who did not know a man. This man's name was Jesus. He lived for about thirty years in a little town in Galilee, called Nazareth, with his mother and a man called Joseph who was espoused to his mother and who remained faithful to both of them, though Mary remained ever-virgin. He was a carpenter. Then, at about the ...

For those whose parents are seriously ill, the Elder advised that they should do whatever good and kind deed they can for their parents, to care for them lovingly, to give them affectionate attention and treat them with the tenderness they would a baby, to look after them in every possible way, and also even to ‘indulge their every whim’ so as to keep them happy. We must in every way alleviate the cross of sickness. ‘If you do this’, he said, ‘two things will happen to you. The first is that God, as He says in the Old Testament, will grant you a long life, and he will also give you a gift (that your days may be long ...

In the Gospel reading for the 7th Sunday of Matthew (9, 27-35) we have two events. The first is the cure of two blind men and thereafter that of the man who was both mute and possessed. Both cases are extremely tragic, as Saint Matthew presents them, not only because of the bodily suffering involved, but also because of the deeper, spiritual dimension given to their illnesses. The reading concludes by telling us that Jesus ‘went about all the cities and towns’ with one essential soteriological aim: teaching, preaching and curing every disease and every weakness. Christ’s work is composite and multi-dimensional. The meaning of ‘to cure’ The third feature of the Lord’s work was the cure of ‘every disease and every ...