The Gospel of today (Mark 9:17-31) depicts the event which is both the revelation of the power of the Kingdom of Heaven, and a very sad case of some unexpected weakness of the disciples of Jesus Christ against the power of this world…

“His disciples asked Him, “Why could we not cast it out?” (that is the demon out of the young man). So, He said to them, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting.”

And this is a good reminder of the main idea the fourth Sunday of the Great Lent, that we have today, when we commemorate the life and the teaching of John of the Ladder. We call him by this “second name” as this is the name of his main and great treatise — The Ladder of Divine Ascent. “…[a] dweller of the wilderness and angel in the body…” – we also call him.

After the Bible and the liturgical books, the Ladder is the most read book in the Byzantine and Slavic Christian traditions continuing to nourish the spiritual life of millions around the world, both monks and lay faithful.

The experience presented by this work is the living ascetic experience, to teach but not to boast, as St. John was urged to compile this treatise. The other ascetics asked him urgently and there was a need to pass this experience to his spiritual children.

Who is the writer? Born in the 6^th century he came to the monastery at the age of sixteen; had four years of rigorous life and was tonsured a monk with several prophecies of the elders; spent 19 years in obedience to his very strict spiritual father; then 40 years of silence, fasting, prayer and repentant tears in a desert…

Did he have the fruits?

St. John had a disciple, Monk Moses. One day St. John sent his disciple to spread soil in the garden. As he was fulfilling his obedience, Monk Moses became weary from the summer heat and reclined under the shade of a large cliff.

St. John was in his cell at that moment, resting a bit after his labor of prayer. Suddenly a man of venerable countenance appeared and woke him, reproofing him: «John, why are you resting peacefully here while Moses is in danger?» St. John immediately arose and began praying for his disciple.

When Moses returned that evening, the saint asked him if anything had happened to him that day. The monk answered, «Not much, but I was in serious danger. A large rock broke off from a cliff under which I had fallen asleep at midday and nearly crushed me. Fortunately, I was having a dream in which you were calling me, and I jumped up and ran; at that moment a huge rock fell with a crash upon that very place where I was…»

Yet, this is what St. John told of himself: «I did not fast beyond measure, …and I did not conduct intensified night vigil, nor did I sleep on the ground; but I humbled myself…, and the Lord speedily saved me.»

During this abbacy, St. John was asked to share the experience; and he wrote the soul-saving instruction of 30 chapters, “a kind of steadfast ladder that will take those who desire it to the Heavenly gates”.

So, there are thirty chapters: each depicting a certain vice or virtue. They are not so much rules and regulations, but rather personal observations about what have been practiced.

Let us attend to just some of the wisdom:

“Like the sun, which shines on all alike, vainglory (that is, pride) beams on every occupation. What I mean is this: I fast, and turn vainglorious. I stop fasting so that I will draw no attention to myself, and I become vainglorious over being wise. I dress well or badly, and am vainglorious in either case. I talk or I remain silent, and each time I am defeated. No matter how I shed this prickly thing, a spike remains to stand up against me.”

“It is not the self-critical who reveals his humility (for does not everyone have somehow to put up with himself?). Rather it is the man who continues to love the person who has criticized him….”

“I have known a man who sinned openly and repented secretly. I condemned him…, but he was pure before God, having propitiated Him by a genuine confession.”

“Talkativeness is the throne of vainglory on which it loves to show itself and make a display”

“A venerable man said to me: ‘Suppose that there are twelve shameful passions. If we deliberately love one of them (I mean, pride), it will fill the place of the remaining eleven.’”

“After God, let us have our conscience as our aim and rule in all things, so that we may know which way the wind is blowing and set our sails accordingly”

“As love wanes, fear appears; because he who has no fear is either filled with love or dead in soul.”

And one of the last steps of this Ladder, only after all the mentioned (and not mentioned today) are passed safely is Love.

These steps are the ascent from strength to strength on the human path to perfection, which can only be attained gradually and not suddenly; for, in the words of the Savior, The Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force (Mt. 11:12). Amen

Today, in the very middle of fasting, to support our spirit in the middle of the hard journey, we, together with the entire Church, venerate the Cross of Christ, to receive its strength, power and consolation!

(Not to mention that the Great Lent itself is an essential part of our cross.)

The path of faith is the path of the cross, and there is no other path to God. And Christ Himself, as we have just heard from the Gospel (Mark 8:34-9:1), said: Whoever wants to follow Me, let him deny yourself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.

Let us remember when the Lord said these words: they are pronounced immediately after Peter’s confession (see Mark 8:29) and his appeal to the Saviour not to go to the sufferings… (Let us think about it…)

How can we take up our cross?

The first thing that makes up our cross is our involuntary sorrows (and we often say about them with regret: “this is our cross”, and often add, “we cannot do anything about it…”, and some say these are not the perfect means…), the misfortunes all people are subject to and from which we are not able to evade. These are diseases, departing of loved ones, bad and unpleasant actions of other people, and other difficult and unhappy occurrences. Of course, we try to avoid all this, but sometimes life makes us carry it on. And then (what makes them perfect…), if we accept our cross by faith, then we try to endure our sorrows without murmuring, even as deserved; or otherwise, as we are taught by the holy fathers, if we grumble and curse our fate, we do not bear our cross.

“…for we receive the due reward of our deeds”, said a criminal on the cross, the one who was the first to enter the Heavenly Kingdom, according to the Lord’s word.

“Regarding fasting when there is no health,” says St. Theophan the Recluse, “patience with illness and complacency during it replace fasting.” Even so! And it is certainly true not only about illnesses…

But our cross is not only involuntary sorrows. It is also those sorrows and difficult efforts that we take up, when our Christian faith and duty require it. And it demands that we evade from everything that moves us away from God — from all the temptations to adore and worship the things of this world:

to avoid depending on the pleasures and consolations contrary to God, and to our nature, with which the world catches us in the love and worship of itself;

not to succumb to it can be both difficult and sorrowful… but only then do we bear our cross!

Finally, our cross is the rejection of everything that opposes God within us, inwardly. Because, one can live in a monastery or even in the desert and without any benefit.

“Taking up our cross means enduring difficult unseen labor, and torment as we oppose our own passions, the sin that lives in us, the spirits of evil who furiously make war against us and attack us when we resolve to cast off the shackles of sin, and submit ourselves to the yoke of Christ.” – says St Ignatius, the one who is among those who gave us this simple and complete summary of what is taking up our cross.

For what benefit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?

Another way to do this commandment is to help other people carry their crosses, just like we can help others carrying some heavy things and burdens. This one might be easily available for us, and also reminds us how a man (Simon of Cyrene is his name) was helping the Lord Jesus to carry His cross on the way to Golgotha.

The way of the cross is not easy. But all the other ways do not lead to salvation. For, says the Lord, whoever wants to save his soul will lose it, and whoever loses his soul for the sake of Me and the Gospel will save it.

True life and true freedom, and true happiness (even often in this life) can only come through taking up one’s cross. Amen

Today we celebrate another Triumph of Orthodoxy, as we commemorate the one, who, on behalf of all the ascetics of the Church, confirmed what was once proclaimed by the St Apostle Peter: “you might be partakers of the divine nature”.

No less than that, “the divine nature” we, Orthodox Christians, still claim the God’s grace to be. The true and original Doxia, the Glory of God!

And it could seem that the clarity of the apostle’s words does not give any way to misinterpretation, yet there were people, long after the last ecumenical council, that taught of the God’s grace as created.

That certainly diminished the God’s deed of Salvation, and undermined the very essence of the Salvation – the real reunion with God, to the greatest and mystical extent…

What exactly did the apostles see when they ascended the mountain and the appearance of Christ before them changed? His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white and shiny, like snow, like a bleacher on earth cannot whiten! So, what did they see?

The Holy Fathers — ancient and those closer to our time — agree to say that the apostles saw the uncreated Divine Light.

Saint Gregory Palamas compares what happened on Tabor [ˈteɪbə] Mountain with the inspiration by the Holy Spirit that happened to all the saints.

For example, with the righteous Simeon the God-receiver, who took the Infant Christ into his arms and said these great words of his: Now you let go of Thy servant, Master.

How did he learn about Who he was holding then? The grace of God revealed it to him. No human considerations, no calculations, knowledge or science could reach and teach this. For his purity of life, for his righteousness, for his love for God, the Lord let him understand that, which is invisible by nature.

We see the same in the meeting of the righteous Elizabeth with the Mother of God, when the baby — John the Baptist — leaped with joy in her womb, and Elizabeth herself says: why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

How did she know this, is it from books? Did someone tell her?

The Lord revealed it to her.

What kind of power moved Apostle Peter when he said: You are Christ, the Son of the Living God?

Christ Himself says what was that power: Blessed are you, …, for it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but My Father.

The action, the energy of the same Grace of God, the Holy Spirit.

But this is also a great responsibility, that really echoes the words of the Lord about self-denial, which are the spirit of the Great Lent.

And this is uncovering the greatest sense of this self-denial, the goal of the ascetic labours of a Christian.

To be a part-taker of the divine nature, the divine ineffable energy.

As one preacher and hierarch once said: “we cannot only become spirit-bearing in some figurative sense, but truly God-bearing by becoming, through grace, which is the very Deity, partakers of the Divine life, and Divine Nature.”

So great is the call for us, so let us try and apply all the perfect means of the Great Lent.

“Quench not the Spirit”, says another Apostle – St. Apostle Paul.

And the Great Lent is the most authentic interpreter of these words, about the spirit and the spirits, translating it for us in simple words and giving us its Lenten mind to understand:

O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of slothfulness (that is spiritual passiveness and laziness), despair, lust of power, and idle talk.

First – get rid of that ‘spirit’! To clean the vessel for the Spirit of Truth.

What kind of Spirit it is:

But give me rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant. [And] grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother!

Come to the chruch more often and pray this simple prayer during the Great Lent, and be on guard as of which spirit is our treasure…

“support the weak, be longsuffering toward all. See that none render unto any one evil for evil… Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

And it is right there that St. Apostle says: “Quench not the Spirit”,

Through the holy intercessions of the St. Apostles Peter and Paul, and the venerable hierarch Gregory, who we listen to and commemorate today, О Christ our God, have mercy upon us and save us. Amen.

Today we have the first Sunday of the Great Lent, and as all the Lenten Sundays, it is dedicated to some special event or the commemoration of the saint, and today it is the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

It is not in vain that this feast of Orthodoxy is done on occasion of the first week of the Great Lent and during the Great Lent, for all the faithful that made it real by establishing the pure and true Orthodox faith, really revealed it by their ascetic labour of temperance and self-denial and thus following Christ (according to his word).

This is how they have obtained God’s grace necessary and crucial for the revelation of the true undamaged (as we say) teaching and doctrine and dogmas.

And we should remember that our doctrines are all about the incomprehensible and inconceivable; they don’t try to make it fully rational, but just protect this mystery of God and His Salvation from the false rationalization and profanation (de-sacration).

Thus, they are called (initially, in Greek) the limits, those that confine the infinite truth, not daring to express it completely but by cutting off the false and primitive, and especially – extremely harmful for the Salvation, ideas.

Sometimes they sound like “It is not like this, but the opposite is also a dangerous profanation”. And this is because we speak of the divine and mystical, not of the human or worldly!

And there must be a lot of humility to acknowledge, and a lot of wisdom to correctly express the ideas this way. And it is only due to the divine grace that what the ascetics obtained through labour, this true Orthodox Faith was revealed to everyone, including us, for our protection and salvation.

That is why we celebrate it during the Great Lent.

The formal reason for the feast was the final restoration of the icons, and the sound (yet really simple) doctrine about them. As it was the last false teaching, and that (in 787) was the last ecumenical council.

The iconoclasm (fighting the icons, very cruel and murderous to many Christians and humble and faithful monastics) occurred when under the influence of some non-Christian ideas, due to this influence, some Christians lost their freedom to express their due love and glory-giving to Christ, Who is God in the flesh, by the natural means of expressing it in images and pictures of what they, as Apostle John the Theologian says, saw and touched by their hands: “which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life”.

It is also written: «The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; and we have seen His glory, the glory as of the Only Begotten from the Father» (John 1:14). The Word became flesh! And if flesh, then, of course, the Incarnate One has both form and image—something that can be described. And the description can be done both with words and with colors.

And this last doctrine was more about the freedom than the limits.

Do we depict the essence? No, we depict the image. Or do we cherish the images of the loved ones? Or do we rather express our love through the images?

Do we throw away any photo when/since it has lost the resemblance to them, of their childhood, their adolescence, student or school years?

We certainly don’t! The photos and pictures almost mysteriously depict the personality of our beloved ones.

This is how our Christian faith, on the one hand defends the Truth, defining its borderlines, and on the other, gives us all the freedom to touch it, to partake of if, and to love and glorify it.

With the feast and the triumph of our Orthodox Faith, dear brothers and sisters. Amen!

Tomorrow, brothers and sisters, we embark on the journey of Great Lent. The Church has been preparing us for this special period over the past few weeks. Today’s Sunday is the last before the start of the Holy Forty Days and is dedicated to a very sorrowful event—the expulsion of our forebears from paradise. When we say that the history of humanity begins with the Fall, we mean, first and foremost, that all the descendants of Adam and Eve were born after their expulsion from paradise. Therefore, the entire human race, originating from our first ancestors, consists of people who have never known paradise or experienced life within it, for Adam’s sin closed the way for humanity.

Holy Scripture recounts the creation of the first humans and their life in paradise. The entire world created by God was perfect, and paradise was a special place where people lacked nothing.

People were also perfect, but not in the sense that they had no need for further perfection. Rather, they had no defects, flaws, or deficiencies that could hinder their path to deification. Today, for example, if we wish to do a good deed, pray, or contemplate God, we immediately face various difficulties: overwhelming fatigue, distracting emotions, pressing concerns, and worries. However, the original Adam and Eve had none of these obstacles. Nothing hindered them from ascending the ladder of divine union ever higher. This was the perfection of Adam and Eve.

Despite their perfection and their ideal surroundings, our ancestors were given commandments by God. The first of these was to cultivate the Garden. As Blessed Augustine says, «In the tranquility of a blessed life, where there is no death, all labor is the preservation of what one possesses.» Thus, work in paradise was not burdensome toil «by the sweat of one’s brow» (Gen. 3:19) but rather a light duty and a contemplation of the Creator’s works. The second commandment was the prohibition against eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was this commandment that our forebears transgressed, resulting in their expulsion from paradise.

God, foreseeing the Fall, had already predestined the salvation of humanity through the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity before the foundation of the world. In the Book of Revelation, Christ is referred to as «the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world» (Rev. 13:8).

But why has the Church established the remembrance of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise on the eve of Great Lent? Why, for example, is today not dedicated to Christ’s forty-day fast before His public ministry or some other Gospel event? Great Lent is, in a way, a summary of all Sacred History; that is why it begins with the remembrance of the Fall and ends with Pascha—the day of salvation. Great Lent is a reminder of humanity’s journey from the Fall to Redemption.

Let us recall the biblical text: paradise contained many different trees, among them the Tree of Life in the midst of the garden and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:9). The fact that these two trees grew side by side indicates their connection. The Tree of Life granted life, while the Tree of Knowledge granted wisdom. We cannot correctly understand what kind of knowledge is meant without considering the specific nature of biblical language. To «know good and evil» means to possess wisdom and the ability to discern. Thus, when King Solomon prayed, he said: «Give Your servant a discerning heart to govern Your people and to distinguish between right and wrong» (1 Kings 3:9).

Knowing good and evil means distinguishing between what is beneficial and what is not, and rejecting what is evil: «Turn from evil and do good» (Ps. 34:14). St. Maximus the Confessor says that the Tree of Knowledge granted the ability «to hold onto some things and avoid others.» And our forebears, of course, were meant to develop this ability in paradise.

Then why was the fruit, which was supposed to grant such important and necessary wisdom, forbidden? And why did Adam and Eve receive something entirely different than they had expected after eating it?

Let us recall the well-known words of the Apostle Paul regarding the mystery of Communion: «Let a person examine himself, then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For those who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment on themselves» (1 Cor. 11:28–29). The Apostle explains that a divine gift can be received unworthily, without proper preparation, and without self-examination, leading to the opposite of the intended blessing: one «eats and drinks judgment.» The same principle applies to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The issue was not the fruit itself, but the inner state of those who approached it.

Today is not only the day of remembrance of our forebears’ expulsion from paradise—it is also Forgiveness Sunday. On this day, before the beginning of Great Lent, we ask forgiveness from others and forgive in turn. Our Lord Jesus Christ repeatedly speaks about the necessity of forgiveness. But then why did the Creator not forgive Adam and Eve? Why did He not allow them to remain in paradise but instead banished them from Eden? God is love (1 John 4:16), and forgiveness is an expression of love. Why, then, did He not forgive them?

To answer this difficult question, we must return to Scripture. After the Fall, the Almighty asks Adam: «Where are you?» (Gen. 3:9). The All-Seeing and Omnipresent God, of course, knew where His fallen creation was. His words are not just a question but an invitation to repentance.

Explaining these words, St. Basil the Great writes: «The All-Seeing did not require information, but He wanted Adam to reflect on what he had been and what he had become.» It is not a question about Adam’s physical location but about his spiritual state.

Instead of repentance, instead of acknowledging his guilt and seeking to return, Adam does the opposite—he shifts the blame: «The woman You put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it» (Gen. 3:12). Eve follows the same path: «The serpent deceived me, and I ate» (Gen. 3:13). Is this shifting of blame true repentance? Does it even resemble remorse? Or even regret for what was done? No!

Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise because paradise was no longer paradise for them; it had become the place of their fall. They themselves wished to hide from the Lord.

Today, brothers and sisters, we do not have memories of paradise. No one, except the first people, has experienced life there. But we do have another important experience—the experience of lacking paradise, a longing, a spiritual dissatisfaction. From this sense of deprivation is born a great desire—a thirst for God, a search for the Lord: «My soul thirsts for God, for the living God» (Ps. 42:2). True repentance is born from this feeling, from this thirst, from this state.

The Church reminds us of this and leads us back to paradise—through fasting, through repentance, through the recognition of our sinfulness. All this is done so that when the Lord asks us, «Where are you?» we will not hide but will answer: «Here I am» (Gen. 22:1). «Lord, save my soul; save me by Your mercy» (Ps. 6:4). Amen!