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!