Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feastdays of the Resurrection of the Lord, the Circumcision of our Saviour, and of St. Basil the Great!

In today’s Gospel reading we heard how on the eighth day after birth, the Infant Christ was circumcised and named Jesus. In these paradoxical actions there are things of which we should take note. These events are paradoxical because the name Jesus in Hebrew means ‘God saves,’ and while the newborn Christ, both man and God, the Saviour of the human race, was prophetically being named thus, He was also being circumcised and made a slave to the Jewish law. If at the Nativity we saw that God humbled Himself and became a man so as to join us to Himself and save us, today we see something similar. God obeys the Jewish law so as to free His beloved nation from the yoke of that same law and to join them to Himself. For us, the lesson, as it was last week, is as follows: if Christ was ready to obey the law of the Jews so as to free the race of man from death, then we can learn to live according to the moral law, restrain our passions, and live righteously so as to make at least a small step towards Him.

Today’s saint, the Holy Hierarch Basil of Caesarea, was one of the main defenders of the Orthodox faith agains the Arian heretics in the fourth century. Although this false teaching was condemned at the First Ecumenical Council in 325, it continued to harass the faithful of the Roman Empire for more than fifty years afterwards and was decisively condemned only at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381. We could say that Basil the Great, despite not dying a martyr, nor being exiled from his see, nonetheless gave his life to defend the true faith. He died exhausted by his many troubles at the young age of forty-nine, two years before the calling of the Second Ecumenical Council. He reposed when the emperor and the majority of bishops were heretics and did not live to see the triumph of the Orthodox against the Arians.

We also live in complicated times. In certain places, the Church is persecuted. In others, a moral Christian life is considered dangerous and not desirable for society. The Orthodox are fighting one against another. People who take notice of their conscience and live according to this inner divine voice are at times oppressed. There is no end in sight to war or to the open immorality that surrounds us. Despite all of this, we should not lose heart. Let’s remember that our Lord and God became a man and lived under the law so as to join us to Himself. Our anti-Christian surroundings do not change this. Therefore, let’s pray to the Holy Hierarch Basil, who lived through so much unpleasantness for the sake of truth but, despite this, did not live to see the triumph of Orthodoxy here on earth, and let us hope for God’s mercy.

priest Alexis