Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Congratulations with the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord, as well as the feast of all Russian Saints!

Today in the second Gospel reading we heard the very familiar words of the Beatitudes. They are familiar because we hear them weekly at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, during the Small Entrance, when the Gospel book is solemnly brought to the sanctuary and placed on the altar table. These words are so familiar to us that perhaps we don’t pay them enough attention; they’re sung and we don’t even notice them. Despite our negligence in this regard, these words are so deep and important for a Christian life that we could talk about them and reflect on them for a very long time. Today let’s begin, and let’s continue on the following Sundays, to examine the Beatitudes in detail.

First, let’s remember that there are nine New Testament commandments or beatitudes. They are found in His Sermon on the Mount. Before that moment the Lord had performed quite a few miracles, which made Him well known among the people. Thanks to this, a large group of people was always to be found near Him. The time had come for Him to not simply heal, but to also begin to teach.

The Beatitudes are so called because each of the commandments begins with the word blessed. Since this word is repeated for each commandment, it’s probably a good idea to take some notice of it. Blessed is the English translation of the Greek word makarios, which means happy or fortunate in a religious or spiritual context. It is also useful to know that the Hebrew word for someone who is saved is translated in the Psalter into Greek as makarios, and in English as blessed (“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly (ps. 1)). Therefore, the blessed are not simply those who are fortunate in a religious context, but also those who are saved. Perhaps we can say that a blessed person is one who is happy and fortunate because he has found salvation, or is on the spiritual path to it.

This explains why Christ, despite so many people standing around him, addressed not the whole multitude, but His disciples. Christ came to teach how to acquire not earthly fortune, but heavenly and therefore He primarily speaks to the apostles, who thirsted after such a teaching, while the multitude, who were less prepared to hear such things, stood somewhat to the side and listened, you could say, with one ear, to the words of the Lord. The same could be said about us. If we thirst for salvation, these commandments of our Saviour will interest us and be understandable. On the other hand, if we purely or mostly live a passion-filled earthly life, it will be very difficult to accept the Beatitudes into our hearts and they will bring us no happiness.

Today the Church celebrates the memory of all the Russian Saints. This feastday was instituted in 1918, during the Russian Revolution, to lift the spirits of the faithful at that moment when their world was falling apart. Russians, Ukrainians, Scandinavians, Germans, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Estonians, an Aleut, Chinese and many other representatives of other nationalities are members of this large choir of saints. They lived at different times, under different governments, were members of different local Orthodox Churches, prayed in different languages. Probably the only thing that joins them together is a deep faith in Christ and, as a consequence of this, true blessedness.

Today, one hundred years after the awful catastrophe of the Russian Revolution, once again there is no peace in the lands of Holy Rus’. We have another catastrophe now. Let us fervently pray to our beloved and common saints of the entire Holy Rus’ that the war ends and a lasting peace dawns.

priest Alexis