Dear in Christ Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feasts of the Resurrection of the Lord, the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, and the Optina Elders!

Today we heard three Epistle readings as well as three Gospel readings. One of these Gospel readings, which is appointed to be read on the feastdays of venerable saints, i. e. monastic saints, contains within itself the Beatitudes. If you remember, in my sermons I spent much of the summer explaining the Beatitudes to you in detail. Therefore, if you were listening attentively to today’s Gospel, you probably noticed that the Beatitudes that we heard just now, although more or less familiar, differ from those we discussed in the summer. Moreover, there were only four of them in today’s reading. This is of course the case, not because the deacon got mixed up, but because there are two versions of the Beatitudes, the fuller version from the Gospel according to Matthew and the shortened version from the Gospel of St. Luke. Today we heard the excerpt from the Gospel according to Luke.

For some people, these seeming contradictions between the evangelists lead to doubt. Such people say that the text of Holy Scripture cannot be considered reliable because it contains so many contradictory points. Against such accusations, we believers can answer the following:

First, all four Gospels were written not as historical accounts, but as theological narratives about Jesus Christ. Therefore, the primary goal of the authors was to pass on the theological truths that God became a man, lived here on earth amongst people, suffered for the sake of us sinners, died for our salvation, and arose on the third day. To do this most effectively, the evangelists did not always follow the chronology of events exactly, did not always pass on all the details, sometimes emphasizing one thing over another.

Secondly, all of the evangelists were living people, and as such they remembered events differently. Someone would remember certain events, another would be struck by something else, the third would have no memory of that which the others remembered, but would recollect something entirely different, and so on.

Thirdly, they knew that others were also writing Gospel narratives, and therefore there was no need to retell everything in absolutely the same manner. On the contrary, it was better to describe the events from different points of view so as to give the reader a fuller and more lively portrait of the Saviour.

For such reasons, we can be calm about all of these so-called ‘contradictions’ in the Gospel texts and be sure of the trustworthiness of all that we read in Holy Scripture.

Today we heard how a large number of people came to the Saviour seeking cures for their earthly diseases. Christ heals them, but then offers something better, i. e. the Beatitudes, which are, you could say, a medicine against a more serious condition – spiritual ailments. Let us today, as the apostles and, later on, the Optina Elders did, take to heart these Beatitudes and with the help of these words, be healed from our spiritual woes.

priest Alexis