Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord, as well as with the feast of the Holy Hierarch Jonah of Manchuria, who served the Church as a bishop in northern China in the 1920’s!

In today’s Gospel reading we heard about the miraculous resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain. We are all very familiar with this Gospel narrative, because it is not too often that Christ raised the dead back to life. In all of the Gospel accounts we read of only three such events. Let’s note that Christ did not raise the boy with words alone, but first touched the bier. The Holy Hierarch Cyril of Alexandria says that in this way Christ wished to show that His physical human body contained within itself divine and life-giving power.

Personally for each of us, this explanation of Cyril of Alexandria is important. Although nothing happens accidentally with the Lord, to someone looking from afar it may have seemed that Christ passed by the village of Nain unexpectedly or by chance at the exact moment when that funeral procession, full of so much sadness, was making its way to the cemetery. Had the Lord not been there, had He not touched the bier, there would not have been this wonderful miracle. In our spiritual lives things are not like this, for Christ does not pass by purely by chance when our life is struck by catastrophe, but is always nearby. We can always hear His voice and stretch out our hands to touch Him. At any moment we can open the Holy Scriptures and hear the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ. Weekly we are given the opportunity to communе of Christ’s Holy Mysteries, which is without doubt better than that touch with which the young man of Nain was raised.

If we do this regularly, that is, read the Word of God and receive communion, then the Lord fills us with His grace and we also are risen up, of course not in the literal, but in the spiritual sense. We receive strength to battle with sins and passions and to be renewed. This renewal or new spiritual life makes us sons and daughters of God.

Today let’s remember this and try to live not for our own sake, but for the sake of our Saviour who, as was the case may years ago in Nain with the boy who had died, resurrects us with His touch and word, pulls us out of sin, and renews our life.

priest Alexis