Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord, as well as with the day of the memory of the Apostles Bartholomew and Titus!

Today we heard the parable of the wicked winedressers, preached by our Lord Jesus Christ against the Jewish priests, Pharisees, and Sadducees who, throughout their entire history, persecuted and killed the prophets sent by God for the admonition of the Hebrew people. In this parable, the Saviour foretold that the Jewish elite would not fear to kill the even Son of God Himself. The Lord concluded His parable with the words of the 117/ 118th psalm: “The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.” These very familiar words (for they are repeated at every matins and at every moleben before the singing of the troparia) our Saviour Jesus Christ here applies to Himself. He is that rock which the notables of the Jewish people rejected and which became the cornerstone of the New Testament Christian Church. Today let’s focus our attention on these verses of the 117/118th psalm.

Apparently the 117/118th psalm was composed by an anonymous author after the Jewish people were freed from the Babylonian Captivity and had rebuilt the previously- destroyed temple in Jerusalem. This singularly joyous psalm glorifies the Lord God for His inconceivable care for the Jewish people. Such a joyous glorification of God was very much appropriate because it had been impossible to think that the Jewish people would ever return from Babylon to their homeland and that they, without the needed funds or quality building materials, would be able to build the temple anew. The author of the psalm rightly notes that all of this was possible only by the will of God and not through the efforts of men.

We can say the same thing about the freeing of the race of man from enslavement to sin and about the formation of the Church. For man, this was impossible and therefore God, in the form of His Only-Begotten Son clothed in human flesh, ordered everything. The Old Testament priesthood and preachers, who for so many years built up the Hebrew religious society, could achieve nothing through their human efforts. Although these people rejected Christ and even went so far as to kill Him, they could not in any manner prevent Him from freeing the human race from sin and from establishing the Church. Christ is our cornerstone, that is, not simply a foundation on which the Church stands, but that very stone which joins together separate walls into one whole. Our Lord Jesus Christ, through His incarnation, that is, through joining His Divine nature to a human one, reconciles man and God, joins them together.

Today and every day, let us fervently pray that our Lord Jesus Christ becomes for us the head cornerstone not in an abstract, theological sense, but in reality. May the Lord become for each of us a solid foundation on which we can build our spiritual lives with confidence. Let us also pray that our Cornerstone Jesus Christ joins together spouses into a single loving being, that children and parents also are joined into one strong family organism, that our parish be like one large family, that the citizens of our country live calmly, that between Russian and Ukraine a peace begins to reign for the sake of Christ and the same takes place in the Holy Land also.

priest Alexis