Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord, the ecclesiastical New Year, and the day of the memory of St. Symeon the Stylite!

Today during the Divine Liturgy we heard the Gospel reading recounting how our Lord and God Jesus Christ, after a significant absence, came on the Sabbath day to Nazareth, the town in which He was raised and where everyone knew Him from His youth, and how He read and preached in the synagogue. Christ did not read just any excerpt from the Old Testament, but through His divine providence opened the scroll exactly to that place in the book of the Prophet Isiah where the author clearly foretells the earthly ministry of the Saviour. This excerpt ends with the words that the Messiah will “preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Today let’s try to understand the meaning of these words. It is clear that this Gospel excerpt, with the words ‘the acceptable year,’ fits well with the feast of the Church New Year, but how did the ancient Jews understand them? What did the Lord mean when He preached that “this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears?” And how, brothers and sisters, do they apply to us today?

For the Jews, ‘the acceptable year of the Lord’ referred to the fiftieth year or the Jubilee Year. We have discussed this before. Remember that in the 25th chapter of Leviticus it is prescribed that every fiftieth year be specially dedicated to God. In these Jubilee years slaves were freed, land was returned to its original owners, the fields were not sowed, debts were forgiven, the whole year was like a Sabbath. Such years were proclaimed by the priests in the fall, on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), that is, approximately at this time of year.

At the time of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, the Jews no longer followed the regulations of the Jubilee Years, but despite this our Lord Jesus Christ preached the coming of ‘the acceptable year of the Lord.” Of course this is so because each Jubilee Year was but a foreshadowing of the authentic ‘Jubilee year,’ which began with the coming of the Messiah to earth, with His earthly ministry, and, without a doubt, with His death on the cross and Resurrection on the third day. We, brothers and sisters, are living right now in the period of the most real ‘Jubilee Year,’ for the Lord has freed us from sin and demonic slavery, has settled us in the Church, has promised us a place in the Heavenly Kingdom. Is not all of this incomparably better than the Old Testament Jubilee?

Today’s feastday, the Church New Year, may seem strange or even anachronistic for modern people, but it does not have to be so. Of course, nowadays no one celebrates the new year on the 1st of September according to the Old Calendar, but in reality, now is the time of year when things start anew. Families return home after vacation, people go back to work, children begin attending school again, etc. The Church New Year also ties us to our Slavic Christian ancestors, who marked the new year now, as well as to the Old Testament Jews, to Christ, and to the Apostles.

Today’s Gospel reading fits perfectly not only with this feastday, but is also appropriate for each of us personally, not only during autumn, when life returns to its regular course, but for every day. We, through our sins, turn away from the Lord, sell ourselves into demonic slavery, fall away from the Church and from the future Heavenly Kingdom. It is good to remember at all times, not only at the New Church Year, that the Saviour is always ready to return to us, just like He came to Nazareth a very long time ago, and to preach to us personally the most real and genuine ‘acceptable year of the Lord.’

priest Alexis