Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feasts of the Resurrection of the Lord and the Triumph of Orthodoxy, as well as with the completion of the first week of Great Lent!

In today’s Gospel reading we heard a very beautiful account of how our Lord and God Jesus Christ called Philip and Nathaniel (or, as the other evangelists call him – Bartholomew) to be His disciples. The holy Apostle Philip, perhaps because he had already heard something about Christ from Andrew and Peter, responded at once, without hesitation, and became not only a follower of Jesus, but also His missionary, for as soon as he himself became a disciple, he went and told his friend Nathaniel about the Lord.

It seems that Nathaniel first heard of Jesus from Philip. Nathaniel was a devout Jew, well-versed in the Holy Scriptures, especially in those passages which foretold the coming of the Messiah. We may suppose that, like many of the Jews of that time, he had a burning desire to see the promised Christ, and that the news that He had been found must have excited him greatly. We can also imagine the sorrow that must have filled his heart when Philip told him that Jesus was from Nazareth, for the Scriptures clearly prophesied that the Saviour would come not from that Galilean town, but from Bethlehem. (Few at that time knew that Jesus had been born in Bethlehem of Judea and many considered Nazareth, the town where He had been brought up, to be His place of birth.) Despite his doubts, Nathaniel heeded the counsel of his friend Philip and went to meet the Lord. Nathaniel’s careful and cautious, but at the same time trusting approach to the news of the Messiah was crowned with success. When the Lord opened to him that He knew his most hidden thoughts or feelings (perhaps this is what is meant when Christ said that He saw him under the fig tree), all his former doubts were dispelled and he wholeheartedly accepted Jesus as the long-awaited Christ and became one of His disciples.

It is not by chance that this Gospel excerpt is read today, for Great Lent is, in its own way, a call for each of us to become a true follower of the Lord. Some enter into the Fast readily and without hesitation, immersing themselves in prayer, in spiritual reading, and in the divine services. For others, all of this is more difficult. Let each of us, regardless of how we have spent this first week of Lent, remember that the goal of our Lenten struggle is to come to the knowledge of Christ. Today let us pray to the holy Apostles, that through the Fast we may come closer to our Saviour, and that He send down upon us His grace and open our spiritual eyes, as He did long ago with Nathaniel.

priest Alexis