A Homily for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (7533/2025) from St. John Russian Orthodox Christian Mission Church in Winfield, Pennsylvania, by Priest Paul Siewers.
In this weekend of deep summer we have had commemorations with particular meaning for Russian Orthodox Christian tradition. Friday was the summer feast of St. Seraphim of Sarov. It was on that day in 1903 that the Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia, Russia’s last royal family martyred for their Christian faith, participated in the making of St. Seraphim as a saint before the Revolution. He remains a special saint to us. He lived in the woods in the 1800s and showed others in modern memory the glory of God in the uncreated light all around us from God, in theosis or oneness with God’s divine grace. Only Orthodox Christianity fully teaches grace as uncreated in theosis, how Christ empowers us to reach our full potential as human beings by emptying ourselves in him, instead of by the world’s way of self-assertion. Humble St. Seraphim of Sarov in the woods, a friend of bears, taught that by example to many, and he still does through our memory of him and his prayers for us.
Then yesterday, Saturday, was the feast of the Holy Prophet Elijah, and according to Church tradition we blessed cars at the men’s retreat at the Union County Sportsmen’s Club. This is an ancient tradition. Chariots and carriages and buggies were blessed by earlier generations of Orthodox Christians on Elijah day; now automobiles, recalling how God transported Elijah in a chariot of fire with horses of fire (4 Kingdoms 2 in the Septuagint). So our tradition is living and ongoing. According to Orthodox tradition, Elijah with Enoch will return as the two witnesses against Antichrist in the last days (Rev. 11). Meantime his passing reminds us of God’s protection of the faithful in travels, something I took special note of after the car accident I survived a couple years ago with God’s help, which helped nudge me along unworthily toward ordination as a priest. God helps. We never know which day He will take us. But we ask His protection to be whole for service.
Today, among other holy saints, we also commemorate the Holy Prophet Ezekiel. His record of the prophecies given him by God while in exile from the ruins of Jerusalem shows the links between the Old Testament and the New. They give us hope also as exiles and pilgrims on earth today in the “Babylon” of the global spirit of Antichrist.
The Gospel Reading for today (Matt. 14:14-22) reminds us of how the New Testament fulfills the Old, how Israel became realized in the Orthodox Christian Church, and God’s care for us in her. It tells of Jesus feeding the multitude with loaves and fishes. Remember how our Lord taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” The word translated “daily” in English in the original Greek is epiousion, which means also “above-essential.” So “give us this our super-essential bread” is another way to translate that verse of the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus gave us lessons on this both in today’s Gospel reading and most completely in His giving us His body and blood in the Eucharist.
Catholicism sought to rationalize the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist using the term Transubstantiation. That involves an attempted articulation of the Eucharist as materialistically real. Protestants often dismiss the Eucharist as merely a remembering and symbolic. But Orthodoxy follows true apostolic tradition in understanding by experience the Eucharist as both real and symbolic. Based on that phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, the Eucharist involves “super-substantiation,” beyond-substance or hyper-substance, not just trans-substance in any materialistic way, and not just transcendent in some symbolic way, but both (this is similar to St. Dionysius the Areopagite’s discussion of the mystical synthesis of apophatic and cataphatic ways of knowing and articulating truths about God).
There is an incredible mystery in the Eucharist of deeper dimension than we can describe. This is why as Orthodox Christians we refer to the Eucharist as a mystery more than a sacrament, which is a term used in the West as if for a type of object or thing. So also as St. Seraphim of Sarov showed, we understand grace to be uncreated energy, dynamic, more a force field than a thunder bolt or static act. In God’s uncreated energies we can know Him intimately in a way that we can not know the mystery of His Essence. Nonetheless we participate directly in Him if we struggle with His grace to purify our hearts and open them to His illumination. This again is seen in the lives of the Saints, like Seraphim, and of the Holy Prophets, like Elijah and Exekiel.
The Gospel Reading ties all this together. Jesus with compassion for the multitude takes the five loaves and two fishes, “and looking up to Heaven, He blessed and broke the loaves.” About five thousand men, besides women and children, ate and were filled. And the fragments that remained of the bread and fish filled twelve baskets The Church Fathers interpreted this both as an historical event and as symbolic, similar to the way we interpret the Eucharist. The loaves were actual and filled the multitude. But the five loaves according to the Fathers also symbolize the five senses. Some said in addition they symbolize the five biblical books of the law. The two fish symbolize the words of the Fishermen, the evangelists and apostles as fishers of men also, one fish symbolizing the Gospels, and the other fish the Epistles. Church Fathers also have said the two fish symbolize the two natures of our Lord Jesus Christ, fully God and full man in one person. So in the symbolism, the law of God of the Old Testament combines with the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament to fill the multitude, leaving fragments in 12 baskets symbolizing the Twelve Apostles reaching out to the world. Old Testament Israel became fully the Church.
Blessed Theophylact, an early commentator on the Gospels, notes the phrase “five thousand men, besides women and children” also has spiritual meaning, which is that all Christians should be manly in the sense of being Christ-like. As the Apostle Paul said, there is neither male nor female in Christ. This is in the mystical sense of theosis including the Church as the Bride of Christ. This does not involve any worldly sense of identifying with passions and trying to change genders, which are created in complementarity. For as Jesus also said in the Gospels, in anticipation of our fallen state God made us men and women for marriage, except those who accept virginity or monasticism in the Church. Both are noble callings to be manly in the sense of virtuous. The word virtue comes from a root (as in virile) meaning strength. That power is the uncreated grace of God available to all. In marriage, while the man is the head of the family, he is charged with laying down his life for his family like Christ.
Divine Providence sustains us in Creation, through both physical and spiritual gifts The link between the Old Testament and the New in the spiritual meaning of the Gospel Reading is also seen in the Book of Ezekiel. It shows the horrors of the old Temple from which the glory of God has departed. Then it shows joys of the new Temple as the glory of God enters from the East, prefiguring the New Jerusalem of the Church as seen in the final book of the New Testament, the Apocalypse. The entrance to the temple changed for the people from the Old Testament east gate to the west in the Church, because now in the Israel of the New Testament Church, the east from which the sun rises is the entryway for Christ coming in among us, through the royal doors, in the Eucharist, His Body and Blood.
Ezekiel, the exile in Babylon, wrote also from God’s prophecy to him about the Cherubim with the four faces, the four living creatures, the four Evangelists of the New Testament on the chariot of God, to encourage the exiles who had witnessed the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the first Temple. The four Evangelists and their Gospels would reach out to all four corners of the earth in the fulfillment of Israel in the Church, just as the account of the loaves and fishes also symbolized in the baskets of twelve fragments the apostolic work to the world.
St. Gregory the Dialogist points out that the four living creatures in Ezekiel represent also the four cardinal virtues of Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Contemplation of God. This is what makes us all as Christians manly, in that they show forth how we are made according to the image and potentially in the likeness of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord and our struggle to nurture those God-given virtues.
Indeed, St. Gregory the Dialogist shows us also how those four elements of the Cherubim, the Four evangelists as symbols of the four universal virtues, also represent four aspects of Jesus’ earthly life—His Incarnation, His sacrifice on the Cross, His steadfastness unto Resurrection, and His Ascension. In all this he pulls us up, like our forefathers Adam and Eve, with Him into His story, the Gospel story, until salvation. But we in His grace and in His Church must also be faithful in opening our hearts and following Him and helping to bring up others as well into His salvation.
As the Apostle Paul noted in his inspired writing, we add to the four cardinal virtues identified with the four aspects of Jesus’ life and the four Evangelists, the capstone Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. They rise up from the Church like the onion dome and Cross that symbolically will rise from our own Temple soon, God willing. Together these virtues are also the seven graces or gifts of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Prophet Ezekiel’s book provides us also with the ultimate sense of God’s sustaining providence—the resurrection of all the dry bones in the valley of death, the Resurrection that we will all experience at the time of the Second Coming and Final Judgment. The scattered dried skeletons of our lives that become new life, but also for His judgement. We experience this embodied renewal in spiritual terms through the mysteries of the Body of Christ, His Church. His Resurrection becomes our Resurrection. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Glory to God for all things!