20th Sunday after Pentecost
Galatians 1:11-19; Luke 7: 11-16
In today’s Gospel story, an event of great significance is mentioned, which happened near a small town in Galilee. Historians-researchers say that Nain was never a big city, but nowadays it is a cluster of mud huts. Linguists say that “Nain” means “beautiful”; seemingly, it has the best landscape in Palestine.
Apart from biblical maps, Nain is not marked on any geographical map. In the Holy Scriptures, that city is mentioned only once, in The Gospel of Luke (Luke 7:11). The Apostle Luke recounts that Jesus, on his way to the city of Nain, before entering the city gate, met a funeral procession.
The evangelist Luke testifies that Jesus was accompanied by “many of His disciples… and a large crowd,” and that “a large crowd from the city” was coming to meet Him in the funeral procession. So, in fact, two crowds met.
In one crowd, the centre of attention was the coffin with the deceased, and in the other, the Divine Teacher Jesus Christ. The symbol of death and the symbol of life, for Christ preached that He is “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). Life and death met face to face and life won; Christ conquered death. Thanks to this event, a small, inconspicuous town became a historical place on the globe for all Christ's confessors—for the first time in the history of mankind, a resurrection from the dead was accomplished in or near it.
And little Nain in northern Galilee remains such a historic place to this day. Pilgrims who visit Palestine seek to see the place where Jesus Christ, out of mercy for the widow, brought her only son back to life.
But by resurrecting the dead, Christ proved beyond doubt that the Son of God possesses the power of God - does the works of the Heavenly Father.
“For as the Father raises the dead and gives life to them, even so the Son gives life to whom He will.”
(Jn. 5, 21).
Thus, the resurrection in Nain is a testimony to Jesus Christ's divinity, an affirmation through action of what was expressed verbally.
When the Jewish scribes and Pharisees did not believe and denied that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, He addressed them with the following words of reproach:
“…do you say of Him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'? If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; but if I do, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may know and believe that the Father is in Me, and I in Him." (Jhn. 10:36-38)
And the resurrection of the dead in Nain, and all the miracles of healing the seriously ill by the word of Jesus Christ (lepers, blind, paralyzed, bleeding, etc.) — these were the works that undeniably affirmed that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He is consubstantial with God the Father; that in His human body resides the power of God, within Him dwells The Father spiritually—as He affirmed verbally. (Jhn. 10:38; 14:11)
We constantly acknowledge that truth in our Orthodox faith. The scribes and Pharisees who did not recognize that truth perished spiritually. And all those who do not want to recognize this obvious truth will perish.
I would like to draw your attention today also to the passage from The Epistle of Apostle Paul to the Galatians. Apostle Paul preached the Gospel — Christ's teaching in Galatia, a Roman province in Asia Minor (now part of Turkey). He, so to speak, gave birth to the Galatians in Christ.
But humanity's enemy, the devil, through people possessed by him, came after Paul and sowed “tares” (see parable about tares — Matthew 13:24-30). The argument was not just a denial of Christ's teachings but that Paul was not a true apostle; therefore, the Gospel he preached was false and should be rejected. As we can see, it was done with insidious cunning to tempt the trusting.
Apostle Paul, unable to personally come and explain matters to the Galatians (as he was at that time in Macedonia, Greece), writes a letter-epistle to them and reproaches those unstable Christians who sway “wherever the wind blows”.
“I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.” (Galatians 1:6-7).
That we might correctly understand the situation at that time: during Paul's evangelical preaching, there was no separate written book of The Gospel. It was taught orally by the apostles.
And Apostle Paul warns the unstable Galatian Christians that even if an
“Angel from heaven should preach any other gospel than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed!” (Gal. 1:8).
Some Galatians were tempted because new preachers, criticizing Paul, catered to their desires, while Paul certainly did not praise their pagan desires and customs. Apostle Paul plainly states that he must please God in his preaching and not people:
“For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.” (Gal. 1:10)
The Apostle Paul writes to the Galatians frankly that he was really the one who, at the beginning of the founding of the Church of Christ, “persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it”, but when the Lord called him, when he learned that Jesus Christ, who was already in heaven at that time, is truly the Lord, the Son of God, then he went to proclaim His Gospel “among the Gentiles”. (Gal. 1:13,16)
God's truth is independent of the person or the personal merits of the preacher; a person can be imperfect, they may have made mistakes in the past, but when that same preacher of the Gospel teaches the truth, teaches about the true Christian faith, it must be adhered to and confessed. This was equally true in the times of the apostle Paul on earth, just as it is now.
When I was preaching on the Mission radio program of our Church, I received a letter from a listener: he praised me for preaching well, but at the same time said that the Orthodox are such and such: they are idolaters, drunkards, etc., that Volodymyr the Great accepted from the Greeks a faith that was not as it should be, but he, a “spiritual Christian”, studies and knows the Holy Scripture. This is an example of the hypocrisy of modern scribes, a kind of sowing of the same tares to try to tempt us to shake our faith, just as was the case with the Galatians.
The truth of our faith is evidenced not only by the words of the preacher of our Christian faith, but by the confession of our faith in life. Individual preachers, individual church leaders may be imperfect, but the truth of our faith, as in the time of Volodymyr the Great, is “right and pure”.
It is also necessary to remember that although our people massively accepted the Christian faith from the Greeks during the reign of Volodymyr, Prince of Kyiv, and although there is also a personal merit of Volodymyr in this, we are aware that the same faith from the Greeks had been penetrating Kyivan Rus’ for centuries.
Between the Apostle Andrew the First-Called and Volodymyr the Great, we cannot name a single preacher of the Gospel on our lands, yet it is indisputable that such people existed and through them the Lord prepared our people to accept the saving Christian faith.
There are some episodic testimonials concerning the manifestation of Christianity, when “Baptized Rus” swore an oath in the church of St. Elijah in Kyiv in 944, and there is also a mention that earlier, in 860, Prince Askold embraced the faith of Christ, and almost a century later, in 955, Princess Olga accepted baptism... All of these are just brief illustrations of a long historical period, but they are indisputable evidence that the faith of Christ was preached on the territory of Kyivan Rus’ for centuries, long before it was accepted by Prince Volodymyr.
The heralds of the faith of Christ in the lands of Kyivan Rus’ may have been imperfect people, but the Lord acted through them, as He did in His time through the Apostle Paul. It pleased God to revive our people to life in Jesus Christ, and He revived them through the preaching of the Gospel by weak, unknown people, and, as witnessed by Apostle Paul:
“My strength is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)
Amen.
Very Rev. Fr. Taras Slavchenko
Taras Slavchenko was born on March 8, 1918 in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine. After graduating from school and the Pedagogical College, he entered the language and literature faculty of the Scientific Pedagogical Institute. Having successfully completed it in 1938, he served as a teacher in a secondary school.
