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		<td align=right valign=top width=20%><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=+1><p align=right>Christ, the Model of Our Faith, Part One: It's All Greek to Me.<p align=right>For the Sunday:<br><small>Hebrews 11:24-26,32-12:2;<br>John 1:43-51.</small><p align=right>For the Martyrs:<br><small>Hebrews 12:1-10;<br>Marrhew 20:1-16.</small><p align=right>The First Sunday of the Great Fast, known as The Sunday of the Holy Prophets or The Sunday of Orthdoxy.<p align=right><small>The Forty Holy Martyrs of Sebaste.</small></font><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=-1><p align=right>Return to <a href="index.htm">ByzantineCatholicPriest.com</a>.</font></td>		

		<td align=right valign=top width-80%><font face="Maiandra GD"><p align=justify>12:18 PM 3/9/2014 — Last week I had hinted that we might continue with St. Paul during the Great Fast; the problem is, we can't, even if we stick with our focus on the Apostolic Readings; and I'll explain exactly why in a moment.  But, I'm warning you ahead of time that today's homily is rather dry and didactic;—not really “rather” but very much so—but that's for a reason, necessitated by what I have decided to do in preaching this year for the Great Fast.  <img src="restoration.jpg" align=right hspace=15 vspace=5>It is neither inspiring nor reflective and, if you're not really interested in the Bible, probably rather boring; but, in contemplating my plan for the Great Fast, I can't liberate myself from the fact that these introductory remarks need to be made.  That being said, let's take a moment to review some of last year's thoughts about this important Sunday.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;The liturgical celebration of the First Sunday of the Great Fast has gone through an evolution over the centuries; and we've spoken about that many times. Originally it was a commemoration of the Old Testament prophets and their prophesies concerning our Lord; hence Philip telling Nathaniel, "We have discovered who it was Moses wrote of in his law, and the prophets too...” (John 1:45); not to mention the reading from Hebrews, which is all about the prophets and their sufferings.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Then, following the iconoclastic controversy, the focus of this Sunday changed, and became a celebration of the restoration of the veneration of icons throughout the Church; hence it's still popular title, "The Sunday of Orthodoxy" or "The Sunday of the True Faith."  In quite a few parishes of the Byzantine Tradition, this has become the only focus of this Sunday, with children re-enacting the procession with icons led by Empress Theodora in 842; and some of our priests have become fanatical about observing that custom because it is so idiosyncratically Eastern.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Here at St. Michael's we've typically focused on the Gospel passage itself: our Lord’s first meeting with Nathaniel, how he spied Nathaniel coming from a distance and could immediately read the state of his soul which, luckily for Nathaniel, was “without guile”, as our Lord put it; and, from this I asked you to meditate on the fact that Christ is able to see into the darkest corners of our hearts, even into places where we ourselves have ceased to look, giving you an analogy about our souls being like our computers: we think we have a good firewall in place, and our anti-virus software is up to date, but our Lord still gets in and is able to see what we think we’ve long since deleted and now forgotten about.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Last year I chose to focus on one particular line in our Lord's initial conversation with Nathaniel, wherein the new apostle states that Jesus is “the Son of God” and “the King of Israel” (cf. John 1:49), and how this is almost word for word what Peter says of our Lord, except for the part about being King of Israel; and we ruminated on the political bent that Nathaniel brings to his initial interpretation of our Lord, and how that changed over time.  The lesson we drew from that was that Jesus reveals himself to us according to where we're at, drawing us into a deeper understanding of him over time as we grow in our relationship with him.  I was tempted to repeat that homily for you again this week, as it was one of the more lucid ones I had preached to you in recent years; and, if you don't remember or had missed it, I would recommend you go back and look at it on the web site.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Nathaniel disappears from the Gospel after this one brief encounter; we know he is there, but what he may have said or done after this point is not recorded.  It’s safe to assume that his understanding of exactly who and what Jesus is grew and developed over time, as it did for all the apostles.  Some, like Peter and John, knew early on that Jesus was God;—they had figured it out—some of the others didn’t realize it until after our Lord had risen from the dead.  <img src="nathaniel.jpg" align=left hspace=15 vspace=5>Judas began where Nathaniel may have begun, seeing Jesus as a political figure with spiritual overtones; but, when he realizes that there isn’t going to be a revolution to overthrow the Romans, he becomes disillusioned and betrays our Lord.  He does realize it at the end, after his betrayal, and that realization drives him to suicide, as you know.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;But what about Hebrews?  Who wrote it and what is it?  Those, believe it or not, are not easy questions.  For many centuries it was referred to in the liturgical life of the Church as the Epistle or Letter of the Blessed Apostle Paul to the Hebrews.  As time went on, and the Church looked at this New Testament book with a more critical eye, it became apparent from the style of the Greek that it could not have been written by St. Paul; so, the name of the Apostle was dropped from the title, and you will have noticed that our cantor, in introducing the reading, simply referred to it as “the Epistle to the Hebrews.”  The problem with this is that it's not really an epistle, either: there is no greeting at the beginning, no salutation at the end, and nothing in the body of the book itself to indicate that it's a letter to anyone in particular; as a matter of fact, there's nothing even to indicate that it was originally addressed to any Hebrews.  The Jews began to be referred to as Hebrews during the time of their exile in Babylon, so named after the language they spoke; and, some scholars have suggested that the word “Hebrew” is being used here in a purely figurative sense, in that all Christians are pilgrims and exiles in this world (cf. 1 Peter 1:1 & James 1:1).

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;You might remember—though you probably don't—back in the beginning of December, on the last Sunday of Philips Fast when we were looking at Colossians, I had concluded the homily by reminding you that the Christians in Colossae were hearing that letter from Paul read to them in Church as the sermon, which is why Paul ends that letter reminding them that they are going to be singing hymns and spiritual songs because, as soon as the letter is finished, they're going to begin the Great Entrance which, as you know, is accompanied by the Cherubic Hymn.  During the time of Paul's many travels spreading the Gospel of Christ, these letters that he would send back to the Churches he had established along the way were being read as homilies at the Divine Liturgy.  That the so-called Epistle to the Hebrews was intended by its author as a sermon is pure speculation, but we do know that it was used exactly this way for many years throughout the entire Early Church, even in Churches established by St. Paul.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;So, who wrote this sermon?  One of the leading candidates is Apollos, whom you'll remember is the Christian convert from Greece who succeeded St. Paul as Bishop of Corinth; his candidacy for authorship is supported by the fact that the Greek contained in Hebrews is the best in the New Testament: perfect syntax, perfect sentence structure, perfect grammar, and so lyrically beautiful as to be almost poetic.  Clearly, Hebrews was written by someone born and raised in Greece, and Paul wasn't.  Paul's Greek, by comparison, is a grammatical disaster zone; he gets himself so fired up about what bothers him that his sentences often make no sense at all, which is why we need labor-like scholars such as Msgr. Knox to decipher them for us.  Not so Hebrews.  Take, for example, the very last verse of today's Apostolic Reading: <font face="system">"...ἀφορῶντες εἰς τὸν τῆς πίστεως ἀρχηγὸν καὶ τελειωτὴν Ἰησοῦν, ὃς ἀντὶ τῆς προκειμένης αὐτῷ χαρᾶς ὑπέμεινεν σταυρὸν αἰσχύνης καταφρονήσας, ἐν δεξιᾷ τε τοῦ θρόνου τοῦ θεοῦ κεκάθικεν"</font> (Heb. 12:2).  I know you don't know Greek, but if you did you'd swear that Homer had converted to Christianity; and, even without knowing Greek, you can hear that it rhymes.  Even Msgr. Knox's cultivated English can't do justice to it: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the origin and the crown of all faith, who, to win his prize of blessedness, endured the cross and made light of its shame, Jesus, who now sits on the right of God’s throne.”


<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;That one verse, by the way, is the perfect introduction to what we're going to be doing in the next few weeks, as it touches on what is probably the most important of the many themes addressed in Hebrews; and, as we shall see as the Great Fast progresses, the learned author, whoever he may be, is going to be taking us on a trip through the Old Testament, showing us how it all culminates in our Lord, God and Savior, Jesus Christ.  I had mentioned to you several months ago how the Fathers of the Church saw every word of the Old Testament pointing to Christ; so, we're going to be visiting with them, as well.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;It is, if you think about it, the perfect theme for a series of Great Fast homilies; for, what is the Great Fast all about?  It's about reorienting our lives toward Christ.  And that one single verse that I just repeated for you—just to give you a taste—does something not found in any other book of the New Testament: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the origin and the crown of all faith....”  Whereas all the other books of the New Testament, including the Gospels, present our Lord as the subject of our faith, only Hebrews presents him as an example of faith.  And as ambitious as that sounds, given that Jesus is God, it is the mysterious author of Hebrews who will show us how its done.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;I'll leave you with that for now.

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