The feast of Christ’s birth calls every truth-seeker to remember that in Christ, truth is given in full. The grey wisdom of pagan times bowed in reverence before it. It brought light to new peoples and lifted them up.
Christ brings to us the fullness of truth, the highest that people can hold. In Him, the mind and the heart receive joy-giving answers to the hardest cries of the soul. Even His enemies have learnt, and still learn, from Him. The moment thought lifts itself above passing sights and fleeting time, He wins and keeps it. He works in the world through the persuasion of the heart, against which all reasoning is powerless. He points to a way of learning not gained by books but by upright living; as the will grows clean, the mind climbs higher.
If in the world — here and there, as now — falsehood and error rage in their madness, they may, for a time and in some places, cast a shadow over Christ’s truth. Yet as the sun on a dark day shines bright, warm, and life-giving, though clouds hide it from our eyes, so does the truth of Christ work always in the world, even as it fights with the shadows of doubt, error, and lies. Sound study, when kept honest, should lead a man to a clear and full knowledge of Christ’s truth. Then will that truth, showing its full power and overcoming every lie, deliver the human mind to salvation.
To Christ they'll come.
Both lie and evil succumb.
The wealthy and the lowly,
The simple, wise ones — all will come.
From earth's far corners slowly
All roads to Christ will lead them home.
All human grief and tribulation,
Each spirit's thirst and lamentation,
The wellsprings of our burning tears,
Christ holds them in His heart and clears —
All sink into this ocean.
A. Maykov
What, though, may one say to a pure heart and an unclouded conscience, what can one say to a soul that believes in God and His holy law, when it must face the dreadful, seemingly hopeless battle of man’s flawed will against the holy will of God?
Don't say there is no saving grace,
That sorrows crushed you to the sod.
The darker night, the brighter stars,
The deeper grief, the closer God.
A. Maykov
The seed of right, of peace and love, sown by Christ fell not on waste. Yet God’s love allows weeds to grow alongside the wheat. “Let both grow together until the harvest.” Should one, too eager, tear out the weeds, he might tear out the wheat as well, for in the world their roots twist tight together.
As in nature, so in morals: dark and threatening sights are seen. Evil seems to win; the world looks sunk in wrong.
Where is then the truth of God? Here: in grace. He chooses not to crush the world but to heal it; He draws from wrong the good that can be drawn; within decay He fans the spark of new and better life.
Now and then, upon the great ocean of our existence, the winds of malice may whip up a wild revolt of raging waves; yet never do these storms and breakers rule even the whole face of the sea, and its vast depths they do not rule, nor will they ever. There, in the depths, the element remains pure and still: there are eternal peace and rest. The ocean, still in its peace, keeps welcoming into its quiet depths the force even of the most violent waves…
The calm, untroubled, and boundless power of God’s love, the ground of the whole sea of life — our life included — is always ready to receive, and does receive into its depths, the whole sum of the raging, spiteful waves from the rebel surface. Down in the depths of Divine love, the anger dies down; the storm melts away, and does no harm either to the ocean’s purity or its peace.
Take to heart the might of the boundless, the reaches of this ever-peaceful, ever-calm divine love, made known to us by Christ. Then you will see how small are man’s rebellions against God’s goodness, truth, justice, and love. Since Christ was born, since this Sun of Righteousness rose and lit the whole world — and the human world most of all — with a light that does not grow dim, man has been given an unbroken power to rejoice without cease: in truth that does not fade, in justice that cannot be broken, in love that cannot be overcome, and in man made whole.
The rebellions of evil have no strength. Rejoice.
Sermon by Hieromartyr John (Pommer), Archbishop of Riga
Source:
Newspaper “Slovo”. — 1927. — No. 484. — p. 1. https://azbyka.ru/propovedi/propovedi-svyashchennomuchenika-ioanna-pommera-arhiepiskopa-rizhskogo.shtml#ch_0_11
