Save as PDFIn the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!
Today we heard the Gospel reading about the healing of the demon-possessed man. His father implored the Lord to have pity on his son, he appealed in despair for performing miracle and healing the son. The Lord reproaches him in the face of everybody saying, “Faithless and perverse generation! How much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you?” Then He asks to bring the son to Him and heals him. This clearly shows that the Saviour doesn’t place responsibility on the son for faithless of his father, He is merciful towards the son and heals him.
Not only the life of this adolescent’s father can be an example of faithless, but the life of each of us. He tried to lay the blame for his sinful faithless on the disciples, saying that they were unable to help his son. The Lord correctly reproaches the father. He says that His disciples were unable to heal his son not because of their faithless, but because of his lack of faith. But nowadays we so often reproach the Church, when people, and sometimes you and I lay the blame on it for our own lack of faith and faint-heartedness We say, “I prayed in front of the wonder-working icon but my mother is still sick. I went on a pilgrimage but I haven’t got a job yet. Why doesn’t God answer my prayers? Why doesn’t it happen what I want?”
The problem is that very often we don’t have enough faith so that our prayers can be heard. We pray without sincerity doing it more for self-calming, but in reality, we don’t believe that God can perform miracles in the modern world, in our life. We read about miracles of the past, we know about great elders of the past, but we so free ourselves from church influence that we already don’t realize the words of the Apostle Paul who teaches that “Christ is the same today, yesterday and unto ages of ages”. That’s why we must, first of all, pray, so that the Lord can give us faith, even it is the size of a mustard seed. Our prayer must be the prayer of the one who called upon in the Holy Gospel, “I believe, Lord, help my disbelief!” It is this prayer that will be the most sincere call upon the most Merciful God.
We know that the Church always offers us new hope, offers to start from the very beginning. Let’s follow the example of today’s Gospel to be filled with faith and understanding what God wants from us, His children. The great ascetic and saint of America and Russia, whose memory we celebrate this month, Saint Herman of Alaska, is known by his words, “From this day, from this hour, from this minute let’s love God above all”.
Let’s join the words of the righteous monk Herman with joy, and from this minute let’s love God above all, so that we can have faith which will really allow us to say to the mount, even if it is a mount of our sins in our heart, “go away”, and it will disappear for ever! Amen!