Sunday after Theophany
Ephesians 4:7-13 Matthew 4:12-17

"Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."
(Matthew 4:4)

There are several known cases when a child came into the midst of animals and the animals fed it, and the child grew up. We are not referring to legends here--such as, for example, about the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, who were supposedly nursed by a she-wolf—but to real and proven cases. In India, a man was found in his youth who grew up among beasts. For several years, experienced scientists and educators tried to teach that young man to speak and eat like a civilized person, behave like a human being, but all their efforts were in vain.

There was a human body, there was a brain in the head, there were obviously genes, but it is impossible to re-educate such a creature, who was “raised” by animals, into a human being. As a consequence of such influences, the child grew up without words, without human language, and only heard the growls and grunts of animals.

Although, as we also know, people can teach a parrot and some birds to speak.

What do these facts of life convince us of? - A person is created not only by way of the physical body but most importantly by the human word, which in turn is a gift from God to people. Without enlightenment by the human word, language, a human being becomes a beast. Fundamentally, the human word or language creates and educates a person.

Similarly, a person who grows up without enlightenment by the Word of God, without enlightenment by the warmth of divine knowledge, the knowledge of love and mercy, grows up without faith, callous and indifferent to the people around him or her. A person who grows up without enlightenment by God's word, without enlightenment by the rays of God's love, can acquire a sum of certain knowledge and technical qualifications, can acquire various professions, but such a person is not restrained by any moral law and can be more dangerous than any savage beast. For this reason atheists are so dangerous when they seize power in a country. The tens of millions of victims in the Soviet Union, the terrible cruelties, the organization of an artificial famine in Ukraine in 1933, the suffering of many people - all this is the result of the absence of God's Word in the lives of those godless leaders: government officials who were “educated” without God's Gospel and who committed all those criminal acts.

In our times, when people have learned to produce nuclear weapons of mass destruction, in the age of electronics, rockets, and space travel, people without enlightenment by and through God's Word, who have seized power in many countries possessing enormous technical means, can cause countless murders and suffering and even the destruction of nature, flora and fauna throughout the globe.

Therefore, in our time, as well as almost two thousand years ago, the words of the Lord Jesus Christ are true:

"Man shall not live by bread alone..." (Matthew 4:4).

A fully fledged person must also live by the "word from the mouth of God," that is, be guided in his/her life by the Holy Scriptures, and especially by The Gospel, which conveys the teaching that came from the mouth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

After a forty-day fast in the desert, Jesus Christ began preaching the Gospel, the teaching of the salvation of the human race. He did this in Galilee, the poorest province of the Jews, where mostly simple poor people lived -- fishermen, craftsmen, shepherds, and where there were, obviously, the least educated people.

Jerusalem at that time was the centre of Jewish education: there were appropriate schools, there were many educated scribes, experts in the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament; there was the Jewish temple - the main shrine of the Jewish faith - the Sanhedrin, the leaders of Judaism and the wealthiest people.

Christ was obviously looking for the most beautiful soil of human hearts--in which His divine teaching of the Word of God could sprout--and He rightfully chose the poor province of Galilee, which had the least material wealth, but the most people with a pure heart, who sought to live according to the truth, who were looking for God's Truth, who were not corrupted by the luxuries of this world.

"The people who sat in darkness saw a great light,"

wrote the prophet Isaiah more than 700 years before the birth of Christ.

And so, indeed, it did happen; the prophecy of Isaiah from God was fulfilled. It is an indisputable historical fact that Christ did begin preaching the Gospel in Galilee, where the people had long been in darkness, and that Jesus Christ chose his first and closest disciples and followers in Galilee, and from among poor labourers who sought God and His truth.

Also, whoever desires to know the truth about the early history of the Church of Christ will learn that during the first three centuries of the Church's development, its membership was mainly composed of the oppressed and exploited from the lower strata of society, who sought to recognize the true God and fulfill His will, expressed through the Gospel of Christ.

It is also quite certain that Christianity has never rejected people on the basis of their material position, so gradually the Church was filled with people of different classes and different material capacities, but in the first three centuries, when the Church of Christ was persecuted, it was mostly avoided by the rulers and the rich.

And Christianity, the faith of the mostly persecuted, overcame the world, the power and might of the Roman Empire, which ruled many countries on three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe), with the Word of God. The powerful administrative and military forces of the Roman Empire could not stand against the Word of God, which was capturing the consciousness and sensibilities of many people who were eager to know the Truth, just as the forces of other states could not stand.

Thus, Christianity from the grassroots defeated all the tops of human society. And let us never forget the fulfilled prophecy that the light of salvation, the light of Christ, shone out of darkness, from among the oppressed and humiliated. This was so, for people who lived in wealth, in luxury, had lost their sense of truth and the need to fulfill the will of God.

And even among us, the Ukrainian people:

• Didn't the light of truth shine for the Ukrainian spirituality from the most oppressed stratum, from the midst of a serf family?

• Didn't Taras Shevchenko, a poor descendant of serfs, show our people the light of truth for them?

• Did he not put the language of his oppressed and denigrated people on guard for the truth of his people?

• Were there not more educated people before Taras Shevchenko and in his time among the descendants of the Cossack officers who became the nobility of the "foreign fatherland"?

There were professors and scientists in various fields of science, bishops and generals, and government ministers... There were also the Kochubei, Bezborodko, and Rodzianko families among those people. But the word of truth shone from the Kobzar. From his Kobzar came the calls to love Mother Ukraine, to "love the least of these brothers," and those calls, which were inspired by the Spirit of Truth that came from God, captured the hearts of all segments of the Ukrainian people, and they were certainly most sensitively perceived, and are still most sincerely perceived, among the oppressed and despised.

And those ideas of love, the calls to all segments of the people to love their Motherland, all their brothers and sisters, still haunt the enslavers of our people, the atheists who either rejected or were not enlightened by the Word of God.

May those seeds of God's Word that speak to us from The Holy Gospel, which shone out of the darkness, from Christ, and those seeds of truth that God's chosen one Taras, who by God's inspiration sowed and guarded the truth of our people, always germinate in our hearts, in our feelings, and in our minds, so that we may bear the fruits of goodness and truth through our actions.

Let us hold on to this truth, for it is indivisible with God, and may it be the same in our lives as it is in The Gospel. The Lord Jesus Christ said:

"And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!" (John 8:32)

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.

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