When the Spirit of Truth Works in People
21st Sunday after Pentecost
Galatians 2:16-20; Luke 8:5-15
In an excerpt from the Epistle of Apostle Paul, which was read last Sunday, the Apostle of Christ states: I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. (Galatians 1:11-12)
Paul expressed that truth in response to those people who reproached him that he was not a true apostle, because he did not walk, and was not with Jesus Christ during His preaching on earth.
But we should all be cognizant of the fact that the very book of the Gospel written by four evangelists - “is not of/from any man”. It is good news from God, from Christ the Saviour. And all the books of the Holy Scriptures, whether they are the Epistles of the Apostles, or the Revelations, or the legislative and prophetic books of the Old Testament, they are not of/from people.
Of course, they were written by people, but they were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, as Christ also called Him, and therefore the power of what was written and preached by the prophets or apostles “were not with enticing words of man’s [human] wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power”. (1 Corinthians 2,4)
More specifically, this means that the power of the gospel preaching was not in the wisdom of the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James or Peter, but in the power of God, the power of Christ, which was transmitted through those people.
Judging purely their intellectual abilities, the manifestation of their minds, there may have been wiser people who could have expressed their wisdom orally or in writing throughout many centuries of human history. There were great philosophers, writers, scientists of various fields of science.
In different ages, people of great intelligence and great abilities lived on earth, such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the doctor Hippocrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition), Copernicus, Shakespeare, Shevchenko, and others similarly great. great people. In our century, Einstein was particularly distinguished as a great scientific theoretician.
Their works have and will have a significant impact on a greater or lesser number of people, but their works will not be able to transform, change lives, spiritually revive people on Earth, if they were not inspired in their works by the Holy Spirit from God.
Saul/Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, spiritually reborn by Jesus Christ, guided by the idea of Christ's mission of salvation, the idea of serving and preaching the Gospel of Christ among people, no longer had earthly, selfish personal desires. Christ dwelt in him in spirit.
For that reason, Paul said, as we heard in the epistle read today: "I am crucified with Christ [that is, all the vital human bodily desires have died in him, have disappeared], nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:19-20).
Having received such a rebirth from above, transformed by the Gospel of Christ's evangelization, Apostle Paul, like the other apostles, had an indomitable power of the Spirit, a courageous and indomitable fearlessness in the preaching of Christ's doctrine.
Because of that, despite the obstacles created by his Jewish brethren, the Roman state administration, and despite the pridefulness of human wisdom of the educated Greeks, the preaching of the Gospel by Apostle Pavel was the most successful. People felt the power of God's Spirit in his apostolic sermons.
No human wisdom, no human science could have provided such a spiritual rebirth, such a sermon with invincible power. And how pitiful do such pygmy scribes look, who, in order to show their erudition, quote that Nietzsche said so, Churchill said so, and Christ said so. Such disproportionate pitiful comparisons only testify to their human limitations and ignorance of the Holy Spirit. Because of that, such writings and sophistry will quickly be forgotten, and almost no one will remember the authors of those and similar writings.
A person reborn and possessed by the Gospel of Christ is governed by serving the eternal Truth, and that Truth dwells in it, acts, shines in words and deeds. Such a person becomes truly great in people’s eyes, in his service to God and his neighbours.
That is why the greatness of Taras Shevchenko so shines and impresses us, and because of it the flames of his fiery poems burn invincibly, because in him works not just the talent of a poet, not just beauty, the perfection of the art of words, but the Spirit of Truth, which transformed his spiritual being, gave him extraordinary courage to oppose the powerful of this world (against the tsar and the Russian tsarist government, which enslaved his people).
And this is not simply our conjecture. In the epigraph to the poem Dream ("Everybody has his own destiny"), for which the autocratic Russian Tsar Nicholas II was most angry, Taras Shevchenko himself revealed the source of his spiritual strength and courage, putting words from the Gospel of Christ as an epigraph:
"…the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him." (John 14,17)
(In the original, T.Sh. quotes from the Gospel in Old Slavonic).
This Spirit of Truth radiates from the main works of Taras Shevchenko and because of that has such a great influence on the awakening and regeneration of the consciousness of many millions of Ukrainian people, just as it also has an influence on other peoples of the world.
Russians have their greatest poet O. Pushkin, who was very talented. But Pushkin's influence on the life and consciousness of his own people will never be able to compare with the influence of Taras Shevchenko on his people, because in Pushkin only the art, only the beauty of words is revealed, whereas, in Shevchenko the Spirit of Truth - the Holy Spirit – is at work. It speaks tangibly through the talent and fiery art of the poet's words.
Even were we to consider simply the external or textual artistry of the work, how many references are there from the Holy Scriptures, how many appeals are there to God in Shevchenko’s works; and, how many are there in Pushkin?
The most beautiful and intelligent expressions are not capable of making deep and long-lasting effects on people, when they do not feel in the artful words, in artistic images, that these are bearers of eternal Truth - the Spirit of Truth. This was so in the past, and will remain so throughout all time. Christians of the first and the beginning of the second century not only heard, but felt the breath of the Holy Spirit in Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, the first great, after the apostles, Christian writer-theologian. People felt that in him, as in Apostle Paul, Christ lives and abides. Ignatius spoke and wrote: "I want all people to know that I will accept death for God of my own free will, unless He saves me. Let me be thrown to the wild beasts to be torn by them, but in that way, I will join God.” (The Epistle of Holy Martyr Ignatius, to the Romans)
Ignatius was indeed brought to Rome and thrown to be torn apart by wild beasts, but contrary to the intentions of the Romans, who were the biggest persecutors of Christians at the time, after such a punishment of Ignatius and others like him, the number of Christians multiplied many times. People in whom the flame of the Spirit of Truth burned could not be destroyed, although they could be physically killed.
Christianity did not win on the battlefield in the battle with Emperor Constantine. It won through the power of the Holy Spirit that governed the martyrs, ascetics, theologians of the first centuries of Christianity. That is why we say that Christianity won in the hearts of people, that is, in their faith, in their feelings and convictions.
We still believe that, despite the severe and cruel persecution of Christianity by the ungodly in our times, the awareness or sense of the presence of the Spirit of Truth in them will give Christians the strength to endure and defeat the servants of the devil.
We believe that the Spirit of Truth--which believers receive from God, and through which they are also sustained by the Holy Scriptures and by the works of divinely inspired authors--will feed them, and that it will ignite in their senses, in the faith of many, and burn the regimes of delusion, untruth and slavery.
We believe that the time will come when, according to the words of our national poet- prophet, “And on renewed holy land/ Will be no enemy, no traitor,/But rather will be son and mother,/And people will be on the land.” And Archimedes and Galileo, 1860, (O scientists of ancient time!) (https://lyricstranslate.com)
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.