Post-feast of the Dormition; Holy Martyr Agathonicus and those with him (286-305); Passing into Eternal Life (1964) of Bishop Symeon (Lukach) Confessor of Krasnoyarsk and Pastor of the Stanyslaviv (Ivano-Frankivs’k) Region
1 Corinthians 1:26-29; Matthew 20:29-34
Read 1 Corinthians 1:26-29
“God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”
Throughout the Holy Scriptures, we see how God, acting in His creation, chooses the most unlikely of people to be His messengers and His faithful witnesses. Our thoughts might turn to the barren Sarah and aged Abraham, or David, the most unlikely of Jesse’s sons, or the tax collector Matthew, or the simple and unlearned Galilean fishermen who spread the Gospel to the world. In the history of the Church, there are innumerable stories of how God has worked through His saints to do the most important work of continuing His work in this world. Many of the saints have been the most humble, ordinary people who may seem to us weak on the outside and may often have been discounted, yet who shamed the strong by their humility and their unfailing witness to the truth. Two excellent examples for me are St. Teresa of Calcutta, the small and soft-spoken Albanian nun who revealed Christ in the weakest and the poorest, and Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko, the sickly Polish priest who stood for truth and human dignity against the seeming unassailable strength of the Communist system. Neither was outwardly strong, but God used them to challenge the strong and to exalt the weak and so reveal truth and love.
God has given us these seemingly unlikely people as witnesses throughout salvation history to show us not only that He is at work in the world, not only that His providence is acting, but that He has created all things and all people with a specific purpose in mind. We cannot know God’s purposes in full, but when we see that He works in the lives of these witnesses, who many in their time would have discounted, we catch a glimpse of who He is and His great love for the world. St. Paul reminds the Corinthians of these ways of God and reprises in his own words what the Mother of God proclaimed at her encounter with Elizabeth that He has “put down the mighty from their seats, and has exalted the humble and meek” (Luke 1:52). Brothers and sisters, even if we consider ourselves weak let us remember that God does not see us that way. He will give us the strength we require if we but ask Him so that we might proclaim the Truth.