The Holy Martyr Conon (249-251)
Great Fast Day 19
Sixth Hour – Isaiah 13:2-13; Presanctified – Genesis 8:4-21; Proverbs 10:31-11:12
Abstention from meat and foods that contain meat. According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today.
Read Isaiah 13:2-13
What is the day of the LORD? Here we can put Isaiah’s readings into an apocalyptic key. Such violent depictions of tragedy seem to come threaded in our cultural imagination about the end times. But note verse 8: “And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travails: they shall be amazed one at another; their faces shall be as flames.” We may think of this not as an end but a beginning. The Day of the Lord comes about like a birth. St. Ambrose of Milan remarks about this suddenness: “The day of the Lord comes suddenly, it says, and in an unexpected way like the pains of childbirth, which forestall all one’s efforts to hide them.” Our recreation begins on the cross. Here is where the birth pangs of humanity are more clearly felt. The result of unifying ourselves to the Lord and his cross means to participate in his divinity. Then and only then will we experience the flames upon our faces, resplendent with the divinity of Christ.
The day of the Lord then seems like violence from the outside, just like a birth. But the only way to new life is through sacrifice.