The Holy Forty Martyrs of Sebaste (321-23).
Great Fast Day 18. According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today.
Sixth Hour – Isaiah 11:10-12:2; Presanctified – Genesis 7:11-8:3; Proverbs 10:1-22; Hebrews 12:1-10; Matthew 20:1-16.
Read Genesis 7:11-8:3
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
Water is both lifegiving and destructive. Israel’s Mesopotamian cousins tried to account for this and other capricious natural and human forces in their mythology. Their narrative reveals itself to be a projection of human striving to maintain order and keep chaos at bay, which ended up encoding in their culture distant, fickle gods and power dominance among people. These twisted relationships became deeply entrenched, appealing to the worst of fractured human nature.
Genesis is a window into God giving Israel, their neighbours, and us a way out of that cul-de-sac of death. Instead of a beginning in which there was only the chaos of the physical elements, becoming through separation the warring gods, Genesis 1 revealed one all-sovereign, loving God, speaking and ordering all things into existence for good. In today’s reading, in the worst catastrophe imaginable – the separated waters of the “great deep” and the “heavens” coming back together, undoing God’s creation, returning it to the primordial state – we see the ark on the “face of the waters,” reminding us of “the Spirit of God … moving over the face of the waters” in Genesis 1:2. God provides for the fulfilment of His covenant with creation even in acting in opposition to human sin: God “remembered Noah and all the beasts” and recreated the order of the heavens and the earth.
We so deeply want to make sense of tragedy and wrongdoing. We want someone to put an end to intractable evil and seek to find benevolent meaning in destructive events. But God does not forget us and re-enacts His original intentions throughout history: “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:21-23)