The Discovery of the Relics of the Holy Martyrs at Eugenius (345-408).
Great Fast Day 11. According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today.
Sixth Hour – Isaiah 6:1-12. Vespers – Genesis 5:1-24. Proverbs 6:3-20.
Read Isaiah 6:1-12
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
In today’s reading we hear the account of the call of the prophet Isaiah. Confronted with an experience of the divine glory, Isaiah is struck by the realization of own distance from God: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5)
Significantly, the prophet refers to himself as a man of unclean lips, who dwells in the midst of a people of unclean lips. We often take on the characteristics of those people or things we love or spend significant time with. We, almost unintentionally make our own , the speech patterns and mannerisms of our spouse, lines from our favourite movies and TV shows, and even the vernacular of the industry in which we work. All of these things have the effect of forming our hearts.
St. Gregory the Great warns us of this danger: To take part in the talk of worldly people without defiling our own heart is all but impossible. If we permit ourselves to discuss their affairs with them, we grow accustomed to a manner of speech unbecoming to us, and we end clinging to it with pleasure and are no longer entirely willing to leave it. We enter upon the conversation reluctantly, as a kind of condescension, but we find ourselves carried along from idle words to harmful ones, from trivial faults to serious guilt, with the result that our lips are more defiled with foolish words, and our prayers further and further removed from God’s hearing.… Why should we be surprised, then, if God is slow to hear our petitions when we on our part are slow to hear God’s command or pay no attention whatever to it? (St. Gregory the Great, Dialogues 3:15)
We cannot all become monks and leave the world, but we can recognize the risk of our hearts growing cold because they are being formed by the conversations and habits of the world, which can never give life. Thus we pray in the Prayer of St. Ephrem, which we pray during these holy days of the Great Fast, “…take from me the spirit of vain-talking…”
Like the prophet, if we are able to recognize our position and humble ourselves before God, our hearts, which have grown cold from constant contact with the world, can be set ablaze again,
being touched with the burning coal taken from the altar of God, in which the Fathers see a type of the Holy Eucharist. As St. Cyril of Alexandria reminds us: Let our lips be touched by the divine coal, which burns away our sins and consumes the filth of our transgressions. Moreover, it makes us zealous by the Spirit. By saying “taken from the altar with tongs,” Isaiah means that we receive faith in and knowledge of Christ from the teachings or announcements in the law and the prophets, in which the word of the holy apostles confirms the truth. By quoting from the law and the prophets, the apostles convince their hearers and “touch their lips with the burning coal” in order to lead them to confess faith in Christ. (Commentary on Isaiah 1:4)