🕃 The Holy Apostle and Brother of the Lord in the Flesh James.
Saint with Great Doxology. Abstention from meat and foods that contain these ingredients.
Colossians 4:10-18; Luke 10:1-15.
Read Colossians 4:10-18
Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, “Prisoners,” appear like human bodies struggling to escape their stone prisons. The great artist could look upon a rough block of marble and see what others could not: beautiful human figures concealed beneath its surface. His task was not to invent beauty, but to remove everything that encumbered it.
Now consider St. Paul’s conversion. He does not merely say that God revealed Jesus Christ to him. No! He writes that God was pleased “to reveal his Son in me. That little preposition opens a window onto the mystery of salvation.
The Greek Fathers remind us that Christ was not God’s afterthought, sent merely to repair Adam’s failure. Christ is the eternal Image of the Father, the very pattern according to which Adam was first created. St. Irenaeus teaches that man was fashioned according to the Image of the invisible Word. St. Nicholas Cabasilas declared: “It was not the old Adam who was the model for the new, but the new Adam for the old.”
What a revelation! We were fashioned according to Christ from the beginning! Sin did not erase that image but disfigured our likeness to Him and darkened our spiritual eye, the nous. Saul knew the Scriptures and was zealous for God, yet could not see Christ. On the Damascus road, he was blinded and days later, scales fell from his eyes. But the greater miracle occurred within: divine grace illuminated his spiritual vision, revealing the very Christ in him whose Church he had persecuted.
St. Irenaeus compares Paul’s illumination to the restoration of a blind man’s sight. The Lord does not discard the eyes He fashioned; He heals them. So too with our wounded nous.
“The Image comes to restore the image.”
Like Michelangelo’s masterpiece emerging from the stone, the Christian soul is gradually freed by grace from the encasement of sin until, like St. Paul, we receive not simply knowledge about Christ but a personal, encounter with Him in us.