Our Holy Father Meletius, Archbishop of Antioch (379-95);
Zechariah 8:7-14; Zechariah 8:19-23
According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today. Abstention from meat and foods that contain meat.
Read Zechariah 8:7-14
A merism is a literary device that uses extremes to indicate the whole. In the first passage from the reading of Zechariah, we hear a merism that speaks to the Lord’s salvation: “Thus says the Lord all-mighty: Behold I will completely save my people from the east land and from the west land” (Zech 8:7 LXX). God could have said, “I’m gonna save everybody.” But the poetic device:” from the east to the west” There are 8 billion people on earth currently living and about 107 billion people have lived on earth from the beginning of humanity. With numbers so large it’s hard to even fathom the desire of God to save the whole human race.
A merism like today’s reading makes it more concrete, gives it a certain definition of space that we can wrap our head around. We can look east and west on an open field in Western Canada, for example, and see the vast expanse of land, with seemingly no end in sight, just the horizon that hinders our view from the curve of the Earth. We know a Lord whose desire to save knows no bound of the horizon form the east and to the west. He desires to save, that we might “be a blessing” (Zech 8:13). Our salvation is not first for our good, but that the glory of God be manifest in his saints, those whom he saves.
As we stand on the horizon of Lent, this time of repentance has dawned, so that from east to west we might return to the Lord as the one who desires to set us up as his people. Through repentance, “we can sow peace; the vine shall yield its fruit, and the ground shall give its increase, and the heavens shall give their dew; and I will cause the remnant of this people to possess all these things” (Zech 8:12)