FIFTH WEDNESDAY OF LENT – Saint Hilarion the New, 754
am: Ps 119:145-176
pm: 128, 129, 130
Exod 7:8-24
2 Cor 2:14-3:6
Mark 10:1-16
LITURGICAL THEME FOR THE DAY: St Hilarion the New, Abbot of Peleke Monastery, from his youth, he devoted himself to the service of God and spent many years as a hermit. Due to his holy and blameless life he was ordained a Priest, and later he was made abbot of the Pelekete monastery . St Hilarion suffered on Great and Holy Thursday in the year 754 AD, when the military commander Lakhanodrakon suddenly descended upon the Pelekete monastery in pursuit of icon-venerators, boldly forcing his way into the church, disrupting the service and throwing the Holy Gifts upon the ground. Forty-two monks were arrested, slapped into chains, sent to the Edessa district and murdered. The remaining monks were horribly mutilated, they beat them, they burned their beards with fire, they smeared their faces with tar and cut off the noses of some of the confessors. St Hilarion died for the veneration of icons during this persecution.
MEDITATION OF THE DAY:”In the lesson from 2 Corinthians appointed for today we are struck by the great proclamation of the Apostle to the Gentiles: “Thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ . . . ” This is an excellent passage to help us begin to prepare a focus for the coming of Holy Week beginning with the Great Process of Palm Sunday n a few days. On that day we recall Christ despite the many setbacks and frustrations was purging forward without hesitation and assurance that the mission of salvation was not in doubt. Using the experience of Rome, when the victorious general would lead his troops into the city, we know that Christ undertook a battle not rightly his and as a result we share in a triumph not rightly ours. That assurance has given us courage to continue on in the pattern he set. It is that assurance which gave Blessed Hilarion the courage of his convictions to march on amidst great opposition, but he was assured of the one who would lead from strength to strength and from triumph to triumph. As we make our way to the final days of Lent can we be reinvigorated spiritually with that conviction so much that our witness to the faith is renewed?
PRAYER OF THE DAY: Lord God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown.
Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen..
ANCIENT WISDOM/PRESENT GRACE: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”- C.S.Lewis
Lenten Discipline– Admit to God, to ourselves and to at least one other person how our consumer lifestyle has hurt others – family, the poor, workers in sweatshops, the environment. For every negative, wasteful habit, there is a positive, constructive, less wasteful one. The seven deadly sins are countered by the four cardinal virtues plus faith, hope and love.