Kiev, March 15, 2021
Photo: news.church.ua
The Church calls on us to contemplate Adam’s expulsion from Paradise on the last Sunday before Great Lent because it is the spiritual reality that we all live in. And Great Lent is given to us to reclaim the natural life that Adam and Eve led in the Garden before their fall into sin, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine preached on Forgiveness Sunday yesterday.
“We all need to realize our inadequacy before God and forgive our neighbors, and ask forgiveness ourselves. Otherwise, a Christian will not come to repentance, but it precisely repentance that is the main goal of fasting,” the Ukrainian primate told his flock, reports the Information-Education Department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Sin makes us cowards, and this is why Adam and Eve did not immediately ask forgiveness, but began to seek to justify themselves, His Beatitude emphasized.
“Because of their lack of repentance, a tragedy occurred for mankind—people have become unable to live in Paradise,” he said, stressing the importance of repentance.
But once outside of Paradise, man began to feel his distance from God, and “this was the beginning of repentance.”
As the Holy Fathers teach, it was Adam and Eve’s inability to fast that plunged the world into sin, and thus, “through the observance of fasting, we regain Paradise,” Met. Onuphry said, stressing that we fast not to kill ourselves but to kill the sin within us.
In the Word of the Primate program on Ukrainian television, His Beatitude added that “Fasting is pleasing to God because God wants us to return to our natural state, to the state in which He created us. God gives a person a special reward for fasting.”
According to Orthodox teaching, the natural state of man is that in which Adam and Eve were created, without sin, corruption, and death. Sin and death are unnatural and we are called to return to the natural state through the Orthodox spiritual life.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Vkontakte, Telegram, WhatsApp, Parler, MeWe, and Gab!
