Moscow, December 27, 2021
patriarchia.ru
While the Apostle Paul calls us to put off the old and to be renewed in Christ, much in society rather holds up the old, fallen man as an ideal to be emulated, the Russian Patriarch preached yesterday.
Commenting on yesterday’s Epistle reading (Col. 3:4-11), in which the Apostle Paul encourages us to lay aside our sinful habits, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill focused especially on the film industry.
“This old man is present as an ideal in fiction, and especially in modern cinematography,” the Patriarch said.
It is “offered to us again and again, this idea of the old man, as a living ideal. Most often, it’s from the media and modern culture that we most often encounter the propaganda of this old man,” His Holiness added, in his homily at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral yesterday.
The old man is the fallen man, guided by his emotions, passions, and sinful thoughts, the Patriarch explained. Conversely, the call to put off the old man is “a call to spiritual vigilance, to ensure that we don’t let the old man as an ideal into our consciousness, into our heart.”
The fact that the fallen man is continually presented to us as an ideal “is nothing but a diabolical temptation,” Pat. Kirill is sure.
“They want to draw us into this idolatry again, and they do so with the help of many temptations, false ideas, even whole false doctrines, but most often, at the everyday level, when, striving exclusively for the arrangement of our personal well-being, we forget about the most important thing—about our inner life, about the state of our soul,” His Holiness concluded.
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