In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!
Dear brothers and sisters, the path to salvation in life can be very hard. And we know the simple truth that none on earth can be saved if they rely only on their own labors, their own virtue, their own morals, and their own repentance. We can be saved only if God’s mercy is poured down on us. It is only through Christ’s Sacrifice on Golgotha that we are saved. That is why we need a Savior—our Lord and God Jesus Christ.
After all, there were many righteous people in the Old Testament who surpassed us that stand here many times in their piety, but they did not attain salvation, because the Messiah hadn’t come yet. That is why the most frequent petition in all the services of our Church, and the prayer we turn to Heaven with, is: “Lord, have mercy.” That is, we cannot be saved by any of our merits that we perform, but only by Thy mercy. We put our hopes on Thee, O Christ.
And, of course, the first Intercessor and Helper in the work of our salvation Who prays for us is the Mother of God. And, as the Holy Fathers say, when a Christian receives Communion, no matter what height of spiritual life he may have reached, the Lord enters into him as into a coffin, as into a dead person, in order to resurrect and regenerate him, transforming him in His grace.
After all, God sees imperfection even in His Angels. And that is why after reading some prayers of the Holy Fathers, we often imagine ourselves to be something: We fast, we pray, we do good works, and we are generally not bad people. And the Holy Fathers said in their prayers: “Lord, all our righteous deeds before Thine are like filthy rags; and all our purity before Thine is like vomit.”
And what can we say to justify our actions? Nothing. We can just close our mouths and hope for Thy mercy. And those who trust in God’s mercy will never perish, because God’s favorite act is to have mercy on people. God looks for a reason, or rather for a pretext to have mercy on a person when he asks for mercy. St. Herman, Patriarch of Constantinople, said: “If Thou didst not intercede, O Theotokos, no one would be holy, and no one can be saved except by Thee, O Theotokos.”
Today is a significant day for us: we are marking our patronal feast of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, which coincides with the National Unity Day in Russia. Russia is called a home of the Most Holy Theotokos. God has given us this great and beautiful country. I remind you that it occupies about one-third of the territory of Eurasia, or one-eighth of the entire Earth’s landmass; it is the largest country in the world. Twenty-three percent of our territory is Europe, and seventy-seven percent beyond the Urals are the Far East and Siberia.
According to popular tradition, the Mother of God covers our lands with Her intercession. The Tikhvin Icon of the Mother of God protects the northern frontiers, the Donskaya Icon guards the southern regions, the Pochaev Icon protects the western borders, and the Kazan Icon guards the eastern parts. And central Russia is under the protection of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God.
The Kazan Icon of the Mother of God is one of the greatest holy shrines in Russia, the guardian of the Russian people. The events that determined the major course of Russian history are connected with it. Its miraculous finding during the reign of Tsar Ivan IV (1547–1584), after the annexation of the Kazan Khanate, occurred following a fire in June 1579 when non-Christians began to mock the Orthodox faith, through the nine-year-old girl Matrona, the daughter of the strelets (streltsy were a Russian light infantry) Daniel Anuchin. The girl discovered it amid the ashes on the site of her burned house at the command of the Mother of God.
In 1611–1612, during the Time of Troubles, the Polish invasion, under the threat of Catholicism and the loss of our country’s independence, with the blessing of Hieromartyr Hermogenes, Patriarch of Moscow, the people’s militia under the command of Prince Pozharsky and the citizen Minin carried Kazan Icons of the Mother of God and soon defeated the foreign invaders.
The Kazan Icon of the Mother of God was especially venerated by the Romanov family. Tsar Michael Feodorovich Romanov, who was elected to the Russian throne by the Zemsky Sobor (the “Assembly of the Land”) in 1613, established its annual commemoration.
While preparing for war with the Swedes (the Great Northern War), Emperor Peter I the Great (1682–1725) ordered a field copy of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God to be made. And in 1709, on the eve of the Battle of Poltava, he prayed in front of it for victory.
In 1812, during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the great General and Field-Marshall of Russia Michael Kutuzov took the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God to the front, prayed fervently in front of it and arranged for prayer services to be celebrated for the soldiers.
The Mother of God also helped through Her wonderworking icon during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945). Metropolitan Elias (Karam) of Lebanon, who was praying for the salvation of Russia while keeping a very strict fast, had a vision of the Mother of God in a pillar of fire, announcing that the Kazan Icon must be taken and carried around besieged Leningrad, and the enemy would not set foot on its land. She also said that a prayer service must be celebrated in Moscow, then Her icon must be sent to Stalingrad, and next it must accompany the Soviet Army right to the Russian borders. This was conveyed to Stalin by Metropolitan Alexei (Simansky) of Leningrad (the future Patriarch Alexei I) and Locum Tenens of the Patriarchal Throne Metropolitan (the future Patriarch) Sergei (Stragorodsky). Stalin promised to do everything that had been told to him. And it was done. They prayed both in Stalingrad and in Königsberg, and miracles, help, and signs followed everywhere. And in 1947, after the end of the war, Stalin received Metropolitan Elias in Russia, because all the prophecies transmitted by him on behalf of the Mother of God had been fulfilled. At the suggestion of Patriarch Alexei I, Metropolitan Elias was presented with a copy of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, a jeweled cross and a panagia1 decorated with precious stones from all the regions of Russia. And in 2002 a replica of the wonderworking Kazan Icon of the Mother of God returned to the cathedral in the city of Kazan.
Dear brothers and sisters, do not forget to pray to the Most Holy Theotokos every day, because the history of Orthodoxy is replete with cases that remind us of this. I want to tell you one such story, which is recounted by Athonites. One man named John became the leader of a band of 100 robbers. He had great reverence for the Sovereign Lady Theotokos. Every day, morning and evening, he would read the akathist to Her. The All-merciful God wanted the robber to be saved for honoring His Most Pure Mother. And he sent him a holy elder.
While sitting in ambush, the robbers saw the elder passing by and seized him. The ascetic said to them, “Please take me to your leader: I want to tell him something that will be useful to him and you alike.” When they took him to their leader, the elder said to him, “Get all your people together so that I can tell give them a word.” The leader called his men. “Is everybody here?” the elder asked. “Only the cook is left, but he’s a useless person.”
“Call him,” the elder commanded. The cook came, but for some reason he couldn’t look at the elder and kept turning away. Then the elder exclaimed: “In the name of our Lord and God Jesus Christ Crucified, I command you to tell me who you are, who sent you, and what you have been doing here!”
“I’m a liar and I always lie,” he replied. “But now that you’ve tied me up by the name of Christ, I have to tell the truth. So, I’m a demon. The devil, my father, sent me here to work, set and clean the table, cook for this gang leader and watch over him, waiting for the moment when he did not read the akathist to the Virgin Mary. Once this happened, I would have the right to send him to hell. I’ve been here for fourteen years now, and there hasn’t been a single instance when he missed this akathist.”
Then the elder ordered, “I command you in the name of the Holy Trinity to vanish and never tempt Christians henceforth.” Then the elder brought the robbers to reason, and some of them became monks, while others married, pleasing God with their good works; and all were saved.
Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov) preached what the remembrance of the abundant miraculous help of the Mother of God to our Russian land obliges us to do. “The closer, the more merciful and attentive the Mother of God is to us, the more careful we must be concerning our behavior and our faith. The more is given to us, the more we will be called to account. Brothers and sisters, let us cherish the holy union with the Lord Jesus Christ and His Most Pure Mother, Who chose our land as Her portion. Let us keep in mind Who our Intercessor is, Who our Help and Hope is, and let us not break our union with Her—but rather let us strengthen it by our faith, way of life and hope.”
And His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia reminds us: “How wonderful that this particular day has been chosen as a public holiday—National Unity Day! May God grant all of us, learning from the example of this great episode from our history, to keep faith in our hearts and preserve the unity of our nation. If we combine faith and faithfulness to our Fatherland, we will undoubtedly have the spiritual power that can lead our Fatherland to victories. May the Protection of the Most Pure Queen of Heaven rest over our country, over our Church, and over all of us.”
Glory be to our God always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
