Kiev, March 23, 2026
Photo: uoc-news.church
“Without humility before God, even fasting and prayer will bear no fruit,” His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine, the primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, said in his homily on the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of St. John Climacus.
His Beatitude celebrated at the Church of St. Agapit of the Kiev Caves, which sits just outside the walls of the Kiev Caves Lavra, as the schismatics have taken over all churches within the monastery itself.
The Metropolitan noted that Great Lent is a special time given to mankind for spiritual growth through prayer and fasting, and that the Church offers the faithful the example of St. John Climacus—a great ascetic of the sixth century and the author of the renowned spiritual work The Ladder of Divine Ascent—as a guide for this season, reports the Information-Education Department of the UOC.
Met. Onuphry explained that The Ladder depicts the soul’s step-by-step ascent toward purification and union with God, a progression that the Savior also described in the Beatitudes (Mt. 5:3–12).
The first rung on this spiritual ladder, the Ukrainian primate said, is poverty of spirit—a man’s awareness of his own weakness and complete dependence upon God. “It’s important not to step off this rung. This is the foundation. If the foundation is wrong, the house will collapse. When a man remembers that he’s nothing, that God is everything, and that all he has belongs to God—then he’s building his life the right way,” Met. Onuphry said.
He further noted that fasting and prayer are the wings that lift a man to each rung of the spiritual ladder, but that without humility before God these efforts will bear no fruit. “We often claim for ourselves what belongs to God, what God has done. We attribute it to our own merit. And in this we offend God,” he said.
In conclusion, Met. Onuphry called on the faithful to stand firm on this foundation and, even with small steps, to ascend the spiritual ladder, so that their lives may be pleasing to God and lead to salvation in Christ.
“We’re not saints and make no claim to holiness. We simply want to be saved and to make at least a small step forward—to make ourselves a little more gentle, meek, peaceable, merciful.”
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