The Good News

      In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

     Every week we hear the reading of the Gospel in church – and so on from year to year, throughout our entire lives; and besides, believers read the Gospel day after day.

     And how frightening, how sad it is to think that we are so accustomed to reading the Gospel and to the holy, regenerating words that God pronounces for us, how frightening and sad it is that we become so accustomed – and the word Gospel means for us only the name of the book, but does not arouse in us the rapture, the tenderness that this word pronounced by John the Baptist, repeated by the disciples of the Savior Christ, stirred up in the souls of people.

     For the word Gospel in Russian really means only a book that contains a story about the life and miracles of the Savior and His teaching. But in Greek, the word "gospel" means "good news," something utterly reproclaimed, the novelty of which is so wonderful that it can be said of it as good. And the word good is used in the Gospel so reverently! After all, you remember how a man came to Christ and said to Him: "Good teacher, what shall I do to have eternal life?" And the Saviour answered him: "Why do you call Me good? Only God is good."

     And if we say of this Gospel message that it is really good news, then it should signify for us the complete newness of life, the newness that only God can impart to us.

     What is this news about, what is not only new but wondrous in it? – The news that God, Who for all the peoples of the earth and even for the Jewish people was the One Whom the Prophet calls "God afar", that is, a terrible God, a God so great that it is impossible to approach Him, a God about Whom the prophets and ascetics said: "Woe is me! I have seen God, I have only to die...", – that this God has ceased to be God from afar and has become so indescribable, so immeasurably close to us: He has become man. In all things He became like unto us; He bore our flesh; His soul was like any human soul, He had a human mind, and a human heart, and a human will. But beyond that, He was the Living God made man.