The transfiguration of Jesus on Tabor testifies to the power and authority of the Lord both over His bodily nature and over people who left this world thousands of years ago. As the Saviour said to His disciples: "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to Me," or as the Church sings at the funeral service of Her faithful: "Christ our true God possesses the living and the dead," and so on, you who possess the living and the dead. The Gospel tells about the transfiguration of how Jesus with His three disciples, Peter, John and James, climbed a high mountain. And he was transfigured before them: and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white like light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with Him (Matt. 17:2-3). Who among men has ever been able to make his face shine like the sun, and his garments whiter than snow? Further, who could summon and present before three witnesses famous people from the other world who lived on earth thousands of years ago? No one ever. He alone, forever mysterious and manifest, is the Messiah of the world, the Lord of nature.

Ah, my Theodoulos, but what can be said about the terrible miracles of the Lord Jesus, before death and after death? When He suffered and died on the Cross, He, Whose innocent Blood the Jews took upon themselves and on their children, how the sun was darkened, and darkness enveloped the earth from noon to three o'clock in the afternoon (from the sixth to the ninth hour in the East), how the earth shook, how the tombs were opened, and the dead arose from the tombs, and appeared in Jerusalem, as in the temple of Solomon, defiled by the merchants of faith, the thick and heavy veil, the katapetasma, tore itself from top to bottom? Without command, all nature rebelled - and submitted to its Master. After all, all nature submitted to Him not as a tyrant and enemy, but as a lawful Lord and Friend. This is what happens when a horse and an ox recognize their master and joyfully bow their heads before him.

And again: what can be said about the miracle of His resurrection, when His dead body came to life, rose and came out of the tomb, without touching the stone slab rolled to the tomb? Or how the resurrected Lord twice entered a room whose doors were locked and appeared to His disciples without opening the doors?

Or how at Emmaus He suddenly became invisible to Cleopas and the other disciple with whom He had just walked and talked for a long time?

Or about His ascension: how did He ascend bodily to heaven from the Mount of Olives before His faithful? And He ascended in the same body that He bore on earth, for He did not need to put on a purer body, as we will need it, since His body was always and forever pure and undefiled.

Without rolling away the tombstone, He arose, without opening the locked doors, He appeared in the upper room of Jerusalem. How? We don't need to know. But I think that just as He came out of the womb of the Most Pure Virgin Mary, without causing Her pain and without damaging Her motherly body. How is that? And we don't need to know that. We need only one thing: to know and believe that the Strongest of the world, the Lord of nature, the One and Only, has appeared in the world, capable of saving people from the power of demons, from sin and death, and returning to man power over nature.

All this was assimilated by our forefathers and Christian fathers, and countless millions of them were saved by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. All this we, the Orthodox, assimilate and work to be saved by the same faith in the same Only Saviour.

We can only pity the Jews and Indians: the former because they cannot open their eyes and see in the Lord Jesus Christ the Savior of the world and the Messiah Whom the Old Testament prophets clearly prophesied, and the latter because they cannot see the difference between their yogis and Christ. "And our yogis perform miracles like Christ," say the Indians. Truly, misunderstanding stemming from despair. Yes, yogis perform miracles, but which ones? Illusory, useless and meaningless, moreover, with the help of demonic forces fighting through people against Christ. They create illusions for people and show them, for example, a tree that supposedly pecks out of the ground and rises to its full height in a few minutes; Or they make the rope rise from the ground by itself and stand in the air straight like a stick. Who benefits from these worthless and illusory miracles? Christ performed real miracles, and only miracles that were useful and salvific for people. Magic is always from demons. The Egyptian magicians managed to imitate the miracle-worker of God Moses, but they performed only three miracles out of ten performed by him. And here we have not Moses, but Christ, the omnipotent Lord of nature. To Him alone all nature joyfully submits. All the righteous rejoice in it, freed from slavery to nature. Heaven and earth praise Him, and will be glorified forever and ever.

The Sons of the Kingdom

Now I want to ask you, Theodoulos. You've been asking me so far. What do you think: if robbers take the household away from home to a dark forest, into impassable abysses, and rob and defile them, starve them, wound and kill them, what will the owner of the house, the father of the family, do?

You say that first of all he will attack the robbers in order to defeat and tie them up. Well said. We have spoken the same way before. The Lord Jesus, the Savior and Messiah, first of all attacked the main enemy of the human race - Satan and his gloomy army. And Satan rushed away from Him, as if carried away by a terrible heavenly whirlwind, and Satan's warriors, foul and stinking demons, came out of people with a cry and a great cry, wherever He, the Expeller of demons, appeared. Thus the Saviour began with the fact that the first.

Tell me, Theodoulos, what will the master of the house do next, when he has defeated the enemy and freed his household? Will he immediately bring into the house these liberated, but dirty, hungry, wounded and mad with fear?

You say no. He will first wash them, feed them, heal them, clothe them, calm them down and shower them with incense. Truly, even heaven and earth cannot give a better answer. After all, such an answer was actually given by Heaven through His Messenger, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The first is the first, and the second is the second. But the first would be meaningless without the second. As a matter of fact, the main goal in the second, in our case, is that the household should be prepared and honored to enter their father's house. I say "honored" because the members of the household themselves are largely to blame for their captivity and enslavement. For they had set aside from the householder, and had reached out, like Eve, for the false and tempting promises of the robbers, until they had led them into gloomy forests and impassable wilds, until they had turned them into hungry laborers and their shackled slaves. And this labor and slavery lasted for thousands of years in all countries and peoples until the Coming of the Savior of the world.