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“Man sentenced God to death; by His Resurrection, He sentenced man to immortality. In return for a beating, He gives an embrace; for abuse, a blessing; for death, immortality. Man never showed so much hate for God as when he Crucified Him; and God never showed more love for man than when He arose. Man even wanted to reduce God to a mortal, but God by His Resurrection made man immortal. The Crucified God is Risen and has killed death. Death is no more. Immortality has surrounded man and all the world.”
“There is no end to the love of the Lord Christ for man.”
“In truth there is only one freedom – the Holy freedom of Christ, whereby He freed us from sin, from evil, from the devil. It binds us to God. All other freedoms are illusory, false, that is to say, they are all, in fact, slavery.”
“A man in this world must solve a problem: to be with Christ, or to be against Him. And every man decides this, whether he wants to or not. He will either be a lover of Christ or a fighter of Christ. There is no third option.”
“Christians, always rejoice, for evil, death, sin, the devil and hell have been conquered by Christ. But when all of this is conquered, is there anyone in the world who can bring our joy to naught? You are the lord of this eternal rejoicing as long as you do not give in to sin. Joy burns in our hearts from His Truth, love, Resurrection, and from the Church and His Saints. Joy burns in our hearts all because of sufferings for Him, mockings for Him, and death for Him, insofar as these sufferings write our names in Heaven. There is no true joy on Earth without the victory over death, but the victory over death does not exist without the Resurrection, and the Resurrection does not exist without Christ. The Risen God-Man Christ, the founder of the Church, constantly pours out this joy into the hearts of His followers through the Holy Mysteries and good deeds. Our faith is fulfilled in this Eternal joy, insofar as the joy of faith in Christ is the only true joy for human nature.”
“In Christianity truth is not a philosophical concept nor is it a theory, a teaching, or a system, but rather, it is the living theanthropic hypostasis – the historical Jesus Christ (John 14:6). Before Christ men could only conjecture about the Truth since they did not possess it. With Christ as the Incarnate Divine Logos the Eternally complete Divine Truth enters into the world. For this reason the Gospel says: “Truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).””
“Humility is upheld and protected by the Holy Spirit, and not only draws man to God, but also God to man. Furthermore, humility was the cause of the Son of God taking flesh, that closest union of God with man: Humility made God a man on Earth. Humility is the adornment of Divinity, for the Word made flesh spoke with us through the human body with which had clothed himself.”
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“If Christ is not Risen from the dead, then why believe in Him? To be honest, I would never have believed in Him had He not Risen and not, therefore, vanquished death. Our greatest enemy was killed, and we were given immortality. Without this, our world is a noisy display of revolting stupidity and despair. For neither in Heaven nor under Heaven is their greater stupidity than this world without Resurrection. And there is not a greater despair than this life without immortality. There is no being in this world more miserable than a man who does not believe in the resurrection of the dead. It would have better for such a man never to have been born.”
“Why is the God-man the fundamental truth of Orthodoxy? Because He answered all the questions that torture and torment the human spirit: the question of life and death, the question of good and evil, the question of Earth and Heaven, the question of truth and falsehood, the question of love and hate, the question of justice and injustice. In brief: the question of man and God.”
“Just try and imagine either a more perfect God than Christ or a more perfect man. But you will not be able to do so, because no individual or collective human thought can imagine either a more perfect God than Christ or a more perfect man. What is exceptional and unique in all this is that all Divine perfections in Christ are humanly real and concrete. Divine truth and love, righteousness, goodness, and beauty are given in Him as the clearest human and Earthly realities. There is no perfect good or perfect truth or beauty that cannot be found incarnate in His Person and realized in His life.”
