Love is concrete and expressed by doing good; on the contrary, indifference reveals a lack of love towards God and one’s neighbor. The apostle John understood what love is, experienced it, and, entering the heart of Christ, understood its expression. And so, in his letter, he tells us how to love and how we are loved. God is the one who loved us first. And when showing love to others, we must not be afraid „ get our hands dirty“. God loves first.

The eyes of love come from God. I begin to love, or I can start to love because I know He loved me first. If he didn’t love us, we certainly couldn’t love. If a child were born and could speak after just a few days, it would certainly explain this fact: I feel loved by my parents. And what parents show their child is what God shows us: he loves us first. And this gives birth and growth to our ability to love. This clearly defines love: we can love God because he loved us first. „If someone says: «I love God» and hates my brother, he is a liar. John does not say about such a person that he is “uneducated,” or you are wrong, “but calls him a „liar. I’m praying, I’m getting ecstatic… and then I’m writing other people off: I hate them, I don’t love them, or I’m indifferent to them… It doesn’t say: „You got a “ wrong, but it says: „You are a liar. This word in the Bible is clear because being a liar is intrinsically proper to the devil: he is the Great liar, and he tells us in the New Testament that he is the father of lies. This is the definition of Satan that the Bible gives us. And if you say that you love God and you hate your brother, you are on the opposite side: you are a liar. There are no concessions on this. Whoever doesn’t love a brother is lying about the love of God ...feet can find excuses for unloved, e.g., someone can say: Father, I have no hatred, but so many people hurt me, I can’t stand their rudeness and rudeness. John writes: «For whoever does not love the brother he sees cannot love God whom he does not see». If you cannot love people, from the closest to the most distant, with whom you are in contact, you cannot tell us that you love God. You’re a liar. It is not only about direct feelings of hatred, but it can also be about indifference to the problems of others. However, love is expressed by doing good.

We must humbly admit that we don’t know. And we probably won’t. There are many different explanations for the origin of the world throughout history. These include various mythologies, fables, and fables. There was a time when people believed them. If the world existed for another 500 years, people at that time might look back with a smile at the current conception of evolution. The atheists of the communist era lumped together mythology, fable, and the biblical interpretation of the world. To them, the book of Genesis was mythology—a great mistake. A believer is, therefore, a believer who does not believe in mythology but in the message of God. The book of Genesis does not describe the mechanism of creation. It focuses on a more important fact. God says. I am the creator. Man, look around you at all that I have created for you. See how I love you. Do you see the beauty here? The book of Genesis is understandable to everyone.

Whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated. The Book of Genesis could only have been written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The Book of Genesis is not a scientific study of the world’s origin but a proclamation of God’s omnipotence, greatness, and love. It is necessary to interpret the Book of Genesis correctly, not literally. For example, it says that God created the world in 7 days. As we know, a day is short. The day mentioned in the Bible is God’s day, not ours. We don’t know how long God’s day lasted. There is no problem accepting evolution, of course, as interpreted by religious scientists and many Nobel Prize winners. God has written the universe’s history and life for billions of years.

Can you imagine coming to God’s judgment, hearing the assessment of your life, and saying, “What are you talking about? I don’t remember it that way. When have I seen you like this and like that?” It would probably be like a bad dream, wouldn’t it? Those from the left were somehow surprised by today’s Gospel.

And now, try to imagine a young woman being courted by a young man. He keeps telling her he loves her. He invites her to dinner, gives her flowers, and tells her how beautiful she is. But he makes almost no effort to get to know her, to get to know her heart. He never tries to comfort her when she’s struggling, nor to help her when she’s sick; he doesn’t ask her how she feels, what she’s going through; he doesn’t listen to her; he doesn’t care what she experienced that day; and she doesn’t even remember what makes her happy. One day, he proposes to her. Should he be surprised when she rejects him?

We could compare this young man to the “caps” from today’s Gospel reading to those from the left. They don’t understand why Jesus doesn’t want to let them go to heaven. Maybe they confessed their love to Jesus but didn’t show it. Jesus does not want to drive us away; he does not want to lose us. But how do we know him when we talk about Him and love for Him but do not show Him love here? Is it true love? Does the young man from that example love the young woman?

To truly love is to know whether God or the people around you genuinely. This expression is even used by Scripture to express love: Adam knew his wife Eve, that is, he loved. And we can only know when we notice. It starts with noticing Jesus, who is with me.
“Jesus, I don’t want to miss you!”

The spirit of the age is a particular atmosphere that causes carelessness and leads to a failure to distinguish good from evil. Today’s liturgical reading from the First Letter of John (1 John 3:22-4:6) exhorts the faithful to ‘abide in Bohu,’ that is, ‘believe in Jesus Christ and love one another.’ A person can live in the most sinful cities and the most atheistic societies, but if he remains in God, then such a man or woman brings salvation. Also, today, many Christians do not know who the Holy Spirit is and identify him as the dove. However, the Holy Spirit is the one who allows you to remain in the Lord, he is a guarantor and a power.

An apostle writes about a ‘spirit that does not confess that Jesus comes in the body,’ that is, ‘spirit antikrista,’ which ‘already has in the world.’ The spirit of the world is the opposite of the Holy Spirit. The worldly spirit is a particular atmosphere that causes carelessness and leads to being unable to distinguish good from evil. Therefore, to remain in God, we must ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit, a guarantee. But how do we know if we have the Holy Spirit or the spirit of the world? Apostle Paul gives us advice: ‘Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God’ (Ef 4:30). If we follow the spirit of the world, we grieve, ignore, and leave the Holy Spirit aside, and our lives go elsewhere.

The ear of the world provides for forgetfulness. It does not delay the sin that you record and ask for forgiveness from God, but the spirit of the world makes you forget what sin is as if something could be done. These days, a priest showed me a video recording on a mobile phone of how they welcomed the new year in a particular tourist town in a Christian country. They celebrated the new year worldly, with spending and festivities. That is the spirit of the world. Is it a sin? No, dear, that is corruption, which is worse than sin. The Holy Spirit leads you to God, and when you sin, He protects you and helps you to get up, but the spirit of the world leads you to corruption so that you cannot distinguish between good and evil. Everything is the same, identical.

The ear of the world leads to ignorance, which does not distinguish sin. An Argentine song sings, ‘Just keep going, no matter, we’ll meet down in the oven.’ So how should we behave to distinguish? The apostle John gives us advice: ‘Beloved, do not believe every spirit at once, but examine the spirits to see if they are from God… […] or from the world. But what does ‘explore ghosts’ mean? It’s simple: when you feel something, you want to do something, or you have a thought or a judgment about something, ask: it comes from what I feel, from God’s Spirit or from the spirit that is in the world. It is necessary to ask what is happening in ours once or twice a day. That is why St Paul and St John say: ‘Do not believe every spirit at once.’ Unfortunately, many Christians today have hearts like the streets and do not know who is coming and who is going because they cannot question what is happening in them.

Roto advises you to take some time every day before bed or at noon – when you want – and ask what has passed through your heart that day. What actions or thoughts have occurred to me? What spirit moved my heart? The Spirit of God, the gift of God, the Holy Spirit, who always leads me to meet the Lord, or the spirit of the world, which sweetly and slowly removes me from the Lord through a very gradual slide. So let us ask the Lord for this grace to remain in the Lord and ask the Holy Spirit to give us the grace to recognize the spirits, that is, what moves within us. May our heart not be like a road but the place of our encounter with God.

Today, on the Feast of the Epiphany, the great light that shines from the cave of Bethlehem through the Magi of the East floods humanity. The first reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah and an excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew, which we have just heard, juxtapose the promise and its fulfillment. A particular tension emerges when we read excerpts from the Old and New Testaments in sequence. Behold, the marvelous vision of the prophet Isaiah appears before us, who, after the humiliations suffered by the people of Israel at the hands of the powerful of this world, sees the moment when the marvelous light of God, who, seemingly helpless and unable to protect his people, will rise above the whole earth, so the kings of the nations will kneel before him. They will come from the ends of the world and lay their most precious treasures at his feet. And the hearts of the people will tremble with joy.

Compared to the vision above, the one presented by the evangelist Matthew seems poor and small: it seems impossible for us to recognize the fulfillment of the words of the prophet Isaiah in it. Namely, it is not the rulers and kings of the earth who come to Bethlehem, but the wise men, strangers who were probably viewed with suspicion. In any case, they were not worthy of any special attention. The people of Jerusalem were informed of what had happened, but did not consider it necessary to take any action. Nor did anyone in Bethlehem seem to be paying any attention to the birth of this child, whom the wise men called the King of the Jews, or to these men who had come from the east to visit him. Shortly afterward, when King Herod shows who is practically in power, he forces the Holy Family to flee to Egypt, offering proof of his cruelty through the bloodshed of the innocents (cf. Mt 2:13-18). The event with the Magi seems to have been erased and forgotten. It is therefore understandable that the heart and soul of the faithful of all centuries are more attracted by the vision of the prophet than by the moderate account of the evangelist. This is also confirmed by the depictions of this visit in our nativity scenes. In them, we find camels, dromedaries, and mighty kings of this world kneeling before the child and laying their gifts in precious cabinets at his feet. But we must pay more attention to what both texts want to tell us.

What did Isaiah see with his prophetic eye? In a single moment, a reality revealed itself to him that would shape the whole of history. But even the event that Matthew tells us about is not a negligible episode that ends with the sudden return of the wise men to their own country. On the contrary, it is a beginning. These figures from the East are not the last, but the first in a long procession of those who, throughout history, can recognize the message of the star and follow the paths indicated in the Holy Scriptures. And so they can find the one who appears weak, but who has the power to give the greatest and deepest joy to a person’s heart. Because it manifests the wonderful reality that God knows us and is close to us, that his greatness and strength are not expressed in the logic of the world, but in the logic of the defenseless child, of the one whose strength lies only in the love that is entrusted to us. Throughout history, there are always people who are illuminated by the light of the star, who find their way and come to it. Each person experiences, in their way, the experience of the Magi themselves.

They brought gold, frankincense,, and myrrh. These are certainly not gifts that meet basic or everyday needs. At that moment, the Holy Family would surely need something other than incense or myrrh, and even gold it could not immediately serve. However, these gifts have their deeper meaning. They are an act of right. In fact, according to the oriental mentality of the time, they represented the recognition of a man as God and King. They are therefore a sign that shows submission. They express that from that moment on, those who bring gifts belong to the ruler and recognize his authority. The consequence is immediate.

The Magi can no longer continue their journey, they can no longer return to Herod, and they can no longer be allies of this powerful and cruel ruler. They have been permanently placed on the path of the child. On this path, which will teach them to disregard the great and powerful of this world and to lead them to Him who awaits us among the poor. On the path of love, which alone can change the world. The wise men did not just go on a journey, but something new began with their act. A new path was laid out, a new light came into the world that would not go out. The vision of the prophet is being realized: this light can no longer be unknown in the world. People will turn to the child and be irradiated by the joy that only he can give. The light of Bethlehem continues to shine throughout the world. And for those who have received it, St. Augustine reminds us: ‘Even we, when we recognized Christ as our King and priest who died for us, honored him in the same way as if we had given gold, incense,, and myrrh. All we need do is bear witness to him by choosing a different path from the one we have found (Sermon 202, In Epiphany Domini, 3,4).

So, if we read Isaiah’s promise and its fulfillment in the Gospel of Matthew together against the great backdrop of all history, it seems obvious that what we are told here and what we are trying to imitate with the manager, is not a dream and an empty game of sensations and emotions that have no strength and are unrealistic. But that it is the truth that shines in the world, even when Herod still seems to be stronger, and it seems that the child can be pushed away among them, are insignificant, or can be trampled on directly. But it is only in this child that God’s power manifests itself, gathering people of all centuries to walk the path of love that transforms the world under his rule. Yet, even though the few who were in Bethlehem became many, there still seem to be few believers in Jesus Christ. Many have seen the star, but few have understood its message. Scribes of the time of Jesus knew God’s word perfectly. They could easily list everything that could be found in the Holy Scripture about the place where the Messiah would be born, but as St. Augustine says, ‘it turned out with them as stone milestones – while they provided information to travelers, they remained idle and motionless’ (Sermon 199. In Epiphany Domini, 1,2).

We can ask: What is the reason some see and find and others do not? What opens eyes and hearts? What is missing in those who remain indifferent, those who point the way but remain motionless? We can answer: Their excessive self-confidence, their claim to perfect knowledge of reality, and their belief that they have already expressed a final judgment on things – this makes their hearts closed and insensitive to God’s newness. They are sure that they have a complete overview of the world and are no longer inwardly shaken by the courageous action of such a God who wants to encounter them. They put their trust in themselves more than in him and do not consider it possible that God would be so great that he could become small – that he could come closer to us. What is missing here is the authentic humility that can submit to the greater, but also the authentic courage that allows the truly great to be believed, even though it is manifested in a defenseless child. What is missing here is the evangelical ability to be a child at heart, the ability to be amazed and to come out of ourselves and to follow the path shown by the star, on God’s path. However, the Lord has the power to see us, and he has the power to save us. So let us ask him to give us a wise and innocent heart that allows us to see the star of his mercy and embark on his journey, so that we may find him and be flooded with that great light and true joy that he has brought into this world. Today, on the Feast of the Epiphany, the great light that shines from the cave of Bethlehem through the Magi of the East floods all of humanity. The first reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah and an excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew, which we have just heard, juxtapose the promise and its fulfillment. There is a particular tension that emerges when we read excerpts from the Old and New Testaments in sequence. Behold, the marvelous vision of the prophet Isaiah appears before us, who, after the humiliations suffered by the people of Israel at the hands of the powerful of this world, sees the moment when the great light of God, who, seemingly helpless and unable to protect his people, will rise above the whole earth, so the kings of the nations will kneel before him. They will come from the ends of the earth and lay their most precious treasures at his feet. And the hearts of the people will tremble with joy.

We know 4 theories about how the world came into being.

1. Orthodox biblical, It admits the creation of the world only according to the text of the book of Genesis. He considers any speculation to be a betrayal of God’s revelation.
2. Moderate biblical theory. He does not admit evolution, but says that we do not know exactly how God created His work. The Book of Genesis only hints at this. and informs about it.
3. Evolutionary-creator theory. Admits evolution as a magnificent, long-term creative program of God, which God directs, has directed
4. The theory of evolution does not admit of God’s direction, although the initial impulse and laws may come from God. However, the whole development takes place only on the basis of universal laws of nature, mathematical probability, the principle of necessity and chance.

Composition of the universe

The first moments of the big bang – the day without yesterday

We begin the New Year with a look at the Mother of God.

Although sincere and benevolent, our mutual New Year’s wishes for “happiness and health” still have their shadow: that the years of our lives—even if we live them in health and happiness—will be shortened by another year in the new year. The fulfillment of time means for us the shortening of our lives. What fulfillment in the new year can compensate us for the loss of time? What exceptional event would it have to be?

St. Paul writes that God sent his Son when the time was fulfilled (cf. Gal 4:4). What can it mean that time was fulfilled then, when nothing has changed over time in the change of seasons, in wars, crises, births, and deaths? When Jesus was born, time and events were still passing similarly. After all – as St. Paul writes Paul – also in this fullness of time the Son of God was born of a woman and according to the law (cf. Gal 4:4). Nothing extraordinary happened outwardly. And yet, it was a turning point in history. Who knew about it? When the shepherds told them what had been said about this child, all who heard it marveled. But Mary kept all these words in her heart and pondered them. After eight days they gave him the name Jesus, which the angel had given him before he was conceived in his Mother’s womb (cf. Lk 2:17-19,21).

Our era is generally referred to as the time “after Christ.” In the new year, it will be another year older. We know how “old” this time is, but we do not know our place in this process for the duration of time. We do not know when this time will be fulfilled towards its end. Is Christianity also aging with time instead of being fulfilled? Our ancestors did not call years “after Christ” but “years of the Lord.” And this is precisely what we forget: that time, understood in a Christian way, does not age if fulfilled in Christ. How we forget this is evident from our mutual wishes, that we wish for many things, starting with health, but we do not wish for the fullness of life in Christ, and yet we say that we are Christians.

Jesus Christ was born and submitted to everything that the time law determined. With his coming into the world, time was fulfilled. For us, this means that we, too, are not deprived of our humanity and snatched away to another world, but are incorporated into the one who did not become superhuman. However, in this time, this world suffered for us and died to save us. Christ does not live among us only for extraordinary situations, Sundays, and holidays but for a completely ordinary mortal life. The time has come for us in Bethlehem to be fulfilled in that Christ will stand by our side in this coming year, that we will not be dependent on ourselves, on our piety, on our anxiety and weakness, on the conditions of the world, but that we can turn to him because, through faith in Christ Jesus, we are all children of God (cf. Gal 3:26).

Let us begin the new civil year by looking at Mary, the Mother of God, under her protection. She was the first confirmation of the hope that God placed in his creation. She also reinforces our hope, which we need as we look into the unknown of the new year. Let us also remember our Slavic apostles, St. Cyril and Methodius, the holy fathers Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, the patron of our diocese, St. John the Baptist, and our patrons. All of these fulfilled earthly time and preceded us into eternity, but they form one community of the Church of Christ with us. In them, we have our intercessors with God. When we realize all this well, we will find that we do not have to be so helpless and sad in this world, even when we must carry our cross.

In God is our hope. Our concern must be to eliminate everything that erodes this hope. These are sins. The beginning of all evil temptations lies in the instability of the spirit and a small trust in God. Therefore, we must not despair but ask God to help us in all our sufferings. He certainly – according to the words of St. Paul – will not allow us to be tested beyond our strength, but with the test will also give us the ability to endure (1 Cor 10:13). I wish you and ask for unwavering hope and faith in him who became man for us to redeem us in the coming year.