Meeting of Our Lord Jesus Christ! Orthodox Church

Описание: THE MEETING OF OUR LORD.
The Church today places before us the righteous and God-receiving Symeon, not as an ornament of devotion, but as a living witness to the faithfulness of God and the unity of prophecy and fulfillment. His life stretches across centuries. His aged hands become the meeting place between the written prophecy and the Logos who had taken flesh and became man. His story is not legend, but part of the sacred memory of the Church, preserved in the Menaion for this feast and affirmed in the patristic mind.

Holy Tradition testifies that Symeon was among the Seventy elders appointed to translate the sacred Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek in Alexandria. This translation — the Septuagint — was not accidental. It belonged to the divine economy. The promise to Abraham was never narrow. “In your seed shall all nations be blessed” (Genesis 22:18). The covenant was spoken in Hebrew, yet its fulfillment was destined for all mankind. The prophetic word would need to be heard beyond Judea.

After the spread of the Greek language throughout the inhabited world, divine providence prepared that the Law and the Prophets be rendered into Greek. The very text most often cited by the Apostles in the New Testament is this Greek translation. The Church received it, preserved it, and proclaimed Christ from it. As St. John Chrysostom teaches, Scripture is not a human invention but a divine instrument guiding mankind to salvation; therefore its faithful transmission is part of God’s providence.

Symeon stood within this sacred labor. When he came to the prophecy of Isaiah — “Behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son” (Isaiah 7:14, Septuagint— he hesitated. The word parthenos means Virgin. According to the Church’s received tradition, Symeon reasoned according to the natural order and considered altering the word to mean merely “young woman.”

Here the tension between divine revelation and fallen reasoning is revealed. The human mind measures according to nature; God acts beyond nature. As St. Gregory the Theologian teaches, the mystery of God becoming man surpasses reason yet does not contradict truth. It calls the mind upward rather than submitting to its limitations.