NEBAB #36: Lent Week 6: Gebre Hier

NEBAB #36

The Orthodox Tewahedo Magazine

LENT WEEK 6: ገብርኄር - GEBRE HIER

 
The Spiritual Education Unit

Ethiopian Orthodox Church

Archdiocese of the Caribbean and Latin America

In this issue:

Gospel: St Matthew 25:14-30

    1. A Far Country

    2. Profit and Loss

    3. Faith and works

    4. “Ask Abba/Kes”

    5. A Miracle of the Holy Virgin Maryam

    6. Children’s corner

    7.ይበል ግዕዝ 

    8. Orthodox Q&A

Commentary on the Gospel:

St Matthew 25:15

And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.

So that we do not say that "God is playing favourites among his servants", our Lord tells us that the fair and wise merchant gave his talents to each according to his ability. Let us consider parents and their children- they may have six children in the house, and they will not give the same amount of food to their eldest teenager as to their youngest toddler. They would not say to the teenager "this is what your brothers are having, so this is what you will have", and give him a small bowl of mashed peas, nor will they say to the toddler "this is what your brothers are having, so this is what you will have" and put a steak in front of him.

How many of us wish we could call fire from heaven like St Elijah, or bind the angel of death like St John Chrysostom, or receive wings like St Teklehaimanot? But if we were to receive the gifts they had, could we handle the temptations the devil brought to them? Have we conditioned our souls in true humility to avoid falling into pride? Even now we think highly of ourselves, although we cannot even move a small tree, let alone a mountain! We must realise that everything that happens in our lives, whether sickness or health, poverty or abundance, is all given according to our ability.

May we hear the words of life!

 

A Far Country

The 8 weeks of The Great Fast, also known as Lent, have names and themes laid out in St Yared’s Tsome Digua. The sixth, Gebre Hier, means ‘Good Servant’. To appreciate the kind of servants we are called to be, let us consider the following.

After we were instructed concerning the second coming of our Lord and our God and our Saviour Jesus Christ- let every knee bow at the mention of His great name- He continued to instruct us on the way to prepare for His second coming by parables in Matthew chapters 24 and 25. Why does our Lord say of the merchant that he travelled into a far country? Hear an interpretation. 

The far country is used to illustrate the longsuffering of God. He waits and waits for us, giving us as much time as we need, and more time after that. He gave Nineveh 40 days to repent, He gave the Jews 3 years and 3 months to believe in Him, and every morning He gives us another day to leave our impure ways and come close to Him. Often we may think that God has turned His back on us, or has forgotten us, or is delaying. In Matthew 24:48, the evil servant thought the same thing. His lord was giving him time to fulfill his duties, and he took that goodness as a fault on his master's part.

The far country is used to teach us that when God is silent, He is not absent, and that when we feel as though He has forgotten us, He is just giving us time. We are therefore warned not to treat what we think is distance between us and Him as an excuse to create actual distance between us and our God. What a shame that would be!

Profit and loss

In Ge'ez, Matthew 25:18 says that the unprofitable servant dug in the earth and hid his master's gold. The significance of this should not be underestimated.

How do we get gold? We all understand the basics- gold is a metal mined from the ground. We dig in the ground and retrieve it, then after separating the pure gold from anything else, we trade it as money, craft it into instruments, and use it as decoration. This lazy and unprofitable servant went to the trouble of putting the gold right back where it had come from in the first place, undoing the benefit of all that hard work and going back to square one.

Even though by burying the gold he returned it to its original place, this foolish approach is not a 'neutral' action. Far from it, he has actually brought about a great loss! The work that was done to dig up the gold had the profit of providing us with the resource. Burying the gold doesn't undo that work, it actually adds more work to arrive at the same place you were before! Do we see why this servant was called wicked and lazy? What a waste!

The work of salvation has already been done. It was finished on the cross and we have been given the result- the free gift of grace, but if we are lazy we bury that grace in the dirt of our own desires! We cannot undo the work that our Lord and our God did to save us, but we can reject His salvation when He offers it to us. Let us instead work, going up and down, to and fro, labouring and struggling to make a spiritual profit.

We'll work till Jesus comes!

Faith and Works:

Return on Investment

Our Lord wants to teach us to be investors, so He gives us the parable of the talents. Let us look at some of the talents He gives us and how to make them profitable.

Mercy- There should be none quicker to forgive his debtors than a Christian, and no one should give without expecting to be repaid more readily than we. We have seen the mercy of God up close, we know our sins, we know what we deserve, and we know how God blesses us when all we have earned is a curse. God has given us mercy from His own infinite supply, and for us to be good servants we have to multiply it by showing it to those around us. (Read Matthew 18:23-35)

Patience- It becomes easier with every passing day to doubt the promises of God. When we were babies and had not yet developed object permanence, we were puzzled by the game 'peekaboo', forgetting things as soon as we could no longer see them. While we have grown past that, we can still struggle with object permanence in our own way. When people are born or die or get sick or are healed we remember God, and then as time passes we forget Him again. God was patient with mankind for 5500 years before the Incarnation of the Word and has been patient with us for over 2000 years since. Let us keep reminding ourselves of God so that even when He takes a long journey to a far country (Matthew 25:14), we never beat our fellow servants, and eat and drink with the drunken. (Read Matthew 24:45-51)

Joy- We often hear that misery loves company. It tries to spread like mold through bread, and drag us down into sin. When St Paul tells us to rejoice in the Lord always (Phil 4:4), he teaches us the antidote to the mold of misery. If we meditate on the goodness of God consistently we can only have one disposition- joy! That joy can also spread to others, and often people will ask about our inexplicable constant joy, which is a form of evangelism, not by the strength of our words, but by the universal language of a smile.

Ask Abba/Kes

"Why did the lord in this parable say 'you should have given my money to the bankers'?"

People go to the bank for 2 reasons. To secure their money, and to make it return interest. If you deposit your money in the bank it will gain interest, but if you keep it in your pocket, or under your mattress, it will gain nothing. The one who takes the money to the bank is contrasted with the lazy person who does nothing with their money.

BIBLE QUIZ!

How much were the riches of Job at the beginning and at the end of the book of Job?

 

A Miracle of the Holy Virgin Maryam

There was a certain Jew who possessed a herd of cows, and he had a son who used to pasture the cows outside the city with Christian children.

One day the cowherds gathered to eat bread, and the son of the Jew came to eat with them.

They said to him, “You are a Jew, and we are Christians; you cannot eat with us until you become a Christian like us.”

He said, “Bring me to Christianity.”

They said, “Sit down.”

The cowherds then took water from the drinking vessel, sprinkled it on the Jewish youth’s head, and said, “We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and your name shall be Garanin.”

Straightaway he sat down and ate with them, and when they called him by name they said “Garanin.”

When evening came, the young Jew returned to his father’s house. He emitted a great light from his person, as well as an aroma more pleasant than any other scent—sweeter, indeed, than the smell of wine and salve.

Garanin sat down, and the people became drunk from the smell of his perfume.

In his wife’s presence, the Jew said to his son, “Tell me, where did you get this sweet smell? Tell me quickly, so that I may not kill you.”

The young man said, “My dear father, I don’t know; no one perfumed me.”

His father said, “Tell me what you have done today in the desert.”

The young man told him everything that the sons of the Christians had done to him: how they stopped him from eating with them until they had baptized him, and how they had called him “Garanin.”

When his father heard these words, he became furious and said, “What shall we do with this wicked young man?”

When the Jews saw the light and smelled the sweet perfume that emanated from Garanin, they became Christians.

But the Jew’s wife said to her husband, “Go to such and such a man, the heater of the bath. Order him to light a great fire, then throw the young man into it so that he may be consumed.”

Garanin’s father took him and carried him to the man who heated the bath, whom he instructed, “Light a fire in the furnace of the bath.” The bath keeper did so.

Then Garanin’s father cast him into the furnace and shut the door upon him.

The next morning, a certain man of noble rank went to the bathhouse to bathe, and he found the water cold.

He called the bath keeper and told him to heat the bath for him, and when the bath keeper went to the furnace, he found it closed and with no fire inside it. Then, when he opened the door, he found the young man sitting down, and the fire extinguished.

The bath keeper said to him, “Who brought you here?”

The young man said to him with tears, “My father cast me in here so that the fire would consume me. But a woman came to me; she was the most beautiful of women! She took me to her bosom, extinguished the fire, and departed. I neither wished for you to come nor for you not to come.”

When the bath keeper heard this, he cried out with a loud voice. A crowd of men gathered, brought the young man from the furnace, and took him to the bishop.

Garanin’s parents heard that their son was alive, so they went to the bishop. When they saw their son, they cried out, “We brought him up in the Jewish faith, and he has become a believer in the Christian faith.”

The young man told them everything that had befallen him from first to last, and all those who were there marveled.

The bishop commanded that the youth should be fed [at his expense] for all the days of his life, and he baptized the Jew and his wife.

Many other Jews were baptized on that day because of the miracle that Our Lady Mary, the Mother of the Light, had wrought.

Note: This story is considered the very earliest Miracle of Mary story ever, arising in Jerusalem in the 100s or 200s CE [AD].

O Holy Virgin Maryam, pray for us!

LIJOCH! The Children's Corner

Memory verse: St Matthew 25 : 21

His lord said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.’

Colour the picture

ይበል:ግዕዝ (yibel Ge’ez)

Let's reclaim our forefathers’ language

In Ge'ez, the phrase we know as 'good and faithful servant' is

ገብር ኄር ወምእመን

gebri' hier wemi'imen

There are 2 important words to explore this week:

The first is ኄር hier - good.

From the root verb ኀየረ hayere, also written as ኄረ hiere - to be good. It gives us the adjectives ኄር hier and ኄርት hiert, the masculine and feminine for 'good' or 'excellent'. It also gives us another verb ኄረወ hierewe - which also means to be good, benevolent or excellent. From this we get the common word ኂሩት heerut - goodness (as in the Prayer of the Covenant for Sundays ያስተርኢ ኂሩቱ በላዕሌነ yaster'ee heerutu bela'ilene -  that He may reveal His kindness/goodness to us) which should not be confused with ኅሩት hirut, a feminine word that means chosen (as in the common Christian name ኅሩተ ሥላሴ Hirute Selassie - Chosen of the Trinity)

The second is ምእመን mi'imen - faithful, trustworthy, reliable.

It comes from the root word አምነ amene - to believe, to be true, or to profess the faith. This root gives us some very common words, like አማን aman - truth, true, or truly and እምነት imnet - faith. We the members of the church are referred to as ምእመናን mi'imenan - faithful.

ORTHODOX Q&A

"What is a Christian monk?"

There are two ways a person can live, marriage and celibacy. Christian monks are people who choose celibacy, dying to the world and committing themselves fully to the service of God. After going through a special service where they are prayed for with the prayers for the dead, they begin their monastic life. Monks spend long hours working with their hands and praying for the world. They take three vows- poverty, chastity and obedience, and live the rest of their lives accordingly. Some are hermits, living by themselves, others live in monastic communities. Some stay in the monasteries while others are sent out into the world to serve.

Send us your questions at: seu.eotccarla@gmail.com

References

Short message on behalf the Spiritual Education Unit:

His Grace Abune Thaddaeus, Head Administrator Archimandrite Abba Gebreyesus, and all clergy and faithful- thank you for the opportunity to share this labour of love with you. Thanks also to the team of the Spiritual Education Unit for their hard work.

-Liqe Teghuan Tekle Mariam Greene

Miracle of the Holy Virgin Mary: pemm.princeton.edu/en-us/stories/188

CONTACT US:

Archdiocese headquarters: Medhane Alem (Saviour of the World), Old Golden Grove Rd. Arouca, Trinidad and Tobago.

Tel. 868-642-4230.

e-mail: eotc.arch.carla@gmail.com

ethiopianorthodoxtewahedochurchcarla.org