Meat Fare Sunday – Father Gavril Galev
Posted By Macedon on March 14, 2024
~+~
“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
This preparatory Sunday for the Great Lent and the Resurrection of Christ, is called Meat Fare, because according to the Typikon, meat is excluded from the daily diet. This day is the last day in which meat can be consumed, from tomorrow (Monday the 11th), that is, in the next week, there is no fasting on Wednesday and Friday, however, meat is not allowed for consumption at all. So that from next week (Monday the 18th) we also exclude cheese (and all dairy produce) and eggs from our daily intake of food and commence strict fasting, the Great Lent begins.
In this week, the Church has preordained that the Gospel about the Last Judgment of Christ is to be read, that is, His glorious second coming. In His first coming the Lord came as a humble man, as a humble servant who did not differ from us in anything, therefore people could not recognise Him and crucified Him. However, out of His great mercy and love, He liberated us from our sins by his actions, crucifying our sin on the cross, and with His Blood He washed away our sins and He opened the heaven to us again.
Sin, which is actually the missing of the target, which our forefathers did, when they led the entire human race in the wrong direction and led them to doom and destruction and the worst of all, to death and hell.
When Saint Basil the Great, one of the wisest of his time, and even to this day in the history of humanity and Christianity, was asked what the greatest wisdom was, he being a philosopher and a wise man, answered simply: “The remembrance of death”!
(more…)
