Hidden fruit

Zealous Elijah was sent to bear witness to the truth and to preach the Living God.  But what fruit did this most holy prophet see from his mission?  The way in which God snatched him from life, before he had managed to complete his task, was certainly miraculous, but it was also a blow, this replacement by another prophet.  Yet it was precisely for the seed of his witness that God had sent him. Saint John the Baptist bore witness to the truth and condemned iniquity. Yet, on the one hand, iniquity continued, and seems to this day to prevail, while he himself had his honourable head severed from his body.  He did not succeed, but he remains the Fore-runner of Christ, the Most Honourable of the Prophets.  Where is the host of Apostolic churches founded by the Apostles in the East?  Where are the feats and wonders performed by so many saints? What has become of the sermons of thousands of preachers of the Word of God?  The world continues to wallow in the filth of sin. And our own children, our own flocks and our own people, on whose behalf we labour and struggle, let us be quite clear about this, will live in the sin of their hearts in the same passions as those in which the whole of society lives.  But they will live unto eternity,however, when God snatches them at the particular moment appointed for them, which He alone knows. It is God Who gives the victory, even if we are continually under the harrow, and it is He Who wins the people about whom we care, not with our efforts, but in the way He revealed to Isaiah, when he prophesied thus to him foretelling his failure. “A holy seed shall be its stump”(Isa.6:13), that is of Zion.  As if He were saying:  “You will fail.  When people are eating my word and the bread which I shall give, they will blaspheme and renounce me and say ’Get out of here, God’.  But within Zion I have placed a seed giving life through the power of the Spirit, which shall be a stump, a base, a root, the mighty trunk.  A seed which will last through to the end of the ages, through the maelstrom of sin and the cataclysm of all evil it will maintain the ‘remnant’ of Israel and shall transform it into a Church, the body of the Son of God, the Father of the Saved. ...Let us then have more confidence in what we profess than in ourselves, whoever we are, however grand and important we are, or think we are...  Let us have confidence in God, remembrance and dolorous love toward Him...

Elder Aimilianos