Homily on the Holy Great Martyr Paraskevi
Sacred and Godless Education
By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou
By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou
The Holy Great Martyr Paraskevi is a great saint of our Church, who is honored in the month of July and I can add that she is a saint who is especially honored in our Metropolis. Many parish churches and chapels bear her name and blessed Christians honor her memory. The holy churches are filled on this day, people embrace her holy icon, perform the mysteries and prepare themselves appropriately to commune with the Body and Blood of Christ. This is important, because with the Divine Liturgy and with the Divine Communion we are sanctified and we imitate in practice the life of the saints.
The martyrdom of Saint Paraskevi was terrible and inconceivable to the human mind. No one could make her deny Christ, because she had personal knowledge of His Grace and His presence. She preferred to die rather than deny Christ. The question is, to what is this great faith of hers due, who did not consider either threats or martyrdom and remained faithful to Christ. The synaxarion gives us a detail that is important for the interpretation of this personal faith of hers. He writes: “After the Saint learned the sacred letters, she always studied the Scriptures and, staying in the church of God, was engaged in holy prayer.”
From a young child, Saint Paraskevi learned from her parents to live within the Church, studying “the sacred letters” and engaging in “holy prayer.” What are these “sacred letters”? The Apostle Paul writes to his disciple Timothy: “From infancy you have known the sacred letters, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15). The letters of a language are not sacred in themselves, but indifferent. They are letters with which we compose sentences to express all our thoughts on a specific subject. However, the content of the letters gives the name to the letters as sacred or as profane. When we use the letters of the Greek language to praise God, as is done with the troparia of our Church, they are sacred. When we use the letters of the same language to blaspheme or deny God, it is profane and blasphemous. Thus, “sacred letters” are the hymns and prayers of the Church, they are the Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, they are the prayers with which we glorify God, we thank Him for all that He offers us and we beg Him to give us His gifts.
Saint Paraskevi was raised by her pious parents with these “sacred letters”, that is, she studied the Holy Scriptures, participated in the worship of the Church and engaged in “holy prayer”. Her parents, named Agathon and Politia, left her a great spiritual legacy, that is, they raised her with the “sacred letters” of the Church. These “sacred letters” gave her faith in God, patience in her life, courage in all her actions, and these “sacred letters” made her a great martyr and glorified her. 19 centuries have passed since then and her memory is honored. Today, there are various secular “stars” who are honored by young people, but this honor is temporary, they are easily forgotten, they easily enter the stage of obscurity. Saint Paraskevi with the "sacred letters" will live on for centuries, as long as this world exists, she will be glorified. In contrast to the "sacred letters" are the so-called "godless letters". After the liberation of Greece, the atheistic mentality began to enter our country much more, which is why a blessed monk, Christophoros, called Papoulakos, traveled all the regions of Greece at that time and spoke about the "godless letters". These deconstruct the tradition of the place, these make man live without foundations.
In today's era, when there is great disappointment from many factors, strong psychological imbalance, terrible instability, ideological confusion, religious syncretism, etc., all of which create insecurity, we need to rely on the "sacred letters" of our Church. Those of us who honor Saint Paraskevi and our saints in general should not do so only externally, we should not associate the feast only with external manifestations, but give great value to what made Saint Paraskevi stand out, and this is "the sacred letters" of the Church and "holy prayer."
I wish you all many years, may you have the protection and blessing of God through the intercession of our blessed Saint Paraskevi, and may you remain faithful to the "sacred letters" of our Church.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
