By Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol
What can someone do to a person who has hope in God? Nothing!
What is fear? What is it that you fear? The fear of death? Christ abolished death! Where does fear lie? Where does the threat lie? There is only one threat for us. Our threat is one - to lose Christ. That is a threat.
If a person loses his relationship with Christ, indeed, whatever he acquires in his life is miserable. The person who has lost Christ in his life is miserable. And for the one who has found Christ in his life, everything else is secondary.
You see, Job, whose prophecies we read during Great Week, lost his possessions, lost his children, lost his friends - he lost everything. What did he do? In all this, Job remained blameless before God. He did not complain against God.
When he lost his children — his seven children — he said: “I have nothing in this world.” And then he himself, and his wife also, in all these things he was found blameless before God. Why? Because he was freed from the bonds of this world. Christ broke the locks of Hades, the gates of Hades, and crushed the keys and chains of Hades, that is, all that binds us, and He liberated us. Christ freed us! Only when we are freed from the bonds of the world can we enter the sphere of God’s joy.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
