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Saint George Antiochian Orthodox Church
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Homily for the Sunday before the Elevation of the Holy Cross

By Fr. Fadi Rabbat

 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Beloved in Christ,

We stand today at the threshold of a great feast. Tomorrow we will gather to exalt the Holy Cross, to lift it high before the eyes of the whole Church, and to sing before it in reverence and awe. And today, even in this very Divine Liturgy, we already go forth in procession with the Cross, honoring it before its exaltation.

The Gospel this Sunday prepares us. It does not simply tell us a story. It opens for us the very meaning of the Cross itself.

Even the Epistle we have just heard, from Saint Paul to the Galatians, already set our compass toward it. “Far be it from me to glory,” he says, “except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world… for neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation” (Galatians 6:14-15).

Not a new law. Not a new debt satisfied. A new creation. Whatever happens to us at the Cross does not merely pardon us from a distance — it remakes us from within.

Christ says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up.” A strange image. Why would the Lord compare Himself to a serpent?

Beloved, this is one of the oldest and most beloved types in the whole of Christian preaching.

Saint John Chrysostom meditates on it with words that have echoed through the centuries: “There a serpent bit, and a serpent healed; here death destroyed, and a Death saved. But the snake which destroyed had venom, that which saved was free from venom; and so again was it here, for the death which slew us had sin with it, as the serpent had venom; but the Lord’s Death was free from all sin, as the brazen serpent from venom. For, saith Peter, ‘He did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth.’”

Do you hear the beauty hidden in this?

In the wilderness, the people looked upon a bronze serpent lifted on a pole, and were healed of the venom that was killing them. Not because the bronze had power in itself, but because it pointed forward, in mystery, to the Cross.

Sin bit us long ago, and its venom has been working in the human race ever since — in our anger, our fear, our despair, our broken relationships, our broken hearts. We are prone, all of us, to fix our gaze upon our own wounds rather than upon the One who heals them — to stare at our sins, our fears, our weaknesses, until we forget to lift our eyes at all. The Cross calls us upward. It is not merely an ornament borne upon the breast; it is a way of seeing.

And what heals venom? Not the absence of the serpent’s image, but a death without venom. A death without sin.

That is what hangs on the Cross we carry in procession this very day. Not another sinner dying like the rest of us. But sinless Love itself, lifted up, so that whoever looks upon Him — really looks, with faith — is healed.

This is why, when you lift your eyes to the icon of the Crucified Lord in this temple, you do not find a broken man collapsed in defeat. The Church has never depicted Him so. His eyes remain open in the tradition of our iconography; His body is composed, at rest, reigning even from the wood.

The Fathers understood the Cross not as a place of shame but as a throne — for Love was never defeated there.

Death climbed onto the Cross expecting a victim, and found instead its conqueror.

This is why the Lord says plainly, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Beloved, notice: not to condemn the world. The Gospel is careful here.

“God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”

The Cross is not a punishment God inflicts. 

Not because the Father desired the death of His Son, and not because God had need of a sacrifice that He might be reconciled to man — no. It is love, freely given, lifted up so that everyone — everyone — can see it and live. And this healing did not begin in the wilderness of Moses. It reaches all the way back to Paradise itself.

Saint John of Damascus teaches that “the honorable Cross was foreshadowed by the tree of life planted by God in the midst of Paradise; for as the fall and death came about through a tree, so it was fitting that through a tree life and resurrection should be given.”

This is why the Church, in the very hymns appointed for tomorrow’s feast, dares to sing: “By the Blood of God the venom of the serpent is washed away… for it was fitting that the tree be healed by a Tree, and that, by the sufferings of the Dispassionate One on the Tree, the sufferings of the condemned be loosed.”

The gate that closed behind Adam and Eve is opened again — not by force, but by a Tree planted in the center of the earth, bearing, instead of the fruit that once brought death, the very Body and Blood of the One who is Life.

And this is why, today, in this Forefeast, as the Cross passes among us in procession, the Church already sings, “We offer thee in mediation the life-giving Cross which, of Thy goodness, Thou hast given unto us, the unworthy, O Lord.”

Notice the words — “in mediation.”

The Cross stands between our sin and God’s mercy, not to separate us, but to join us. It is the meeting place. It is where our venom is met by His sinlessness, where our death is met by His life-giving Death, and healing happens.

So what does this mean for us, practically, today?

It means that as this Cross passes before you in procession, you are not looking at a symbol of suffering for its own sake. Carrying our cross does not mean simply enduring pain. It means fixing our eyes, like the Israelites in the desert, on the one place where healing is offered — freely, without our having earned it.

It means that when venom moves in you — bitterness toward someone, despair over your health, shame over your past — you do not have to manage it alone. You lift your eyes. You look at the Cross. And like those bitten in the wilderness, you live. And in that look, you discover that your pain is no longer a place estranged from God, for Christ entered into it before you. 

He says to every soul: Behold Me, and do not be afraid. I am with you, even in the place where you think you are alone.

It means that we, too, are sent as the Son was sent — not to condemn anyone around us, not our families, not our students, not our neighbors, not even our enemies — but so that through us, in some small way, the world might be saved.

And healing, beloved, is not the end of the story.

Saint Peter tells us that through Christ we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). 

This is why Saint Athanasius could dare to say that the Son of God became man so that man might become god — not gods in our own right, never that, but united to the true God by grace, the way iron laid in fire takes on the fire’s own glow without ceasing to be iron. 

The venom that once worked death in us is not merely removed. In its place, the very life of God is planted. We do not simply survive the Cross. We are transfigured by it.

The bronze serpent healed those who looked upon it. But it was only a shadow. What we carry today, and will exalt tomorrow, is greater — the true and life-giving Cross, holding not an image of the destroyer, but the very Body of Him who destroyed death by death.

Saint Ephrem the Syrian, gazing on this same Tree, wrote that it “has issued an everlasting Life that is freely chosen by all who wish to have it” — freely chosen, beloved, not imposed.

And the Church, keeping vigil for tomorrow’s feast, sings that this Tree, “bearing for men the vesture of life, hath been planted in the ground, and the whole world hath been filled with all manner of joy.”

Let us then draw near to the Cross not with the eye of fear, but with the eye of faith — for beyond the Cross lies the empty tomb, beyond death lies life, and beyond the wounds lies the resurrection of mankind in Christ.

So today, as this Cross passes among us, and tomorrow, as we bow before it exalted, let each of us bring one wound, one fear, one sin, and simply lift our eyes toward the Cross.

And let us pray as the Church already prays: Save Thy hierarchs and Thy flock, and grant Thou peace through the Theotokos, O only Lover of mankind.

To Christ our God be glory, together with His eternal Father and His all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Homily for the Feast of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, 2026
By Fr. Fadi Rabbat
 
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
 
Beloved in Christ,
 
On this great feast of the Nativity of our Most Holy Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, the Church does not set before us the newborn child in the arms of Joachim and Anna, but a scene from many years later — the house of Martha, in a certain village, where the Lord Himself has come to rest.
 
It seems, at first, an unusual Gospel for a feast of birth. We might expect to hear only of a barren womb made fruitful, of an aged couple’s prayer finally answered. Instead the Church gives us a home in Bethany, and two sisters receiving a guest.
 
But the Holy Fathers knew exactly why the Church chose this reading for this day, and if we follow it closely, it will open for us the whole mystery we celebrate today.
 
Martha welcomes the Lord and busies herself with much serving. Her sister Mary, instead, sits at His feet and listens to His word.
 
Martha, worn out and a little wounded, appeals to Christ: “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?” And the Lord answers with a gentleness that still speaks to every anxious heart: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”
 
St. Gregory Palamas, in his homily on this very feast, calls this day nothing less than the beginning of our salvation — the first feast of the Church’s liturgical year, because in this small, hidden birth, “a new world and a mysterious paradise” have been revealed. Her barrenness before this day was no accident, he says, “because the coming of that which alone is new under the sun, the culmination of miracles, had to be prepared by means of miracles.”
 
Joachim and Anna, who had no child, were preferred to those with many, “so that the all-virtuous Daughter might be born of the most virtuous, the all-chaste of the most chaste.”
 
That is precisely the soul we meet grown to womanhood in Martha’s house, beloved — the child born today already destined to be, in Palamas’s words, “the living Tabernacle of God not made with hands,” the Ark that would hold not tablets of stone but the living Word Himself. She is Martha’s hospitality and Mary’s contemplation joined in one soul: she received the Lord into her house, and even more, into her own body, and she never for a moment stopped listening to His word and keeping it in her heart.
 
This is why, immediately after, a woman from the crowd cries out to Christ: “Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed You!” And the Lord, without denying this blessing, deepens it: “More than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”
 
He is not correcting the woman — He is revealing the true source of His Mother’s blessedness, the very blessedness whose beginning we celebrate today. She is praised not only because she carried Him in the flesh, but because, long before the angel came to her, her whole life — from the day of her birth — was being made into a place where the word of God could be heard and kept.
 
“Let it be to me according to Your word,” she said at the Annunciation, and that single sentence of obedience is the “good part” that was never taken from her, the fruit of a life whose first seed was planted on this day.
 
This, beloved, is why the Church calls today’s feast not simply a birthday, but a doorway — Palamas calls it “a boundary to the law and to prototypes” and, at the same time, “a doorway to grace and truth.”
 
Everything, he says, “began to be made new” on this day: enduring precepts in place of temporary ones, the spirit instead of the letter, the truth instead of shadows. In one small house in Nazareth, salvation history quietly turned on its hinge.
 
So what does this feast ask of us, in our own homes, in our own Marthas and Marys?
 
We, too, are often distracted with much serving — with the noise, the errands, the worries that fill our days and pull us in many directions at once.
 
There is nothing wrong with serving; the Church needs her Marthas. But the Lord reminds us today, through the birth of His own Mother, that only one thing is truly needed: to sit still enough, often enough, to actually hear His word — and then to keep it, the way she kept it from her very first days, until it becomes not just something we know, but something we are.
 
Beloved, the Theotokos stands before us today not as someone distant and unreachable in her glory, but as the pattern of exactly this: a life given over, from its very beginning, to hearing and keeping the word of God so completely that it became capable of bearing God Himself. What began in her — a small, hidden birth in the house of a barren couple — is the promise that God can make a dwelling place even of what seems empty, ordinary, or long unanswered in our own lives.
 
Let us, then, choose today the good part which will not be taken from us.
 
Let us entrust our lives, our households, and our departed to Christ our God, through the prayers of His Most Holy Mother, who is more honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim.
 
To Him be glory, together with His Father who is without beginning, and His all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

 

Homily for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost & 13th Sunday of Matthew, 2026
by Fr. Fadi Rabbat
 
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.
 
Beloved in Christ,
 
Today the Lord swings open before us the doors of a wedding feast — not an earthly banquet, but the Kingdom of Heaven itself, prepared before the foundation of the world and held out to us as pure, unearned love.
 
A king makes a marriage feast for his son. The calves are killed, the table is spread, heaven itself stands ready. Only one thing is missing: the guests.
 
And they do not come.
 
Let us pause here, beloved, for this refusal is no distant history. It is the mirror of our own hearts.
 
Saint John Chrysostom marvels that the excuses given are not even wicked in themselves. One goes to his farm, another to his business — ordinary life, the things that fill our days. Yet Christ says they “made light of it.”
 
The danger, St. John Chrysostom warns, is rarely open rebellion against God. It is the quiet drifting, the slow substitution of the urgent for the eternal, until the wedding of the Kingdom becomes, in our hearts, one appointment among many — and not even the most pressing.
 
How often do we say, in effect, “Lord, I will come — later, after the harvest, after the business is settled, after this season of my life”? And the years pass, and the invitation remains unanswered.
 
The parable darkens further. The servants — the prophets, the apostles, and in every age the martyrs — are seized and killed, and the king in his justice sends his armies. The Fathers see here Jerusalem’s own sorrow, the city that would not know the day of her visitation.
 
But let us hear this not merely as history but as warning: a heart closed to grace does not stay neutral. It hardens. And mercy refused today does not knock forever.
 
Yet see now the mercy of God, who will not let the feast go empty for want of the invited. “The wedding is ready,” He says. “Go into the thoroughfares, and invite as many as you find.” And the servants go out into the crossroads, the highways, the places no one expected an invitation — and gather all, both bad and good, until the hall is filled.
 
Saint Cyril of Alexandria sees here the calling of the Gentiles — us, beloved, who were once far off, strangers to the covenants of promise, now seated at the King’s own table. No one stands too far from that door for Christ’s mercy to reach them. This is why the hall holds both bad and good together: the Church on earth is not a museum of the perfect but a hospital, a banquet thrown open to sinners already healed and sinners still healing, side by side at the one table.
 
And yet — here the Gospel turns to search our own souls. The king comes in to see the guests and finds a man without a wedding garment. He speaks no accusation, only, “Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?” And the man is silent.
 
This silence, beloved, is the heart of today’s Gospel. To be called is mercy — none of us earned our place. But to be called is not yet to be clothed.
 
The Fathers teach that this garment is not brought in from the streets; it is woven within us, thread by thread, through repentance, humility, and love.
 
Saint Andrew of Crete, whose Great Canon calls every soul to weep over the garment torn by sin, teaches that it is restored not by our effort alone but by tears joined to the grace of Christ. And Saint John Chrysostom says plainly: the garment is mercy and charity, a life of good works — for we are clothed at baptism in Christ Himself, but that robe of light must be kept unstained, or rewoven when torn, through confession, almsgiving, and forgiveness freely given.
 
We come to this table every time we draw near the Divine Liturgy — guests called from the streets, seated by grace and not by merit.
 
But let us ask honestly: have we let the garment given us in baptism grow soiled with indifference, with grudges we refuse to release, with sins we have grown too comfortable carrying? Or are we even now weaving it anew, in humility, in love?
 
The word to that silent man is severe — bound hand and foot, cast into the outer darkness. Not for being uninvited; he was found among the guests. But because he mistook presence in the hall for transformation of the heart.
 
Many are called — the doors stand open to every soul without exception — but few are chosen, not because God withholds His mercy, but because so few of us let that mercy truly clothe us, remake us, and prepare us for the wedding.
 
So today, beloved, let us not merely occupy a seat at the feast. Let us come clothed — in humility, in reconciliation with one another, in mercy toward the poor, in hearts unhardened by the business of this world.
 
Let us not stand speechless before the King, but let our lives themselves answer Him: Lord, You called me from the streets, and I have put on the garment You gave me, and by Your grace I have kept it unto the wedding.
 
To Christ our God be glory, together with His eternal Father and His all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.