Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk celebrates the Liturgy at the Serbian Orthodox Church in Moscow MP

On July 12, 2019, on the day of commemoration of the holy and glorious and all-great First Apostles Peter and Paul, the Divine Liturgy at the Moscow monastery of the Serbian Orthodox Church - in the Peter and Paul Temple on Yauza - was performed by Metropolitan Hilarion of the Department for External Church Relations . Vladyka Hilarion was served by the representative of the Patriarch of Antioch and the whole East under the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Metropolitan of Philippi Niphon , the representative of the Patriarch of Serbia under the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Bishop Anthony of Moravichskii , Vice-Chairman of the Department for External Church Relations, Archpriest Nikolai Balashov , representative of the Patriarch Rights Council , Patriarch Nicolas of Russia and All Russia, Patriarch Nicolas of Russia and All Russia All Russia Archpriest Daniel Andreyuk , cleric of the Moscow Church of St. George the Victorious in the Little Georgian x Archpriest Kakhaber Gogotishvili, Secretary of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate on inter-Orthodox relations, Archpriest Igor Yakymchuk, Archpriest Sergei Gutenko ( Ukrainian Orthodox Church ) clergyman Peter and Paul Church on the Yauza Archimandrite Alexander (Kotov), other clerics of the parish, rector of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Nativity Church in g Feldkirch in Austria (Serbian Orthodox Church), Priest Nikola Balovic. Slavenko Terzić, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Serbia to the Russian Federation, Orthodox pilgrims from Serbia prayed at the service. A delegation of the Catholic foundation Urbi et orbi was also present in the temple. After the special litany, a prayer for peace in Ukraine was read. At the end of the Liturgy and prayer, the word of Bishop Anthony of Moravic, sounded, noting in particular: “Our church is a connecting bridge between the Serbian and Russian Orthodox Churches. And now this is evidenced by the chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, who today with us prays for all the Orthodox in the world, and especially for the Russian and Serbian peoples. ” In memory of the perfect festive divine service, he presented the head of the DECR with the image of the first apostles Peter and Paul. Metropolitan Hilarion addressed the crowd with a sermon: “Today, the Church remembers the holy Apostles Peter and Paul. They are called the first gods, and we often see their images at the right hand and oushu our Lord Jesus Christ. They had a very different fate. We hear a lot about the holy Apostle Peter in the Gospels. In each of the four Gospels, Peter is not only mentioned - they contain episodes from the life of this apostle, and talk about how he reacted to the words and deeds of his Master, the Lord Jesus Christ. In today's gospel reading, we heard that when the Lord asked: "For whom do people take Me?", The disciples began to say: "For Elijah," "For Jeremiah," "For one of the prophets." When the Lord directly asked them the question: “And who do you say that I am?”, Then only Peter answered. Is it because he alone believed at the time, or because he was responsible for the whole community, Peter said: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And the Lord answered him: "Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, because it was not people who revealed this to you, but My Heavenly Father. Behold, I tell you: you are Peter, and on this stone I will raise My Church, and the powers of hell will not prevail I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and what you tie on earth will be bound in heaven, and what you untie on earth will be untied in heaven "(Matthew 16: 17-19). Saint Apostle Peter, already in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, as we see, actually stood at the head of a community of twelve disciples. He was the eldest of this group, and after the Lord Jesus Christ was resurrected and ascended to heaven, it was Peter who was destined to lead this community for some time. Peter, as we read in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, was the one who initiated the election of the twelfth apostle to the place of Judas the traitor who had fallen away. And under his chairmanship this election took place. But surprisingly: we read in the Book of Acts about this election, we know who was elected - a man named Matthias, but this man never again appears in this book; he was elected, and he seemed to have disappeared. And a completely different person who was not a member of the apostolic community, was not one of the twelve disciples of Christ, moreover, was a persecutor of the Church, appears in the Book of Acts through several chapters. Still a young man, he was apparently ten to fifteen years younger than the other apostles and differed from them in education and culture, because they were mostly illiterate Galilean fishermen, and this was an educated man, an expert on the Law of Moses, who studied at the feet of the distinguished Rabbi Gamaliel. And it was this man that the Lord called to the apostleship in a miraculous way. He armed himself with letters against the Damascus Christians to organize the same kind of persecution that he had previously organized against the Jerusalem Christian community, and when he was approaching Damascus (the place that is associated with this amazing event), the Lord appeared to him and asked: " Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me? " Saul, shocked and blind, asked: "Lord, who are You?" And the Lord said, "I am Jesus, whom you persecute" (Acts 9: 5-6). This phenomenon was such a shock for Saul that he was completely reborn. He lost physical sight for some time, but he opened spiritual sight. And then the Lord sent one of his disciples to him so that he would perform a baptism over him and instruct him in the basics of the Christian faith. And then, as the apostle Paul himself says, without consulting with flesh and blood (Gal. 1:16), he went and began to preach Christ crucified and resurrected. This sermon met with mistrust in the apostolic community — no one could believe that a man who was yesterday a persecutor of Christianity suddenly became an apostle. And when Paul came to Jerusalem and tried to join the apostolic community, they did not want to accept him, because they did not trust, they thought that he was a man who had crept in order to destroy the Church that was being created from within. Paul, however, continued his apostolic writings. He met with the apostle Peter, they spent together fifteen days. We do not know what they were talking about, but one can imagine that the apostle Peter was talking about Christ, and Paul seemed to have absorbed all these stories. But he did not absorb it simply in order to retell them to other people. He never recounted what he heard from the apostles, but always said what he had received from the Lord himself, and we learn this from the messages of the apostle Paul. But when Paul heard these stories, he understood that Jesus Christ, who appeared on the way to Damascus, was not a simple man, it was God who became a man. It was to the first Apostle Paul that it was the merit of the realization of the wonderful and supernatural fact that Jesus Christ is not one of the prophets, not Jeremiah, not Elijah, but the Incarnate Son of God. He is credited with the creation of Christian theology and reflection in theological terms and theological categories of the history recorded by the Evangelicals. Paul, even before the Gospels were written, began sending out his epistles - to the Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians, Galatians, Ephesians, Timothy, Titus, Hebrews. In these epistles, Paul did not just admonish the Christians of various cities - he created a theological system, expressing it in terms that would later be used by the Church and would be included in its theological dictionary once and for all. And today, without even realizing it, we are talking about Jesus Christ in the language that the apostle Paul created. Reading the prayers of the Liturgy, especially the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, we see that they are all woven from words and expressions borrowed from the Epistles of the Apostle Paul. In a surprising way during the life of the apostles Peter and Paul were not close people. We never read about traveling together, preaching together. Peter and John preached together for some time, they even performed miracles together. But Peter and Paul once crossed for fifteen days in Jerusalem, then crossed in Antioch, where there was a conflict between them, which is described in the pages of the book of Acts. And then, apparently, their paths diverged and, perhaps, they never again converged. Peter preached in some lands, Paul in others. We know little about where Peter went and where he preached, and we know very well about where Paul went and where he preached. Open any edition of the New Testament, published in the Publishing House of the Moscow Patriarchate , and you will definitely see at the end of the book a map of the missionary travels of the Apostle Paul. Look at this map, follow the travel routes - and today these places are known, people travel by it, but if now we overcome such distances on airplanes in two or three hours, then the Apostle Paul walked on dusty roads on foot, and not in sports shoes, and in light sandals. He traveled tens, hundreds and thousands of kilometers to preach Christ crucified and resurrected. How did the Church mark his feat? She introduced him not just to the number of the twelve apostles, but put him next to Christ, in a place similar to that which the apostle Peter occupies. The church called Paul one of the two first apostles. When we look at the icon of Pentecost, we see that there are twelve apostles on it, and one of them is Paul, although, of course, he was not physically present at this event, because then he was still a persecutor of the Church of Christ. And when in ancient temples we see the composition of the communion of the apostles, which is usually depicted in the altar, we can see that on the one hand Peter comes to the Lord, and then five more apostles, and on the other hand, Paul and five more apostles. There is no Jude in this apostolic council who was present at the Last Supper, nor Matthias, who was elected instead of Judah, but there is Paul, who entered the apostolic community by the providence of God and, as we heard in the apostolic reading today, he himself said that more than others the apostles worked hard in the gospel of Christ. " In memory of the joint prayer on the feast of the first apostles, the head of the DECR presented his books “Apostle Peter. Biography "and" Apostle Paul. Biography". Metropolitan Hilarion emphasized that the deeds of the holy apostles and in our day inspire Christians to work and serve. The apostles Peter and Paul were the founders of the holy Church of Antioch, and in them they are especially honored, noted also Metropolitan Hilarion. Welcoming the Metropolitan of Philippi Niphon, he said: “We are pleased to testify our deep spiritual closeness and thank Your Holiness of Antioch in your person for the support we feel, including the difficult issue for us related to the Ukrainian schism and its legitimization by the Patriarch Bartholomew ". “We also feel support from the Holy Serbian Orthodox Church,” continued Vladyka Hilarion. - As the apostle Paul said, when one member hurts in the body of a person, all the other members suffer with it (1 Cor. 12:26). In the same way, when a single church falls to the test, other churches suffer along with this suffering church. ” The archpastor stressed: “Today we are anxiously following what is happening in Montenegro, where events are developing according to the scenario similar to what was happening in Ukraine, where state authorities state that it is necessary to create a Montenegrin church separate from the Serbian Church, where a bill to nationalize all the temples built before 1918, with the aim, obviously, of transferring these temples or some of them to the schismatics. In general, everything that has already happened in Ukraine is happening, and we see the sad fruits of this. ” As Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk noted, on July 9, 2019, at a meeting of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church , a statement was made in support of the Serbian Orthodox Church and all its believers living in Montenegro. “We pray that the unity of the Serbian Church will be preserved and not shaken by anything,” said the DECR chairman. Addressing the representative of the Patriarch of Serbia under the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Bishop Anthony of Moravic, Vladyka Hilarion wished him God's help in his ministry. “I would like to all of you, dear fathers, brothers and sisters, to wish the help of God in your labors. May the prayer of the Blessed Virgin Mary accompany us on our way, may the prayer and the teachings of the holy first apostles Peter and Paul help us to rise from strength to strength in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, ”said Metropolitan of Volokolamsk Hilarion.