OrthoAnalytika
In this homily, Fr Anthony challenges us to reflect on our own expectations of God. Like the Jews, we often approach God with our own predefined ideas of what He should do for us. When our problems persist or even worsen, we are faced with a choice: either we try to control God and limit His power by confining Him to our expectations, or we allow Him to transform our lives in unexpected ways, leading us to a deeper relationship with Him. Enjoy the show!
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Today, Fr. Anthony continues to keep it real while talking about the great challenge of loving our enemies. Love your enemies. Matthew 5:43-48 1 Corinthians 13: 1 John 13:34 Romans 15:1a St. John Chrysostom: [St. Paul] adorns love not only for what it has but also for what it has not. Love both elicits virtue and expels vice, not permitting it to spring up at all. St John Chrysostom: For neither did Christ simply command to love but to pray. Do you see how many steps he has ascended and how he has set us on the very summit of virtue? Mark it, numbering from the...
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Fr. Anthony concludes his prestantation on beauty at the 2025 UOL Lenten retreat by connecting music with love. Music taps into and draws from something that is primal, foundational, and rational (word – bearing); so does love. Music requires mastery of certain skills and concepts that require repetition to master; so does love. Music improves when there are different voices represented; so does love. Music works with dissonance to move us towards deeper truths; so does love. Music often requires periods of silence for listening, anticipation, and appreciation; so...
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Fr. Roman Marchyshak is the priest at Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Trenton, NJ and teaches liturgical music at St. Sophia Ukrainian Orthodox Seminary. In this presentation, he talks about the role music plays in the worship of the Orthodox Church, reminding us that it is not an adornment, but an essential element. He had some of the seminarians from St. Sophia's sing selected pieces to illustrate his main points. Enjoy the show!
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This is the audio for the first part of the 2025 Ukrainian Orthodox League Lenten Retreat held on Saturday April 5th in Philadelphia. Beauty helps us understand Orthodox (INCARNATIONAL!) theology better and thus live more graceful lives. It is also one of the best ways to do Orthodox Evangelism. People come to us for many reasons, but an encounter with God is what they really long for. Beauty is a special charisma of the Church – secular beauty is a pale imitation (or perversion) of that true beauty. Beauty resonates with the built-in beauty receptors of our senses,...
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On the Sunday of St. John of the Ladder, Fr. Anthony delivers a homily that encourages us to take our pursuit of joy, peace, and freedom from anxiety seriously. He begins by asking whether we truly want these things or if we expect them to come without effort, likening it to people desiring health or success without being willing to make the necessary sacrifices. He emphasized that true peace and joy require commitment, not idle desire, and must be pursued through effort, prayer, and fasting. Fr. Anthony critiqued the common temptation of chasing material security and success, such as the...
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Fr. Anthony leads a discussion with the men of Christ the Savior's parish on the basics of leading a Christian home. Enjoy the show!
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Still trying to “keep it real,” Fr. Anthony leads a class on the challenges that come when we try to love our neighbor. Enjoy the show!
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Mark: 8:34-9:1. In this homily, Fr. Anthony discusses the true meaning of taking up one's cross in Christian life. He emphasizes that Christ's cross was not just a symbol of pain but of sacrificial love, where Jesus Christ gave Himself for the salvation of others. The act of following Christ involves denying personal desires to serve others, even when it's difficult or misunderstood. By sacrificing our time and efforts for others' well-being, we emulate Christ's example, aligning our actions with His purpose for eternal life. The homily highlights that true sacrifice is motivated by love and...
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In this lesson, Fr. Anthony talks about how necessary a prayer rule and proper worship are to knowing and loving God. Enjoy the show!
info_outlineRevelation Class 12 – The Trumpets
22 January 2025
Revelation, Chapter Eight - Eleven
Patrick Henry Reardon, Revelation: A Liturgical Prophecy (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018), 58–69.
In the present text, the immediate response to the opening of the seventh seal is silence in heaven for thirty minutes (verse 1), while the angels with the seven trumpets prepare themselves (verses 2, 6), and the throne room is ritually incensed (verse 3). The silence that accompanies the incensing provides a time for prayers to be offered, the ascending of which is symbolized in the rising incense smoke (cf. Lk 1:9–10; Ex 30:1–9; Talmud, “Tamid” 3.1). In the temple ritual of Israel, it is likely that thirty minutes was required for the priest to make the rounds of the temple with his censer, though it sometimes took longer (cf. Lk 1:21)…
The trumpets, moreover, will be sounded by the seven “angels of the Presence” (cf. Tob 12:15; Lk 1:19). The trumpets themselves are best understood in two points of reference. First, there were seven trumpets sounded in the procession around the walls of Jericho in Joshua 6. It is useful to bear in mind that the Ark of the Covenant was borne at the end of that procession, after the seven trumpets. Similarly, at the end of the sounding of the seventh trumpet in the Book of Revelation, the Ark of the Covenant will once again appear (cf. 11:15, 19).
Second, that event of the fall of Jericho was given a constant liturgical expression in the ritual of the Jerusalem temple by the sounding of the trumpets (1 Chron 15:24; Neh 12:4–42). Almost any time anything of significance happened in the worship at the temple, such as prayers, sacrifices, and so forth, the trumpets were sounded. Thus, the blare of the trumpet symbolized Israel’s constant and sustained worship of God. This is also the function of the trumpets here in Revelation 8.
The blowing of the seven trumpets parallels the opening of the seven seals in several close particulars. Thus, the first four trumpets form a unified whole (verses 7–12), as did the first four seals (6:1–8). As in the case of the fifth and sixth seals (6:9–17), the fifth and sixth trumpets will be expressed in a longer and separate narrative (9:1–21). Finally, a pair of visions will precede the sounding of the seventh trumpet (10:1–11:14), as another pair preceded the opening of the seventh seal (7:1–17).
In addition, by introducing various plagues upon the earth, the seven trumpets find another extensive parallel in the seven bowls of plague that will follow them. Finally, let us note that the plagues visited on the earth at the sounding of the trumpets, like the plagues visited on Egypt, do not touch those who, having been sealed, belong to God.
Chapter 9
The first four trumpets produced plagues that resembled the seventh, first, and ninth plagues of Egypt (Ex 9:22–26; 7:20–21; 10:21). These plagues, prompted by the trumpets, affect only the physical and astrophysical world, not human beings—at least not directly. The final three, described by the heavenly eagle as “woes,” afflict mankind directly (8:13).
The image of a fallen star already appeared in 8:10–11. Now another star falls in response to the fifth trumpet (verse 1; cf. Is 14:12–20). This star opens the bottomless pit, from which arises a hellish smoke (verse 2; cf. 8:12) that contrasts with the incense smoke of prayer. The abyss represents existence without the worship of God—the theological term for which is “hell.” As John watches, a massive swarm of locusts takes form within that hellish cloud (verse 3), reminiscent of Egypt’s eighth plague (Ex 10:12–15). Unlike those former locusts, however, these locusts attack men themselves, not plant life (verse 4). Their activity is limited to five months, which is roughly the normal life span of locusts…
The torture inflicted by these followers of Abaddon is spiritual, not physical, and the Christians, sealed with the sign of the Living God, are exempt from it.
To the citizens of the Roman Empire the Euphrates River was a symbol analogous to the “Iron Curtain” of the Cold War era, that is, a border beyond which the enemy world lay massively in menace (verse 14). …
The army that John sees, like the army of locusts summoned by the previous trumpet, comes right out of hell. Both of these invaders, the locusts and the horsemen, are sent to encourage men to repentance, but men’s hearts, like the heart of Pharaoh, are hardened. The idolatries listed in verse 20 are the root of the other moral evils listed in verse 21. This relationship of idolatry to moral evil is identical to that in Romans 1:21–32 and Ephesians 5:6.
Chapter 10
Just as there was a double interrupting narrative immediately prior to the opening of the seventh seal, so a pair of visions will now precede the sounding of the seventh trumpet. the angel holding the little scroll, and the two faithful witnesses.
In the first of these, John is struck by the angel’s numinous character, at once bright and obscure. The angel’s body is clothed in a cloud, reminiscent of the cloud of the divine presence during ancient Israel’s desert journey and the cloud associated with the tabernacle of the divine presence. The face of the angel, on the other hand, has the luminosity of the sun. Nonetheless, the very fierceness of his countenance is tempered by the rainbow arching over his head, a reminder of the eternal covenant between God and creation in Genesis 9.
The scroll the angel holds is smaller than the scroll in Chapter 5, a detail suggesting that its message may be less universal. Indeed, the message of that scroll is not directed to the world, but to the community of faith (verses 8–11). It is not read but eaten; John absorbs its message into himself. He assimilates the Word that he might then give expression to it. In this respect he imitates the prophet Ezekiel (cf. Ez 2:9–3:4).
Chapter 11
In our reading of the Book of Revelation thus far we have encountered the Danielic expression, “a time, times, and half a time” (Dan 12:7). If we substitute the word “year” for “time,” the meaning of the expression is clear. “three and a half years,” or forty-two months, or (following the Hebrew calendar of thirty days per month) twelve-hundred and sixty days. In the Book of Daniel this was the length of time during which the Jerusalem temple was violated by Antiochus Epiphanes IV (Dan 9:27).
Similarly here in Revelation it is the symbolic length of time of severe trial and the apparent triumph of evil (verses 2–3; 12:6; 13:5). John’s contemporaries must also have been struck by the fact that the Roman siege of Jerusalem also lasted three and a half years, from AD 67–70. In the present chapter this length of time refers to the persecution of the Christian Church, of which Jerusalem’s temple was a type and foreshadowing.
Within the Christian Church, however, we find an inner court, as it were, a deep interior dimension that the forces of evil cannot trample. … This is the inner court of which John is told to take the measure (cf. Ez 40:1–4; Zech 2:1–2), a measuring that he will narrate later (21:15–17).
The literary background of John’s vision of the two witnesses is Zechariah 4:1–3, 11–14, where the prophet has in mind the anointed ruler Zerubbabel and the anointed priest Jeshua, the two men who preserved the worship in God’s house. Those two figures represented royalty (Zerubbabel was a descendent of David) and priesthood (Jeshua was a descendent of Aaron), which are two essential aspects of the life in Christ (cf. Rev 1:6; 5:10).
“Two” witnesses are required, of course, this being the minimum number required in order “to make the case” (Deut 19:15). But the two witnesses in this chapter of Revelation are the heirs, not only to Zerubbabel and Jeshua, but also to Moses and Elijah. It was the first of these who afflicted Egypt with plagues, and the second who closed up heaven for three and a half years (cf. Lk 4:25; Jas 5:17). This is John’s way of asserting that the Christian Church, in her royal priesthood, continues also the prophetic war against false gods. She will destroy God’s enemies by fire (verse 5), as did Moses (Num 16:35) and Elijah (2 Kgs 1:9–12).
When the monster from the abyss kills these two servants of God (verse 7), the forces of evil seem to have triumphed (verse 10), but they will be carried up to heaven, again like Moses and Elijah (2 Kgs 2:11), because the victorious Lamb has the final word….
In the hymn that follows the seventh trumpet (verses 17–18), we should especially observe that God’s wrath is salvific, a matter at which believers will rejoice, because God’s reign is established by his wrath. God is not a neutral observer of history. … The wrath of God is the last thing in the world that Christians should be afraid of, for the wrath of God is on their side (Mt 23:35–36).
As in the ancient procession around Jericho, the Ark of the Covenant appears after the seventh trumpet (verse 19).