11Does a spring send out from the same opening fresh and bitter water?
12Can a fig tree, my brothers, yield olives, or a vine figs? Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh water.
13Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by his good conduct that his deeds are done in gentleness of wisdom.
14But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart, don’t boast and don’t lie against the truth.
15This wisdom is not that which comes down from above, but is earthly, sensual, and demonic.
16For where jealousy and selfish ambition are, there is confusion and every evil deed.
17But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceful, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.
18Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.
1Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don’t they come from your pleasures that war in your members?
2You lust, and don’t have. You murder and covet, and can’t obtain. You fight and make war. You don’t have, because you don’t ask.
3You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
4You adulterers and adulteresses, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
5Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who lives in us yearns jealously”?
6But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
Mark 11.22-26 (Gospel)
22Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God.
23For most certainly I tell you, whoever may tell this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and doesn’t doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is happening, he shall have whatever he says.
24Therefore I tell you, all things whatever you pray and ask for, believe that you have received them, and you shall have them.
25Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father, who is in heaven, may also forgive you your transgressions.
26But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your transgressions.”
Commemorations
Ven. Xenophon and Mary
Xenophon was a wealthy senator in Constantinople during the reign of Justinian. He and his wife Mary had two sons, Arcadius and John, to whom they gave every advantage of education. When they were of age, Xenophon sent them both to study law in Berytus (Beirut). But the ship on which they set out was wrecked in a storm, and the two brothers were cast ashore, alive but separated, neither knowing whether the other had survived.
Both brothers gave thanks to God for their salvation and, newly conscious of the vanity of earthly things, both became monks: John in Tyre and Arcadius in Jerusalem. Two years later, having heard no news from his sons, Xenophon made inquiries and found that they had never arrived at Beirut, and that they had seemingly perished in a shipwreck. Giving thanks to God, who gives and takes away, both Xenophon and his wife Mary put on coarse garments and went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In Jerusalem, they met the spiritual father of Arcadius, who told them that both their sons were alive and that they would soon see them.
By God’s providence, John and Arcadius met one another at Golgotha and, joyfully reunited, spent some time serving Arcadius’ holy Elder. Two days later Xenophon and Mary, visiting the Elder, spent time with their two sons but did not recognize them until the Elder revealed their identity. The parents wept for joy and decided immediately to take up the monastic life themselves. Giving away their considerable wealth, the two entered monasteries in the Holy Land. Both parents and sons went far in the life of prayer, being granted the power to work miracles and foreknow future events.
St Ammonas of Egypt, disciple of St Anthony the Great (350)
“Saint Ammonas was a disciple of Saint Antony the Great and became his successor at the head of the hermits of the outer mountain of Pispir, after having spent fourteen years at Scetis in ceaseless prayer to the Lord to be granted victory over anger. He was afterwards consecrated bishop, probably by Saint Athanasius the Great. He possessed impassibility to the extent of being as though ignorant of the existence of evil, and incapable of passing judgment on anyone.
“One day some people came to ask him to settle a difference among them. The Saint responded by pretending to be insane, and answered a woman who treated him as a madman: ‘You don’t realize how much trouble I’ve given myself in the desert to acquire this madness and I have lost it today because of you!’ On another occasion when he was taken to visit a brother with a bad reputation, he sat on the barrel where [the erring brother’s] concubine was hiding while his accusers searched his cell in vain. Then, taking his leave of the unfortunate man, he simply said: ‘Brother, have a care for yourself!’
“When he was asked which deeds of ascesis are most pleasing to God, he replied: ‘Just sit in your cell and eat a little every day, always keeping the prayer of the Publican in your heart (Luke 18:13), and you can be saved.’ He also said that the fear of God begets moans and tears and these cause joy to arise in the soul, filling it with divine strength to do what is pleasing to God, and that this power from on high establishes us in the company of the Angels. Raised thus from height to height as we humbly pray to be delivered from sin, we shall (he said) receive as if of itself, revelation of the mysteries of God.” (Synaxarion)
Our Holy Mother Paula of Rome (404)
She was born in 347 to a noble family in Rome, and at age sixteen married Toxotius, a prominent nobleman. Though her husband was a pagan, he was devoted to her and gave her freedom to keep a Christian home and rear her children as Christians. They were blessed with five children. When she was thirty-two her husband died suddenly, and Paula resolved to turn her large house in Rome into a monastery. Later she traveled to the Holy Land with her spiritual father St Jerome (June 15). In Bethlehem she established two monasteries, one for women (where she dwelt) and one for St Jerome and his companions. Every day the nuns chanted the entire Psalter, which they were required to learn by heart. Paula was exceptionally austere in her fasting and lavish in her almsgiving, often giving away to the poor even the goods needed by her community for subsistence. She aided her spiritual father and brother Jerome in his controversies with Origen’s followers: St Jerome himself was hot-tempered, and St Paula often exhorted him to confront his enemies with patience and humility.
When she was fifty-six years old, she felt her death approaching, and heard Christ say to her ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away; for lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone’ (Song of Songs 2:10-11). To this she replied ‘The time of harvest has come. I shall truly see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living,’ and gave up her soul joyfully. Her funeral was attended by throngs of monks, nuns and poor people, all of whom revered her as their mother and benefactress.