The Presentation to the Temple of the Lord - celebration of man's sacrificial gift offered to God and its receiving back as a divine gift
On the occasion of the feast of the Presentation to the Temple of the Lord, HG Bishop Ioan Casian was present in the midst of the faithful of the Holy Three Hierarchs and St. Dumitru Parish in Toronto. On Saturday evening, the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick was celebrated where, along with the hierarch, participated Fr. Viorel Țencaliuc - dean, Fr. Iulian Stoica, Fr. Emanuel Ionuț Tencanliuc, Fr. Mihai Cristea and Fr. Vasile Aileni.
On Sunday, at the end of the Divine Liturgy, in the sermon, the hierarch emphasized the humility with which Christ the Son of God manifested it through His submission to the presentation of the Temple.
“The Savior Jesus Christ is brought according to the Old Testament ordinance to be consacrated like any first born in every family. Due to the sacrifice brought to the Temple on this occasion, the baby was redeemed. Symbolically, the child consecrated to God was received back as the gift of God returned to man. By this sacrificial gesture of bestowal and receiving, man is reminded of God's first creation in Paradise and the fact that he is the image and likeness of the Creator. The human person recovers in a spiritual way the divine filiation. The person is no longer just a son or a daughter resulting from a purely human, horizontal and immanent desire of an earthly family. The human person becomes the son or daughter of God as in the first creation. The limits of the immanent human condition are exceeded by the feeling of belonging to God, to spiritual world. Man is resettled in the dynamics of growth not by a simple human, cultural, philosophical or material tradition but by the word of God which gives it depth, authenticity and verticality.
Christ did not need to be brought to be presented to God because He Himself was of a divine nature and the Son of God. Christ humbles Himself by pointing in the same way that the Old Testament tradition was inspired by God. If in the Old Testament the presentation to the Temple remained a symbolic gesture, in the New Testament it acquires inner thread power through the incarnation of Christ. It becomes a gesture that expresses exactly the quality of the son or daughter of God of every human person.”
The responses to the Divine Liturgy were provided by the psaltis Stefanos Athenagoras and the parish choir. The celebration ended with a brotherly agape prepared by the committee of the ladies of the parish.
