Night Office - A Word in Season
WEDNESDAY
Year II
First
Reading 2 Timothy 1:1-18
Second
Reading
From a treatise of
John of Apamea
(Premier traite, IX, 104-105: se 311,137-13$)
John of Apamea
(Premier traite, IX, 104-105: se 311,137-13$)
Our
hope, our resurrection, and our true life
This mystery of the glorious economy of Christ, who revealed
himself and appeared in our world at the end of time, was foreseen, prepared,
and hidden before the creation of this world, in the knowledge of God the
Father. As the man of God, Paul, says: He chose us in him before the
creation of the world. So before the
heavens were separated and the firmament was spread out, before the earth
appeared and the whole visible world was organized, by his foresight he
predestined us, feeble and inferior beings, chose, renewed, sanctified, and
formed us in the image of his Son. And this, so that after we had lost and
forgotten our greatness, our dignity, our splendour and the glory we received
at our creation, thanks to Christ we might be renewed, made perfect, and to the
full receive life, the richness and vision of the mysteries of God in
his holy world. In his second Letter to Timothy, speaking of our call and our
intimacy with God, Paul declares that it is not because of our works, our
justice, or our virtue that we are each given glorious hope, but by the
grace of God.
He has saved us and called us to a holy life, not because of our
works, but in accordance with his own will and his grace, given to us before
all time in Christ Jesus, and now revealed through the appearance of our Saviour
Jesus Christ. So he has shown us that even before the action of air on the
variations of temperature was known, before the sky was adorned with its
lights, before the proportions of day and night were known, before the seasons
were distinguished in the composition of the world, and before we ourselves
received the stamp and image of a body and became visible in a bodily form, he
prepared, disposed, called, and sanctified our living and reasonable world for
the happiness, splendour, and glory of his glorious kingdom. With this richness
and perfect life he raised our creation to be near him in glory, even before
the creation of this world of ours. We, for our part, because of the error which
held sway over us, were unable to grasp the degree of greatness which we had
received at our creation. It was therefore essential for him who is our
greatness and our kingdom, our life and our truth, to reveal himself, so that
what had been given to us before the beginning of the world, in the foresight
of God the Father, might be revealed to us by Jesus Christ, imaging it for us
in himself from beginning to end, namely, from birth to death.
As he clearly images what has happened to our soul and our true
life because of error, we must learn from seeing his own humiliation for us to
what depths we had fallen from the true height.
If he was crucified for us, it was so that we might learn the
extent to which we are prisoners of the corrupting passions and are immersed in
the darkness of error. And more than that, by raising the dead in the glory of
his Father, he wishes to reveal to us our hope, our resurrection, and our
true life.
NOTE:
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| apamea-cc-mdziedzic |
John the Solitary
There
is a significant number of works on spirituality, variously attributed in the
manuscripts to John the Solitary, John of Apamea, or (incorrectly) John of
Lycopolis (or Thebes, died ca. 394). It seems likely that John the Solitary and
John of Apamea are two names for the same person, who seems to have lived in
the first half of the 5th century. He is not the same person as the John the
Egyptian condemned by Philoxenus, or a John of Apamea condemned by a Syrian
synod in 786-7.
John
must have been educated in both Greek and Syriac, and may have had some
training in medicine.
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