Abstract
Khaled Anatolios is an academic theologian and a priest in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. His collection of sermons takes the reader through the liturgical year from the perspective of the Eastern, Byzantine tradition.
Feasts for the Kingdom is a refreshing opportunity for those from Western, post-Reformation Christian traditions to renew their acquaintance with the familiar cycle of the liturgical year, but with added, often unexpected, insights, hence the inclusion of some Feast Days that may be unfamiliar. There is a poetic lilt to be found in Anatolios’s writing style, and, within the genre of the homily, he serves up challenging theology disguised as light, encouraging spiritual snacks.
The Feast Days of the church calendar are times when Christians are encouraged to recall the life of Jesus and to enter into the joy, suffering and whole experience of each episode in turn. Anatolios uses the Feast Day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the celebration of the finding of the relics of the true cross by St Helena, to examine St Paul’s words: ‘May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ The Feast of the Entering of the Mother of God into the Temple, which celebrates a non-biblical story from the childhood of Mary, is taken as an opportunity to explore our owns preparedness for the coming of Christ. And the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, another non-biblical event, is an opportunity to preach on the subject of holding on to faith in the face of seeming difficulties.
The book is a reminder of how curiously different the Byzantine tradition is from that of the West, and yet at the same time how similar the message. The Sunday before Christmas is when, in Anatolios’s tradition, the Gospel reading is the list of names that forms the genealogy of Christ. Not, he notes, a subject in the top ten of preachers’ texts. It is a reminder that Mary was just the last link in a chain that stretches back to the beginning of the human race and that we are all, in some way, complicit in God becoming a human child. The eternal word becoming flesh in Jesus 2,000 years ago was the first stage in God’s plan – that is, to become flesh in the whole human race as we all become members of his body.
Anatolios is a storyteller with the gift of surprise. He recounts how he greeted an ageing and retired archbishop with the traditional greeting ‘Christ is Risen!’, to which the old man replied ‘Are you sure?’ Taken aback, and thinking he had been misheard, the younger priest repeated ‘Christ is Risen!’ Only to receive the same response. It was a challenge. ‘Either fully own and fully commit to this strange thing you are saying or don’t say it at all. Make sure you really mean it’ (p. 180).
By adding Eastern Byzantine insights, Anatolios enables the Western reader to see that which is familiar through a new set of colour filters.