8th Sunday After Pentecost-- Remembering Ss. Vladimir and Olga

THE LORD FEEDS US THROUGH THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

Brothers and sisters in Christ—

     Today, in the Gospel, the Lord Jesus feeds the great multitude in a miraculous and unexpected way.  It is time for us to reflect that, in the very same way, He feeds us in very miraculous, very unexpected and beautiful ways, to satisfy our hunger and thirst for salvation, for the life of God and the glory of His presence.  Again and again, over the long history of the Church, the Lord has told us, His disciples, the same simple message concerning the great spiritual hunger and desperation of this world.  He says to us repeatedly, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” Then, when the task seems so very far beyond our power, the Lord Himself, by His Divine Power, takes it upon Himself to feed the people through us. 

     One of the way that the Lord feeds this desperate world, so hunger for Divine Life, is through the lives of the saints.  He raises up certain people in every age, to whom He gives the ability to feed His people with inspiration and example.  Today we turn our eyes to the ones, whom our Church calls “the Equals to the Apostles,” because they brought their whole nation with them to the Christian Faith: Great Prince Volodymyr and his grandmother, the Princess Olha. 

     Particularly, today, we should focus on Saint Olha, just as it is appropriate to examine the root before we turn our attention to the lofty heights of the full-grown tree.  St. Olha is a good example to us, because she is so much like ourselves.  In the history of the life of St. Olha, we see a remarkable change from before she came to Christ to the period after her Baptism. She, who was so well known for cruelty, deception and vengeance, became known instead for gentleness, sincere charity and wisdom.

     St. Olha was born at Pskov, but at a young age she was wedded to Prince Ihor of Kyiv, who had succeeded his father Prince Oleh.  Some time later, she bore the prince a son, whom he named Sviatoslav.

     Prince Ihor was anxiously seeking to unite the Rusyn lands by extending the authority of the Kyivan Prince into the territory of all the neighbouring principalities.  As a result of this policy, Prince Ihor was assassinated by his rivals from the region of Drevlyani, when his son, Sviatoslav, was only three years old.  After Ihor’s death, Olha became the regent for her infant son.  Gathering her armies together, she marched against Drevlyani with a terrible vengeance.  At the siege of Yaroslavl, she pelted the city with rotten wheat, and then released flocks of pigeons, which had burning firebrands hanging from their legs.  The thatch roofs of the city were set on fire, and many burned and choked to death in the ensuing conflagration of flame and smoke. 

     Rounding up all the leaders of the plot that had killed her husband, her justice was terrible.  She brought them to Kyiv, bound with ropes.  In the freezing cold, she made them lie next to one another on the ground.  Then, she slowly scalded them to death with boiling water. 

     Once her vengeance was complete, she turned her attention to completing her deceased husband’s policies, by extending and strengthening Kyivan authority over all the surrounding regions.  She was the first to divide her territories into oblasti, which were ruled by governors responsible to her in Kyiv, thus ignoring and circumventing the authority of the local rulers.

     In this way, she handed over a very well organized state to her son, Sviatoslav, on his sixteenth birthday. Sviatoslav made her his ambassador to the Roman Empire, and sent her to Constantinople to negotiate a treaty of peace.  Olha, at this point, was already familiar with Christianity.  When she left Kyiv at the head of the embassy to Constantinople, she already intended to become a Christian there.

     Olha was baptized in Constantinople in 954 by Theophylact, the Patriarch of Constantinople.  The Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus was her godfather. Her godmother was the Empress Helen, who would also become, after the passage of many years, the grandmother of St. Volodymyr’s wife, Princess Anna of Byzantium.  St. Olha’s lady in waiting and future daughter-in-law, Malusha, was baptized with her.  Some years later, after her wedding to Prince Sviatoslav, Malusha bore Volodymyr.

     After Olha’s return to Kyiv from the embassy to Constantinople, she became known for her gentleness, meekness and wisdom.  At every opportunity, she promoted the Christian faith and the life of prayer.  She continuously urged her son, Sviatoslav, to embrace Christianity, but he did not acquiesce.  She turned her attention to building up the Church in Rus’.  She tried many, many times to obtain bishops for Kyiv and the surrounding cities, but her entreaties were not heeded, either by the Church in Constantinople, or by the Pope of Rome.

     As a mature Christian, her deepest inspiration came from the passage from the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew, in which the Lord Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Whoever humbles himself like a child, he is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.” She strove to practice this kind of meekness and humility everyday.  Because of her humility and her incessant prayers, her innocence was restored to her.  Despite her many sins, she was given the gift of incorruption after her death. When she died in 969, she was interred, according to her instructions, in the Church of St. Nicholas Over Askold’s Grave, but her grandson, St. Volodymyr, ordered for her remains to be moved to the Church of the Most Holy Mother of God, where they lay in a special sarcophagus, through which the people could peer, and see her body in the same condition as when she was alive.

     The lives of the saints are our nourishment.  Is not the life of St. Olha our nourishment? Are we not sustained in our faith, when we can see that someone, whose sins were so great, was, nevertheless, glorified and purified with her original innocence restored? We can have that too.  No matter how great our sins, an evil and angry heart can become renewed, like the heart of a little child.  St. Olha is praying that this may be so, for all of us.