Between the Magazine and the Readers¹

Among the questions that are answered in the Friday meeting at the Cathedral, and which are sent to the magazine.

Question
Is the fire by which the wicked will be punished a burning fire, or is it the painful torment of conscience because they did not attain bliss and did not enjoy Christ like the righteous?

Answer
Since human deeds involve both body and soul, the whole human being—body and soul—is rewarded for them. He who goes to bliss, his body and his soul enjoy bliss. And he who goes to the lake burning with fire and brimstone, his body and his soul are tormented.

The torment of conscience is a torment of the soul only, and not of the body with it. This would mean that the body was not punished, although it was the greater agent in sin in most cases.

Is the adulterer, for example, who defiled his body with the pleasure of sin, not to have his body punished? And is the careless person who neglected fasting, and greedily indulged in food and drink, wine and stimulants, also not to have his body punished? And is the one who struck, and who killed, and who insulted, and who walked in the various lusts of the body, also to have his body remain far from torment?!

What then is the punishment of the body? And is it the torment of fire? And weeping and gnashing of teeth?

The Scripture mentioned the punishment of fire: the unquenchable fire, the eternal fire, the lake burning with fire and brimstone. So what is this fire?

The first truth that you should know is that the body will be tormented by fire, and the second truth is that this fire does not annihilate the body; rather, it will remain despite being burned by it. It will be tormented by it, but not annihilated.

Therefore, the sinful body must be tormented, and the punishment cannot be limited to the soul only, such as the torment of conscience, or the pain of being far from Christ, or the pain of deprivation from the Kingdom, and separation from the assembly of the holy angels, or the pains of the soul in its contempt for itself and its imagining of its falls, and remembering the ugliness of the sin it committed.

No, for all these are torments of the soul only, and the body must share with it in the punishment. For we are not spirits only, and our bodies will rise on the Day of Judgment to receive their recompense.

Question
What does it mean to receive the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost?

(Did not the Lord Christ breathe on the faces of His disciples saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit”?) And that was before the Ascension and before the coming of the Holy Spirit. So what does it mean that they received the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, when they had received Him previously?

Answer
When the Lord Christ breathed on the faces of His disciples, He gave them at that time the grace of the priesthood, or the Sacrament of the Priesthood. Therefore He said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:22–23).

At that time He gave them the Sacrament of the Priesthood, in which the Holy Spirit works for the absolution and binding of sins. But the Sacrament of the Holy Chrism, that is, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, He granted to them on the Day of Pentecost. He gave them the anointing which we receive in the Sacrament of the Myron. And people used to receive it in the days of the apostles by the laying on of the apostles’ hands upon them.

Question
Some have said that the Psalm “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,” cannot have been written by David, because David did not sit by the rivers of Babylon. This occurred in the days of the Babylonian captivity, hundreds of years after David… And it is noted that it says “we sat” in the past tense, that is, something that had already happened…

Answer
As a basic principle, we tell you that David did not write all the Psalms; rather, they were attributed to him because he wrote most of them. Nevertheless, even if David had written this Psalm, there is nothing to prevent that…

Perhaps he wrote it in the spirit of prophecy, by the inspiration of the prophet who sees the future as though it were occurring or had occurred. And the past tense does not contradict prophecy at all.

For the Psalm that prophesied about the crucifixion of Christ spoke in the past tense. David said in it, “For dogs have surrounded Me; the congregation of the wicked has enclosed Me. They pierced My hands and My feet. I can count all My bones; they look and stare at Me” (Psalm 22:16–17). And it is clear that David’s hands and feet were not pierced. But he said that in the spirit of prophecy about Christ, and he said it in the past tense about things that would happen in the future, to someone else and not to himself…

Comment:
We mentioned in the previous issue that fish is not eaten on Wednesdays and Fridays because the rite of Wednesday and Friday in fasting is the rite of the Holy Forty. We received a comment from Dr. Youssef Mansour, Professor of Practical Liturgics at the Theological Seminary, in which he said, “Please clarify that what is meant is the fasting rite, not the rite of performing the prayers.” And he mentioned differences in the rite between the church’s liturgical prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays and its prayers in the Holy Forty.

We of course mean only the similarity in the fasting rite in terms of not eating fish, and not the similarity in the prayers. For example, the hymns of Wednesday and Friday are not chanted in the manner of Great Lent… And I thank Dr. Youssef Mansour for his remark.

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¹ An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III – Al-Keraza Magazine – Fifth Year – Issue Eleven – 14-12-1974.

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