Today, the Orthodox Christians celebrate the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee. It is an important preparatory Sunday before Great Lent, which reminds us that everyone who proudly exalts himself will be lowered, and everyone who humbly lowers himself will be exalted.

The Lord pays attention not to earthly ranks or status. Not to orders, titles, merits, or political weight. What is important for Him is the sincerity of prayer and repentance — that which is kept in the hidden depth of the heart of man. And that is why the Publican, despised by everybody but sincere in his prayer, had more chances to be justified and enter the Kingdom of Heaven than the seemingly decent and serious but too self-confident Pharisee.
It is a pity that most politicians in the current leadership of Ukraine, while in fact being publicans, or rather plunderers, behave like that Pharisee: losing a sense of reality and manifesting their pride, they consider themselves to be all-powerful.

The vanity and pride of a Pharisee, unfortunately, contribute to the spiritual blindness of soul and lead to a spiritual fall, and condemning one's neighbour nullifies all good works. What to say of those who, having put on too large a crown, having taken an undue burden, have devastated, plundered, sold out, destroyed a most rich and beautiful country under the guise of patriotic slogans? Who have brought grief to millions of people by their short-sided and illegal actions, repressions, and intrigues. What is going on in our country today is unlikely to have any justification whatsoever for the present and future generations. And only one thing is left: to ask God for mercy and believe that He will find these prayers and this repentance sincere. But the current rulers of Ukraine seem to have chosen another path — the one on which their forerunners, the Bolsheviks, already walked and disappeared into the abyss of non-being.

Providentially, it is today that the Holy Orthodox Church honours all the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church of the XX century, who suffered in the years of godless persecution. This day is set for the closest Sunday to the commemoration day of the Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev, who was killed by the revolutionaries near the walls of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra in 1918. And the feast itself is dedicated to those who, like the first Christians, were afraid of neither sufferings nor death and retained faithfulness to God to the end.

There were countless Orthodox people among those murdered in the years of the persecution: laypeople, monastics, priests, and hierarchs, whose only "guilt" was their faithfulness to God. We know only a small part of them — according to some data, more than one hundred thousand priests alone were shot in the years of the repression. The purpose of the Bolsheviks of the early XX century was to turn the people into an obedient biomass, and they needed their own quasi-religion as a tool for that. The Soviet Country energetically created her own pocket Renovationist Church for it — the so-called "Living Church" — while justifying the persecution of Christians by high goals and wonderful ideals. A "bright future" instead of the Kingdom of Heaven, Marx instead of Jesus Christ, the hammer and sickle instead of the Cross, the May Day rally instead of the Paschal Cross Procession. Millions of the Orthodox were destroyed for the sake of these ideas.

History has made a full circle. Today, a century later, "new Bolsheviks" led by Yermak and Zelenskyy repeat the methods of their "grandfathers" with striking exactness. They receive the torch from Poroshenko in supporting new renovationists and open persecutions of the true Church, unprecedented in recent history. It is a pity that, like a hundred years ago, these ideas have been actively supported by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Like then, the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church is slandered and defamed, subjected to repressions and armed robberies. The clergy and the laity have to live in an atmosphere of constant threats, unlawful searches, arrests, and seizures of churches and property. The list of offences can be continued for very long, but one thing is clear: this path leads to a catastrophe. I am sure that all these and many other facts will become an object of unbiased judicial considerations in short time.

And still, by the grace of God, like a hundred years ago, only few people faltered, feared, and turned away from the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Like in the times of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the XX century, it has turned out that there are a lot of brothers and sisters, fathers and hierarchs among us who stand firm in the faith and fearlessly profess the Truth. Today, we all need to keep UNITY so that we ourselves may sustain and help our fainthearted neighbours to overcome the fear of the theomachist system. The fear of God casts away any fear of what is sinful — empty and temporary.

Turning to the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors today, we ask them for intercession, lest we should lose the capability to discern good and evil, truth and lie and to discern the path to salvation from a road to death.

Through the prayers of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors, may the Lord strengthen our faith, protect our Church and the Orthodox people, and strengthen and save us in all the present and future trials!