The disciples go up after Jesus, become witnesses of His transfiguration, see His glory, and hear the Father's word about the Son. Three evangelists tell of this event, and all three connect it with Christ's words that some of His disciples will see the Kingdom of God come with power. If this really was a "taste of the Kingdom," then how does the disciples' experience differ from ours?

We, like them, try to follow Christ (sometimes successfully, sometimes not, just as they did); we believe in His glory, in His divinity; through His words in the Gospel we hear the voice of the Father... The only thing we lack is the experiential sensation, as vivid as the one that seized the disciples then in the radiance of unearthly light. But have we not been told: "...blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:29)? Do we not taste the Kingdom even before death, uniting ourselves by faith with its Source?

Once again we read that the Son of Man must suffer and be humiliated, and rise on the third day. The cycle of church readings is scarcely offering us precisely these passages now "by chance." The Lord Himself speaks of His Passion: "For this hour I came." The meaning and purpose of the Savior's birth in Bethlehem is not to make our life a little easier and more pleasant. He comes in order to share with us and destroy our death.

That is why the celebration of the Nativity has, since ancient times, had a number of features in the Eastern Church that bring it close to Pascha. In a certain sense, the whole life of Christ from the very beginning was the way of the Cross and Resurrection. And as we are moved and rejoice in Christ the Infant, we must not forget this.

Continuing the theme of charismatic high priesthood, the author of the epistle again turns to the figure of Melchizedek, who became a symbol of the Messiah as High Priest. This symbolism was quite traditional, rooted in the pre-exilic era, when the Yahwist messianic tradition was being formed under the influence of the preaching of the later prophets. It was in those days that Melchizedek of the ancient tradition became Melchizedek as a prototype of the Messiah. His name literally means "righteous ruler" or "ruler of righteousness" (historically this may have been not a name but a title, but in any case it later came to be perceived as a proper name), and the title ruler of Shalem (Salem), as Jerusalem was called in the most ancient period, was interpreted as "ruler of peace" (Hebrew shalem means "peace," including that gracious peace of God which, according to traditional messianic expectations, would descend on the people and the land on the day of the Messiah's coming).

It is no surprise that such a ruler-priest, who blessed Abraham himself, was seen as a prototype of the Messiah-High Priest, who in due time would bless the people in the same way, opening for them the way into the Kingdom (vv. 1-3). Speaking this way, the author of the epistle emphasizes that priesthood, as a spiritual reality and as a ministry, is not limited only to the specific form of Levitical priesthood that belonged to the Jewish people throughout their history. He does not deny the reality or effectiveness of the Levitical priesthood; he merely points to the fact that the possibility of priestly ministry in the world existed even before the birth of Moses and Aaron, with whose name the Yahwist tradition connects the beginning of the Levitical priesthood, and that Abraham himself, the forefather of the Jewish people, does not reject this priestly ministry (vv. 4-10). Just as the Kingdom exists from the beginning, so too the possibility of sanctifying creation, and above all the human person, exists from the beginning. And if this is so, then priestly ministry, without which such sanctification is impossible, must also exist in the world from the beginning. And just as the fullness of the Kingdom is not revealed to the fallen world all at once, neither is the whole fullness of priestly ministry revealed to it all at once, though at times it is partly disclosed to the chosen, just as the fullness of the Kingdom, hidden until its time, was sometimes partly disclosed to them.