Today's passage is one of the places in the Bible that speaks of an obvious lack of human freedom. For the sake of an oath made before his nobles, a drunken king is ready to override both his fears and the remnants of his conscience.

The evangelists' attitude toward Herod Antipas is interesting. They seem reluctant to condemn him and regard him with a certain indulgence. Indeed, the king appears before us as a man with very little freedom: he arrests John not on his own initiative, but because John denounces his unlawful marriage; he listens to John in prison while trying to resist the intrigues of the queen, who is seeking the prophet's execution. And now he “has to” behead him, once again against his own will.

Need we say that a person commits the greatest evil when deprived of freedom, under the power of suggestion, pressure, and circumstances that they cannot, or do not want to, resist and that draw them into sin and death? Once we understand this, we begin to value anew the freedom Christ gives: the freedom to resist circumstances and human and demonic pressure; as one priest put it, the freedom “to disobey evil.”

When you prayerfully reflect on the image of John the Baptist, as though focusing your gaze on his icon, you understand that he is some entirely special person. After all, the Gospel contains many remarkable people, kind and sincerely loving the Lord... But in John there is something that seems to separate him from everyone, to set him a little aside. “Among those born of women there has not arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist...” (Matt. 11:11) — perhaps precisely here lies the reason for this feeling of inaccessibility, of remoteness.

And yet he was only a human being. There is one other human being before whom we have a similar feeling of inaccessibility: Mary. She is simply a woman, and at the same time She is far greater than any woman, for She carried in Her womb the Son of God Himself. This is what unites these two people, apart from blood kinship. But not only this: both became those through whom the birth of Christ was accomplished, in the flesh through Mary, and in the Spirit through John. And both at the same time felt themselves to be humble, unworthy witnesses of the miracle taking place before their eyes.

This is probably why these three icons stand at the center of the Deesis row: Mary, the Savior, and John. And the words of the prayer become somehow especially understandable: “As by natural kinship and by prayerful concord you are one, Mother of the King of all and divine Forerunner, offer together a supplication for the servant who has greatly angered the All-merciful One, that He may show mercy and save, bowing to your intercessions, and change me from my fiery kinship.”

Christ gathers enormous crowds of people and feeds them with bread. There is enough bread for everyone, and each of the apostles even manages to gather a whole basket of leftovers. And this is the same Christ who said that a person lives "not by bread alone" and refused to engage in social reforms!

To understand this event, it is necessary to turn to the biblical parallels for such a mass feeding of people: the manna that God gave Israel in the wilderness. And also to the prophecies that in the triumph of God's Kingdom people will be filled with bread. For the first readers and hearers of the Gospel, the allusion to these sacred texts meant that God's Kingdom was already being realized in Jesus; in Him God had already come to people.

This story was undoubtedly associated for them with their own experience of divine life, into which they entered through the breaking of the bread: thanksgiving, blessing, breaking, distribution of bread, and gathering of leftovers were all actions involved in the celebration of the Eucharistic meal. In that meal, as in this story, the basic human concepts - bread, life, God - are forever connected with the person of Jesus.