JUSTIN POPOVIC

On June 14 (1), the Church honors the memory of St. Justin Popovich. Justin lived a long life, was born in 1894 and died in the Lord in 1979. He was a deeply educated man, a gifted writer, the author of many books on dogmatics and a collection of lives of saints. In 1948, Justin became the confessor of the convent in Celije, where he labored until the end of his days. In 2010, he was canonized by the Serbian Orthodox Church. According to the name of the monastery, in the liturgical calendar the saint is called St. Justin of Celije.

These words belong to St Justin. “If you have believed in the risen Lord Jesus Christ with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your thought, you have already conquered death, you have already entered into eternal life.” How can we understand his words? What does it mean to believe with all our heart?

After all, faith is not a property or an acquisition, but a gift from God. It is an unaccountable, sovereign, without beginning, that is, if translated literally from the original Greek, the anarchic Gift of God and the Father in Christ Jesus. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,” writes Paul (Eph. 2:8).

An extremely important property of the Orthodox Christian faith is such that only when transmitted, that is, communicated to others, believers and non-believers, it comes to life in the heart of the confessor himself and becomes his real property by the power of the Holy Spirit. Faith is inextricably linked to mission. Perhaps the best example of this is the Easter exclamation “Christ is Risen,” when the conviction of faith in the Resurrection of Christ comes to life in the heart, transmitted to those near and far, and to everyone. Such a person of Easter greeting was Saint Justin.