On February 19, the holy Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of a man named Ravoulas. Now, Ravoulas was a monk who was born in Syria and eventually ended up in Phoenicia. From an early time he decided that he wanted to be not unlike Saints Elias and John the Baptist in going into the middle of a mountain and building a monastery. This wasn’t as easy as one might think, even though it was rather isolated, because at that particular time, around 480, it was a very difficult place to be, because of the immense number of pagans that populated the area. In so doing, he was probably not unlike Paul and Barnabas, who found themselves in the midst of a highly Jewish area and yet had to contradict and exhort and try to explain the Christian faith to those people.

Ravoulas did the same thing, and gradually more and more people came to him. He was not hesitant at all to condemn some of the more hideous pagan practices that he found in the area, yet at the same time when he saw things that were good and true among these people, he was very exhortative to them and tried to explain to them the things that they were doing good and that were indeed coming from the one, true God, Jesus Christ.

After a period of time, the pagans dissipated because they had all converted thanks to the efforts of Ravoulas. It is said that he was very compassionate, very wise, extremely slow to anger, and was extremely knowledgeable about the holy Scriptures, both the Old and the New Testaments. Whenever he encountered some kind of demonic temptation, he was quick to pull a verse out of Scripture that would countermand what was being said to him in temptation. Ravoulas loved the Scriptures and felt that they were the foundation of the Christian faith, which indeed they are, and he did not hesitate at any time to use them in the battle against the paganism that he found himself in the midst of.

After a while, a good long while, almost 80 years of age, Ravoulas sensed that his time was coming to a close, and after a short, brief illness, he reposed in the Lord, with all of his works behind him and all of his testimony to Christ in terms of the number of people that he was able to convert, and died beloved among all of those people. So he reposed in peace even though his spiritual labors were arduous. It tells us a little something perhaps about how, as Orthodox Christians, our knowledge of the Scriptures should be far, far better than any of the people around us.

In this day and age, when so many pervert the Scriptures—maybe not intentionally; maybe simply because they are misguided, but yet the perversions still stand because the teachings are incorrect—Orthodoxy, which has the entire truth about our Lord Jesus Christ and about God the Father and about the Holy Spirit, is the only Church which really has a right to interpret the Scriptures, because we are the ones, through the Church, that gave them to the world. Because of this, like Ravoulas, we need to know them inside-out, and we need to understand what they mean, particularly in the context of the holy Fathers of the Church and what they have said.

This serves as perhaps a warning to us, because if we don’t know the Scriptures, if we don’t know our faith, then how can we convert anyone to the true faith of our Lord Jesus Christ? Ravoulas encountered a very difficult pagan situation, one that was filled with a lot of violence and a lot of disgusting practices, but because of his faith and his knowledge of God and his knowledge of the holy Scriptures, he was able to work miracles in his 80 years of life. Let’s take him as an example to all of us: to learn our faith, to study our faith, to understand the difficulties of Scripture in the context of what the entire patristic literature tells us, and go forth boldly, because since the Scriptures are ours, we have an even greater burden in being able to proclaim them with authority, with love, and with compassion, all given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.