On 26 February 2018, Metropolitan Vikenty of Tashkent and Uzbekistan, head of the Central Asian Metropolitan District, began his archpastoral visit to the parishes of the Samarkand Deanery. On this day His Eminence celebrated the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, Vespers and Matins at the Cathedral of St. Alexius, Metropolitan of Moscow. His Eminence was assisted by the clergy of the Samarkand Deanery.
After the service, Metropolitan Vikenty addressed the worshippers with an edifying archpastoral word:
"Dear brothers and sisters, we are celebrating the memory of a great teacher of the Church of the Slavic peoples, St. Cyril, Equal to the Apostles, Teacher of the Slavs. He created an alphabet for the Church Slavonic language and translated the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament and the liturgical books. This happened even before the Baptism of Rus', when the Slavs, the Russian Slavs, were not yet Orthodox. One may say that the Lord was preparing us Slavs to receive Christianity. It is very important that we received everything ready for our spiritual growth and truly took in pure food.
The first book a Russian person read was the Gospel, and there was nothing else. That is, he began to be taught and instructed precisely by the words of Christ, and so he received these holy words into his heart and became such that the Russian people came to be called a God-bearing people, bearing God in their hearts. That is what our ancestors were called, because from early childhood they were "nourished" by Holy Scripture and lived by Holy Scripture thanks to such teaching.
The life of an Orthodox Christian in the ancient times of the Russian Orthodox Church was a life wholly given over to the Gospel; they lived by the Gospel. Now, unfortunately, we know the Gospel but do not fulfil all of it; we are divided within ourselves, and on the one hand we know how we ought to act, yet we ourselves do otherwise. But they did as they ought, according to the Gospel, and so they were called God-bearers, bearing God in their hearts.
Today we heard the Gospel reading in honour of this saint, Cyril, Equal to the Apostles, Teacher of the Slavs. It contained the parable that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a field in which a great treasure was hidden. And a man, having found this treasure, went and sold all that he had and bought that field in order to obtain the treasure. What does this mean? It means that a person, in acquiring faith in Christ, acquires the understanding of and faith in the existence of a great treasure, the Kingdom of Heaven, eternal life. And he leaves everything, is attached to nothing earthly, and lives only for this Kingdom of Heaven. He lives by the Gospel, and not as one cut off from this life, as we imagine when a person goes off into the desert. No, he lives this life, on this earth, among his family, but he works and labours for the sake of the Kingdom of Christ, because he has found this faith. We have this faith, but we do not live for the faith in this life. That is our trouble. But when we have found Christ in our hearts, we need nothing else; our soul has cleaved to Him and nothing hinders us. When we have a longing for and love of Christ, as for a precious pearl, then of course nothing will block the way to Christ."
