On the Sunday falling between July 13 and 19, the Church commemorates the Holy Fathers of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, assembled at Chalcedon in the year 451. In 2026, this commemoration falls on July 19, the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost. Through the meeting of these two observances, the order of readings at the Divine Liturgy is enriched: the Epistle of the Sunday (Romans 15:1-7) and that of the Holy Fathers (Titus 3:8-15) are read, followed by the Gospel of the Sunday, which recounts the healing of two blind men and a mute man at Capernaum (Matthew 9:27-35), and the Gospel of the Fathers — in the Romanian calendar, the Lord’s High-Priestly Prayer (John 17:1-13), and in Greek practice, the word about the light of the world from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14-19). Whichever order is followed, the readings of this Sunday are woven into a single thread: Christ opens the eyes of those who believe, looses the tongue of those who cannot speak, and preserves through the Fathers of the Church the faith He entrusted to His disciples whole and undiminished.
This is the second commentary in our category. In the first, How We Read Holy Scripture in the Orthodox Church, we walked the road to Emmaus and set out the five steps of reading within the Church: we listen to the text, seek its context, read it in the light of Christ, hear it within the Church, and bring it into life. Here, for the first time, we put them to work upon the readings of a Sunday.
The Fathers of Chalcedon and the Cause of Their Assembly
The Fourth Ecumenical Council was held at Chalcedon, near Constantinople, in the autumn of 451 under the Emperor Marcian and gathered, according to the number preserved by tradition, six hundred and thirty Fathers. Its occasion was a new error concerning the mystery of Christ. The archimandrite Eutyches of Constantinople taught that after the Incarnation only one nature remained in Christ, as though His humanity had been swallowed up by His divinity and our human nature no longer endured in Him fully and truly. The local council of Constantinople, under Patriarch Flavian, rebuked and condemned him in 448. A year later, however, at Ephesus, an assembly dominated by the violence of Dioscorus, Patriarch of Alexandria, vindicated Eutyches and persecuted the defenders of right belief — the gathering the Church has ever since called the “Robber Council.”
At Chalcedon, the Fathers corrected the injustice and confessed that our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, consubstantial with the Father according to His divinity and consubstantial with us according to His humanity, known in two natures united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” in one person and one hypostasis, as the Council’s dogmatic definition declares. The four words guard the mystery on both sides: the first two forbid the mingling of the natures into which Eutyches had fallen; the other two forbid their separation, into which Nestorius had fallen and for which he had been condemned earlier at the Third Ecumenical Council.
These words guard not an arrangement of terms, but the very salvation of man. If the Lord’s humanity had dissolved into His divinity, Christ would no longer be consubstantial with us, and our nature would have remained untouched by His healing — for whatever the Son had not taken upon Himself from man would have remained unhealed. And if there were two in Christ, one who suffers and another who saves, then it would no longer be one and the same Son of God who is born, suffers, dies, and rises for us. Only by being true God and true man does Christ unite man with God in Himself — and the boundary set at Chalcedon keeps this confession whole to this day.
The Epistle of the Holy Fathers: The Right Measure of Zeal (Titus 3:8-15)
The Epistle appointed for the Fathers is the conclusion of the Epistle to Titus. Saint Paul asks his disciple to affirm the teaching he has received “constantly,” so that “those who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works” (Titus 3:8). Zeal for truth, therefore, is not separated from the doing of good: faith confessed is revealed in deeds that are “good and profitable to men.” Immediately, however, the Apostle sets a boundary: “Avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and useless” (Titus 3:9). Not every discussion of sacred things edifies. There is an inquiry that seeks the truth and submits to it, and there is a quarrel that feeds upon itself and gives birth only to division. Paul teaches Titus to distinguish between them.
The heart of the passage lies in the command concerning the one who has gone astray: “Reject a divisive man after the first and second admonition, knowing that such a person is warped and sinning, being self-condemned” (Titus 3:10-11). In the Apostle’s language, this word first names the divisive man who forms a party of his own and troubles the community. The Church then rightly understood it also of the one who breaks the unity of faith, because the deepest division is born from the distortion of faith. The command first requires patience — one admonition and then another, that is, a persistent call to correction — and only afterward separation, when the man continues to defend his error. This is the pastoral key by which the Councils also worked. Eutyches was summoned, heard, and rebuked; the judgment came only after he had hardened himself in his teaching. The words “self-condemned” also disclose the nature of anathema: before the whole Church it recognizes and seals the separation the man himself has chosen; it bars him from communion with the faithful so that the sickness may not pass to the healthy; and at the same time it remains a call to repentance, for the door of return is not closed while a man lives. This cutting is the work of a physician, not an outburst of anger.
The Epistle ends as it began, with good works: “Let our people also learn to maintain good works, to meet urgent needs, that they may not be unfruitful” (Titus 3:14). Right dogma and fruitful life uphold one another; where one is absent, the other also withers.
The Light of the World and the Jot of the Law (Matthew 5:14-19)
In Greek practice, the Gospel of the Fathers is taken from the Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). The word was spoken to the disciples, but the Church places it upon her lips whenever she celebrates the God-bearing Fathers, whom the troparion of these Sundays calls lights upon the earth, through whom we have all been guided to the true faith. A lamp is kindled from another flame: the disciples give light because they have received the light of Christ, and the Church’s confession stands in the sight of the world like the city upon the hill. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16) — the light is shown in deeds, while the glory does not stop at man but ascends to the Father.
There follows the word concerning the Law: “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). And then the measure: “One jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18). The Lord speaks here of the Old Law, which He fulfills in Himself; yet the image of the jot also illumines, by analogy, the history of dogma. In the Arian turmoil following the Council of Nicaea, a single letter separated “consubstantial” (homoousios) from “similar in essence” (homoiousios) — and in that one letter lay the separation between the confession of the Son’s full divinity and its obscuring. Whoever imagines that details carry no weight in matters of faith has understood neither the Lord’s word concerning jot and tittle nor the Fathers’ struggle for a single right word.
The final warning concerns teachers above all: “Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19). The error of one who teaches does not remain his alone: it multiplies in all who receive it from him. For this reason the Fathers added no new faith to the apostolic one; they stated it with a new precision required by the appearance of errors, sometimes placing new words — such as “consubstantial” — in the service of the ancient truth. For this they are called great in the kingdom of heaven: they did and taught what they had received.
The High-Priestly Prayer: Kept in Truth, That They May Be One (John 17:1-13)
The Romanian calendar appoints another Gospel for the Fathers: the Lord’s prayer on the night of the Mystical Supper, which the Church calls the High-Priestly Prayer. Russians and Serbs also read the same Gospel at the commemoration of the Fathers, celebrating during this period the Fathers of the first six Ecumenical Councils, with the Epistle from Hebrews 13:7-16; Greeks and Bulgarians read Matthew 5:14-19. The choice of the High-Priestly Prayer is profound. Before His Passion, Christ prays to the Father for His disciples: “Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are” (John 17:11). The unity requested in the prayer grows from keeping the word: “I have given to them the words which You have given Me; and they have received them” (John 17:8). The disciples are one because they hold the same word; where the word is distorted, unity disintegrates. Yet this unity does not end in right teaching: it is perfected in the love among the disciples and in the joy of Christ, which the Lord asks for them in the same prayer — “that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves” (John 17:13). This is why the Church reads this prayer at the commemoration of the Councils: the confession of the Fathers is one of the visible fruits of Christ’s prayer, which does not cease to work in the Church until the end of the age.
Here too stands the word that discloses what is truly defended in every dogmatic definition: “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3). And He who asks to be known unto eternal life asks at the same time to be glorified “with the glory which I had with You before the world was” (John 17:5) — the High-Priestly Prayer itself confesses the eternal divinity of the Son, which the Councils would defend. They did not defend formulas for the sake of formulas, but the true knowledge of God, which is man’s eternal life itself. Whoever distorts this knowledge touches the fountain of life.
The Healing of Two Blind Men and a Mute Man (Matthew 9:27-35)
The Gospel of the Sunday recounts three healings. Two blind men follow Jesus, crying out: “Son of David, have mercy on us!” (Matthew 9:27). Their eyes do not see, but their faith sees: they confess the One from the seed of David, the promised Messiah, while many whose eyes were sound passed beside Him without knowing Him. The Lord does not heal them on the road; He lets them follow Him into the house, and there He asks them: “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” (Matthew 9:28). The question does not seek information; it calls faith to come forth into the light through confession. Only after their “Yes, Lord” does He touch their eyes: “According to your faith let it be to you” (Matthew 9:29). Faith does not purchase the gift and does not compel God; it opens the human person, like a door drawing aside before the One who stands and knocks. And the Lord, who does not enter by force, grants sight to those who have opened to Him.
The third man healed can ask for nothing. He is mute, possessed by a demon, and others bring him to Christ (Matthew 9:32). Grace works here through the faith of those who carry him: in this man are revealed all those whom the Church brings in her prayer when they themselves can no longer cry out. The Gospel speaks of a particular man whose muteness came from the demon that possessed him; it does not teach us that every infirmity of speech or body comes from demons. “And when the demon was cast out, the mute spoke” (Matthew 9:33): the loosening of the tongue comes with the expulsion of the one who bound it. The crowds marvel. The Pharisees, however, utter the darkest word of the passage: “He casts out demons by the ruler of the demons” (Matthew 9:34). They see the healing with their own eyes and call it the work of the devil. This is the blindness that belongs no longer to the eyes, but to the will; and this is true muteness: the mouth that speaks but can no longer confess.
The passage closes with an image of Christ’s whole work: He goes about the cities and villages, “teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people” (Matthew 9:35). Teaching and healing go together — an image of the Church herself, who guards dogma and heals man through one and the same work.
Sight and Confession
Set beside one another, the readings of this Sunday interpret one another. Heresy is, in its depths, a disease of sight: the one who mingles the natures in Christ and the one who separates them no longer sees in His fullness the One who appeared in the flesh. The right definition of faith is the healed eye of the Church. The Fathers of Chalcedon stood before Christ like the blind men of Capernaum: they asked for light, were asked whether they believed, and confessed — and through their loosed tongue the Church spoke clearly the mystery she holds to this day. It was not they who were blind, but the world troubled by errors needed the Church’s vision to be spoken clearly, and God spoke it through them. Those, however, who saw the light and called it darkness placed themselves, like the Pharisees of Capernaum, beneath the Apostle’s word: self-condemned.
The Epistle of the Sunday, from the Epistle to the Romans, adds the final teaching: “We then who are strong ought to bear with the scruples of the weak” (Romans 15:1). Others brought the mute man before Christ. In this way the weak are carried by the strong within the Church: through prayer and through the confession made even on behalf of the one who cannot yet speak.
We know this road from the beginning of the category: on the way to Emmaus, the disciples’ eyes were opened only after the Lord interpreted the Scriptures to them and broke the bread. The same hand that touched the eyes of the blind men at Capernaum still opens today, within the Church, the eyes of those who read the Scriptures together with Him.
At the end of the Liturgy of this Sunday, our prayer may be the one from Capernaum: Lord, keep our eyes open toward You and our tongue loosed for confession, according to the faith of the Fathers whom we celebrate today. “According to your faith let it be to you!”