Before suffering and dying, Jesus made a promise to His disciples: „When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me: and ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.“

In the original Greek text, the word translated into English as „comforter“ is „parakletos“. This word is used in five places in the New Testament, four times for the Holy Spirit and once for Jesus himself. Namely, Saint John writes in his First Epistle: „My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.“

When we say that God’s Word is like a mirror, it means that through His Word God shows us ourselves exactly as we are. Not only that, but God’s Word also shows us what we should be like according to His will and teaches us what we must do to achieve the goal God has set for us. Above all, living according to God’s will consists of active love of our neighbor and keeping ourselves “unspotted from the world”.

There is still a great deal that we do not know and cannot understand. How do we put the nature of God into human words? It is impossible: our finite mind is incapable of understanding the infinite God. However, we do know something. We know that God – the Supreme Being – must be perfect. And if someone is perfect, then he must also be unchanging. This is exactly what Saint James says in today's Epistle: in God there is “no variableness, neither shadow of turning”.

St. Peter says in today's Epistle that we are “strangers and pilgrims”, admonishing us to “abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul”. It is important to know that the Christian faith does not oppose man’s body and soul, and does not think that man is only a soul imprisoned in a body, as some Eastern religions believe. Man is a whole of body and soul, and an integral part of our creed is the belief in the resurrection of the body. Eternal life is not only for the soul but also for the body.

Suffering is inherently averse to us, especially when we have to suffer unjustly. Sometimes, of course, we just think that our suffering is unjust, when in fact we ourselves are to blame for it. And sometimes it can happen that not accepting suffering makes us suffer even more – not only when we angrily kick a stone after stubbing our toe on it, thus hurting ourselves even more, but even more so when physical torments become spiritual ones and mental.