GOD IS WITH US
From December 30, 2025 to January 3, 2026, SUPRASL: A World Fellowship
of Orthodox Youth, hosted a five-day New Year’s Eve gathering. Rather than welcoming the New Year with noise and spectacle, participants chose silence, prayer, and shared life.
As with all SUPRASL events that draw Orthodox students from dozens of countries the sharing f culture, language, tradition, experiences and perspectives in paradoxically exactly the thing that helps uncover the unity of our faith in Christ and our life in the Orthodox Church, and see more clearly that truly God is With Us!
It is this uncovering of unity through diversity which reminded me of this excellent passage from Fr Tom Hopko’s The Winter Pascha:
It once happened that a person hearing the Orthodox vigil on Christmas for the first time in English was greatly angered by the singing of this prophetic canticle [God is with us from Isaiah] . She came to the priest, very upset, and asked him how such a terrible song could be sung in church. When the priest asked her which song she meant, and discovered which it was, he was surprised that this woman, who was a member of the Orthodox Church, had never heard the song before. It turned out that she had indeed heard it, but had never understood its meaning clearly because of the foreign language in which the services had been celebrated. Her difficulty was with the fact that the verse said, “God is with us!” and that it called all people to understand and submit themselves. How unbelievably pre-sumptuous, she declared, that the Orthodox would solemnly proclaim that God was with them and then be even more arrogant in demanding the others understand and submit!
Although the woman was gravely mistaken in her interpretation of the song, her attitude betrayed a common approach to religion in North America, where no church is supposed to think itself truer than others, and where submission in any form is considered to be degrading and demeaning.
The point of Isaiah’s canticle is not that God is with one particular group of people and not another. The point is rather that God is with all people in the coming of the promised Messiah. The writings of the prophet himself make this teaching quite clear, as the interpretation of the gospels and the apostolic writings of the Christian New Testament plainly testify:
Behold My servant, whom I uphold, My chosen, in whom My soul delights; I have put My Spirit upon him, he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not fail or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his law. Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. I am the Lord, that is My name; My glory I give to no other, nor My praise to graven images. Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.” (Is 42:1-9).
GOD IS WITH US