The Holy Church remembers today the tragic event of the Beheading of the Prophet and Forerunner John. To worthily commemorate the memory of the saint, a great ascetic and desert dweller, it was established as a strict fast day.

St. John the Baptist preached repentance to people, calling on them to believe in the Messiah Who was to come after him; thus he made people’s hearts ready to accept the Gospel and the grace of God. The throngs of people went to River Jordan to receive the forgiveness of sins, to hear the fiery preaching, or simply see the one who rejected all of the life’s pleasures and ate locust and wild honey of the desert.

When the Lord was already preaching in Galilee and visited Judea, the Holy Forerunner, while remaining in the shadow of the Savior, has continued his ministry saying: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

The saint became a victim of the drunken tyrant and died in Herod’s prison: intoxicated with wine, the ruler gave a dreadful order to behead John the Baptist as a reward to a young girl who greatly pleased him with a dance. “Mad Herod mercilessly beheads you who revealed his wretched nature; but Christ, the Creator and Redeemer of us all, makes you His Baptist, the head of the Church, oh thrice-blessed,” the monastery choir sang at the vigil service.

The gruesome death of the Prophet at the time of the feast was not a pointless end of his righteous life but a great deed of martyrdom in the name of God’s truth that makes sense in terms of eternal life, like anything we do in our life, be it good or bad.

One of the side chapels of the Trinity Cathedral in the Seraphim-Diveyevo monastery was consecrated to St. John the Baptist and the third uncovering of his righteous head. That’s why all the days of remembrance of the Forerunner of the Lord in Diveyevo are celebrated with special solemnity. Today’s feast was marked with the sisters’ general communion and the Sunday office of Panagia with the procession.

On the eve of the feast, Rev. Fr. Vladimir Kargin, the monastery’s senior priest, presided at Vigil in the Trinity Cathedral, and on the day of the feast Rev. Fr. Anthony Belov, one of the monastery clergy, celebrated the early-morning Divine Liturgy in the side chapel to St. John the Baptist. The service was also celebrated in the Dormition Church.