Daily Orthodox Devotional — Tuesday, February 24, 2026
- Daily Orthodox Devotional — Tuesday, February 24, 2026
Daily Orthodox Devotional — Tuesday, February 24, 2026
Tuesday of the First Week of Great Lent
Today’s Commemorated Feasts and Saints
- The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete (read throughout the first week of Great Lent)
- The First (4th c.) and Second (452) Finding of the Honorable Head of the Holy Glorious Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist of the Lord, John
- Venerable Erasmus of the Kiev Caves (Near Caves — 12th c.)
✝ A Note on Today’s Readings
Today falls at the convergence of two great liturgical movements: the austere penitential rhythm of the First Week of Great Lent, and the joyful commemoration of the Finding of the Head of St. John the Baptist. The Lenten readings from Isaiah, Genesis, and Proverbs call us to repentance and wisdom. The festal readings for the Forerunner — drawn from Isaiah 40, Malachi, Wisdom of Solomon, Luke, 2 Corinthians, and Matthew — proclaim the one who prepared the way for Christ.
This double witness — mourning our sins while rejoicing in the saints — is deeply Orthodox. Great Lent is not only sorrow; it is luminous sorrow, shot through with the coming light.
LENTEN READINGS — First Week of Great Lent
📖 Isaiah 1:19–2:4
From the Orthodox Study Bible (NKJV, with Septuagint modifications)
¹⁹If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good things of the land. ²⁰But if you are unwilling and disobedient, you shall be devoured by the sword,“ for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
²¹How the faithful city of Zion has become a prostitute! It was full of judgment. Righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers. ²²Your silver is worthless; your tavernkeepers mix wine with water. ²³Your rulers are disobedient and companions of thieves. Everyone loves bribes and follows after rewards. They do not defend the orphans, nor do they regard the cause of the widow.
²⁴Therefore says the Master, the Lord of hosts: “Woe to the mighty ones of Israel, for My anger against the adversaries will not cease; and I will execute judgment on My enemies. ²⁵I will bring My hand upon you and purge you completely. I will destroy those who disobey and remove all the lawless from you; I will humble all the arrogant. ²⁶I will establish your judges as at the first and your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward, you shall be called the city of righteousness, Zion, the faithful mother-city.” ²⁷For her captives shall be saved with judgment and with mercy. ²⁸The lawless and sinners shall be destroyed together. Those who forsake the Lord shall come to an end. ²⁹For they shall be ashamed of the idols they desired and the gardens they longed for. ³⁰For they shall be as a terebinth tree that has lost its leaves; like a garden with no water. ³¹Their strength shall be as broken fiber and their works as sparks of fire. The lawless and the sinners will burn together, and no one shall quench them.
2 The word that came from the Lord to Isaiah the son of Amoz concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
²Now it shall come to pass in the last days, the mountain of the Lord and the house of God shall be visible on the tops of the mountains and exalted above the hills. All the Gentiles shall come to it. ³Many Gentiles shall travel and say, “Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will proclaim His way to us, and we shall walk in it.” For the law of the Lord shall go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. ⁴He shall judge between the Gentiles and rebuke many people. They shall beat their swords into plows and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
OSB Commentary — Isaiah:
The central theme of Isaiah is “the Holy One of Israel,” who punishes His unrepentant people but later redeems them. Man’s role is one of faith in response to God’s holiness and vision for the world. The invitation of verse 19 — “If you are willing and obedient” — is never coercive. God sets before His people the choice between blessing and judgment, life and death. The vision of Isaiah 2 lifts our eyes to an eschatological horizon: the Church, the mountain of the Lord, draws all nations to herself. The beating of swords into plows is both a prophetic image of the Kingdom of God and a call to conversion — from violence to cultivation, from war to fruitfulness.
📖 Genesis 1:14–23
The Fourth and Fifth Days of Creation
¹⁴Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven for illumination to divide day from night. ¹⁵Let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years. Let them be for illumination in the firmament of heaven to give light on the earth.” It was so. ¹⁶Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. ¹⁷God set them in the firmament of heaven to give light on the earth, ¹⁸and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. ¹⁹So evening and morning were the fourth day.
²⁰Then God said, “Let the waters bring forth creatures having life, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of heaven’s firmament.” It was so. ²¹Thus God made great sea creatures and every living thing that moves with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. God saw that it was good. ²²God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on earth.” ²³So evening and morning were the fifth day.
OSB Commentary — Genesis:
The Holy Trinity is revealed in the Old Testament in subtle ways. The act of creation is not impersonal or mechanical — each day ends with “God saw that it was good,” a loving, relational gaze upon the created order. The lights of day four are not gods, as the surrounding pagan cultures believed, but servants of the one God — signs and seasons that order human life toward worship. Creation is both gift and vocation. In Great Lent, we return to this primordial vision: the world as God’s good gift, and ourselves as His image called to steward it wisely.
📖 Proverbs 1:20–33
Wisdom Speaks Out
²⁰Wisdom sings in the streets; She moves boldly in the squares.
²¹She preaches on high city walls And sits at the gates of lords. At the gates of a city she boldly says,
²²“So long a time as the simple hold fast to righteousness, They shall not be ashamed;
²³But those without discernment, since they are desirous of arrogance, And are become ungodly, they hate perception, And are become subject to reproofs.
²⁴Behold, I shall bring forth upon you the utterance of my breath, And I shall teach you my word.
²⁵Since I called, but you did not obey, And spoke at length, but you paid no attention,
²⁶But made my counsels invalid, And were not persuaded by my reproofs;
²⁷Consequently, I will laugh at your annihilation, And will exult when ruin comes to you,
²⁸And when confusion reaches you unawares, And overthrow comes like a whirlwind,
²⁹And when tribulation and anguish come to you, And when destruction comes to you.
³⁰For it shall be, when you shall call upon me, I will not listen to you;
³¹Evil men will seek me, but not find me, For they hate wisdom, and choose not the fear of the Lord.
³²Neither do they wish to follow my counsels, But despise my reproofs.
³³Therefore, they shall eat the fruits of their own way And be filled with their own ungodliness.
For since they wrong the simple, they shall be killed, And a close examination shall destroy the ungodly.
But he who obeys me shall dwell in hope, And shall be at rest without fear from every evil.“
OSB Commentary — Proverbs:
The Orthodox tradition identifies Wisdom (Sophia) here not merely as a personified virtue but as an icon of the pre-eternal Word of God — the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who calls out to all humanity. Great Lent is precisely an invitation to hear this call and not to be numbered among those who “paid no attention.” The Lenten season turns us from the noise of the world’s squares back toward the voice that has been crying there all along. The promise to “he who obeys me” — rest without fear — is the promise of union with God Himself.
FESTAL READINGS — Finding of the Head of St. John the Baptist
📖 Composite 8 — Isaiah 40, 41, 45, 48, 54 (Key Passages)
Prophetic readings for the Feast of the Forerunner
Isaiah 40:1–5, 28–31
¹“Comfort, yes, comfort My people,“ says God. ²“O priests, speak to the heart of Jerusalem, comfort her, for her humiliation is ended, her sin is pardoned; for she received from the Lord’s hand double for her sins.“
³The voice of one crying in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight the paths of our God. ⁴Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill humbled; the crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough places into plains. ⁵The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God; for the Lord has spoken.”
²⁸Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the God who created the ends of the earth, neither hungers nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable. ²⁹He gives strength to the hungry, and sorrow to those who do not grieve. ³⁰Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the elect shall be without strength. ³¹But those who wait on God shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not hunger.
OSB Commentary:
Isaiah 40:3 — “The voice of one crying in the wilderness” — is the great prophetic text of St. John the Baptist, cited by all four Evangelists. In the person of John the Forerunner, the ancient prophecy becomes flesh: the preparation is not merely a geographic leveling of hills, but the leveling of every human pride and the filling of every humble soul. “Those who wait on God shall renew their strength” — the Forerunner himself is an icon of this: his entire life was an ascetic waiting upon the Lord.
📖 Composite 9 — Malachi 3, 4 (Key Passages)
Malachi 3:1–5
¹“Behold, I send My messenger, and he will prepare the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come into His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, whom you desire. Behold, He is coming,“ says the Lord Almighty. ²“But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can withstand His appearance? For He enters like a refiner’s fire and as soap in one’s wash. ³He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver and gold. He will purify the sons of Levi and pour them out as purified gold and silver, and they will bring an offering to the Lord in righteousness. ⁴Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord, as in the days of old, as in former years.
⁵“And I will draw near to you in judgment, a swift witness against sorcerers, adulterers, those who swear falsely by My name, those who exploit wage-earners, those who oppress widows and afflict orphans, those who pervert the justice due foreigners, and those who do not fear Me,“ says the Lord Almighty.
OSB Commentary:
Malachi 3:1 is the verse Jesus Himself quotes in reference to John: “I send My messenger before Your face” (Matthew 11:10; Luke 7:27). The Forerunner is the final Old Testament prophet — the hinge between promise and fulfillment. His ministry of refinement continues: the Lenten call to repentance is itself the work of the “refiner’s fire,” purifying us so that our offering to the Lord may be acceptable.
📖 Composite 3 — Wisdom of Solomon 4, 5 (Key Passages)
Wisdom of Solomon 4:7–15; 5:1–5, 15–16
⁷But though a righteous man may die before his time, He shall be at rest.
⁸For old age is not honored for its length of existence, Nor measured by its number of years;
⁹But discernment is gray hair for mankind, And a spotless life is the maturity of old age.
¹⁰There was once a man pleasing to God and loved by Him, And while living among sinners he was taken up.
¹¹He was caught up lest evil change his understanding Or deceit deceive his soul.
¹²For envy arising from lack of judgment obscures what is good, And a whirling of desire undermines an innocent heart.
¹³He was made perfect, For in a short time he fulfilled long years,
¹⁴For his soul was pleasing to the Lord; Therefore, He took him early from the midst of evil. Yet peoples saw this but did not understand, Nor take such a thing to heart,
¹⁵That the Lord’s grace and mercy are with His elect And that He watches over His holy ones.
5:1, 15–16
¹Then the righteous man will stand with confidence In the presence of those who afflict him.
¹⁵But the righteous live forever, And their reward is with the Lord; And their care is by the Most High.
¹⁶Therefore they shall receive a kingly dwelling of dignity And a crown of beauty from the hand of the Lord, Because He will shelter them with His right hand And protect them with His arm.
OSB Commentary:
These verses from Wisdom of Solomon are read in the Orthodox Church at the Vespers of prominent saints, and they illuminate the paradox of martyrdom: what appears to the world as an untimely death is, in God’s eyes, a perfected life. John the Baptist was beheaded in prison — what could look more like failure, abandonment, waste? Yet the Church reads Wisdom over his memory: “The righteous live forever, and their reward is with the Lord.” The finding of his holy head — not once but twice — is God’s own vindication of His prophet.
📖 Luke 7:17–30
John’s Messengers Inquire of Jesus
¹⁷And this report about Him went throughout all Judea and all the surrounding region.
¹⁸Then the disciples of John reported to him concerning all these things. ¹⁹And John, calling two of his disciples to him, sent them to Jesus, saying, “Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?”
²⁰When the men had come to Him, they said, “John the Baptist has sent us to You, saying, ‘Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?’”
²¹And that very hour He cured many of infirmities, afflictions, and evil spirits; and to many blind He gave sight. ²²Jesus answered and said to them, “Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them. ²³And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.”
²⁴When the messengers of John had departed, He began to speak to the multitudes concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? ²⁵But what did you go out to see? A man clothed in soft garments? Indeed those who are gorgeously appareled and live in luxury are in kings’ courts. ²⁶But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet. ²⁷This is he of whom it is written:
‘Behold, I send My messenger before Your face, *Who will prepare Your way before You.’*
²⁸For I say to you, among those born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist; but he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.“
²⁹And when all the people heard Him, even the tax collectors justified God, having been baptized with the baptism of John. ³⁰But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the will of God for themselves, not having been baptized by him.
OSB Commentary:
John’s question from prison — “Are You the Coming One?” — is not a failure of faith but a pastoral act. He sends his disciples to see for themselves, to witness the miracles, so that they might believe and follow Jesus. Jesus’ answer is itself a mosaic of Isaiah’s prophecies (Is 35:5–6; 61:1), declaring His own messianic identity through deeds rather than titles. The contrast at the end is searching: the “sinners” (tax collectors) recognized God’s justice and repented; the religious leaders rejected it. In Lent, we examine which side of that divide we inhabit.
📖 2 Corinthians 4:6–15
The Power of an Apostle
⁶For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
⁷But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. ⁸We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; ⁹persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed— ¹⁰always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.
¹¹For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. ¹²So then death is working in us, but life in you.
¹³And since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, “I believed and therefore I spoke,” we also believe and therefore speak, ¹⁴knowing that He who raised up the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with Jesus, and will present us with you. ¹⁵For all things are for your sakes, that grace, having spread through the many, may cause thanksgiving to abound to the glory of God.
OSB Commentary:
“We have this treasure in earthen vessels” — this single line encompasses the entire mystery of the Christian life. The treasure is the Holy Spirit, the knowledge of God’s glory in Christ. The earthen vessel is the fragile, mortal, suffering human body. Paul and John the Baptist share the same paradox: the weaker and more broken the vessel, the more clearly the divine light shines through. John’s head — severed, buried, found in a clay vessel or beneath the earth — is itself the ultimate earthen vessel holding a priceless treasure. Great Lent is the season in which we allow God to crack our pretensions so that His light may pour through.
📖 Matthew 11:2–15
Are You the Coming One?
²And when John had heard in prison about the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples ³and said to Him, “Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?”
⁴Jesus answered and said to them, “Go and tell John the things which you hear and see: ⁵The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. ⁶And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.”
⁷As they departed, Jesus began to say to the multitudes concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? ⁸But what did you go out to see? A man clothed in soft garments? Indeed, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. ⁹But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet.
¹⁰For this is he of whom it is written:
‘Behold, I send My messenger before Your face, *Who will prepare Your way before You.’*
¹¹Assuredly, I say to you, among those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist; but he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
¹²And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force. ¹³For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. ¹⁴And if you are willing to receive it, he is Elijah who is to come. ¹⁵He who has ears to hear, let him hear!“
OSB Commentary:
The declaration “among those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist” is Christ’s own canonization of His Forerunner — spoken not after his death, but while he still languished in Herod’s prison. This is God’s economy: the greatest saint is not yet delivered; his best work — his death — is still ahead. The enigmatic saying about the kingdom “suffering violence” is understood by the Fathers to mean that the Kingdom requires struggle, zeal, and holy effort — the very virtues Great Lent is meant to cultivate. We “take it by force” not through aggression but through the striving of prayer, fasting, and repentance. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”
✝ Reflection for the Day
Today the Church holds two notes simultaneously, like a great chord: penitence and joy. Isaiah calls us to reason with God about our sins. Wisdom calls us with her voice from the streets. Creation itself, recalled in Genesis, witnesses to God’s goodness and our vocation.
And over all of this stands the great silhouette of St. John the Baptist — the last of the prophets, the first of the martyrs of the New Covenant, the man of the wilderness who ate locusts and wild honey, who called kings to account, who pointed to the Lamb of God, and whose head was found hidden in the earth and raised to glory.
His message to us across the centuries is simple and urgent: “Prepare the way of the Lord.”
Great Lent is that preparation. It is not punishment. It is invitation. God says to us today, with Isaiah: “Come now, and let us reason together… If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good things of the land.”
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Source: OCA Daily Lectionary — oca.org/readings | Scripture text from the Orthodox Study Bible (Thomas Nelson) | Commentary from the Orthodox Study Bible notes
Tags: #orthodoxy #scripture #daily-devotional #orthodox-christianity #greatlent #johnthebaptist #forerunner #lent2026
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