By Michael Haldas, Quotes of the Day for April 14, 2017
“Christ, crucified and risen, is our Paschal lamb, our Passover. United to Him in baptism, our life becomes an unending deliverance from evil…Evil is overcome only by good, which the Son of God Himself demonstrated on the Cross and which believers are called to emulate.” (Orthodox Study Bible, 1 Corinthians 5:6-8, Romans 12:19-21)
“The death and resurrection of Christ contain the utter and complete emptiness of hell, the threat of non-being and meaninglessness, the absurdity of suffering and of injured innocence. They also contain the fullness of paradise, the complete joy of existence and the ecstasy of transcendent love. Everything is there.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“I believe that Christians make a serious mistake when we begin to speak first about God rather than first about Christ and His death on the Cross and resurrection from the dead. It is a mistake because it presumes we know something about God that is somehow “prior” to those events. We do not, or, if we think we do, we are mistaken. The death and resurrection of Christ are the alpha and the omega of God’s self-revelation to the world. Nothing in all of creation is extraneous or irrelevant to those events.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate.” (C. S. Lewis)
“Now, it is clear that we are not, humanly speaking, present to the historical event itself, so that we can feel the dust beneath our feet, hear the jeers of the soldiers, or shiver in the sudden chill of the sun’s eclipse. We do not need to be. We revel in the fact that God stepped into history, and we affirm the events described in the Scriptures to be fully accurate. And the power of Christ’s crucifixion moves through all time, because the One crucified was fully God as well as fully man. Through the use of Scripture in the Church we become present to the everlasting mystical reality of Christ crucified and risen again.” (Fr. John Hainsworth)
~Michael Haldas, https://www.ancientfaith.com/contributors/michael_haldas.
Michael Haldas is an author, a religious educator and a speaker. He wrote Sacramental Living: Understanding Christianity as a Way of Life (published by Eastern Christian Publications), a book which he presented special editions of as gifts to Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in private audiences. Michael is also published monthly in Theosis Magazine and he has authored several Orthodox Christian themed articles for various publications. Additionally, he has recorded and contributed to multiple YouTube, DVD and CD educational projects. He teaches adult religious education and high school Sunday school at the Greek Orthodox Church of St. George in Bethesda, Maryland and has worked with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese Religious Education Department to create educational lessons and materials.
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