After the Saviour had miraculously healed the paralytic, the Jews, especially the Pharisees and Scribes, were moved with envy and persecuted Him, and sought to slay Him, using the excuse that He did not keep the Sabbath, since He worked miracles on that day. Jesus then departed to Galilee.
About the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles, He went up again to the Temple and taught. The Jews, marveling at the wisdom of His words, said, “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” But Christ first reproached their unbelief and lawlessness, then proved to them by the Law that they sought to slay Him unjustly, supposedly as a despiser of the Law, since He had healed the paralytic on the Sabbath.
Therefore, since the things spoken by Christ in the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles are related to the Sunday of the Paralytic that is just passed, and since we have already reached the midpoint of the fifty days between Pascha and Pentecost, the Church has appointed this present feast as a bond between the two great feasts, thereby uniting, as it were, the two into one, and partaking of the grace of them both. Therefore, today’s feast is called Mid-Pentecost, and the Gospel Reading, “At Mid-feast”–though it refers to the Feast of Tabernacles–is used.
It should be noted that there were three great Jewish feasts: The Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. Passover was celebrated on the 15th of Nisan, the first month of the Jewish calendar, which coincides roughly with our March. This feast commemorated that day on which the Hebrews were commanded to eat the lamb in the evening and anoint the doors of their houses with its blood. Then, having escaped bondage and death at the hands of the Egyptians, they passed through the Red Sea to come to the Promised Land. It is also called “the Feast of Unleavened Bread,” because they ate unleavened bread for seven days.
Pentecost was celebrated fifty days after the Passover, first of all, because the Hebrew tribes had reached Mount Sinai after leaving Egypt, and there received the Law from God; secondly, it was celebrated to commemorate their entry into the Promised Land, where also they ate bread, after having been fed with manna forty years in the desert. Therefore, on this day they offered to God a sacrifice of bread prepared with new wheat.
Finally, they also celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles from the 15th to the 22nd of “the seventh month,” which corresponds roughly to our September. During this time, they live in booths made of branches in commemoration of the forty years they spent in the desert, living in tabernacles, that is, tents (Ex. 12:10-20; Lev. 23).
Apolytikion of Mid-Pentecost
Plagal of the Fourth Tone
Mid-way in the feast, refresh my thirsty soul with the flowing waters of piety. For You cried out to all, O Savior, “Let him who thirsts come to me and drink.” You, O Christ our God, are the Fountain of Life, glory to You.
Kontakion of Mid-Pentecost
Fourth Tone
O sovereign Master and Creator of all things, O Christ our God, Thou didst cry unto those present at the Judaic Mid-feast and address them thus: Come and draw the water of immortality freely. Wherefore, we fall down before Thee and faithfully cry out: Grant Thy compassions unto us, O Lord, for Thou are truly the Wellspring of life for all.
~Website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (GOA), https://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints?contentid=893&PCode=4PW&D=W&date=05/13/2020.
The Fall of Constantinople, May 29, 1453
THE CAPTIVE CHURCH, by Aristeides Papadakis, Ph.D.
In general, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a great misfortune for Christianity. For Eastern Christendom it was nothing less than an unqualified disaster. As a result of the Ottoman conquest, the entire Orthodox communion of the Balkans and the Near East was suddenly isolated from the West. For the next four hundred years it would instead be confined within a hostile Islamic world, with which it had little in common religiously or culturally. Orthodox Russia alone escaped this fate. It is this geographical and intellectual confinement which, in part, explains Orthodoxy’s silence during the Reformation in sixteenth century Europe. That this important theological debate should often seem distorted to the Orthodox is not surprising: they never took part in it. And yet, it is not the isolation alone, but the consequences of Ottoman rule that make these pages of Church history so bleak from virtually every point of view.
The new Ottoman government that arose from the ashes of Byzantine civilization was neither primitive nor barbaric. Islam not only recognized Jesus as a great prophet, but tolerated Christians as another People of the Book. As such, the Church was not extinguished nor was its canonical and hierarchical organization significantly disrupted. Its administration continued to function. One of the first things that Mehmet the Conqueror did was to allow the Church to elect a new patriarch, Gennadius Scholarius. The Hagia Sophia and the Parthenon, which had been Christian churches for nearly a millennium were, admittedly, converted into mosques, yet countless other churches, both in Constantinople and elsewhere, remained in Christian hands. Moreover, it is striking that the patriarch’s and the hierarchy’s position was considerably strengthened and their power increased. They were endowed with civil as well as ecclesiastical power over all Christians in Ottoman territories. Because Islamic law makes no distinction between nationality and religion, all Christians, regardless of their language or nationality, were viewed as a single millet, or nation. The patriarch, as the highest ranking hierarch, was thus invested with civil and religious authority and made ethnarch, head of the entire Christian Orthodox population. Practically, this meant that all Orthodox Churches within Ottoman territory were under Constantinople. The authority and jurisdictional frontiers of the patriarch, in short, were enormously enlarged.
Still, on balance, all these rights and privileges, including freedom of worship and religious organization, seldom corresponded to reality. The legal privileges of the patriarch and the Church depended, in fact, on the whim and mercy of the Sultan and the Sublime Porte, while all Christians were viewed as little more than second-class citizens. Moreover, Turkish corruption and brutality were not a myth. That it was the “infidel” Christian who experienced this more than anyone else is not in doubt. Nor were pogroms of Christians in these centuries unknown. Devastating, too, for the Church was the fact that it could not bear witness to Christ. Missionary work among Moslems was dangerous and indeed impossible, whereas conversion to Islam was entirely legal and permissible. On the other hand, converts to Islam who returned to Orthodoxy were put to death. Of a piece with this grim situation was the fact that new churches could not be built and even the ringing of church bells was not allowed.
Finally, the education of the clergy and the Christian population fared no better – it either ceased or was of a rudimentary kind.
Nor was the patriarchal throne ever secure. Few patriarchs between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries died a natural death while in office. The forced abdications, exiles, hangings, drownings, and poisonings of patriarchs are well documented. But if the patriarch’s position was precarious so was the hierarchy’s. The hanging of patriarch Gregory V from the gate of the patriarchate on Easter Sunday 1821 was accompanied by the execution of two metropolitans and twelve bishops. (The gate still remains closed in St. Gregory’s memory.) The above summary – stark and short as it is – is sufficient to convey the persecution, decay, and humiliation that Eastern Christendom suffered under Ottoman rule. If we add to this tragic fate the militant communist atheism under which most Orthodox lived after 1917, we get some sense of the dislocation and suffering of Eastern Christianity in the last five hundred years. The grave problems that western Christians had to face as a result of the French Revolution and the secularization of western society in general might be said to pale against these facts.
~Website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (GOA), goarch.org, “History of the Orthodox Church”, http://www.goarch.org/ourfaith/ourfaith7053.
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