Daily Meditations Archives - Page 158 of 349

The Second Monday after Pascha. CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! Job the Prophet, Holy Week, Holy Friday, Great Friday, Savior, Septuagint, Cross, Satan

05/06/2019

The righteous Job (whose name means “persecuted”), God’s faithful servant, was the perfect image of every virtue. The son of Zarah and Bossorha (Job 42), Job was a fifth-generation descendent of Abraham. He was a truthful, righteous, patient, and pious man who abstained from every evil thing. Job was very rich and blessed by God in all things, as was no other son of Ausis (his country, which lay between Idoumea and Arabia). However, divine

RENEWAL FRIDAY. CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! OF TIME AND ETERNITY: THE RESURRECTION (Part II)

05/03/2019

In the passages in which it addresses the Resurrection, then, the New Testament witnesses not to the resuscitation of a corpse, and certainly nothing like a return to the life of this world. It addresses rather the entire passage of Jesus from earthly mode of existence to a spiritual and eternal mode of existence. The Jesus whom faith proclaims as the Lord of the universe is no longer defined and limited by time and space,

RENEWAL THURSDAY. CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! OF TIME AND ETERNITY: THE RESURRECTION (Part I)

05/02/2019

Nothing about Jesus is so misunderstood, misrepresented, trivialized and falsified as the Resurrection. Everything in the Gospels has to be understood in light of the Resurrection. Christian faith takes its meaning from the Resurrection—every claim about Jesus, every notion of what it means to live in trusting hope, every view of the world, every take on reality. What the Christian knows of God—with “knowledge” that is qualitatively different from knowledge about anything or anyone else—comes

RENEWAL WEDNESDAY. CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! HUMAN NATURE IS HEALED

05/01/2019

CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! One has to distinguish most carefully between the healing of nature and the healing of the will. Nature is healed and restored with a certain compulsion, by the mighty power of God’s omnipotent and invincible grace. One may even say, by some “violence of grace.” The wholeness is in a way forced upon human nature. For in Christ all human nature (the “seed of Adam”) is fully and completely cured

RENEWAL TUESDAY. CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! THE VICTORY OVER DEATH

04/30/2019

CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! The Resurrection of Christ was a victory, not over his death only, but over death in general. “We celebrate the death of Death, the downfall of Hell, and the beginning of a life new and everlasting.” In His Resurrection the whole of humanity, all human nature, is co-resurrected with Christ, “the human race is clothed in incorruption.” Co-resurrected not indeed in the sense that all are raised from the grave.

RENEWAL MONDAY. CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! THE POWERLESSNESS OF DEATH

04/29/2019

CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! In the death of the Savior the powerlessness of death over Him was revealed. In the fullness of His human nature Our Lord was mortal, since even in the original and spotless human nature a “potentia mortis” was inherent. The Lord was killed and died. But death did not hold Him. “It was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24). St. John Chrysostom commented: “He Himself

THE HOLY AND GREAT PASCHA! CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN!

04/28/2019

CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! Pascha, our Passing over into Life Finally! The Hebrew Scriptures have been opened and the mystery declared: how the sheep was sacrificed, and how a people were redeemed, and Pharaoh wincing, lashed by unsuspected mystery. Therefore, all-beloved, apprehend the secrets of the Pascha. See that they contain both new and old, eternal and provisional, what passes and what will never pass away, mortal and immortal, both. For the law is

The Holy and Great Saturday

04/27/2019

“I am the Resurrection and the Life” (Part III) The very death of the Incarnate reveals the resurrection of human nature (St. John of Damascus, De fide orth., 3.27; cf. Homil. in Magn. Sabbat., 29). “Today we keep the feast, for our Lord is nailed upon the Cross,” in the sharp phrase of St. John Chrysostom (In crucem et latronem, hom. 1). The death on the Cross is a victory over death not only because

The Holy and Great Friday

04/26/2019

“I am the Resurrection and the Life” (Part II) The ultimate reason for Christ’s death must be seen in the mortality of Man. Christ suffered death, but passed through it and overcame mortality and corruption. He quickened death itself. “By death He destroyed death.” The death of Christ is therefore, as it were, an extension of the Incarnation. The death on the Cross was effective, not as the death of an Innocent One, but as

The Holy and Great Thursday

04/25/2019

“I am the Resurrection and the Life” (Part I) The Incarnation of the Word was an absolute manifestation of God. And above all it was a revelation of Life. Christ is the Word of Life, ho logos tês zôês (I John 1:1). The Incarnation itself was, in a sense, the quickening of man, as it were the resurrection of human nature. In the Incarnation human nature was not merely anointed with a superabundant overflowing of