Most of us memorized John 3:16 in church school. Those familiar words contain the whole of the mystery of God’s ineffable love for us: “God so loved the world that He gave His Only Son,” that through His sacrifice death might be conquered, and we might receive the gift of eternal life. The great feast of Christ’s Resurrection, Holy Pascha, enables us to recall and to relive His victory over death. That victory becomes our
One of the most astonishing features of our time is the tendency of spiritual truths, till recently known only to contemplatives, to become historical facts. So the splitting of the atom is only the outward expression in history of the spiritual state of disintegration in humanity known to Tradition and called just the same thing, ‘atomization’. When the self turns away from God, it can no longer contain its nature; it becomes an individual –
It is much easier to appreciate the glory of Jesus’ resurrection than his painful crucifixion. Yet, Mark’s Gospel, written around 65 to 70 AD, focuses on Jesus’ “suffering servanthood.” Christians believe that we are “saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus.” The key is to put both together. We need to deeply trust and allow both our own dyings and our own certain resurrections, just as much as Jesus did! This is the full pattern
The great but often neglected feast of Mid-Pentecost (Wednesday of the fourth week after Pascha) brings together with magnificent hymnody the major themes of Pascha, Ascension, and Pentecost: The Resurrection and Christ’s glorification, together with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. On the eve of the feast we read a passage from the prophecy of Isaiah 55, which again focuses on the image of water: “Thus says the Lord, ‘Everyone who thirsts, come to the
Jesus rose with His wounds; and we, too, rise with our wounds. In repentance, we are able to realize a resurrection of the heart before the final resurrection of the dead. The key to this mystery is given to us at the moment of our baptism, which offers the possibility of repentance and the foretaste of resurrection. Through baptism, we find that our resurrection through repentance is not a denial or a disparagement of our
Christ said: ‘I am the Way’. If He is the Way, we should follow Him, not outwardly, but from within. And we must remember that on Golgotha and in Gethsemane He was confronted by the hostility of everyone. Alone. There are times, when the love of Christ touches us that we feel eternity. This cannot be understood rationally. God acts in a manner proper to Himself, which is beyond reason. We must not be too
THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT antinomies or paradoxes of Christian faith are the incarnation of the Son of God and His resurrection from the dead. Both of these find their fulfillment in the celebration of Easter, known in Orthodox tradition as Holy Pascha: The Passover of our Lord from death to life. A resurrectional hymn sung at each eucharistic celebration reminds us that every such celebration commemorates and actualizes for us Christ’s victory over death. The
An anthropology which embraces an [Orthodox Christian] notion of sin will deal with good and evil in terms not of moral value, but of being and non-being, life and death, communion and separation, disease and healing. And the Church addresses us in the same terms: we are to be grafted by baptism on to the living Body of the Risen Christ, and thus enabled to receive the power of the resurrection by which our life
In our civilization, so rich in knowledge and in power, we can no longer offer any reply to the enigma of death. We want only to forget death. Yet it meets us again and again in the form of hatred, oppression, separation, illness, and the disappearance of persons we love. This is why the message of Easter, of Holy Pascha, resounds today with such renewed strength. God takes on human flesh, suffers, dies, and descends
The entire message, indeed the very essence of Christianity can be summed up in the Church’s triumphal cry on the night of Holy Pascha: “Christ is truly risen!” It is precisely in the light of Pascha that Jesus of Nazareth reveals Himself and offers Himself to the world. It is specifically to Christ’s death and resurrection that Christians bear witness by their faith, just as they experience His presence in worship and sacraments, in sharing
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