Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death,
and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!
Category Archives: church
Christ forsaken.
Holy Friday, and I am sick. I see what a gift it was to be able to participate in last night’s Matins of Holy Friday service, now that I’ve already missed the first two services of the today and am just focusing on being better for the rest of the weekend.
While I am down it seemed a good thing to meditate on some words of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom from God and Man, in a chapter discussing Christ’s incarnation and death on the cross. I will share what seems a terribly truncated passage in the interest of accomplishing it today and in hopes that it will be just long enough to provoke profitable meditation. But I really wish you all could read this book that I first read last year and thought at the time, “That is the best book I have ever read.” Metropolitan Anthony:
One cannot be, as it were, plugged into life eternal and die. St. Maxim the Confessor underlines the fact that at the moment of his conception, at the moment of his birth, in his humanity Christ had no participation in death, because his humanity was pervaded with the eternal life of his divinity. He could not die. It is not an allegory or a metaphor when in the Orthodox Church on Thursday in Holy Week, we sing “O Life Eternal, how can you die; O Light, how can you be quenched?”
He died on the cross, and the operative words are the most tragic words of history: He, who is the Son of God, because he has accepted total, final, unreserved and unlimited solidarity with men in all their conditions, without participation in evil but accepting all its consequences; He, nailed on the cross, cries out the cry of forlorn humanity, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
…When Christ said “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he was crying out, shouting out the words of a humanity that had lost God, and he was participating in that very thing which is the only real tragedy of humanity — all the rest is a consequence. The loss of God is death, is forlornness, is hunger, is separation. All the tragedy of man is in one word, “Godlessness.” And he participates in our godlessness, not in the sense in which we reject God or do not know God, but in a more tragic way, in a way in which one can lose what is the dearest, the holiest, the most precious, the very heart of one’s life and soul.
Mystical Supper
The Orthodox Church remembers so many events on Holy Thursday that it takes five mostly-long passages to comprise the Gospel reading. These events are: the washing of the disciples’ feet, the institution of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper, the agony in the garden of Gethsemane, and the betrayal of Christ by Judas.
Icon Reader shares a 15th-century Russian icon that includes all of these events:
This site explains at length all the commemorations of the day, including the Last Supper, which is our experience also in the Divine Liturgy as the article testifies: “In the Eucharist the Church remembers and enacts sacramentally the redemptive event of the Cross and participates in its saving grace.”
On his blog this week Fr. Stephen explores Judas’s “banal and prosaic” reason for betraying Jesus: the love of money. He writes: “Money is the anti-Eucharist. Like the Eucharist, it is a way of life.”
“Christ gives His disciples the Eucharist on the ‘night in which He was betrayed.’ … Christ loves the Father – and all that the Father has given to Him. The bread that Christ gives is life, and life more abundantly…God give us life!
Incessantly and Altogether Beautiful
Tonight marks the end of Lent in the Orthodox Church. We enter Holy Week with Lazarus Saturday, and of course we do fast until Pascha, but it’s not technically Lent anymore for us. We now stop thinking about whether we succeeded or failed at Lent, because we need to focus on what God has done and be fully present for these last days of the remembering of the death and resurrection of the Lord.
In our parish we had Matins of Lazarus Saturday, a time to remember the whole story of how Lazarus had been dead four days when Jesus came into town and his friends said, “If only you had been here, he wouldn’t have died.” And Jesus wept. Then He showed his power over death, and raised Lazarus. And then followed the events that sent Him to His own death, which He also overcame for our sakes. His powerful beauty is still filling this world.
Despite the effects of the Fall and despite our deep sinfulness, the world continues to be God’s creation. It has not ceased to be “altogether beautiful.” Despite human alienation and suffering, the Divine Beauty is still present in our midst and still remains ever active, incessantly performing its work of healing and transfiguration. Even now beauty is saving the world, and it will always continue to do so. But it is the beauty of a God who is totally involved in the pain of the world that He has made, of a God who died on the Cross and on the third day rose victorious from the dead.
–Metropolitan Kallistos
Gladsome Lights 