Paschal Greetings: Christ is Risen!

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

Dear fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, Christ is Risen! Христос Воскресе!

After the excitement and hustle and bustle of celebrating and triumphantly proclaiming the Lord’s Saving Resurrection, we now enter a quieter time of contemplative reflection on the risen Saviour and the empty Tomb.

As we read in the Lord’s appearing to the disciples, His first act was to exchange the “shlama”: “Peace with you.”

It is in this peace of Christ, without the chanting of the choir, without the enthusiastic Resurrection exclamations of the clergy with incense, cross and candles, and without the animation and excited joy of the community, that each of us must now prayerfully contemplate and reflect upon the world-changing, history-changing, cosmic reality of the words, “Christ is Risen! Христос Воскресе!”

What do these revolutionary words mean for each us, not simply as a statement of fact, but in relation to the way we live our lives? 

It is not enough to have unflinching, cast iron faith in the Lord’s Resurrection, unless the events of that first Pascha have a spiritual and moral impetus for us, and challenge us to live and spiritually struggle in the light and power of Christ’s Resurrection.

Not only are we baptised in the power and image of the events of the resurrection, descending into and rising from the baptismal font, mirroring the Lord’s descent into death and rising from the depths of Sheol (Hades), but we are each called to continually be “rising” from the old fallen person, to resurrectional lives of changed, transformed personhood in Christ.

From the moment each of us rose from the waters of baptism, our spiritual struggle should have been, and should continue to be one of divine ascent, led heavenwards by the Risen Lord, Who in our baptism took hold of each of us, just as He grasps the wrists of Adam and Eve in the Paschal icon of the Harrowing of Hades, as He raises their souls from death to life and from Hades to heaven.

In the letter to the Hebrews, which speaks of the Saviour as our Passover and High Priest, the Apostle Paul writes that “The blood of Christ . . . will purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (Hebrews 9:14), and in the Paschal canon, we sing of Pascha (the new Passover) as “a Pascha of purification”.

We will only understand Pascha and the Mystery of the Resurrection if we struggle to serve the Living Lord, as those who have been purchased and cleansed by Christ’s Blood, and heed the call of the Paschal Canon:

“Let us purify our senses, and we shall behold Christ, radiant with the unapproachable light of the Resurrection, and we shall clearly hear Him say, Rejoice! as we sing the hymn of victory.”

Struggling for this purification, and confessing and repenting when we fall, are the means by which the Resurrection will have an abiding and continuing reality in our lives, and is the only path by which we can hope to be partakers and behold Christ the Conqueror of death.

Now, in the quiet of Holy and Bright Monday, and in the days of the Paschal Season that lie before us, we must contemplate, evaluate, and struggle for this purification, as day-by-day, we sing the Paschal hymns, so that Christ’s victory may trample down all that is fallen and sinful within us, and that He may raise us up, even in this earthly life, to renewed life in Him.

As we sing the Paschal Canon, which is profitable every day in this holy season, we should reflect upon the chains and snares which hold us captive: our bad habits, habitual sins, the recurring temptations, and, perhaps passions which hold us as slaves, not to life, but to a living-death and to the evil one.

We must turn to the Lord, asking Him to grant us freedom from the chains of our sins, just as He freed the righteous in Hades from the captivity of death, knowing that this liberation must come by our fulfilling His will in struggling for purity and fighting temptation, seeking to make each day a day of resurrection.

As much as in the Great Fast, this is a time for struggle – a resurrectional struggle for the freedom which the Lord’s glorious Rising brings: a season for positive, affirmative action in which the joy of the resurrection is reflected in every aspect of our lives.

With St John Chrysostom, we face hell and death knowing that, the great final victory is already won, but that the stealer of souls will do everything to rob us and our brothers and sisters of the new life that the risen Lord brings.

Preserving humility and knowing our weakness, we must find our strength in the risen and victorious Lord, and armed with the cry of victory – “Christ is Risen!” – we must be bold and courageous knowing what Christ has gained for us, and boldly and confidently say,

“O death, where is thy sting?

O hades, where is thy victory?

Christ is risen, and thou art cast down.

Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen.

Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice.

Christ is risen, and life flourisheth.

Christ is risen, and there is none dead in the tombs.

For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of them that have fallen asleep.”

Let us unite ourselves to the Lord’s victory and third-day rising from the Tomb, and recognise the Resurrection as a constant living reality and not a just future event: as our birthright and calling by the Lord of Life, in Whom all things are made new.

May Christ our true God, Who rose from the dead, and trampled down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowed life, through the intercessions of His most pure Mother, of the holy and glorious Apostles, of our holy and God-bearing fathers, David, Dyfrig and Teilo, and of all the saints, have mercy upon us and save us, for He is good and He loveth mankind. Amen!

Greetings for the Nativity of the Mother of God

Dear brothers and sisters,

Greetings on this joyous feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos, by which the imminence of God’s preparation for the Incarnation in time and space was manifested in the world, after centuries in which His prophets preached the coming of the Messiah, and during which the ancestors of Christ looked forward to “the beginning of our salvation”.

This event was long in preparation, and the culmination of God’s interaction with mankind and creation since the ignominy of the Fall and Adam and Eve’s banishment from Paradise. In her “God-bestown birth”, Adam our first-father offers up his offspring, the Mother of God, whom St Andrew of Crete calls “the most-worthy fruit of mankind”, and in the birth of the Virgin, the first-father and first-mother rejoice,

“For, behold! she who was fashioned of the rib of Adam manifestly blesseth her daughter and descendant, saying: “Deliverance hath been born in me, for which cause I am freed of the bonds of hades!”

(First stikheron of the vesperal litia)

The prophet Isaiah, considered an evangelist-before-the-evangelists by St Jerome, had preached,“Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel”, and on this feast we celebrate the birth of the Virgin, who would be the Gate through which God would enter the world as its Saviour and Redeemer, with the feast – in the words of St Andrew –“as a doorway to grace to grace and truth.”

Rejoicing, we greet the Mother of God – the portal of our salvation – with hymns, heeding the joyful words of the litia doxastikon at vespers:

“On the right excellent day of our feast let us strike the spiritual harp; for the Mother of Life is born today of the seed of David, dispelling the darkness: the renewal of Adam, the restoration of Eve, the Well-spring of incorruption, our release from corruption. Because of her we have been deified and delivered from death. And we, the faithful, cry out to her with Gabriel: Rejoice, thou who art full of grace, the Lord is with thee, granting us great mercy for thy sake!”

May God bless you all on this wonderful feast, as we ask the Mother of God to intercede for all of her children, who greet her Nativity with joyful thanksgiving. And, greeting one another, let us rejoice together, for, lo! the Virgin issueth forth from the womb of the barren woman, unto the salvation of our souls!”

In Christ – Hieromonk Mark