Showing posts with label Easter. Show all posts

Bartholomew, Patriarch of Constantinople and world leader of Eastern Orthodoxy, issues a circular letter each Easter that is read in all Orthodox churches. Since Easter falls on the same day for both the Eastern and Western churches this year, we reproduce part of it (available in full here) below.

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...Christ has risen from the tomb as divinely human and humanity has risen with him! The tyranny of death belongs to the past. The hopelessness of hades' captivity has irrevocably gone. The only powerful Giver of Life, having through His Incarnation voluntarily assumed all of the misfortune of our nature and all that it entails, namely death, has already "brought death to hades by the lightning of divinity", granting us life--and "life in abundance" (John 10:10).

...The devil assaults Life by means of the sinful tendency that exists within us like "old rust", using this to entrap us in either tangible sin or delusional belief. Hubris is the offspring of that "rust", while both comprise the sinister couple responsible for disrupting relationships within ourselves, with others, as well as with God and the whole creation. Accordingly, it is imperative that we purify ourselves of this rust with great attentiveness and carefulness in order that the profuse life-giving light of the Risen Christ may shine in our mind, soul and body, so that it may in turn dispel the darkness of hubris and pour the "abundance" of Life to all the world.

This cannot be achieved by philosophy, science, technology, art, or any ideology; it can only be achieved through faith in what God has condescended for us human beings through His Passion, Crucifixion and Burial, descending to the depths of hades and rising from the dead as the divine human Jesus Christ. It is also expressed in the sacramental life of the Church as well as through laborious and systematic spiritual struggle. The Church as the Body of Christ unceasingly and to the ages experiences the miracle of the Resurrection; through its sacred mysteries, its theology and its practical teachings, it offers us the possibility of participating in that miracle of sharing in the victory over death, of becoming children shaped by the light of the Resurrection and truly "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).

Over at Monachos.net, MC Steenberg has an excellent essay exploring the theological connections between the Nativity and the Resurrection. If you read the whole thing, pay particular attention to how he compares the icons of the two feasts.
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There is an intimate, intrinsic connection between the Feast of the Nativity of Christ in the flesh, and the feast of His glorious Resurrection, the holy Pascha of the Lord. The two are united in the single saving reality of the Son's incarnation, which from His human birth to His death and resurrection manifests the eternal saving design of the man-befriending God....At the Feast of the Nativity, when we hymn Christ's birth, we are already singing a Paschal song, already commemorating the great and mysterious events at the other terminus of His earthly life--for in Christ, the eternity of God meets the finitude of His creation, and we see in every moment of the Son's human life the full scope and dimension of that eternity. Already, as we hymn the infant lain in the cave, we are enabled to sing with the hymn, 'Salvation enters the world and the curse is destroyed'; already we are able to taste the glory of Paschal midnight, which we rejoice in the full mystery of a 'death that has trampled down death', bestowing life to those in the tombs. It begins here. It is known and encountered now.