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The Pascha Page

Paschal Acclamation / St. John Chrysostom on Pascha / Belief in the Resurrection / Easter in the English Orthodox Tradition

Monachos Site Paschal Resources Page

Christ is Risen! Indeed He is Risen!

St. John Chrysostom on Pascha

"IF ANY BE PIOUS AND A LOVER OF GOD, let him take part in this fair and radiant festival. If any be an honest servant, let him come in and rejoice in the joy of his Lord. If any have wearied himself with fasting, let him take part now in the recompense. If any have worked from the first hour, let him receive to-day his just dues. If any have arrived at the sixth, in no wise feast with thankfulness. If any have arrived at the sixth, in no wise let him be in doubt; in no way shall he suffer loss. If any arrive only at the eleventh, let him not be fearful for his slowness. For the Master is munificent, and receives the last even as the first. He giveth rest to him of the eleventh, even as to him who has wrought from the first hour. And He is merciful to the last, and provides for the first. And to this one He gives, and to that one He shews kindness. And He receives their labours, and acknowledges the purpose. And he honours the action and praises the intention.

Wherefore enter ye all into the joy of our Lord, and let the first and the second take part in the reward. Ye rich and ye poor, join hands together. Ye strong and ye heedless, do honour to this day. Ye who fast and ye who fast not, be glad today. The table is full: do ye all fare sumptuously. The calf is ample: let no one go forth unsatisfied. Let all take part in the banquet of Faith. Let all take part in the wealth of Righteousness. Let no one lament for poverty, for the Kingdom is made manifest for all. Let no one bewail transgressions, for forgiveness has dawned from the tomb. Let no one be fearful of death, for the death of the Saviour has set us free. He has quenched it by being subdued by it. He Who came down into Hades, despoiled Hades; and Hades was embittered when it tasted of His Flesh. Isaiah, anticipating this cried and said: Hades was embittered when below it met Thee face to face. It was embittered for it war rendered void. It was embittered for it was mocked. It was embittered for it was slain. It was embittered for it was despoiled. It was embittered for it was fettered. It received a Body, and encountered God. It received mortal dust, and met Heaven face to face. It received what it saw, and fell whither it saw not.

O Death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory? Christ is risen and thou are overthrown. Christ is risen and the demons have fallen. Christ is risen and the Angels rejoice. Christ is risen and there is none dead in the tomb. For Christ is raised from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept. To Him be glory and power from all Ages to all ages. Amen."

The Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom.

What happens when we truly believe in the Resurrection according to the Scriptures ....

There is no fear of death

This is an unholy fear born out of the consciousness of our sin, our nakedness, the poverty of our mortal nature apart from God. When we believe in the resurrection we know that death has no more dominion over us. The long reign of sin is ended by virtue of the Father's grace and mercy and, moreover, by the power of the Holy Spirit in disarming death and granting us eternal life, incorporate in the Body of the Risen Lord, (which is the Church). This makes the Christian life a victorious and vigorous calling. We can do anything for God, knowing that whether we live or die, we belong to Him and He will bring us home to His Kingdom provided that we persevere to the end.

There is nothing to harm us

Christ being Risen has conquered utterly all opposing powers; He has stripped them and lead them captive in his victory procession. The faithfulness and power of God manifest by the Spirit in His Son urges to take hold of His promises and believe that in Him is our life and nothing will harm us so long as we take this to be the rock of our faith within the Church whose gates are firmly closed to hell. The Christian life is, therefore, one of great adventure and daring provided that we trust in Him, obey His commandments and stay resolutely within His all-protecting Body, the Church, the Ark of Salvation. In this endeavour the most Holy Mother of God is always there for us, urging our closer walk with God and nurturing within us a deeper obedience to the will of Her Son.

Life makes sense

This generation has disbelieved itself into the absurdity of life without God. In a recent documentary, Peter France recounts his journey into Orthodoxy by exposing ruthlessly his own logic about life before he entered the Church. As soon as life ceases to be useful, he once believed, it is better to end it oneself. "Useful" in his context meant making an intellectual contribution to society. It could easily have defined by anyone else on any other grounds. What is common to the godless notion of life is its utter futility. Because the eyes have been darkened to the true life of Man, (which is God), modern secular people face only the absurdity of death or the mad dash for one's own interests and pleasures. Hedonism or despair await those without the Kingdom. True life, a full life, a purposeful life is only to be found in the God who raises from the dead all those who call upon Him in faith.

This is truly good!

God created the world and called it good. How is it then that even some who call themselves Christians can support abortion, defend the indefensible in war, rape the environment, call for consensual euthanasia or attempt to "improve" life through genetic engineering? Still others despise the body by abusing themselves or abusing others through drugs, fornication or violence. Some, less spectacularly, perhaps consign the body to the waste bin of history through spiritualism, the occult, New Age or reincarnation.

What all these heresies deny is the fundamental goodness of the body, the created order and all living things. In some sort of "super-spiritual" state the peddlers of this deadliness justify their beliefs by pointing away from this world to somewhere else. But Christ came to save this world, to renew its potential to give glory to God by delivering the material realm from its slavery to death. The resurrection of the body, is, therefore, a subversion of all attempts to reduce the scope of our salvation in Christ, and, thereby, introduce new (and some not-so-new) evils by the back door. In that Christ was raised from the tomb, bodily, the whole Universe as well as our bodies will be glorified in the New Creation which is the Kingdom of God.

We are not talking to ourselves!

Finally, and on a personal note, Christ, being raised means that we are not "talking to ourselves." For the last two thousand years Orthodox Christians, (and, no doubt others without opportunity to join the Church), have lived and died for the sake of the Son of God who was born lived, died and was raised from the dead for them. In this we have been utterly right or irrevocably mad. When we love and serve the Saviour we are in a personal and communal relationship with the Living One, not a figment of our imaginations but a real flesh and blood relationship with Christ, kindled by the Spirit and serving the God whom we invoke as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The resurrection of Christ makes all this possible. As St. Paul said, if Christ has not been raised, then we are of all men most to be pitied. Pity us not! As it is, Christ lives, He dies no more, and we live now and shall live for ever in Him!

Fr Gregory

Easter in the English Orthodox Tradition

By trying to explore Easter in the English Orthodox Tradition, we are going back to the Church as it was before there was any break between East and West. In those days, the lives of the Apostles and Martyrs, and the Fathers of the Church were all living realities.

The Church was One and it was Apostolic, and it knew nothing of the excesses which were to come in Mediaeval times – legalism, inquisitions and burnings at the stake –

nor those of the so called Reformation – with its iconoclasm and rejection of the saints.

This meant that the undivided Church was able to worship and fast and feast without any need to look over its shoulder to see whether it was right or wrong.

So it is strange to find that in popular tradition Christmas seemed to have many more traits than Easter. Maybe one explanation of this is purely human in that a long and well kept Great Lent and Holy Week left the faithful too weary to party. You sometimes hear it said that the Norman Conquest of 1066 wiped out all traces of the Orthodox/Celtic/Saxon church in England and this is true as far as church and monastic buildings, and styles of worship are concerned. But it is also claimed that William could not conquer the Englishman’s heart, and the half-millennium of Orthodox, if not Byzantine, influence lingered long in their culture.

This was brought home to me many years ago now, when as a boy, I first came across "pace"-eggs, as we called them. The brightly coloured eggs intrigued me and I asked my father what they meant. The old tradition had filtered down, and as a high-Church Anglican, he was able, in a few words to explain to me that the red-ness reminded us of the Blood which Jesus shed, and that an egg was a symbol of the new life which would break out of its shell, just as Jesus had broken out of the Tomb at His Resurrection. Whether those kinds of pace-eggs are still found outside Orthodoxy, I know not, but the chocolate variety, it will be claimed, keep the tradition going.

The age-old feminine wiles to obtain new attire led them to celebrate the new-life proclaimed at the Resurrection by the strong English tradition of always wearing a new Easter bonnet, and I understand that this line is still plugged in the shops today.. Lamb was ever the chosen dish to break the Lenten fast and this was garnished with bitter mint-sauce which was said to represent the sour wine which Jesus was offered on the Cross. It seems strange that there are no traces of any pudding peculiar to Easter, but it is obvious that the spicy Hot Cross bun of Good Friday remains popular even today.

By contrast, there was, however, a fair amount of weather-lore concerning the Feast of Feasts. e.g. "Whatever the weather on Easter Day will also prevail at harvest" or again, "If it rains on Easter Day, it will rain every Sunday till Whitsun". More troublesome was: "A white Easter brings a green Christmas". The truth of these saws may be questioned: what they do portray is the way in which an every-day faith linked with every-day life.

Because the yew-tree is said to live for a thousand years it was used to decorate the churches for the Feast as a symbol of the eternal God. Graveyards were also decorated at this time of the year, the departed being regarded as still part of the family, and today the custom prevails of putting flowers on family graves at Easter. Incidentally, because Psalm 137 said the exiled Jews hung up their harps on willow trees as a sign of mourning, willow-branches were used to decorate the churches on Palm Sunday and to represent the palm, figs would be eaten in pies and puddings, Sometimes it was called "Fig Sunday".

Turning to the artistic heritage of the un-divided Church, there is little to show as nearly the Norman Conquerors ruthlessly destroyed all the artifacts. But the Christian faith is based on the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and it is highly significant that the greatest survivor of all from the Orthodox past is the Book known as the Lindisfarne Gospels.

The four Gospels were transcribed in Latin by the monk Eadfrith, probably in honour of St Cuthbert, about the year 698 in an uncial script which betrays the Irish influence. There are 258 pages of calf-hide, which, fortunately for us, have preserved the original, delicate colouring. When Henry VIII dissolved the monastery, the MS passed, eventually, into the hands of a private collector, Sir Robert Bruce (1571- 1631) and from him it gradually descended into the British Museum in 1753. It is surely nothing short of a miracle that this valuable part of our history has been preserved intact and is available for all to see in the new building of the British Library on Euston Road in London.

Another important preservation from the end of our period is the oldest poem in the English language known as "The Dream of the Rood". Its 156 lines describe dramatically

Christ’s Passion through the eyes as it were of the Cross, that is the Rood, itself. Evidently this is a typical Anglo-Saxon hallmark to have an inanimate object like a cross, speak. It describes being cut out of the forest and raised up as a gallows. As Christ approaches, the Rood realizes its purpose and this puts it on the spot. The Rood considers that all living things should serve God, yet the Rood is about to assist in the death of God’s Son.

The Rood recognizes that it is his duty to stand firm, to be the gallows of Christ, because only by doing so will it be obeying the wishes of his liege-Lord. The poem then describes how Christ, himself very much seen as a Germanic hero, wants to enter battle, and eagerly climbs on the Rood. The Rood trembles but accepts its role in the Crucifixion doing what is demanded in spite of its inner agony. It speaks of the pain it felt when the nails were driven in and the mocking both it and Christ received.

Then Christ died, but the Rood notes that He only "rested there" — he knows that Christ will conquer death. The Rood is torn down and buried and soon found by the followers of Christ who adorned it with gold and silver and began the adoration of the Cross. The Rood now tries to explain that adoration because it must have bothered recent converts to

Christianity. It explains that it should be seen as a victory-sign, not because Christ was crucified on it, but rather because of what Christ accomplished for us by His crucifixion.

This is a very developed theology and the Rood goes on to explain that Christ’s death did not mean defeat – which would be a concept difficult for Anglo-Saxon warriors to accept. Instead it means that Christ’s victory over death can likewise be theirs if they will heed the words of the Rood and of Christ Himself.

Here, then, in a very different but thoroughly Orthodox way, is an Easter tradition of the early Church and Father Andrew Phillip sums it up very well when he says*:--

"Teachings were spiritual revelations made to help people live. Theology and life, piety and experience, teachings and mysticism were all one. Old English Christianity, not in spite of being mystical but because it was mystical, was a way of life, it patterned daily life. There was fast and feast; the sorrows of the Crucifixion were followed directly by the joy of the Resurrection. There was no "pie in the sky" of the Protestant moralizers.

Heaven began on earth for all who wanted to live according to the rhythms of Church life, and for most of the Old English period, most Old English did."

*"Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition" page 276.

Fr. John-Mark

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