Christ is Risen!
Beloved Sons and Daughters of the Church of Christ.
The Pascha
of Christ is before us, the Feast of feasts and the Triumph of all triumphs.
There is no greater joy for us Orthodox than this Feast, specifically, and
with all my heart I felicitate you and wish you all possible good.
In the holy
city of Jerusalem, Golgotha and the Tomb of the Lord are located so close
to one another that it would have been possible to build a single cathedral
over these two sacred sites in honour of Christ's Resurrection. In this,
we see the providential indication that only through suffering for the Truth
is pure incorruptible joy born, while joy without suffering, stolen, sinful
joy, is in and of itself no joy at all.
Thus,
the Golgotha of suffering and the Tomb of the Lord are located next to one
another, and will always remain next to one another in the spiritual realm,
as well, as long as the earth endures and humankind continues upon it. They
are inseparable, complementing one another, giving birth to one another.
Some
Christians, His chosen ones, the Lord endows with the great honour of spilling
their blood and being slain for Him, in order to be crowned with the wreath
of martyrdom and to commune of the eternal Pascha of Christ. While all those
of us who remain off of this way of the cross, are also invited to Golgotha
by the Lord, but to a volunteer Golgotha of the Christian podvig [ordeal]
of fasting and prayer, bearing up under wrongs, to which we are so frequently,
so completely unexpectedly, subjected and, the chief thing, the bearing of
our own cross without murmuring. That is our mutual Golgotha, without which
no one will be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
During prayers, we entreat the Lord, as the Physician of our souls and
bodies, to cleanse us from our fiery passions; and, by means of bodily podvig,
do we strengthen our prayer and thereby confirm its sincerity. But it is
only Christ Himself Who cleanses and heals us; He Who, hearing our prayer
and seeing that, through bodily podvig, our prayer is, as it were,
all written in our blood, sends us His fiery grace, which consumes our passions.
And then, for such a one, there is Pascha, regardless of when this might
occur with him.
This is the day of all days, because it is the one "which the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad [in it]." And it is specifically to this joy that the Church of Christ invites and calls all of us, by way of Golgotha, to the Tomb of the Lord and to His Glorious Resurrection.
Amen
+Metropolitan Vitaly
The Resurrection Of Christ
2003
(Translated from the Russian by
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