The Eternal Today: Journeying with the Church, in the Light of the Feasts

Introduction

Our book is a journey through the liturgical landscape that extends from the feast of Christmas until Pentecost. Beginning with the Incarnation of the Son of God, the divine work of the salvation of the world, it continues with the luminous feasts of Holy Theophany and the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple, reaching the rich liturgical period of the devotionary Triodion. The uppermost crown of our journey is Easter, during which we become partakers of the grace of the saving Resurrection of Christ. At this point a new path of expectation and desire opens up to us, leading to the great and final feast of Pentecost.

The feast of Pentecost is the fulfilment of the economy of the Lord Jesus for the salvation of the world. The Holy Spirit comes to the world to perform a great work, to seal the truth of the Lord with perfection, to witness that Christ is the true God and Saviour of the world and to guide man into the fulness of His love. The Holy Spirit opens the eyes of the soul to see the traces of the path of the Lord and to follow Him faithfully. Thus the mind is enlightened to perceive the fire of His word, and the heart is strengthened to invoke His Holy Name, as this is the calling of every Christian. When we bear the Holy Name of the Lord Jesus, then He will open up not only all the paths of our life, but also the gate of heaven, so that we can enter into the great festival of God.

Our journey reaches its end with the Sunday of All Saints. When the Holy Spirit came to dwell in the Church, the greatest fruit which was imparted were the Saints. The main work of the Church is to produce images of Christ. But who is Christ? He is the New Adam, Who came, suffered and ascended the Cross having only one thought and one desire: to save the whole world. When He vanquished death, was resurrected and ascended to heaven, He was glorified with all the content of His heart. This is the splendour of the sacrifice of the Lord, of the New Adam, and from Him come all the holy chosen people of God, who will abide for ever in heaven.

The Lord carried within Him all the nations. He died, showing His love to the end, in order to save all mankind. Thus also the Saints who are imitators of Christ, have the same ‘enlargement’. They embrace through their prayer all the people of the earth, from the beginning of creation until the end of the ages. This grace of the Saints is an enlargement that flows from the incarnate God’s sacrifice. As St John the Evangelist writes, we cannot say that we love God, if we do not love our fellows. If we love Him, He will enlarge our heart with love that makes room for all mankind. The Church teaches that time is neither a linear succession of events nor cyclical, but both a spiral and linear movement towards eternity. From the perspective of the history of salvation, time is a precious gift of God to man. It is the place of the meeting of the Creator and His creatures, which has been prepared so that a personal and dynamic relationship between them may develop which begins in the present life and continues into unceasing eternity.

God descended to earth and even to the nethermost parts of the earth in order to save us, and from there He ascended to the heavens. We Christians have the honour and privilege to follow Christ on the path of His descent so that later we may enter into the glory of His Second Coming. According to Elder Sophrony: ‘If we really do Christ’s bidding, all that He went through will be repeated in us, be it to a lesser degree.’¹

The Church commemorates the saving work of Christ, which He performed ‘once and for all’ and remains active for all time. When we participate in feasts, we do not merely journey in time in our mind, but we receive a real taste of eternity while still dwelling in a specific place and time.

In every feast of the Church we are able through the grace of the Holy Spirit to meet Christ already from this present life and to experience the past, present and future all at once. In this way, the meaning of time takes on a new dimension that we could characterise as an eternal present, time overshadowed by eternity, a gift of the Church to her light-bearing children.

1 Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), On Prayer, trans. Rosemary Edmonds, Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, Essex, 1996, p. 100.

For unto us a Child is born,

unto us a Son is given!

Is. 9:6-7

Nativity Troparion

Thy Nativity O Christ our God

Hath shone upon the world

with the Light of knowledge,

for thereby they who adored

the stars, through a star

were taught to worship Thee,

the Sun of Righteousness

and to laud Thee,

the Dayspring from On high,

O Lord glory Thee!

Thy virtue, O Christ,

has covered the heavens

¹

Wondrous is the event of the Nativity of Christ and perfect the grace of this feast, which spreads over the earth. The virtue of Christ covers the heavens and the Holy Church shines from gladness at the coming of the Most High into the world. It joyously celebrates the manifestation of the love of God, Who so loved the world, that He gave His Only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not be lost in the darkness of non-being, but have everlasting life. ²

God became Man, as the Fathers say, so that man might become god. The Most High descended from heaven, so that man might ascend from his fall. God became poor so that poverty-stricken man might become rich. At Christmas, we celebrate the new creation, the ‘regeneration’³ and refashioning of man. From the moment when God was born and brought grace to earth, the Church, as a mother in travail, suffers anguish and birth pangs, longing for the Son of God to be born in the heart of every man who believes.

On the day of Christmas, we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. This is the greatest mystery of godliness, as the Apostle Paul says, ‘that God was manifest in the flesh’.⁴ At the same time, we celebrate yet another event, namely, that men have received ‘grace upon grace’.⁵ That is, from now on men have the potential to be born in the Spirit together with Christ and born again through His grace.

This is the hope-bearing message of the feast of the Nativity of Christ, the Lamb and Shepherd,⁶ as He is called in the Akathist Hymn. For He is the Lamb Who shepherds the shepherds, and the Shepherd, Who shall gather all together in His Kingdom, lambs and goats, wolves and sheep.

According to the Gospel, the Nativity of the great Lamb and Shepherd happened in Bethlehem,⁷ the city of His ancestors according to the flesh. This was the glorious city of David, the great King of Israel. It was meet that Christ be born in Bethlehem, for He was the seed of Abraham and the descendant of King and Prophet David. He Who would become the true King of kings⁸ and would reign over all the earth arrived there, due to the wise providence of God and the decree⁹ of Caesar. He Who would later become the Governor of Israel, was born in Bethlehem.¹⁰ And who is Israel? Certainly, there is the historical people of Israel, but there is also the spiritual Israel. In Hebrew, Israel means ‘the mind which beholds God’.¹¹ In other words, the Christians who gaze at the Invisible God through faith are the holy nation,¹² the holy Israel of God.

What a great and strange wonder: the ‘King of the Jews’¹³ came to Bethlehem and could find no place to stay. The ‘Lord of lords’¹⁴ came into the city of His ancestors as a refugee. Through the misery of their migration, the refugees offered a homeland, the heritage of His family, unto Him, of Whom every ‘family in heaven and earth is named’,¹⁵ as the Apostle Paul says to the Ephesians.

From the dawn of the life of the divine Infant we discern the unspeakable mystery of the self-emptying of the Son and Word of God. Incomprehensible and indescribable is His greatness, infinite and unfathomable His descent. It is impossible for us to conceive of the grandeur of God with our earthly mind, and we lack the strength to apprehend His humility and His descent, because the God of Christians, the Lord of Israel is boundless in the wealth of His divinity and perfect in His immeasurable searchless self-emptying.

What inference can we draw from the vulnerable way in which Jesus was born without anyone apprehending Him? Whoever has ears to hear,¹⁶ eyes to see, and a heart to understand, perceives that for as long as man lives in this world possessing it, enjoying it, being satisfied and satiated by it, Christ cannot be formed in his heart. This vain world makes every effort to leave its impressions on our soul, fighting to enslave our mind through its idols and to keep hold of us through ephemeral images which it tries to imprint as deeply as possible within us. This world stirs up passionate desires, which, when satisfied, generate greater passions, creating a great tumult in the heart, even the Babylon of the passions. The Prophet says, ‘O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed: happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stone.’¹⁷ That is, blessed is the man who crushes the onset of thoughts and passions on the rock of faith.

Seeing the miracle of the birth of Christ which happened in the most humble and vulnerable way, nothing remains but for us to also become strangers to this world. This is in fact what we are taught by the verse of the Akathist Hymn: ‘Seeing this strange birth, let us become strangers to the world fixing the mind in heaven.’¹⁸ We will become strangers to the vanity of this world which lies in wickedness, only when we transfer our mind to heaven for ‘our conversation