O Thou Who spoiled hell and raised up man by Thy Resurrection, O Christ, make us worthy with pure hearts to praise and glorify Thee. (Paschal Lauds)
We are invited to the company of Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Dominions, Angels and Archangels in place of the spirits who exalted themselves and fell These exalted themselves and said in themselves to God: How will You make up our deficiency, which is intolerable and perceptible for You, as for the Most Wise, Who tolerates deficiency and disharmony nowhere in His world? (St, John of Kronstadt)
…But to the wisdom and omnipotence of God there are no bounds. Through end- less space, as if at a sign of the Divine hand, are strewn numberless starry worlds, of extraordinary beauty and harmony. And lost in the midst of this immense cosmos is a speck – the earth. And on it from dust and nothing ness arises a new creature, man, with the precious gift of likeness to God. (I.M. Kontzevich, The Sources of Tolstoy’s Spiritual Catastrophs, p. 104.)
When the ancient pre-Christian world had reached the spiritual readiness to accept Christ, God sent His Only-begotten Son to earth to transform men into heavenly beings. Christendom is the whole host of mortals who, with free will, have sensed the Divinity of Christ and chosen to die to “this world” only to be born again in Him and to live forever. The Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is the cornerstone and the beginning of our spiritual rebirth.
The Body of Christ, the Orthodox Church, in the course of its first millenium worked out all that is necessary for man during the course of his earthly existence, while awaiting the Gene r a 1 Resurrection to the next world. Christianity became the world religion; the highest peak of civilization was attained by Byzantium, where the whole of society was patterned upon Divine Truth.
But men, tempted by the Prince of this world to seek their end on the earth, gradually fell back, with the “Renaissance,” to the pagan concept of life; developing their know- ledge of this passing world, they ceased to have contact with God. To them God became “dead.” As a result, the contemporary world-view is founded upon a refusal to face man’s mortality and the inevitability of death -in fact, upon a fear of death. modern thought culminates in a dream, a form of what the Church calls prelest, of the communal construction of paradise on earth, the reigning idea of the present age. The Resurrection of Christ becomes merely a feast of spring.
To a sober Orthodox Christian, however, death is a reality both necessary and beneficial; for it forces man to seek and find the truth of himself beyond the bounds of his earthly existence, beyond time and space.
The Christian acceptance of death gives a new value to life on earth; it gives divine hope and acts as the beginning of one’s awakening to the New Birth in Christ.
By night, hidden from the ways of this world – like Nikodemos in the Gospel, must a contemporary man come to the truth of Orthodoxy in quest of Christ’s Resurrection. Only the great mystery of a man’s heart being touched by Christ Himself can orient one to sense truly the paschal joy. Words fail to describe what is beyond the human frame of reference. Yet when Christian martyrs, aflame with Christ’s Resurrection, eagerly gave themselves up to their torturers, they knew by experience the Truth for which they were dying. The desert Fathers withdrew from the world to preserve this living holy Fire of Christ’s Resurrection. Almost two hundred years later, St. Seraphim of Sarov, his heart purified by solitary podvig, became a vessel of this spirit and greeted every man with the joyous words, “Christ is risen,” seeing God’s image in every man.
Orthodoxy today is going through a period of trials and purification. Everywhere the most subtle temptations challenge the purity of one’s faith; thus is one spiritually tested to see if he hungers for the one True Christ or the multitudinous, many-faced antichrists.
The Christian today can withstand these temptations only if, having personally experienced Christ’s Resurrection in his heart, he realizes his own absolute sinfulness and knows the presence of Christ in his life. The annual period of Great Lent becomes a necessary preparation for the experience of the Risen Christ, and this experience is then repeated every Sunday throughout the whole year-for Sunday is the day of Resurrection (in Russian the very words are identical). Thus the man who lives the life of the Church is gradually transformed by the power of the Resurrected Christ, even while still on earth, into a dweller of Heaven; for this, in truth, is that for which he was created.
(Reprinted from The Orthodox Word, Vol.11, No. 1(7), Jan.-Feb.-March, 1966)