To the clergy, monastics, and devoted of the Orthodox Church in America, beloved youngsters within the Lord,
Christ is risen! Certainly he’s risen!
. John of Damascus, the writer of that canon, calls as we speak “the feast of feasts,” and as we have a good time this feast of feasts, this primary and biggest of feasts, we would ask a seemingly easy query: what are feasts, and why can we have a good time them? This query appears notably applicable because the world round us grows ever extra chaotic and sophisticated. Within the midst of all of the change and busy-ness, how can we spare the time simply to have a good time and do nothing of use?
Many people are aware of the Russian festal greeting, s prazdnikom. The important thing phrase right here is prazdnik, the Russian phrase for feast or vacation, which derives in flip from the adjective prazdny, that means “empty,” and therefore “idle.” However this vacancy, or idleness, isn’t merely an expression of absence. The feast has optimistic content material, however this content material isn’t man-made: it’s one thing made by God, one thing that our inaction permits us encounter and respect. Feasts are days on which we stay idle so that God can act; they’re days that we empty of our personal works in order that we are able to fill them with the remembrance of the issues of God: his deeds, his presence, his glory.
In spite of everything, because the Lord says, the sabbath was made for man, and never man for the sabbath (Mk. 2:27). We abused our freewill, sinned, and misplaced the continuous enjoyment of God, as an alternative being cursed to eat by the sweat of our forehead (Gen. 3:19). However God, in his mercy, has given us the feast day, a day on which we’re in a position to return to our Edenic state. We put aside the labor that’s the results of our sin and, for a day no less than, commit ourselves to true relaxation, to the one factor needful: worship in spirit and fact, whose hour is coming and now’s (Lk. 10:42, Jn. 4:23). As we sang at the canon, the feast is the day on which we bless Christ forevermore.
The feast day, on this means, turns into an icon of the deified particular person, full of the divine energies—God’s exercise, reasonably than his personal. The saints empty their hearts, their lives, their being, of every little thing worldly and passionate in order that God can dwell there as his holy temple. The feast can be thus an icon of the life to come, wherein the elect will now not know toil or care, however solely the unending banquet of the dominion, the ceaseless heavenly worship of the one God in Trinity.
Thus, on this primary of sabbaths, I pray that we would all put aside our Lenten labors and rejoice within the day which the Lord has made, Vivid Sunday, his nice and holy Pascha (Ps. 117:24). Following within the footsteps of our self-emptying Grasp, we labored for six weeks to cleanse our hearts and lives of every little thing unbefitting, not so that we could possibly be empty, however so we could possibly be crammed, in keeping with personal measure and capability, with the grace that Christ brings into the world by way of his life-creating Resurrection. Christ rested after his six days of labor, and now after our six weeks of Lenten work, he calls us to enter into his relaxation, to search out our peace in him and the nice salvation that he has wrought for us upon the Wooden.
Christ is risen, the Peace of God, the divine Peace himself, and so, within the midst of a busy and whirling world, we discover eternal peace on his feast of feasts. Could the grace, peace, and pleasure of his Resurrection abide with all of you, at all times, now and all through the ages to come.
Greeting you with festal cheer and Paschal rejoicing, and assuring you of my primatial prayers and blessing, I stay,Yours in Christ,
Metropolitan Tikhon of All America and CanadaTikhon, Metropolitanof All America and Canada
“>+ TIKHONArchbishop of WashingtonMetropolitan of All America and Canada
