Triumph and Transformation

Christianity is peculiar, there’s no doubt about that. We serve the crucified and risen Christ, who revealed Himself as God in the way that He died. Instead of self-fulfillment Christ offers us self-sacrifice; instead of power he offers us a cross. As Holy Week expertly teaches: we must go through the cross to get to the resurrection; there is no empty tomb without Golgotha. We learn that with God our expectations often go unmet, yet if we have patience, his plan transcends our expectations. The Jewish religious leaders of Christ’s day, and many of his own followers, did not grasp this concept. They wanted military triumph over the Romans and instead were offered a kingdom not of this world. They were so bent on victory in this life that they unwittingly rejected victory over sin and death.

I was thinking of these things as the Church celebrated the Sunday of St. Thomas, because a mere week after we share in the great Paschal triumph we are immediately confronted with the question of doubt. Courtesy of St. Thomas, our own doubts about Christ’s resurrection are brought to the forefront. But something different and altogether new sprang to my mind as I listened to the juxtaposition of the Epistle and Gospel readings. I found an entirely new way of thinking about the nature of doubt and the role it plays in our lives.

In the Epistle we are presented with the early days of the apostolic ministry and we are able to see the disciples, especially Peter, anew. They are boldly proclaiming Christ with little care of the consequences. It is even said that the sick were carried out on pallets that “as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them.” It was only a little over a week ago, during the Gospel readings of Holy Thursday, that we saw Peter, weak of will and overcome with cowardice, deny Christ three times. Yet here he is, so infused with the grace of the Holy Spirit that people crave a brief encounter with him. The Sadducees are so overcome with jealousy at this development that they throw the apostles in prison, yet again rejecting the work of God within their midst. Even this doesn’t dissuade the apostles from their work. They are set free from prison by an angel of the Lord, only to be charged: “Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life.”

How powerfully this speaks to our own fears and doubts. It’s as if we instinctively want to turn victory into defeat. It’s one thing to believe in the reality of the crucified and risen Lord and quite another to act on that belief. And yet here we have a powerful testament to God’s ability to transform our doubts and us with them. We are often like Peter in the Gospels, unable to see God’s hand in the chaos and tragedy around us, so ready to give in to fear and doubt. We are more like the Jewish leaders than we give ourselves credit for, too…ready to abandon Christ when God’s plan doesn’t conform to our expectations. We forget that God is more than the God of triumph; he is also the God of transformation. To truly reflect Christ, we must take up our cross. We must also see our doubts about God’s ability to work in the trials and tragedies of our lives for the imposters they are. When St. Peter stood between Christ and the cross, Christ admonished him saying, “Get behind me, Satan.”  Similarly, we must not let our doubts get between us and the cross. For God’s grace to transform us, we must fight through our doubts, knowing that the cross always comes before the empty tomb. It isn’t the doubts that count, it’s our reaction to them. God is always waiting to transform us the way he transformed St. Peter.

Fr. John Ballard (SVOTS ’10) is the assistant priest at St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church in North Royalton, Ohio. He currently lives in Cleveland with his wife, Rebecca, who is a neonatology fellow at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital. They have one child named Max and are expecting their second child at the end of May.

Holy Thursday: A Feast of Humility

Every year, the services of Holy Week bring before us selections from the Old Testament, of Jacob, of Joseph and his brothers, the great prophets Moses and Job.  We hear the ancient prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah with an awareness that everything that has happened before, everything that has been spoken, reaches its fulfillment in our Lord’s passion. During the services, the Gospel passages recount Christ’s final teachings to his disciples, as well as the events that lead to his Passion.  As the week moves on, the pace quickens as our Savior hastens to the events that are so familiar to us: the dinner, the trial, the scourging, the haggard procession with the cross, and the brutal crucifixion itself.  The Church speaks of an end, but now as the end of this week draws near, we must also speak of the beginning, and understand both what is old and coming to an end, and also what is new and coming to life.

All around us outside, the natural world proclaims this pattern: the sun casts more light upon the earth than night’s darkness.  As the prophet says, “For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.  The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come.”  (Song of Solomon 2.11-12)  The Hebrews even reckoned the annual commemoration of the date of Pascha according to this natural order: “In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month in the evening, is the Lord’s Pascha.”  (Lev 23.5-6)

Commenting on the Lord’s Pascha, some Church fathers seized on this idea of annual re-creation and used images from it to describe this liturgical season of the death and resurrection of Christ.  Many noted that this was even the traditional time of the original creation of the World; it was a natural transition to see Holy Week and our Lord’s death and resurrection as a recapitulation of that original creation.  The new creation begins on Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday when our Lord once again separates light from darkness as he calls forth the dead to life.  And as the great King and true light of the world, meekly bearing salvation, he enters into his city, Jerusalem, with great acclamation.  This great light increases even more as his death, burial, and resurrection draw near.  In the face of the brilliant light of our Lord’s passion, the two lights of creation, the sun and the moon, diminish and no longer illumine the world alone.  The week goes on, and on this holiest of all Fridays, our God fashions man anew, as his Christ is crucified.  From the side of this new Adam will not come a rib, but blood and water, by which he establishes and nourishes the Church.  After this will be the Great and Holy Sabbath, the last day of the old creation; God will rest again.  And on the next day, the eighth day, the first day of the new Creation, the man of the earth, once bound by death, will be freed in the life of Christ Jesus.  There will be a new Creation, peopled by those who have been formed by his word, nourished on the food of his body, and illumined by the light of his power.

Here, on this fifth day, on this Holy Thursday, our attention is drawn to numerous themes – the mystical supper, the scheming of the elders, the treachery of Judas.  But let us stop and consider only one event of this day, the washing of the feet.  For here again on this fifth day, the waters splash as they did on the original fifth day, not with every sort of sea creature, but with our Savior calling forth a new way of life for his new creation.  With the knowledge “that the Father had given all things into his hands,” (Jn. 13.3) the eternal Word of God stoops down and humbly puts his hands in the basin of water to wash his disciples’ feet.  By this humble act, as he washes away the filth and grime from feet that trod upon the dusty paths of Palestine and the alleys of Jerusalem, he will create new winged creatures, as man will soar to the heavenly heights of virtue and will keep company with the angels in the presence of God the Father, with his Son, in the Holy Spirit.

The hymnography of Holy Thursday speaks of the washing of the feet as the time “when the disciples were illumined.”  Illumination is, of course, also the way the Church speaks of the mystery of Holy Baptism.  The Church can use this term for both the washing of the feet and Holy Baptism, because the results are the same: we put on Christ, who is our Teacher and Lord, and strive to be all that he is, by doing what he has commanded.  He says as much plainly: “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”  (Jn 13.14-15)  This is how the heavenly heights are opened for us: we will ascend to the heavens when we understand what he did to his disciples and for us, and when we follow his command to “wash one another’s feet.”

We should make no mistake; “foot washing” is not an easy task even now, in our world with all the benefits of modern hygiene.  The extent of our Lord’s love for us can be seen precisely in this, as he takes the filthy, dirty feet of his disciples and washes them clean.  The dirt and grime are precisely what makes this act so beautiful.  In that soiled water, our Lord has called forth new life, a life purified and clean.  He has called forth life that proclaims power in weakness, the triumph of humility and service, the victory of love, and the death of selfishness.  Out of these waters, just like the waters of baptism, he has not called us to be proud or powerful.  He has not empowered us to be self-centered or self-interested.  He has not challenged us to become successful men or women by the standards of the world.  No, he has called us to emulate him.  If we have called him our Lord and King at our baptism, we ought to “wash one another’s feet,” just as our Lord and Teacher has done.

On this day, we are given a vision of God’s new creation.  For all of us who live in this new creation, “washing one another’s feet” means giving ourselves to one another in all love, humility, and service.  The new creation is to be populated by those who are willing to beautifully debase themselves and wash the feet of their brothers and sisters, to offer themselves, to humble themselves, to give entirely of themselves, not being concerned by position, status, authority, pride, pomp, or any consideration other than loving their brother and sister the way the Lord has loved them and in exactly the same fashion.

Fathers, brothers, and sisters, as we stand now at the foot of the steps, ready to ascend to the upper chamber and, as companions of our Lord, to partake of the Divine Word, let us commit ourselves once more to this same Lord, who is going to his voluntary passion for us and for our salvation, to inaugurate a new creation.  Let us pray therefore that by emulating in him in our words, deeds, and thoughts, we may find ourselves in that chamber with him and with all those who have been well pleasing to him from all the ages.  Amen.

Archpriest Alexander Rentel (SVOTS ’95) is Assistant Profess or of Canon Law and Byzantine Studies and the John and Paraskeva Skvir Lecturer in Practical Theology. Fr Alexander finished his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Fr Robert Taft, SJ, at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome in January 2004. Prior to coming to St Vladimir’s as a professor, Fr Alexander was a 2000-2001 Junior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. He has taken numerous research trips to Greece, Italy, and France. He was ordained to the priesthood in July 2001. He and his wife, Nancy (née Homyak, SVOTS ’95) are the proud parents of three children, Dimitrios, Maria, and Daniel.

The Matins of Holy Thursday: A Meditation

“Great are you, O Lord, and marvelous are your works, and there is no word which suffices to hymn your wonders!”

These words, which come from the blessing of water at the baptismal service and at the water blessing on Theophany, are probably not the first words that come to mind now, at the midpoint of Holy Week. (The matins of Holy Thursday, a rich and beautiful service, is usually celebrated on the evening of Holy Wednesday. In many parishes in North America, however, the Service of Anointing is celebrated at that time, and the matins service is omitted.) This is hardly a time for celebration.

We are now at the point in Holy Week when things go from bad to worse. The shouts of “Hosanna” have long faded, and the crowds will soon be yelling “Crucify him! Crucify him!” The religious authorities, threatened by Jesus’ popularity and his assaults on their traditions, are plotting to kill him. The civil authorities have their own agendas, focused on maintaining their positions of power and preserving the pax Romana. Judas, one of the Twelve, is laying his own plans to betray the Master even as he eats and drinks at the Last Supper with the Lord and the other disciples. And immediately after the supper, the disciples begin to argue among themselves about which of them is the greatest. Soon, the disciples will abandon him as he undergoes the passion. Peter will deny him three times, and all the apostles will scatter after Jesus’ arrest. Only a few women remain faithful as they accompany him at his crucifixion, and later as they come to anoint his dead body—and for this reason they become the first witnesses to the resurrection.

No one knows or comprehends the cosmic events that are taking place. The world at large is completely oblivious, and the story of Jesus leaves almost no mark on the official historical records of the day. The Jewish nation rejects the Messiah as, at best, another prophet who met a sad end—he was certainly not the triumphant, worldly king they were expecting. Jesus’ followers, bewildered and confused, give up. Even the women who remain faithful do so not because they understand the significance of what is happening, but because of the personal love they feel for him.

And what about us, who gather together some two thousand years later to remember these events? As the texts of the Holy Week services make abundantly clear, we are just like those weak, sinful individuals portrayed in the scripture readings and in the hymnography. Indeed, it is to us that these texts are addressed. We are just like those crowds that yell “Hosanna” one day, and a few days later crucify our Lord. We do this whenever we despise or ignore our neighbor, who is the living image of Christ. We do this when, like the Pharisees, we concern ourselves more with the externals of the faith than with the law of love. We do this when, like Judas, we value the thirty pieces of silver more than the gift of eternal life.

For the Holy Week liturgical cycle functions as one big parable: a story that first draws us in, and then pulls the rug out from under us as it reveals the weakness of all our own arguments, our own rationalizations. We think that it is the Jews who are responsible for crucifying Christ—and at one time people calling themselves Orthodox Christians would launch pogroms against Jews on these days. We may even consider that some of the Holy Thursday and Holy Friday texts are anti-Semitic, and we fail to realize that they are actually speaking about us. For it is by our own sins and actions that we crucify Christ. It is we who stand condemned.

These Holy Week services thus paint a dark picture of the fallen world in which we live. This is a world in which darkness reigns, where individuals and nations commit the vilest atrocities and genocides. Modernity, despite bring much improvement of the lives of so many people, has also made the extermination of entire peoples ever more efficient and impersonal. Our cities are full of suffering and crime, and that in the richest nation on this earth. And in many parts of the world, conditions are far worse.

In short, these services unmask the reality of this world, a reality we try so hard to conceal even from ourselves. Like the emperor in the familiar fairy tale, we are revealed as having no clothes. Or, in the language of the exaposteilarion that we sing at the matins services from Monday to Thursday of this week, we have no “wedding garment” to enter into the bridal chamber.

Yet it is only when we become aware of this absolute emptiness that we can begin to understand why it was necessary for Christ to come into the world in order to overcome this darkness. We begin to see this now, as Christ first washes the feet of his disciples, then offers his Body and Blood to us in anticipation of his own death on the Cross for our sake. He, and He alone, is under no delusion. He alone sees this fallen world for what it is—a world that rejects its Maker. And yet, as we hear in John’s Gospel, God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten Son, who, by his presence among us, fills the darkness with light. The One who created the world never stops loving his creation, even when that creation does not return his love and chases after idols.

Later today, as we celebrate the Eucharistic liturgy of Holy Thursday, we shall sing “One is holy, one is the Lord, Jesus Christ.” As we do this, we confess not only that he alone is holy, but also that we, because of our sins, are not. Yet we do this with the certainty that through him, we too become holy, not because of anything that we do or have done, but because he freely bestows his holiness on us. We become holy when, at our baptism and chrismation, we are clothed with the “robe of righteousness.” And we reaffirm this each time that we approach the chalice.

The garment that we lack is provided to us freely by the Master. At the time of Christ, the host would provide a wedding garment to all the guests he invited. They did not have to purchase or earn it for themselves. So, in the familiar parable about the wedding feast, the man who comes without the proper attire does so only because he has rejected the free gift of the garment from the Master (Matt 22:11-13).

Our calling today, as we prepare for the liturgy of Holy Thursday, is not to reject that gift, that festal, baptismal garment, but to accept it with gratitude, knowing full well that we do not deserve it. It is for this that Christ comes to us, and why he accepts to suffer and to die on our behalf. This, even more than the many miracles that Jesus performed during his sojourn among us, is the greatest wonder of all.

“Great are you, O Lord, and marvelous are your works, and there is no word which suffices to hymn your wonders!”

Dr. Paul Meyendorff (SVOTS ’75) is a leading specialist in the history, theology, and practice of the Orthodox liturgy and is The Father Alexander Schmemann Professor of Liturgical Theology at St. Vladimir’s Seminary.

Holy Tuesday: a hymn of invitation

Come, O faithful, let us work zealously for the Master; for he distributes wealth to his servants.

Let each of us, according to his or her ability increase the talent of grace:

let one be adorned in wisdom through good works; let another celebrate a service in splendor.

Ihe one distributes his wealth to the poor; the other communicates the word to those untaught.

Thus we shall increase what has been entrusted to us, and, as faithful stewards of grace, we shall be accounted worthy of the Master’s joy.

Make us worthy of this, Christ our God, in your love for mankind.

As more and more people attend and thoughtfully follow the services of Holy Week, many are struck by the incomparably rich hymnography, often sung in unique and evocative melodies. Many of us have favorite hymns, which we greet as friends when they come along each year. There are the landmark hymns of the Bridegroom services, repeated for several nights running. There are, of course, the unforgettable moments of Holy Thursday: “Of Thy Mystical Supper!” The Twelve Gospels! Then Friday: the Burial Shroud! The Lamentations!… Then Saturday and the victorious Prokeimenon! These are like lanterns, lighting our way forward in an otherwise dark terrain.

One of my own favorites is a humbler little hymn (blink and you’ve missed it for the year) sung with the Aposticha at Matins and Vespers on Holy Tuesday. [They hymn's text is at the beginning of this post.] Why do we sing such a hymn during Holy Week? Let’s spend a minute examining its liturgical context before looking at it more closely.

By the time we sing this hymn, we have entered squarely into the journey to Christ’s life-giving Passion. We have traveled six weeks of Great Lent. We have celebrated the victorious entry of Our Lord into Jerusalem (a bitter victory: Jesus knowingly enters the city where he is to be betrayed and slain). We have heard him preaching with increased intensity against civil and religious hypocrisy and injustice. But as we follow Jesus’s journey, we also direct attention at ourselves. As we Orthodox always do in our penitential hymnography (for example, in the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete), we apply all that hypocrisy, all the examples of pride, lust, murderous intent, to our own lives as we live them. It is not a pretty picture. So we ask God’s forgiveness and beg him to help us to become better human beings.

During Holy Week, this sort of penitence is brought to a high level of intensity, a dosage that we cannot sustain for long. But here we are pushed to our limits, because Our Lord himself, the King of Glory, who made the heavens and the earth, is on his way to being betrayed, abandoned, and slaughtered. Matters do not get any more serious than that. We have to make sure we are paying full attention.

That is why, at the Bridegroom services, usually celebrated on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings of Holy Week, we pray for several things surrounding the theme of bring ourselves into realization of who we are and what is happening:

• We ask God to “illumine the vesture of our souls,” to purify us, to give us appropriate clothing in order to celebrate properly the Feast of Feasts.
• We remind our own selves to be wakeful and watchful, rouse ourselves out of our slumber, to penetrate the usual half-awake state of our minds and hearts.
• We contemplate scriptural images as lessons or as inspiration. The common theme to all these services is that of the Bridegroom (Christ) who comes in the middle of the night and finds some who are prepared, others for whom it is now too late. But on different evenings we sing about the withered fig tree, the betrayal of Judas, and – as a positive image – the repentant harlot who wipes Jesus’s feet with her tears and hair.

It is within this broader context, then, that we come to that Holy Tuesday hymn, in which we urge each other to do the particular work that God has given us to do. Let’s look through it to see what it is saying, and why people may be attracted to it.

• We goad each other to work zealously. Don’t almost do something, or just thing about doing it, or do it in a half-baked way. Do it, and do it well for the sake of God.
• Notice that God gives the wedding garment. God gives the talent. Without this initial gift, we have nothing, we are nothing. But once we realize that God has filled our otherwise empty vessels, it is very much up to us to take up that gift and to act on it.
• When God distributes his gifts, he is not using a cookie cutter to form identical little shapes. He is not drawing a uniform pattern for us to imitate like robots. We are different from each other; we do not strive to conform to a single model, even if sometimes the image of a virtuous person in the Church’s Tradition seems frustratingly uniform. In iconography and spiritual literature (depending on where we’re looking) we might find a preponderance of monks, bishops, and virgins. But if we look closer, we find a message applicable to school teachers, social workers, bankers, moms, dads, writers, sanitation workers – people from all walks of life and different talents.
• When it begins enumerating tasks, our hymn encourages us to “do good work” – whatever our station of life, whatever our vocation. Then it identifies specific vocations – but let us take note how these are both particular and universal in character.
• One “celebrates a service in splendor.” (When I was sacristan during my student days at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, I watched as Fr. Paul Lazor, the consummate liturgical celebrant, made a large and meaningful sign of the cross over himself during that line.) Although this verse does carry a particular, clerical meaning, doesn’t it also pertain to our corporate celebration of the liturgy? All of us celebrate the liturgy in splendor when we participate meaningfully in it. Going still further, can this not also pertain to any way in which we – whether lay or ordained – as “priests” offer the world to God, making our whole life a creative service of splendor?
• In the Divine Liturgy we pray for “those who remember the poor.” Is helping the poor, then, something that someoneelse always does? No. Although we recognize realistically that not everyone is called to make his or her whole life a service to the poor, none of us is off the hook in the basic, universal, Christ-imitating vocation of ministry to the poor, solidarity with the outcast, speaking out against injustice.
• While teaching the Word applies in a particular way to teachers and catechists, don’t we all impart knowledge and wisdom – both explicitly and implicitly Christian Truth – in our various vocations (not least those of us who are parents or godparents)?

Wherever we are, whatever we do, whatever our station in life our task is to build upon what we have been given. First, of course, we have to identify the gift, and that is not always simple. But by understanding the gift and recalling that it indeed comes from God himself, we can build on it. The gospels tell us that wasting our talents is one of the things that seriously displeases God. But we pray that, if we recognize and work with our gifts, we will be “deemed worthy of the Master’s joy,” a joy that is beyond anything that we can imagine.

Dr. Peter Bouteneff (SVOTS ’90) teaches courses in theology, patristics, and spirituality at the seminary, where he is Associate Professor in Systematic Theology. After taking a degree in music in 1983 he lived and worked in Japan, and traveled widely in Asia and Greece. He has a doctorate from Oxford University, where he studied under Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. He has worked for many years in theological dialogue, notably as Executive Secretary for Faith and Order at the World Council of Churches, and has written extensively on Orthodox relations with other churches. His theological interests include Christ, the Church, and the human person, but as a great fan of music and cinema he is also committed to exploring the connections between theology and popular culture, and regularly offers a course on religious themes in film. He conceived of and edits the popular “Foundations” series for SVS Press, to which he has contributed a volume on “dogma and truth” called Sweeter than Honey. His most recent book is Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives, published by Baker Academic Press. Tune in to his podcast on Ancient Faith Radio, Sweeter than Honey.

Palm Sunday: Victory of the Heart

Hosanna! 

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest!  [Mark 11:9–10]

Today Jesus enters into Jerusalem, and the cheering crowds greet him like a king entering the city after a military victory—the first-century equivalent of a “ticker tape parade.” The crowds have heard about Jesus, about his powerful teaching and his miracles, specifically raising Lazarus from the dead. They cry out “Hosanna in the highest,” a shout of praise and a plea for salvation. “Save us, Lord!” For years, for generations, these people have languished under the heavy boot of Roman occupation and oppression. They are weary of high taxes, soldiers in their streets, and the constant threat of violence. The people are tired and weary and hungry, and they want freedom.

Do you ever feel this way?

Today, in some parts of the world, Christians struggle under the heavy yoke of political oppression and military occupation. In some places, Christians are in the middle of military conflict and civil war. But, even people who enjoy great political freedom can feel this sense of soul crushing oppression. We can be oppressed by strained relationships among family and friends. We can be oppressed by the anxiety and stress of economic uncertainty. We can be oppressed by the agony of addiction. We can be oppressed by the pain and grief of illness and death. And wherever there is oppression, there is a powerful desire for freedom. We may not face oppression from the Roman Empire, but standing with our palm branches today, singing “Hosanna in the highest,” we stand shoulder to shoulder with our first-century brothers and sisters, longing for freedom. But how do we get that freedom? How do we find liberation from our physical, emotional, and spiritual oppression?

The obvious answer is to go out and fight for it. This was what the crowds in Jerusalem wanted from Jesus as he traveled on that “red carpet” of palm branches and the clothes off their backs (Mark 11:8). In their eyes, Jesus was the perfect leader for a righteous rebellion. Surely God’s Anointed One could raise up an army and restore the Kingdom of Israel. After all, if Jesus had the power to raise Lazarus from the dead, he would be invincible in the face of Roman legions. If Jesus was truly God’s anointed one, then he would be invincible in battle. The crowds wanted the kind of freedom that you win with the spear, the chariot, and the sword.

But to win this kind of freedom you need wealth, strength, and power. They sound awfully good, don’t they? With money, a strong body, and political influence, freedom is yours for the taking. Or is it? Ancient Israel had great power, but fell to the Babylonians. In Jesus’ time the Roman Empire had great power, but over the centuries that empire fell to other nations. As one nation rises, other nations fight to gain supremacy. The same is true for people. Today one person might be wealthy, strong, and have all the power in the world. But one who gains worldly power quickly becomes a target for everyone who wants a place at the top of the food chain.

And so, strength, wealth, and power come with a terrible price. They come with a price of fear, isolation, and anxiety. The more you possess of this world, the more this world will try to take away. So we prepare for battle, we harden our defenses and sharpen our attacks. Whether we attack others with swords or words, with bullets or in business, we strike others where they are weakest, where we can do the greatest amount of damage and gain the greatest advantage. The crowd was hungry for power, and they hoped that Jesus would lead them to victory in an epic battle that would change their world.

On a certain level, the crowd was right. They were at the threshold of a great battle that would change everything—a battle that would grant freedom to the oppressed, and vanquish the foe. However, the army that Jesus came to fight was not flesh and blood; it was, as St. Paul says, a battle against the “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Eph 6:12) However, this battle had begun long before Jesus entered into Jerusalem.

After Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, he went out into the wilderness and fasted for forty days. After that long fast, the tempter comes and tempts Jesus.

“You are hungry? If you are the Son of God, command those stones to become loaves of bread,” says the evil one. This is not merely a temptation about food. Satan is tempting Jesus with wealth. If Jesus were to turn stones into bread, he would never go hungry. And if one were to possess an unlimited supply of bread, he could have virtually unlimited wealth. But Jesus launches a counterattack and replies, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’” (Matt 4:4)

Then the tempter takes Jesus to the holy city, sets him on the top of the Temple, and says, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” (Matt 4:6) Satan tempts Jesus with strength, with physical invincibility. “If you are really the Son of God, then you can do anything you like, even jump off a cliff, and you’ll be fine.” According to this demonic logic, not only could Jesus perform superhuman feats, but he also would be physically invulnerable. He could literally live forever, doing anything he pleased in this world. The spiritual battle becomes more intense, and Christ replies, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’” (Matt 4:7)

Finally, Satan takes Jesus up to the top of a high mountain, shows him all of the kingdoms of the world, points out all the glory of all those kingdoms, and he says, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” (Matt 4:9) It is the ultimate offer of power. What would it be like to rule over the entire world, over all its kingdoms and all its peoples, and have access to all its wealth and all its pleasures? At some level, Jesus must have known that all of this could be his: perfect strength, infinite wealth, and limitless power. Yet, he strikes a powerful blow against the powers of wickedness in his reply: “Begone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” (Matt 4:10)

Today, on Palm Sunday, we have fasted forty days, we are hungry, and if ever we face temptation from Satan, it is now. We face the temptation to gratify ourselves with worldly delights. We face the temptation to demand our liberty from everything and everyone that oppresses us. We face the temptation to fight for strength, and wealth, and power. This is the spiritual warfare that constantly rages on all sides, and today on Palm Sunday the battle is particularly violent.

As Jesus enters Jerusalem, he faces these temptations as never before—all of those people cheering, crying out “Hosanna!,” just begging him to be their worldly general, their commander, their emperor. Yet, Christ refuses to be the earthly king that the people demand. Instead he will be revealed as a kind of king that the world has never seen, a perfect king, a heavenly king, a humble king, crowned with thorns, robed in the purple of mockery, and enthroned on the Cross. Though Christ enters Jerusalem and is enveloped in a firestorm of temptation, he keeps his eyes on the Cross. This is the victory of Palm Sunday.

And today Jesus Christ enters into the Jerusalem of our hearts to lead us to victory. Today, Christ fills us with his power, his strength, and his resolve to overcome the temptation to worldly power. For “the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matt 20:28)

Today we cry out “Hosanna in the highest!,” for Christ vanquishes the powers of evil, and through his perfect sacrifice on the Cross we are liberated from the oppressive desire for worldly power. Christ leads us to the unexpected victory in which the King lays down his own life for the salvation of all. In dying, the true majesty and power of the Lord is perfectly revealed and the powers of hell are vanquished. Following Christ, we lay down our lives as he did: for our brothers and sisters, our neighbor, and even our enemy. Today we cry out “Hosanna in the highest!” as we follow our Lord to his voluntary passion and death on the Cross.

Fr. J. Sergius Halvorsen (SVOTS ’96) is Associate Professor of Homiletics and Rhetoric at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. He completed his doctoral dissertation at Drew University in 2002. From 2000 to 2011 he taught at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell Connecticut, where he also served as Director of Distance Learning. He was ordained to the priesthood in February 2004 and is attached at Christ the Savior Church in Southbury, Connecticut. He and his wife, Dina, reside in Connecticut with their children Thomas, Timothy, and Mary.

Pascha: A Feast of Theology

As we approach Pascha, the Feast of Feasts, it is fitting that we consider once again the nature of the banquet to which we are invited.  As we will sing at Matins on Holy Thursday, we are called to ascend, with our minds on high, to enjoy the Master’s hospitality, the banquet of immortality in the upper chamber, receiving the words of the Word.  The nourishment that we are offered is a feast of theology; the food that we will feast on is the body and blood of the Word, the one who opens the Scriptures to show how they all speak of him and provide the means for entering into communion with him.

Our chapel here at St Vladimir’s Seminary is dedicated to Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom.  Although they each have a particular day of celebration, our patronal feast celebrates them together, as the Three Great Hierarchs.  The hymnography for the feast celebrates first of all their words, their words of theology, how they spoke about God.  The feast was conceived in the eleventh century as a feast of oratory: it was a celebration of those who found the words adequate to express the Word of God.  Such theology is a sacred art – the Byzantines even called it a mysterion, a sacrament – and it is charged with divinity.  It embraces and elevates the words of men to convey Jesus Christ, the Word of God.

The Church celebrates the Three Hierarchs as great examples of those who took on this work.  Having studied at Athens and other intellectual centers of the ancient world, they used all their God-given intellectual powers for the celebration of this divine task.  If we too wish be disciples, or, more accurately, “students” of Christ, we must take on this task of theology, learning Christ and being renewed in our minds.  And there are two very important aspects of this that we always need to bear in mind.

First, that theology is not an abstract discipline or specialized profession.  It is not speculation about God himself, separated from his own revelation or what his revelation says about us.  It is not taking all the things that humans might think of as divine – omnipotence, omniscience, immortality – and then projecting them into the heavens.  This approach creates nothing better than a “super-human”, with divine attributes, perhaps, but nothing more than the best we can humanly conceive.  Rather, theology begins and ends with the contemplation of the revelation of God, as he has shown himself to be.  Anything else is not theology at all, but fantasy.  We do theology when we contemplate God’s own revelation: God, whose strength and wisdom is shown in the weakness and the folly of the cross.  Christ himself, the Word of God, demonstrates his strength and power in this all-too-human way, by dying a shameful death on the cross, in humility and servitude – trampling down death by death – showing that true lordship is service.  This one is the image of the invisible God: in Christ the fullness of divinity dwells bodily – the whole fullness, such that divinity is found nowhere else and known by no other means.

All of us, therefore, all of the people of God, must focus on the transforming power of God revealed in Christ by the power of the Spirit.  As the Great Hierarchs affirmed, we cannot know what God is in himself, but we know how he acts.  We are invited to come to a proper appreciation of the work of God in Christ by the Spirit.  We are called to understand that Jesus Christ is indeed the Word of God, whom, by the same Spirit, we must convey in our words.  To recognize him as the Word of God is not a matter of human perception, but to find the words to convey him certainly demands the application of our minds.  It requires that we raise our minds to a properly theological level, that we may be transformed by the renewal of our minds.  As Great Lent prepares us for the Feast of Feasts, so also honing our mental skills should prepare us for the feast of theology.

The second point to remember is that the theology that we celebrate is a pastoral theology.  The hymns for the Great Hierarchs proclaim that the pastoral power of their theology has overthrown the illusory words of the orators, of those who play with words, speaking on a merely human level.  Their theology is pastoral, in that it shepherds us into true life.  It invites us to understand ourselves, and the whole of creation, in the light of God revealed in Christ by the Holy Spirit.  This is not simply a matter of asking “What Would Jesus Do?”  Nor is it simply a matter of being “pastoral,” as we often hear that word used today, in the sense of ministering to others on their own terms, enabling them to feel comfortable with themselves.  Rather, it is the challenge to transfigure our own lives by allowing God’s own transforming power to be at work within us.

This means that we must confront our own brokenness and weakness, for this is how God has shown his own strength: it is only in our weakness that God’s strength is made perfect.  And we will only have the strength to do this, we can do this only if we begin with God’s own revelation, if we begin with the theology taught to us by the Great Hierarchs.  We have to abandon what we humanly think divinity is, and to let God show us who and what he is.  We must begin, therefore, with the God who confronts us on the cross, who shows his love for us in this:  the love that he embodies.  Reflect on this: that when we are confronted with divine love in action, it is in the crucified Christ.  This reality reveals two things: how alienated we are from the call that brought us into existence, yet, at the same time, how much we are loved and forgiven.  In the light of Christ, we can begin both to understand our brokenness, our emptiness without him, and also to be filled with his love.  Theology shows us that the truth about God and the truth about ourselves always go together.

So, as we approach the Feast of Feasts, let us prepare ourselves to receive this revelation of God on his own terms.  Let us prepare ourselves for the challenge that his revelation presents, so that the Resurrection will transform us and renew our minds and we will find the words appropriate to offer the Word to others.

Fr. John Behr (SVOTS ’97) is Dean and Professor of Patristics at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. His early work was on issues of asceticism and anthropology, focusing on St. Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria. After spending almost a decade in the second century, Fr John began the publication of a series on the Formation of Christian Theology, and has now reached the fifth and sixth centuries. He has recently completed an edition and translation of, and introduction to, the remaining texts of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia. He has also published a synthetic presentation of the theology of the early centuries, focused on the mystery of Christ. He is also a passionate cyclist, often rescheduling family events around the Tour de France. Fr. John’s wife, a Tour de France enthusiast and armchair cyclist, teaches English at a nearby college, and their two sons and daughter are being taught to appreciate the finer points of French culture: the great “constructeurs” of the last century, Le Grande Boucle, and … cheese.