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.

Bring Forth Fruit With Patience

Written by Fr. Thomas Hopko, The Lenten Spring is a book of spiritual readings for the season of Great Lent.

Photo credit: BLAGO Fund, Inc.

The Lenten season is the time for bearing fruits worthy of repentance, the fruits of the Spirit. In a sense, this is what Lent, like life itself, is all about. To produce these holy fruits is not an easy task. It does not just happen. It is neither magical nor mechanical. It is a long, hard labor. It requires much work. And most of all, it takes patience. Jesus made this point in His explanation of His parable of the sower when He said that the good earth that receives the seed of God’s Word and brings forth much fruit does so only with patience: “And as for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the Word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience” (Lk. 8:15).

Photo credit: BLAGO Fund, Inc.

In the Lenten prayer of St. Ephraim there is a special petition for patience. It is a necessity for the person who expects to produce spiritual fruits. A garden grows by being tended. God gives the growth, yet His workers must plow and water and fertilize and cultivate. This must be done slowly, painfully, with tireless effort and endless patience. Otherwise, nothing useful will grow. “In your patience,” says the Lord Jesus, “possess ye your souls.” Or, in a more modern translation, “By your endurance you will gain your lives” (Lk. 21:19).

The word “patience” means “to endure.” It means to bear and put up with people and things. It means to carry the burdens of others, and of “the heat of the day.” It means to watch and to wait, not to hurry and to rush. It means literally to suffer with and to suffer through, in quiet expectation of the hoped-for result. For only those, says Jesus, who endure to the end will be saved (Mt. 24:13).

Excerpt from The Lenten Spring by Fr. Thomas Hopko, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983, p. 103-104.

A journey, a pilgrimage!

Written by Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent is a book of spiritual reflections on the journey through Lent to Pascha. This particular excerpt is from the introduction.

Photo credit: The Temple Gallery

When a man leaves on a journey, he must know where he is going. Thus with Lent. Above all, Lent is a spiritual journey and its destination is Easter, “the Feast of Feasts.” It is the preparation for the “fulfillment of Pascha, the true Revelation…”

Anyone who has, be it only once, taken part in that night which is “brighter than the day,” who has tasted of that unique joy, knows it. But what is that joy about? Why can we sing, as we do during the Paschal liturgy: “today are all things filled with light, heaven and earth and the places under the earth”? In what sense do we celebrate, as we claim we do, “the death of Death, the annihilation of Hell, the beginning of a new and everlasting life…”? To all these questions, the answer is: the new life which almost two thousand years ago shone forth from the grave, has been given to us, to all those who believe in Christ. And it was given to us on the day of our Baptism, in which, as St. Paul says, we “were buried with Christ…unto death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead we also may walk in the newness of life” (Rom 6:4). Thus on Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us... He made us partakers of His Resurrection. This is why at the end of the Paschal Matins we say: “Christ is risen and life reigneth! Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the grave!”

Photo credit: BLAGO Fund, Inc.

Such is the faith of the Church, affirmed and made evident by her countless Saints. Is it not our daily experience, however, that this faith is very seldom ours, that all the time we lose and betray the “new life” which we received as a gift, and that in fact we live as if Christ did not rise from the dead, as if that unique event had no meaning whatsoever for us?… We simply forget all this – so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations – and because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes “old” again – petty, dark and ultimately meaningless – a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. We manage to forget even death and then, all of a sudden, in the mist of our “enjoying life” it comes to us: horrible, inescapable, senseless. We may from time to time acknowledge and confess our various “sins,” yet we cease to refer our life to that new life which Christ revealed and gave to us. Indeed, we live as if He never came. This is the only real sin, the sin of all sins, the bottomless sadness and tragedy of our nominal Christianity…

Even though we are baptized, what we constantly lose and betray is precisely that which we received at Baptism. Therefore Easter is our return every year to our own Baptism, whereas Lent is our preparation for that return – the slow and sustained effort to perform, at the end, our own “passage” or “pascha” into the new life in Christ…

A journey, a pilgrimage! Yet, as we begin it, as we make the first step into the “bright sadness” of Lent, we see – far, far away – the destination. It is the joy of Easter, it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom. And it is this vision, the foretaste of Easter, that makes Lent’s sadness bright and our lenten effort a “spiritual spring.” The night may be dark and long, but all along the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon. “Do not deprive us of our expectation, O Lover of man!”

Excerpt from Great Lent: Journey to Pascha by Alexander Schmemann, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969, p. 11-15.

Going to Church

Reading the bulletin in Church this morning, I noticed that next Sunday is already Zacchaeus Sunday, the signal that Great Lent is soon upon us. How did that happen? The way the liturgical year works, we fast, then we feast, then almost immediately we fast again. There is almost no “normal time.” Probably the single most important thing to me in my life as a Christian is going to Church. Whether it’s a fast (struggling to stand there and pay attention) or a feast (joyous, peaceful, balm for my soul), hearing the words of God and receiving the Eucharist is what makes everything else in life – every single other thing – bearable and even, mostly, good. When I can’t go to Church, well, let’s just say that crankiness is inevitably around the corner. To go to Church is like breathing.

I can think of only two negative experiences I have ever had in Church. I will tell you about one of them, but first I’ll share a little about myself. For better or worse, I always make things too complicated. My husband will tell you that I am not an “analyzer,” I’m a “synthesizer,” by which I think he means that I far prefer to connect everything all up together – all my experiences, thoughts, emotions, people, things, places, everything. While other people are great at focusing in on one thing – and are great at getting things done! – my mind is scattered all over the place trying to pull everything together. So one Holy Week, I was so happy to be in Church every day, because I know that only there I can find genuine holiness and beauty. But this time, there were too many words. You know how it is during Holy Week. You barely finish one service, and you are on to the next one, and every service has hymn after hymn after glorious (or, in the case of Holy Week, gloriously heart-wrenching) hymn. So many words, teaching me, exhorting me, drawing my heart one way and another, putting all the images and experiences and words of the disciples and the people of Jerusalem, Judas, and the Lord himself, in front of me to contemplate. It was too much. I simply could not make it all fit. While God knows, and the wisdom of the Church knows how it all synthesizes together, this was utterly beyond me.

At the time I thought this was such a negative thing, but as another Lent comes upon us, I am actually looking forward to it, services and multitudes of words and all. It will be a time to fast – to give up my “need” to put every last puzzle piece in place, to make everything fit. Giving up my need will then lead to the feast of joy that is Pascha, when the whole of creation, down to the darkest corners of the pit of Hades, will see Who it is that is victoriously in charge.

Recently I have learned that it is not we who inherit the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit inherits us. We are grafted in, we are nourished and cultivated by God to bear fruit unto eternal life. It’s His work on us – in us – accustoming us to bear His Spirit as He takes us into Himself. The work of Christ in His Holy Passion and Resurrection from the dead can be no other than the work of the Son of God made man, ascending the Cross, descending to Hades to recover the lost sheep, and then ascending into heaven to bring His creation to the Father. It’s strictly unfathomable, and yet it’s all given to us when we go to Church.

Tracy Gustilo (SVOTS ’13) is an “itinerant” seminarian (she attends St Vladimir’s one semester per year). During the rest of the time she makes her home in Kansas City with husband Nick and four children, where she attends Holy Trinity Orthodox Church.