«Easter, the most delightful Easter, Easter of the Lord, Easter, Easter of all reverence, has risen for us.". With these wonderful and festive verses, the glorious hymnographer of the Resurrection announces to the faithful the arrival of the most glorious and joyful feast of our Church. Rejoice, O holy people of God, the "pious and God-fearing"", as the holy Chrysostom calls him, "one mouth and one heart", with tears of joy in his eyes, he praises the Risen One from the dead and the conqueror of death, the Lord Jesus Christ. With feelings of profound emotion and immense joy he floods the brightly decorated and brightly lit churches to celebrate the Divine Resurrection and to enjoy the unspeakable wealth of the Lord's goodness. He hastens to celebrate the greatest triumph, the greatest and indescribable victory of human history: The death of our death!
After a long spiritual and physical exercise and journey, during which we became partakers of the saving Passion of our Lord and Redeemer Christ. After an ontological participation "at his death" (Rom.6:4) we come "lamp bearers, for the coming of Christ from the tomb" to "Let us celebrate together with the faithful the saving Easter of God"We now leave behind the gloom and gloom of Holy Week and hurry "I rejoice, my foot" to participate in the ineffable Easter feast, to shine and celebrate, to enjoy to the fullest "of the banquet of faith."
Easter means passage, redemption, salvation. Just as the old people of God, Israel, were saved, thanks to God's miraculous help, from the tyranny of Pharaoh, so too the new people of God, the faithful from all the tribes of the world, were saved from the imaginary tyranny of Pharaoh and passed into the real freedom of God's grace in Christ. The Jewish Easter was a type of the Christian Easter. It was a narrow national and at the same time religious holiday, a commemoration of a national liberation event, of a small people. The Christian Easter is the most glorious celebration of the liberation of all humanity from the most tyrannical and invincible tyrant, the ruler of this world, the devil, and bitter and inevitable death.
The Lord Jesus Christ accepted to become, by His will, a redemptive sacrifice. To become the intelligible "yearling lamb"", the "immaculate priesthood""of the new Easter, in order to defeat the imaginary Pharaoh, the devil, to abolish the kingdom of death and to reconcile the human race with God (Eph. 2:13). Through this supreme sacrifice "Our race, recalled from corruption, has passed on to eternal life."
The glorious Resurrection of the Lord was a foregone conclusion, something that the omnivorous Hades, personified in the hateful face of Satan, could not foresee. The source of life, true life, since "in him was life" (John 1:4) it was impossible to be held captive by the eternal mental bonds of Hades. Thus the soul of the Lord "for I have broken the bonds of death and Hades," and after being reunited with His immaculate body, He rose triumphantly. The apostle Paul solemnly proclaims: "Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death hath no dominion over him" (Rom. 6,9). "Today our Lord Christ broke the bronze gates and abolished this death as well." emphasizes the holy Chrysostom. And he continues: "But why do I mention death? And this
"Even its name has changed. It is no longer called death, but sleep and slumber"!
The saving gifts that flow from the Resurrection of the Lord are inexhaustible. The Divine Resurrection is the inexhaustible source of God's gifts and blessings. According to the apostle Paul, the fact of the Resurrection constitutes the quintessence of the entire Christian edifice. Otherwise "And if Christ be not raised, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. And we are found false witnesses of God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise: therefore he said that the dead are not raised: for if the dead be not raised, neither is Christ raised. And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain: ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life we have hope in Christ only, of all men we are most miserable." (1 Cor. 15:15-19). In other words, Christianity, without the foundation of faith in the Resurrection of Christ, is not only useless to humanity, but even harmful! The scholastic and rationalistic view of the Christian faith in the Resurrection leads to tragic dead ends, strips Christianity of its redemptive power and degrades it and equates it with the other religions of the world, which satisfy only the “religious sentiment” of their followers. Bitter proof of all this are all the tragic dead ends of Western intellectual man, which are due primarily to the denial of the Resurrection and in general to the rejection of redemption in Christ.
We, the Orthodox faithful, following biblical and patristic theology and tradition, base our faith on the unshakable foundation of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have as a springboard in our lives the hopeful principle: “But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep… in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:20,22). Our entire life revolves around the imaginary axis of the Resurrection. Our birth, our way of life, our mentality, our worship, even our death, which for us is a temporary sleep, are determined and directly influenced by the fact of the Resurrection of the Lord and our future personal resurrection in Christ. Thus, nothing scares us anymore, since death, our greatest enemy, has been defeated. All other obstacles and difficulties in our lives are overcome with a feeling of optimism. Despair and gloom are characteristic of unbelievers, of those who have no hope of resurrection, of all those who deny the Resurrection of our Redeemer and, burdened with a Luciferian theme, are entrenched in their subjective intellectual self-sufficiency.
For all these reasons, we leap for joy and heavenly exultation on the holy day of the Resurrection of our Redeemer Christ. We celebrate and glorify the all-glorious Resurrection of our Lord and we celebrate in advance for our own future resurrection and our entry into the endless Kingdom of God. We confess, in the most dynamic way, our faith in the only Savior and Redeemer, the Risen Lord, and we proclaim the message of the Resurrection, so that it may reach every human heart, to the ends of the world and the ends of history. We sing, countless times, with tears of joy in our eyes and a heart throbbing with emotion, the victorious paean of Easter, the most victorious and enthusiastic paean ever heard from human lips: “"Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and granting life to those in the tombs." !
photo JESUS_is_our_only_HOPE, https://pixabay.com
