(Above: Reading the Passion Gospels at Holy Friday Matins: Photo by Luke Soboleski)

Homily for Vespers on Holy Friday from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church, Winfield, PA

Let us go to die with him. So said Jesus’ followers when He returned to be with Lazarus, who had died.

Today is a good day to die, is an old Plains Indian warrior saying. It typifies how monastics in Orthodoxy engaged in spiritual warfare are taught to reflect upon their own death.

Brothers and sisters, today let us indeed die to our old selves with Jesus, let us as the Church prayer says, “commit ourselves and one another and all our life unto Christ our God.”

Earthquake, eclipse, dead rising from graves, the rending of the veil of the ancient Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem.

St. Justin Popovich writes, “Even the Doomsday, my brothers, will not be more terrible than Good Friday. It will certainly be less scary, because then God will judge a man. And now man judges God. Now Judgement Day is for God. And the judgment of Him judges mankind. Now a man values God and values Him with a price of thirty silver coins. Christ for thirty pieces of silver! Is this the last price? Is Judas our final word about Christ? Today mankind condemned God to death. This is the greatest rebellion in the history of heaven and earth. This is the greatest sin in the history of heaven and earth. Even the fallen angels did not do this. Today is the Judgment of God. The world has never seen a more innocent convict or a more insane judge… “

But in His death He gave us life. Some may remember from the Orthodox Christian-inspired movie Ostrov, how Fr Anatoly even sleeps in his coffin, which becomes like a little boat headed for Paradise through God’s grace. Some Orthodox Christians in the world order coffins in advance and have them nearby as a preparation but also a reminder. The point is not to be morbid but to remember how each day may be our last, and how Jesus Christ is the victor over death for us.

The fear of death and the desire to forget about death as central to human life were cited by modern psychologists as two related great motivators of unredeemed human.

But Jesus Christ gives us the answer, from the Gospel readings this week: In this world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. Remember the deed that set in motion the events of this Holy Week: Lazarus come forth.

In adapted words of the old Christmas carol, yet in these dark streets shineth the everlasting Life, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.

Indeed, the iconography of the Church depicts this, with the baby Jesus in a trough for a cradle that is also in the shape of a tomb, His swaddling clothes also like his grave clothes.

CS Lewis, a poetic old-school Anglican who near the end of his life saw the beauty of Orthodoxy although alas never made it into the Church, wrote of how in his biblically allegorical land of Narna it was always winter but never Christmas until Aslan arrived, a lion who was a symbol of Christ. Then the deathliness of the enchanted winter began to disappear with spring. Creatures said, Aslan is on the move.

Brothers and sisters, already at this time on this day, Jesus Christ is on the move, toward the harrowing of hell. “In Hades with His soul as God,” the opening altar prayers of the Priest put it.

He preaches the Gospel of salvation to the righteous in Hades, offering to those whose hearts are not hardened and can see Him the victory over death.

For freedom in Orthodoxy is not a self-assertion of rights. Freedom in Orthodoxy is what He offers us in love, the voluntary service to universal Truth. And as Jesus said in the Passion Gospel readings we heard last night, “I am the Way the Truth the Life.”and

It is a package deal so to speak, and it is personal. Our Truth is a Who, Who is also the Way and the Life. Pilate, the intellectualizing Roman governor, asked the wrong question of the ages, which the West has taken up to its destruction, by asking, “What is Truth?”

Who is Truth stood before Pilate, the “I am He” of Old Testament revelation come in the flesh, fully God and fully man, a Person of the Trinity, God, Who is also a person, a man, one of us, too.

Jesus said, “I Am the Resurrection and the Life, he Who believest in Me though he were dead, yet shall he life, and whosever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.”

The Orthodox Resurrection icon shows us the previously foreboding locks and chains of death broken and strewn on the ground, as our Savior lifts Adam and Eve from Hades into Paradise.

Today He shows us the Way, glory to God! And tomorrow He will come through those royal doors from the East, in the gift of His Body and Blood to us for our salvation, in the Eucharist of Holy Saturday, fulfilling all the prophecies of the Old Testament from the beginning of time. Remember, brothers and sisters, raised by Him from sin and death, we live in His Resurrected Body as we live in the millennia-old living tradition of His Church.

Glory to God for all things!