(Photo of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today in Jerusalem.)
Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA.
Dear Brothers and Sisters, on this Holy Saturday may God grant you many years for repentance, in loving our neighbor more than ourself, and with His help evangelism to help the souls of others find salvation in the Orthodox Church.
For this morning we mark what in many ways is our birthday as Christians, as I’ll try unworthily to underline briefly, may God help.
On Holy Saturday we commemorate how our Lord Jesus Christ freed many captives in Hades, those who could see Him and accept the salvation He offered them, from the beginning of Creation history across thousands of years to our forebears Adam and Eve. And regardless of the date of our entering the Church, Holy Saturday also marks how our Lord has freed us from our tombs of the past of social and family circumstances, from vain thoughts and evil memories, from our sins, and the buffets even of demonic forces.
For today begins our Lord’s victory over death. In ancient times, it was the day for many baptisms in the Church. Indeed, the Holy Fire has appeared this morning in Jerusalem at the Holy Tomb of our Lord.
At our humble yet joyous service here in rural Northern Appalachian America, our Holy Saturday worship, as elsewhere in the world for hundreds of millions of Orthodox Christians, traces in its Old Testament readings the 7,533 years of Creation history of the Church calendar and how they are fulfilled today in Jesus Christ’s victory over death, and his harrowing of Hades.
Holy Saturday is in the blessed in-between ending of Holy Week. Pascha, our Passover, the appearance of Jesus Christ raised from the dead to those on earth, has not yet arrived fully, yet is certain though unknown and leaving even many of the faithful still fearful and trembling. The colors are being changed in Churches from Lenten to Resurrectional.
Just so the Sabbath itself is changing. Can you feel this in our midst? Saturday, the Old Testament Sabbath, was honored by Jesus Christ in the tomb as a time of rest in a sense, even as he prepared to institute the Day of Resurrection that became the Christian Day of Rest, Sunday. Saturday would remain honored in the Church as a joyous day of rest for the departed, in which the Church would throughout the year hold special prayers for the dead. Yet in one sense at rest, in another our Lord is on the move already, to save the righteous, the holy, in Hades and bringing them to Paradise.
Dostoevsky’s unforgettable character of Elder Zosimas, modeled on his actual experience of Elder Ambrose of Optina Monastery, and his study of St. Tikhon of Zdonsk, concisely expressed for us this blessed mystery of the in-between-ed-ness of Holy Saturday. He was speaking with the young Alexei, whose character some say was modeled on our founding ROCOR First Hierarch Metropolitan Antony, who as a youth named Alexei attended some of the Orthodox writer’s discussions, and had a similar personality. The book, The Brothers Karamazov, which has been an influence on many becoming Orthodox Christians including myself, came in part from Dostoevsky’s visit to St. Ambrose of Optina after the loss of his own child Alexei.
Zosimas’ words are these:
Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies.
What does this mean for us in practical terms on this Holy Saturday? It means that in the mystery of Christ we live and move and have our being in the words of the Word, the logoi of the Logos , and we live again today in His Church. Like the Wise Thief on the Cross, God willing, we see the Hidden God on the Cross, fully God and man, come fully to life for us in our tomb of worldly delusion, in our Matrix of virtual reality. We see and honor him like those in Hades today. He pulls us up like our ancestors Adam and Eve in the icon of the Resurrection. Brothers and Sisters, He sits on the right hand of the Father, and by His Ascension that follows on this Resurrection as surely as for us day follows night, He is in our human form also God in heaven today, for our salvation. As the priestly prayer before Liturgy puts it, He is “in the tomb bodily, in Hades with His soul as God, in Paradise with the Thief, on the throne with the Father and the Spirit, Christ Who is everywhere present, the inexpressible one.”
Glory to God for all things!