Reflection at Agape Vespers, St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church, by Priest Paul, Pascha 7533 (2025).

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!

Brothers and sisters, this beautiful Agape Vespers is a bookend to the beautiful Forgiveness Vespers with which we started Lent in Orthodox Christian tradition. Then we asked forgiveness of one another, and today we express our love for one another in the Risen Lord.

Our midnight services throughout the night flowed into fellowship that lasted to about 4:30 (after some laity from Friday into Saturday had stayed overnight to guard our Lord’s Tomb and read the Psalter, with another later in Church before the Pascha service reading the Acts of the Apostles). Now we are back in Church, and we hear the Gospel, how the Resurrected Jesus Christ gave the Holy Spirit to His close followers, and the power to free others from the tomb of our sins. This is the basis for our Orthodox Church in unbroken living Apostolic succession of our hierarchs. Ours is a mystical hierarchy that involves also conciliarity, and the spiritual unity of one another in sobornost, following God willing Christ’s New Commandment to love our neighbor more than ourself, in Christ.

Our Lord in the Gospel for the service tells His disciples that as His Father had sent Him, so He know sends forth His Apostles, the origins of our Hierarchs, who in Orthodoxy trace back directly to those original faithful by the laying on of hands. Appropriately, at our Agape Vespers, we read greetings sent to us from our Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow and our Metropolitan Nicholas in New York City. His Holiness Kyrill wrote in part, “’Out into the light of freedom did Christ lead the despondent captives; to the heavenly heights of Paradise led them He, rejoicing’ (Hymn XXXVIII). These inspired words of Saint Ephrem the Syrian express our profound experience of the Paschal mystery, which is the mystery of salvation of the human person from the influence of evil.” Metropolitan Nicholas greeted us in part with, “How dear and cherished to the believing heart are the ways of our Paschal life and the touching beauty of the nighttime service! May the Lord help the clergy, parents, and grandparents to instill in the younger generation a love for meaningful divine services, traditions, and customs of Great Lent, Holy Week, and Pascha, confirming children and young men and women in faith, piety, and churchliness!”

Today at Agape Vespers we heard the Gospel read in English, Latin, Russian, Slavonic, Spanish, German, and a version in Welsh that the sinful Priest did not deliver because I got too caught up in the rest of the readings and forgot to deliver it. Let us briefly consider the readings in these languages in relation to our Orthodox mission in American Appalachia today.

First, Latin was the language of the Romans in whose Empire Christianity spread. In fact, the Orthodox Christians of the so-called Byzantine Empire referred to themselves as Romans not Byzantines, which is a later Western term used to try to diminish the civilization of the Christian Roman Empire from which Orthodoxy emerged. That whole world of Orthodoxy, which extended into the Slavic lands, has been in effect often erased by the West, which does not understand it. But still we are here, and our missionary work now grows in the West, glory to God!

This is all illustrated in the other languages from our Gospel reading today, too. Welsh emerged from lands in western Britain that showed continuity of Christian culture from days of the Roman province and early evangelism to Britain; those communities helped Christianize Ireland and provide the culture of so-called “Celtic” Christianity that helped prepare the ground for the emergence of Orthodox England. Spanish derived from Latin, and early Spanish-speaking saints from before the Great Schism were Orthodox saints. Today Orthodox Christian missions are growing in Spanish-speaking lands around the world, including Mexico and the Philippines. German is a language close to Old English, a language developed for Orthodox Christian mission work by saints such as the Venerable Bede and the Holy King Alfred the Great, and the Germans were Christianized by Orthodox saints such as the English Boniface. The German language is also related to that of the Vikings, many of whom like St. Olaf became Orthodox Christians, and whose culture spanned from England to what later became Russia. Rus is the Viking root for the latter country’s name, whose language has become that of the largest Orthodox Christian country and local Church in the world, and the only major world power to be so overtly Christian in the twenty-first century in its public culture. Earlier, Slavonic was a language developed for Orthodox Church use, and is considered with Greek one of the sacred languages of Orthodoxy. All these languages developed as languages of the written word because of Orthodox Christianity’s spread in the first millennium of Christianity. May English also again likewise be so in the future, through our mission work in North America and other Anglophone countries, and the increasing volume of English-language Orthodox books and writings of our Fathers, services, and the practice and illumination of new saints and elders in English-speaking lands, God willing!

Continuing the theme of Orthodox Christianity as cross-cultural and worldwide in nature, after the Agape service, during the announcements, we also heard a brief reflection on “Russian Easter” written by the Russian philosopher and semiotician Alexander Dugin, controversial for his politics but insightful for his thoughts on faith and culture, as a Russian Old Believer Christian in communion with the Russian Orthodox Church. He posted this for Pascha this year from a longer piece he wrote several years earlier on “Russian Easter,” which also reminds us of how Russia as an Orthodox land today is the only major world power that is fully Christian in its public culture:

Russian Orthodoxy teaches that existence consists of many spiritual worlds around us, within us, and through us. There is a special rhythm that confuses the ordinary, and brings in the different. Now, it is an amazing time. The days of the Last Holy Week were not very easy, but still great ones. Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, Holy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday … And in the Great day of  Christ’s Resurrection (Easter Sunday), the sun “dances” in the sky, Orthodoxy is our sun, and how it dances … Each of the great days is worth more than a year, more than a century, more than an eternity. It consecrates a sacrament that lasts forever, that reaches back forever, which happened once in history and yet illuminates always; expanded, collapsed into eternity and time, the standard measure of time disappearing … simply Great Time itself …

In this Great Time, everything lose their normal boundaries: feat, betrayal, mercy, cruelty, suffering, enthusiasm, loyalty, compassion, familyhood, friendship, indifference – everything permeates with God’s will, illuminating with new light, the Orthodox light, Great light … the Holy week is a summary of world history, a summary of life, the way of man, salvation of the great compassion of God. The fabric of the week reaches far beyond this reality.

In these seven magical and terrible, passionate and consecrated days, we live the whole history of all reality… What a beautiful, high, terrible and sumptuous faith ours is, the ancient faith, eternal, pure and saving, there is none more beautiful, sweeter, nor brighter…

And Easter brings a new miracle, a new time, a complete Bright Week. Orthodoxy insists on one thing completely absurd for rational consciousness: this week – the Bright Week is not a week, but one day, day of the Resurrection of Christ. A night is no longer the night, an evening is no longer the evening, a dream is no more the dream, there is no Wednesday fasting, only joy, delight and the holiday –

Christ is risen!
Indeed, He is risen!

Trampling down death by death, and to those in the tombs he has given life…

“Those in the tombs”, it is about us, about us. Our bodies, our works, our thoughts and feelings are “those in the tombs”. The world that is not enlightened by Christ, is hiding from him, slipping away, not trusting, not open to his heart, not hot, but cold, covered  by rain, is a world “in the tombs”,  and “those in tombs” live in it… And they (that is, us), “those in tombs”, are opened to a new heaven and a new earth, they are selected on the surface of the lower level of gloom and Acedia, and look at the eternal rays of light and wonder: have we never seen it.

We meet Christ, our Savior, we open our hearts and mouths and let the sweetness of regeneration into the dim twilight of our soul.

Indeed, He is Risen! And it is irrevocable and eternal, and the gates of hell are trampled, and the enemy is crushed, and the  invincible victory is granted to us.

Indeed! Indeed!
It happened.