An homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, for Holy Great Sunday, 7534/2026, by Priest Paul Siewers.
This is our Holy and Great Sunday (aka Palm Sunday or Pussy Willow Sunday), keeping the ancient calendar of the Church alive continuously, while much of the Western non-Orthodox Christian world celebrates Easter. Our Church calendar also is essentially that of old American Appalachia as well. Today we join in greeting our Lord Jesus Christ to Jerusalem with pussy willows found in Appalachia as they are in Russia. We process with Him around our little country Church. For our humble mission is a little fractal and portal of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, connecting through unfathomable dimensions of our God beyond time to biblical days and places directly through these royal doors, from which comes to us the Body and Blood of Christ.
Hosanna we cry as He is brought through the byways of our land. He is welcomed as a triumphing king but let us not make the same mistake twice.
Israel as the Church is not any specific nation. A country is only as spiritually great and truly strong as her heartfelt, humble, and struggling true embrace of our God, not in merely emotional self-asserting ecstasy, but by the beautiful struggle, the joyful sorrow, of Orthodox life. Our sorrow entering Holy Passion Week is joyful because, God willing, we follow His pathway to resurrection, sorrowful because of all our own sins, and the sins and sorrows of humanity, in such dire need of Him. Bearing the Cross with Him this Holy Passion week, we must resolve to carry it on beyond Pascha into the whole Church year by our mission work. As our Lord tells us, His yoke is easy and His burden is life. Let us who are weary and heavy laden come unto Him.
(Above: Faithful at St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, commemorating Holy Sunday today.)
The Church fathers tell us that the colt of the donkey ridden by Jesus Christ on Holy Sunday symbolize the previously unyoked children of the Gentiles grafted into Israel in the New Testament Church. His kingdom is not of this world. Waving pussy willows we feature a local plant symbolizing the spring, which thrives in waters symbolizing the baptism of the Living Water of the Holy Spirit. Today begins the final great movement of the Gospels through Pascha to Pentecost and beyond, blowing us forward in the wind of His breath imparted unto His apostles, to forgive sin in His Church, and then through Pentecost, to bring the Gospel to all the world, and to save countless lives for Him.
Passion Week reminds us that our mission work is a life and death matter, for us and others. What would we not do as Orthodox Christians and good community members to save the life of a child or family member in need, whether in a burning building or some other calamity? Yet so are we called to save the souls of one another as children of God. Our Lord leads the way in parade today. Tomorrow it will be superseded by the sufferings of the trials of Passion Week. Yet the Bridegroom Matins that begin tonight remind us that this week we are to be married as a community, as the Church, to our Lord. Today’s procession is also a wedding parade.
Today is a warning not only of the fickleness of mobs, but also is a procession to a wedding. At Russian Orthodox weddings during the reception you hear calls of “gorky,” or bitter, as the bride and groom and guests drink of the wine, as did those at the Wedding of Cana did at the start of Jesus’ public ministry. So it was at our wedding.
Yet now, at the end of His public ministry before His death, our Lord leads us in our own wedding march. It reminds us of the bittersweetness of marriage, the Cross of commitment with the joys of mutual grace and love, and also of how the Cross to come will be for us a stairway to heaven, together holding the hand of our dear Lord our Bridegroom, through all His sorrows unto death this week, just as the Bride and Groom in the Orthodox wedding service together hold onto the Priest in the Dance of Isaiah, with the Priest symbolizing Christ in the service.
As the old American Gospel song says, Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me home. Yet in Orthodoxy we also know that we must engage in beautiful struggle and seek His outstretched hand, to hold onto it, like the bride and groom at the wedding service. Come unto me, He tells us, and I will give your rest. Brothers and sisters, let us take our Lord’s hand in this Palm Sunday marriage procession in and around the Church. Knowing the sufferings and the hate that the vista of joyful sorrow in Passion Week involves in the world, let us still press onward to the prize of the Resurrection in Jesus Christ of Pascha. Amen.
Saint Gregory Palamas said on this day:
“The commemoration of Christ’s saving passion is at hand, and the new, great spiritual Passover, which is the reward for dispassion and the prelude of the world to come. Lazarus proclaims it in advance by coming back from the depths of Hades and rising from the dead on the fourth day just by the voice and command of God, who has power over life and death (Jn. 11:1-45). By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, children and simple people sing praises in advance to the Redeemer from death, who brings souls up from Hades and gives souls and bodies eternal life.
“…. Since, however, the virtues seem more difficult to us because of our love of comfort, let us force ourselves. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, it says, and the violent take it by force (Mt. 11:12).
“Everyone needs diligence, force and attention, but not to the same extent. Those exalted in honor, wealth and power, and those who concern themselves with words and the acquisition of wisdom by means of them, even if they wish to be saved, are in need of greater force and diligence, since they are less obedient by nature. Exactly this can be clearly seen in the reading from Christ’s Gospel yesterday and today. The miracle performed on Lazarus openly proved the one who did it to be God. But whereas the people were convinced and believed, the rulers at that time, that is to say, the scribes and Pharisees, were so far from being persuaded that they raged against Him even more, and resolved in their madness to hand Him over to death, although everything He had said and done plainly declared Him to be the Lord of life and death. No one can say that the fact that the Lord lifted up His eyes at that time and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me, was an obstacle to their regarding Him as equal to the Father, since He went on to say, I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they might believe that thou hast sent me (Jn. 11:41-42). So that they might know He was God and came from the Father, and also that He did not work miracles in opposition to God, but in accordance with God’s purpose, He lifted up His eyes to God in front of everybody and spoke to Him in words which make it clear that He who was speaking on earth was equal to the heavenly Father on high. In the beginning when man was to be formed, there was a Counsel beforehand. So now also, in the case of Lazarus, when a man was to be formed anew, there was a Counsel first. When man was to be created the Father said to the Son, Let us make man (Gen. 1:26), the Son listened to the Father, and man was brought into being. Now, by contrast, the Father listened to the Son speaking, and Lazarus was brought to life….
“In Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female, nor Greek, nor Jew, but all, according to the holy apostle, are one (Gal. 3:28). In the same way, in Him there is neither ruler nor subject, but by His grace we are all one in faith in Him, and belong to one body, His Church, whose head He is. By the grace of the all-holy Spirit we have all drunk of the one Spirit, and have all received on e baptism. We all have one hope and one God, who is above all, and through all, and in us all (Eph. 4:6). So let us love one another. Let us bear with one another, seeing that we are members one of another. As the Lord Himself said, the sign that we are His disciples is love. When He departed from this world, the fatherly inheritance He left us was love, and the last prayer He gave us when He ascended to His Father was about love for one another (Jn. 13:33-35).” End quote.
Brothers and sisters, the procession today, like a wedding celebration, is a transition, a bridge, a connection from Great Lent to the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord. It runs from the Resurrection of Lazarus the Holy Righteous Friend of God to the Bridegroom Matins and to all the pain and the love beyond. Today the hand the Savior extends to us in this wedding dance is love, the bridge, the meaning, His way forward for us.
St. Gregory Palamas concludes by telling us that just as those in the Palm Sunday celebration “spread their garments in His way[, in] the same manner, let us all, rulers as well as subjects, lay down our natural garments before Him, by making our flesh and its impulses subject to the spirit, that we may be made worthy not only to see and worship Christ’s saving passion and holy resurrection, but to enjoy communion with Him. For if, says the apostle, we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection (Rom. 6.5).” End quote. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
Love is strong as death, the Old Testament tells us.
Love never fails, says our Lord’s New Testament, and goes beyond death to God Himself.
For Christ gives us the Way, Himself, to love our neighbor more than ourselves, and for us like Him to take our Palm Sunday parade as a triumph. even knowing all the betrayal and mortal limits that will mark our path to Pascha on this earth.
As the Akathist sung in prison campus during World War II tells us: “Glory to God for all things.”
[The Holy Sunday Homily of St. Gregory Palamas is translated at: https://orthochristian.com/92790.html ]