Hosanna and Pascha, 2005

The last Sunday of Great Lent is the Sunday of the Man Born Blind. We began our Lenten Journey with the Wedding Feast of Cana. From there we encountered the Sunday Gospels of the leper, the paralytic, the Canaanite woman, and the hunchbacked woman.

These miracles bring before us the all-encompassing solicitude of the Lord for our suffering humanity. Our own death comes to us on Lazarus Saturday. We hear Christ weep for his beloved friend, we hear Christ command the dead. “Lazarus, come forth!”

The Lord summons us out of the deaths of our own sinfulness, brokenness, and frailty. Precisely in our suffering and need, the Lord loves us and calls us to the Wedding Feast.
Thus we meet the Bridegroom of Hosanna Sunday, and then the Risen Lord of Easter.

A sense of awe and wonder pervades the Great and Holy Week.
Recollected and renewed in the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the Lord, we share the angels’ cry of “Holy! Holy! Holy!”




AngelFace. bw focus
Angel written by the hand of Heather Durka, 2003

In every Oriental Orthodox Church there is a Great Veil drawn across the sanctuary, representing the Veil in the Temple of Jerusalem – and the veil of Moses on Sinai, and back to the very Veil of Paradise – all renewed and transformed through the Spirit of Pentecost.

Today the same Spirit of Pentecost animates the Holy Mysteries of the Church and the sacraments. The Spirit is in the Church today, mystically unveiling the Lord in the breaking of the bread just as on the Road to Emmaus two millennia ago, and again mystically unveiling forward from today through all history unto the the 8th Day, the Lord of Glory, to whom the Spirit and the Bride say, “Come!” (cf. Rev 22.17)

May the Spirit of the Lord be upon you this Great and Holy Journey
Fr. Michael Durka +