Christ Our Pasch

We began our Lenten Journey into the Pasch of the Lord
with the Sunday of the Wedding Feast of Cana.

From there we encounter the Sunday Gospels of
the Leper,
the Paralytic,
the Canaanite Woman,
the Crippled Woman,
the Man Born Blind,
the Saturday of Lazarus and the Entrance of the Bridedroom on Hosanna Sunday.

Each Gospel bears witness to the Bridegroom and the Lamb,
who comes to heal and purify His beloved, "to wash her in the bath of the water and the word" (Eph 5) and to embrace her and transform her, for she is betrothed to Him from before the Foundation of the World.

Amen, Alleluia, Amen!

These miracles bring before us the Lord's all-encompassing solicitude for suffering humanity. Through our Lenten Journey of repentance and conversion, the Lord summons us out of the tomb of our sinfulness, our brokenness, our very death. We hear Christ weep for his beloved friend--
And then we hear Christ command the dead: “Lazarus, come forth!”

In this Living Word across more than two millenia of our history,
and precisely in here and now in our suffering and need,
the Lord loves us and calls us to the Wedding Feast of the Bride and the Lamb,
"Amen, Marantha, Come!"

Now we hear anew the Living and Final Word of Sacred Scripture ~
the revealing and consummate Word and Vision of the Heavenly Liturgy in
the Apocalypse of John.

Thus we meet the Bridegroom of Hosanna Sunday, and then the Risen Lord of Easter.

In the Season of Pesaho (Pascha)
alongside the very first disciples we stand and witness "in both worlds" this New Aeon "with the Eyes of Faith"
-- Stomen Kalos! --
the ongoing Mysterion and Exousia of the Resurrection that is present and in power here in our own present day: In His Light we see the Light!

Just as the Angel told them, "Go to Galilee where you will see Him as He Promised --" we go to Holy Qurbana. We sing together -- with all the saints of Heaven and earth, with all the glorious company of the "Clouds of Witnesses" gathered from all Salvation History -- the joyful hymn of hope that always begins our Divine Liturgy of St. James of Jerusalem,

By Thy Light, we see the Light, Jesus full of light!
Thou true light dost give the Light to Thy creatures all.
Lighten us with Thy glad Light,
Thou the Father's Light Divine!

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!”

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 Pascha and Pentecost.

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, 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)