Paschal Epistle to the God-loving Flock Of the North American Diocese
Christ is Risen!
O, come all ye faithful; let us worship Christ’s Holy Resurrection!
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Once again, thanking God we were vouchsafed to arrive at this joyous and bright triumphal celebration. Since the day of Adam’s fall into sin, death reigned over the human race. Death was insur-mountable because all people are “descendents” of this fall into sin, and death would have remained such had we not been saved from death by Death of the Savior.
Sometimes children, in their simplicity ask: “If Christ ‘trampled down death by His death’ then why is it that now everyone continues to die?” The question is simple but the answer is essential even for adults: Because the time has not yet come for general immortality. The disciples had asked the Resurrected Christ about this: “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom…? And He said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power.” (Acts 1:6-7)
At the Lord’s Second Coming not only “shall there be no more death” (Rev. 21:4) but all the dead shall arise from their graves and this earthly life which is familiar to us will cease. The words of the Savior spoken in the Parable of the Sower explain that physically nothing must change until Judgment day: In response to the servants who offered the man who had sown wheat to pull out the tares, the Lord says: “Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest:” (Matt. 13: 29-30).
But we, the faithful, although we continue to live in this sinful, earthly world, in a world of good and evil, in a world of life and death – we have a foretaste of heavenly sweetness. We hymn joyously with the Heavenly Angels, knowing that the gates of hell and death have been abolished by Christ’s Death and hell no longer has power over us. “We celebrate the mortification of death, the destruction of hell, the beginning of a different eternal life.”1 And our physical death is no longer a “death” as such. The words of the Apostle Paul bear witness to this: “I… having a desire to depart and to be with Christ; which is far better: for to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Phil. 1:23,21).
A child’s riddle comes to mind: Question: Who died yet was not born? Answer: Adam. Question: And who was born once and died twice? Answer: Lazarus, the Four-Day Dead.
At this point it is edifying for us to contemplate the death of the Righteous Lazarus. His first death was common: funereal, despairing – the kind that existed prior to Christ’s Passion and Resurrection.2 But his second one was no longer a death but a “gain” – a translation from this most sorrowful and worse world to an incomparably better Eternal Pascha!
The Church provides repose not only to him and to all holy God-pleasers in the heavenly habitations, but calls as well upon all of us: “enter into the joy of your Lord”.
May the grace-filled Paschal joy dwell with all of you! Amen!† Bishop Stefan, of Trenton and North America
7/20 April, 2014
1 Seventh Song of the Paschal Canon.
2 Tradition says that Lazarus, after his resurrection remained alive for another thirty years, was Bishop of the Island of Cyprus where like the apostles he labored much in the spreading of Christianity and there he peacefully reposed. Lives of the Saints (Menaion) St. Dimitri of Rostov, October 17.