My beloved spiritual children in Our Risen Lord and Our Only True God,
CHRIST IS RISEN! TRULY HE IS RISEN!
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"Christ is risen, and the Angels rejoice, Christ is risen, and life is liberated. Christ is risen, and the tomb is emptied of the dead; for Christ, having risen from the dead is become the firstfruits of those that have fallen asleep. To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen." (St. John Chrysostom)
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ON THE SABBATH AND THE LORD'S DAY
by Saint Gregory Palamas
"...God wanted to impart to us a strong awareness of works of this kind and to demonstrate that they are more to be sought after than any works perceptible to the senses. So He blessed and sanctified the Seventh Day, on which He ceased making the visible creation, so that this day might be like an ascent, by means of rest, from things below to those better things above. To quote the great Dionysius, God "in His superabundant goodness, goes out of Himself and transcending all things comes down into all things, in accordance with His ecstatic, supra-essential power which is inseparable from Him." Condescending in His love for man, as He willed and as was fitting, He made this visible of ours. Then on the Seventh Day He went up again, as behooved God, to His own heights, which He had not left, and showed that His rest on that day was still more blessed than what had gone before. In this way He taught us to seek to enter, as far as we are able, into that rest, which is contemplation according to the mind, and ascent to God by that means. The Apostle too explicitly urges us towards this rest...For anyone who enters into it, rests from his works as God did from His.
"...Whatever is said in praise of the Seventh Day applies even more to the Eighth, for the latter fulfils the former. It was Moses who unwittingly first ascribed honor to the Eighth Day, the Lord's Day...However, the lawgiver did not only introduce in this hidden way the dignity of this Eighth Day, which we call the Lord's Day because it is dedicated to the Lord's Resurrection but also on the feast named "Trumpets" referred to the Eighth Day as the "final solemn assembly" (cf. Lev. 23:36 Lxx, Num. 29:35), meaning the completion and fulfillment of all the feasts. At that point he clearly said that the Eighth Day would be called holy for us, proclaiming in advance how divine, glorious and august Sunday was to be after everything pertaining to the law had passed away.
Moses esteemed the Seventh Day because it led into the truly honorable Eighth Day. Just as the law given through him is honorable in so far as it leads to Christ (cf. Gal. 3:24), so the Seventh Day is honorable because it leads into the Eighth Day on which the Lord's Resurrection took place. The eighth day comes next after the seventh, and if you look carefully you will find that after the seventh day, when we are told that all the dead from past ages were resurrected, on the eighth day Christ rose. Not only was Christ's Resurrection accomplished on the eighth day, but it was both the eighth day in relation to the hoped-for resurrection, the rising again, of all men in Christ. That is why Christ is hymned as "the firstfruits of them that sleep" (I Cor. 15:20) and "the first begotten of the dead" (Rev. 1:5). In this same way, Sunday is not just the day eighth in order after the preceding days, but the first of all days, which we call the Lord's Day, and which Moses referred to not as the first day but as "one day" (Gen. 1:5), being exalted above the others and the prelude of the one day without evening of the age to come.
You will understand how much better Sunday is than other feast-days from what follows. Every other festival comes round once a year, but the Lord's Day comes around four times every month, and this frequent recurrence makes the whole year of true remission for us, a year acceptable to the Lord (cf. Isa. 61:2). It was in order to teach us to celebrate it in practice at the end of each week that the Lord first appeared to the Disciples inside the house while Thomas was absent (St. John 20:19-24). He proved He was alive and gave them peace. By His breathing upon them he renewed the divine breath given in the beginning (Gen. 2:7), and endowed them with the grace of the Holy Spirit, imbuing them with divine power to bind and loose sins. He made them sharers in the exercise of His heavenly Lordship, saying to them, 'Receive ye the Holy Spirit: whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them, and whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained" (St. John 20:22-23).
The Lord granted them this power and grace when He appeared to them on the very day of His Resurrection, obviously a Sunday. Then, letting the intervening days of the week elapse, He appeared in the same manner and in the same house, on the eighth day, the Sunday we celebrate today, to inaugurate His festival and to bring the hesitant Thomas to faith. According to the Savior's beloved evangelist and Disciples, "After eight days again His Disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you" (St. John 20:26)...
Let no one out of laziness or continuous worldly occupations miss these holy Sunday gatherings, which God Himself handed down to us, lest he be justly abandoned by God and suffer like Thomas, who did not come at the right time. If you are detained and do not attend on one occasion, make up for it the next time, bringing yourself to Christ's Church. Otherwise, you may remain uncured, suffering from unbelief in your soul because of deeds or words, and failing to approach Christ's surgery to receive, like the divine Thomas, holy healing. There exist not only thoughts and words of faith but also deeds and acts of faith--"Shew me", it says, "thy faith by thy works" (cf. St. James 2:18)-and if someone abandons these and is completely distanced from the Church of Christ and given over wholly to worthless pursuits, his faith is dead, or non-existent, and he himself has become dead through sin. [Source: Saint Gregory Palamas, The Homilies)
(To be continued)
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KONTAKION HYMN
"Though Thou, O deathless One, didst descend into the grave, Thou didst destroy the power of Hades and as Victor, Thou didst rise again, O Christ our God. Thou didst greet the Myrrh-bearing women, saying: Rejoice! Thou didst bestow peace upon Thy Disciples, and resurrection upon those that are fallen."
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"Glory Be To GOD For All Things!"--Saint John Chrysostom
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With sincere agape in Our Risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,
The sinner and unworthy servant of God
+Father George