Paschal Reflections

The power of the Resurrection is in our ability to enter into that place of brokenness and woundedness where we are recreated in the image and likeness of Christ thereby not dissolving those wounds but redeeming them.

We can return home with new eyes, expressing the mercy that was granted us by God to the very people who may have caused our wounds in the first place. We are doing this to follow the commandments, “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate! Pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:44-45).

Rising from the dead is a miracle and we rise from the dead through forgiveness, just as God has forgiven us; as St. John Chrysostom wrote, “for forgiveness has risen from the grave.” It may be paradoxical, but by putting to death what we hold onto, we are able to rise from the grave of resentment and bitterness.

God’s mercy is not just a washing away our own sins, but rather it is a preparatory ointment for the burial of the old man, as the Apostle writes, “You were taught to put away the old self which belongs to your former way of life, since it becomes ever more corrupt after the lusts of deceit. Moreover, you are to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and to put on the new self who in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Ephesians 4:22-24).    

The new self, we know through Christ, will carry the wounds of her former ways, but now redeemed; and the mercy of God continues after the burial and in the new creation is a soothing balm for the wounds that become our trophies in our resurrection. God’s mercy is the oil that comforts and heals us. God’s mercy fills us, covers us, and is spills out from us as we continue to forgive those who hate and wrong us.

This is the means of attaining perfection, “just as [our] Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).  

So, looking back at the prodigal son this story reveals more about our journey running away from ourselves, returning to our woundedness, and the loving, heavenly Father Who runs out to meet us halfway. God is with us, and for a lot of us He is only waiting for us to turn around and see Him so He can embrace us. The moment we take real strides to sit with our pain God is there, waiting to redeem us, and to celebrate our arrival in His kingdom. 

The Kingdom of God has come to earth, realized in the healing Sacraments of His Church. Here, His very grace awaits to pour into us as we bare ourselves to Him.

The Orthodox Church and the spirituality encased in it is a form of therapia; it is a hospital, and it is where our injuries, illnesses, wounds, and very addictions are brought to be administered to by the Good Physician.

(Not coincidentally, but typically one even needs a sponsor to enter into the Church.)

And His way of providing care for His children is to sit with them, be with them, and embrace them. It is only through our brokenness that we can deepen our relationship with God and thereby become united to Him by the care He gives us.

The Paschal mystery lies in this relationship between loving Father and our brokenness as His children. The Son is the radiance of the Father’s glory and to see Christ is to see the Father just as the Father and the Spirit reveal the Son. Entering into communion with God is participating in the divine nature, the divine energies, and being changed—likened to His image that is within us.

Pascha is the celebration of God defeating death by His death for us all. Pascha is the celebration of the hypostatic union of Jesus Christ uniting man to God, intimately and unconfused. Pascha is the celebration of the union between God and man being so powerful that God destroyed death that man could be with Him.

This is the transformative power of Pascha.

And this is why legalism does not fit in the category of Orthodox spirituality: the mystical pursuit of perfection is one performed in love, that is in Christ. We do not recite prayers mechanically expecting change from proper word order and oration, nor should we expect salvation from pendants or fasting. The adornments of our faith and the practices thereof are to be done out of and with love in our hearts.

If we have no love and practice our faith without love, then we are simply going through the motions, and automatons have no hope of real change. We have this one life where change is possible, it is with this mind, body, and soul that we are able to repent and become likened to Christ. Θέωσις, like the Resurrection, is a serious call to repentance. We are to turn away from a rote, stagnant faith and participate in the divine life with love and awe.

We stand in awe at the God-man, the θεάνθρωπος (theanthropos), Who brought us out of death to life everlasting. He created everything that is visible and invisible, He redeemed the vanity of time, and He destroyed death.

This is calling us to deeper engagement with religious praxis, opening the door for personal experience with our God. A God, Who, if there was only you who ever existed would have still become Incarnate to not be apart from you.

Before visible Creation the Incarnation was preordained, that is to say regardless of the Fall Christ’s Incarnation was eternally foreseen. This means that the Incarnate Word was always meant to glorify man independent of man’s sinfulness.

God the Father always meant for man to be united to Him by His Word in the Holy Spirit. God the Father is always with us, and this profound preordination of the Incarnation must be seen as God’s promise to us to never abandon us, but to always be with us, even when we forget. He is always pulling us from the darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, from death to life.

Θέωσις is a process that is a result of the Kingdom come to earth by the Incarnation’s life, death, and resurrection. Θέωσις is the process in which we enter into His life through our life, into His death through our death, and into His resurrection through His resurrection of us.

And when we contemplate the θεάνθρωπος, dying and rising, becoming victorious over death what is it that emerges from the depths of our souls?

What arises from the land of the dead in our hearts?

What yearns to be redeemed by God?

What cries out our heavenly Father needing healing and resurrection?

By our baptism the Holy Spirit that brought Christ up from Hades indwells in us. That means whatever might need healing and redeeming can be healed and redeemed.

But we must enter into the depths of our pain, because that is healing and to sit with our woundedness allows God to sit with our woundedness, too, and it gives Him a chance to embrace us as His children, who He loves very much.

The peace of the Lord that Christ offers after His resurrection is the same peace He offers us with our healing. Christ rises from the dead and gives His disciples His peace.

And that is the very peace He gives us in our lifelong pursuit of holiness.

The pain that we carry may hurt, the death that we undergo in returning home to our wounds may hurt, but they are not the end our journey just as death did not overcome Jesus Christ, but it was He that overcame death.

Healing is painful. Healing is a process. Pascha is a celebration of that process that is ours to partake in by the Incarnation’s death and resurrection.

While I hope those of you who celebrate Pascha are enjoying the festivities going into Bright Week, and for those who celebrated Easter a few weeks ago continue to enjoy Eastertide. I hope for others who aren’t quite sure what to do about this whole God-thing, or His Incarnation, and might have issue with His resurrection.

What I hope you might take from this is a call to repentance. Not in the typical Western, puritanical moralistic understanding of repentance, but through the lens of Orthodoxy and its spiritual therapia.

Repentance is a call to turn away from that which is cutting off your connection to yourself (and to God), chasing things in order to avoid confronting your problems, complexes, and traumas.

All the things we do to ignore our wounds.

Regardless of your orientation toward God, the more we ignore our wounds the more they will fester and create larger and larger problems in our lives. These problems grow to the extent that eventually we can no longer pretend that they are just manifestations of bad luck or *shudder* fatalistic.

It’s like waking up in a gutter or beside a dumpster over and over only to blame the car for not starting the night before, why does this always happen to me?

This is living in the land of the dead without knowing it and to follow Christ to Golgotha is in acknowledging these wounds and, paradoxically, entering into them to heal them. I would suggest that even if you do not believe in God, He is there with you when you repent, turning back to what you have been suppressing and ignoring.

He’ll even meet you halfway.

Awaiting to bring you out of ignorance to understanding.

Awaiting to embrace you as His own. 

Awaiting to throw you a banquet, for you were dead and now are alive again.

You were lost, like us all, and now are found. Selah.

“Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.

He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He destroyed Hell when He descended into it.

He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh” (St. John Chrysostom).

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ