In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Christ is risen
As we are exchanging the Paschal greeting : “Christ is risen”, it is important that we remember that this is not merely a custom. This is very much a proclamation of our Faith. Christ is risen from the dead, and because He rose from the dead He gives us life. He conquered sin. He conquered death. In the times when I have had the blessing to be in Ukraine or Russia during the Paschal season, I always enjoyed how the faithful shout : “Indeed He is risen”. It almost takes your ears off.
We restrained Canadians have to overcome our inhibitions. There is nothing more important for us than the fact that Christ is risen. If Christ is not risen from the dead, nothing else matters (see 1 Corinthians 15:14-19). We might as well go and be social workers, or join the Lions Club. Christ is risen, and so we are here today. Christ is risen, and we are here together in this hospital for sinners.
This is another thing people are constantly making a mistake about. I hear it all the time. People are griping because in the Church there are problems : in the Church people gossip ; in the Church people backbite ; in the Church people are hypocrites. Orthodoxy is a living out of the whole truth, and organisation is very peripheral for us. It is true that we try to be organised and we try to make sense of things, because that is the way we human beings have to live together. There has to be some sort of organisation. However, the Grace of the Holy Spirit is greater than all our organisation. The problem, of course, with our organisation is that we cannot just let a little bit of organisation do. We have to sign, seal, deliver, and guarantee everything, and we bind ourselves up in every sort of rule. We bind ourselves up with every sort of regulation. Then we wonder why we are strangled and cannot move, because we have made provision for so many little, minute things. Still, the Grace of the Holy Spirit is greater than all these things. Even though we, in our sheep-like behaviour, do these things, the Lord still liberates us from ourselves. He liberates us from the restraints that we put on ourselves. He still breathes life into all those rules we put on ourselves, and with which we constrain ourselves. He breathes His life into all that. That is why, even though we have organisation to an extent, when people say that they do not want to belong to “organised religion”, they need to belong to the Orthodox Church !
Why do we paralyse ourselves with all these rules ? We do all these rules to ourselves because of fear. We are afraid. Human beings live in fear. That is why we are a hospital for sinners. We, the hospital for sinners, are here all together acknowledging that we are all in the same boat. Without Jesus Christ we can do nothing. Without the support and help of each other, too, in Christ, we cannot do anything. This is an important fact that we all have to acknowledge. That is why the Church is not a society of perfect and “professional” Christians. This is a society of people who are trying to live the Christian life, and our whole lives are about that : falling down and getting up. A monk was asked what he did in the monastery. The answer was : “I fall down, and I get up ; I fall down, and I get up”.
That is just what we are all doing (even the bishop) : we are all falling down and getting up. We always have to apologise to each other for our slips and our falls, for our mistakes, for our fears. Especially for our fears. These fears, which bother us all to a greater or lesser extent, are the main tools of the devil to keep us separated from each other, to keep us broken apart from each other. It is this that the Master of division, the devil, uses always to divide the sheep away from the Shepherd. The Tempter (Divider) divides the sheep from each other by planting suspicions in our hearts which we voluntarily accept, gullible that we are. We then nurse these things, and unless we come to a point where we are confronted with the fact that this thought that we accepted is a lie, we find ourselves walking out the door of the church. Eventually we will not be able to believe anyone or trust anyone. That is where the devil tries to take us all. It has happened to many people in the course of our Christian life. In the course of all human history, this is how the devil has always been dividing us and conquering us, by pulling us away from Christ.
When the Myrrh-bearing Women are at the tomb, and they are confronted with the empty tomb and with the angels who are saying that Jesus Christ is risen, commanding them to go and tell everyone, they do not tell anyone at the beginning because they are absolutely shocked, amazed, and afraid. Most likely we all would be. After 2,000 years, we are accustomed to the fact of the Resurrection. However, for these women today, it is their first encounter with it. How can they not be afraid ? If we read on beyond the Gospel reading for today, then we would see that the Myrrh-bearing Women were not the only ones that were afraid. All the apostles were afraid too, absolutely flabbergasted and amazed, and they did not know what to do. It was not until the Risen Christ encountered each of them that they began to comprehend. Yes, the impossible has indeed happened. Christ was not stolen, nor was He lost or removed. He is risen from the dead.
There are four different versions of the Resurrection in the four Gospels. We read four different persons’ experience of the Resurrection of Christ. These four different persons are showing us by their encounter with Christ how He truly convinced them that He is risen from the dead. He even ate fish with them. For forty days He was with them explaining to them, and helping them to understand everything that had gone before. The Apostle Peter and the others had thought that they understood everything about Who Christ is. However, they all had run away at the time of the Passion because they were confused when they understood that He was going to be crucified. The disciples could not figure it out at all because they really did not understand everything that our Saviour had been saying to them. He had given them preparation for everything but they had preconceived ideas about who is the Messiah, and what the Messiah would do. They had heard and absorbed all sorts of popular ideas in the society of the time, and various interpretations of the Scriptures and the writings of all sorts of people. One such popular idea was that the Messiah would establish an earthly kingdom better than Solomon’s. They did not understand at all about the Kingdom : the Kingdom not being of this earth.
The initial inability of both the Myrrh-bearing Women and the apostles to understand, and the malcomprehension of them at their first encounter with the Resurrection is very similar to that of “Doubting Thomas”. These malcomprehensions are interrelated. These doubts, this inability to comprehend, give us the opportunity through the subsequent encounters of the disciples with Christ to be convinced of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Moreover, we Orthodox Christians (and other Christians, too) have had 2,000 years of continuous personal and common experience of Jesus Christ who is risen from the dead. It is the same Jesus Christ, always and forever, as the Apostle is saying in the Epistle to the Hebrews. I love to quote this text because in my childhood there was a Norwegian in Bible study who always quoted it. He quoted it throughout my entire childhood. Ole Olson said : “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). It really stuck, especially because of his strong accent, I suppose, but also because of what sort of a Christ-loving man he was. He was truly a good example of a Christian. This same Jesus Christ has been encountering you and me, and all the people that have gone before us, those who introduced us to Christ. This same Jesus Christ has been revealing Himself in His love to us all as the same Person. In the Gospels we see ourselves in our encounter with our Lord Jesus Christ : Jesus Christ as He is appearing to the Apostle Paul, Jesus Christ as He encounters various saints. We are all recognising in ourselves, too, the same experience of the same loving Person, the same life-giving Person.
It is essential for us to remember that our life as Christians is the life of spiritual struggle. It is very important for us to pay attention to this fact in our lives. We who are following Christ are the target of the Tempter. The Tempter will come and try throughout our whole life in one way or another to drag us away from Christ. He never goes away. He will try to distract us, to turn us in on ourselves, to divide us from each other and to pull us down. It is crucial for us all, always, to keep the eyes of our bodies and the eyes of our hearts on Jesus Christ alone. To do this, we can enlist the help of His Mother and the saints who are successive generations of living examples revealing Christ. We can all count on Jesus Christ alone. Every human being, wanting to or not wanting to, fails every other human being. None of us can escape the fact that we are limited, and we will, even by accident, by misunderstanding, by who knows what, fail other human beings even if we did not know we were making a mistake. However, if we keep our eyes on our Saviour, and if we learn to apologise to each other for making mistakes and simply say : “I am sorry”, we will be farther ahead.
More and more I am convinced that the Twelve-Step Blue Book would not be a bad idea for everyone to read and then to follow its steps in practice. We do not necessarily have to go to Twelve-Step meetings all the time but to do so would probably be helpful. The Twelve-Step Programme helps people to get over their inhibitions with each other, and admit that they are all in the same boat. They all cannot overcome whatever it is without God. Actually, the more I am hearing about this Twelve-Step Programme, the more I notice that I am being told by people who are better educated than I that this is truly a very Orthodox programme, a very Orthodox system (with echoes of The Ladder of Divine Ascent). It fits us. However, we have to understand who is Who. Our Helper is Jesus Christ. After that everything falls into place. There is no-one here (myself included) who could dare to say that he or she is not addicted. We may not be addicted to alcohol ; we may not be addicted to some drug or other, but we are definitely addicted to two things : ourselves, and sin. Those two things are more deadly than anything else. It would be very good for us to follow this Twelve-Step Programme, and to admit together that we are all in the same boat of distraction, sin and betrayal. We can better help each other if we admit that we are all more or less stuck and immobilised in the same situation. We can only get out of the quicksand with the help of the Saviour. It is fear, fear, fear that we all have to overcome. The Myrrh-bearing Women and the apostles had to overcome fear. Every Christian has to overcome fear, and it can only be overcome in Christ by His love.
We must constantly keep our eyes on Christ by turning to Him when we are tempted, turning to Him when we are feeling fear, turning to Him when we are in turmoil, turning to Him when we are having doubts. Even though a brother or sister might slip in his or her support of us, still we should accept the good intentions of the brother or sister. We should pray also for the brother or sister who slips. Our supporters may slip, but we slip in our support, too. Let us pray for each other and support each other so that when we slip, we will not fall seriously. We will help to pick each other up. We will all together, supporting each other, enter the Kingdom in the light of the Resurrection, together with the Myrrh-bearing Women, the apostles, all the saints who have gone before us, our parents, our ancestors, and everyone else who is in the Kingdom. Together, may we proclaim our faith : “Christ is risen”.