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Daily Meditations

Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen! The Fifth Wednesday of Pascha: The Descent of Jesus into Hades (Part VII)

06/01/2016

By Father Thomas Hopko We all become the bride of Christ, and we all relate to each other. We do not cease being who we are, because even the risen Christ, when He is raised, is still Jesus of Nazareth. In John’s Gospel, and in the Gospels generally, he even shows the continuity by showing the wounds in His hands. That causes some difficulty for some people, because they say, if He is raised into

Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen! The Fifth Tuesday of Pascha: The Descent of Jesus into Hades (Part VI)

05/31/2016

By Father Thomas Hopko He came to them, but we must remember that those who were literally dead were also still somehow alive in the hands of God, even before the Messiah came. When, for example, the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of Christ, tried to catch Him in his words by saying that according to the Levite law of Moses, if a man had a wife, and he died, his brother

Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen! The Fifth Monday of Pascha: The Descent of Jesus into Hades (Part V)

05/30/2016

By Father Thomas Hopko And we do not ever want to imagine the dead as disincarnate souls. Some of the great teachers of Christianity do that, even Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, Hierotheos, he does that. I must say honestly say I do not agree with him when he does that. The dead are simply completely and totally dead. And then when you are alive, you are completely and totally alive. And I believe that when Christ

Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen! The Fourth Friday of Pascha: The Descent of Jesus into Hades (Part IV)

05/27/2016

By Father Thomas Hopko We Christians believe, Orthodox Christians believe, that Christ is that Messianic King who frees us, and He frees us by dying. He liberates us. He ransoms us by the power of hell. He gave Himself, a ransom, to death, by which we were held captive, in order to release us, and that is what trampling down death by death means. So the icon of the so-called Descent into Sheol shows that

Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen! The Fourth Thursday of Pascha: The Descent of Jesus into Hades (Part III)

05/26/2016

By Father Thomas Hopko Even on the Russian Orthodox crosses, by the way, there is a little inscription at the foot of Jesus’ feet on the cross, in four Slavonic letters, M, L, R, and B, in Slavonic, which translated means, “The place of the skull (or Golgotha) has become Paradise.” So the bosom of Abraham had to be transformed into Paradise, into a living reality again, with interrelationship with all of creation—the sun, the

Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen! The Fourth Wednesday of Pascha: Mid-Pentecost, Feast Day of Saint Sophia Cathedral, Washington, DC.

05/25/2016

By Evangeline Hopkins, Proskynitria  …those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  1 Corinthians 1:24 How is Christ the Power and Wisdom of God? God’s power allowed Him to become human in a way that flummoxed nature. He did this to rescue us from the grips of death, both in Hades and in sin, and to restore the human relationship with God that Adam

Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen! The Fourth Tuesday of Pascha: The Descent of Jesus into Hades (Part II)

05/24/2016

By Father Thomas Hopko So you have this kind of symbolical way of speaking about the condition of being dead. And so it can sound somehow like a place, like heaven would be a place, Sheol would be a place. But all the holy fathers, and many of the modern writers, for example Hierotheos Vlachos, the Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, a very famous, well-known writer of Orthodoxy, today many of his books are translated into English,

Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen! The Fourth Monday of Pascha: The Descent of Jesus into Hades (Part I)

05/23/2016

By Father Thomas Hopko The Paschal icon, the icon of the victory of Christ, God’s Messiah, over death, the last enemy, in the Orthodox Church is an icon of the live, glorious Christ, in the realm of the dead, smashing the gates of Sheol, or of Hades, and releasing, and freeing, and pulling from the tombs, the whole of humanity, symbolized in the persons of Adam and Eve. In that icon, of course, there are

Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen! The Third Friday of Pascha: What Christ Accomplished on the Cross (The Consequences of Christ’s Redemptive Work, Part IV)

05/20/2016

By Hieromonk Damascene The Consequences of Christ’s Redemptive Work, Part IV The Body of the resurrected Christ was incomparably more spiritual than the incorrupt body of Adam before the Fall. Christ’s resurrected, spiritual Body was like the spiritual body that Adam was supposed to attain by ascending to God in Paradise. Likewise, the New Heaven and the New Earth will be incomparably more spiritual than the incorrupt creation before the Fall. Through Christ the New Adam, the

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