ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΑΝΕΣΤΗ! CHRIST IS RISEN!
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, February 22, 2022
One of my earliest experiences within my present parish was the sudden death of a beloved parishioner. She died in a car crash only three days after her Chrismation at Pascha. As the Church staggered through the days of our mourning and her burial, each day seemed to exactly parallel the events of Holy Week which we had just completed. Indeed, when someone dies and is buried in Bright Week (the week following Pascha), the hymnody is simply a repetition of the Paschal hymns. For our death is Christ’s death, and His Pascha is ours as well. We stood at her grave and sang loudly:
Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
And upon those in the tomb
Bestowing Life!
I think we sang it with a greater assurance than I would ever have imagined. Pascha has never been the same for me (nor have funerals).
The path set out for us by Christ leads always to the grave. It takes us to that one point where all earthly dreams and efforts come to an end. Initiation into the Church, in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, is described as a burial. Somehow, it is a fact that is too easily obscured. The Holy Eucharist is a remembrance of death:
For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes. (1Cor. 11:26)
It is, after all, Christ’s Body and Blood that we consume.
Death is anti-modernity. It mocks progress and the project of a better world. At the grave, we have everything in common with a pre-historic figure and nothing in common with the schemes of our modern world. Everything has come crashing to its ironic conclusion. As we bustle about with slogans of a better world we force ourselves to be oblivious to the fact that our Sun is dying and our planet will someday grow cold or be dissolved in fire, or, much sooner, endure yet another extinction-level visitation from a modest-sized asteroid. It is, of course, utterly astounding that the Creator of the universe Himself walked among us, speaking Aramaic, sweating beneath the heat of the noon-day Sun. His visitation alone makes us, the merest specks in a near infinity, remarkable and of significance.
As the Psalmist wrote:
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him? (Ps 8:3-4)
The poet, Shelley, was more dramatic:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Despair. That is the end of all things apart from Christ. However, that same despair rightly frames the event of the resurrection itself. The death of Christ mirrors and accompanies the path of all creation, including ourselves. But it leads us to a moment as surprising as our existence itself (which we take for granted in our ingratitude). That moment is the conquering of death by Life itself, just as Life itself gave (and gives) existence to the universe itself.
To stand in the Church with the body of a deceased friend is to stand at the very heart of our gifted existence. That we are is a gift at every moment. That we shall be is the same gift in even greater form. All that we are and ever shall be is imaged for us in the God-Man, Jesus Christ. It gives us a hope and courage to live with faith that there is purpose in what we do, even in our dying. In all that we do, we do with Him and in Him, and, in union with Him, His life is ours.
~Fr. Stephen Freeman, Glory to God for All Things, “When Death Dies,” https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2022/02/22/when-death-dies/
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