Bible readings in the Divine Liturgy

• Each Liturgy has an Epistle Reading and a Gospel Reading
• The Gospel Book has a place of honor on the holy altar
• Currently the regular readings are from Romans and Matthew
• Today is the annual commemoration of the birth of St. John the Baptist
• The designated readings for this feast replace the regular readings
• Study the Epistle reading to understand why it was selected for the Forerunner
• The Gospel reading relates the events surrounding his conception and birth

Bible readings in church

• Psalms in every service
• OT at some Vespers, NT at some Matins and every Liturgy
• Matins Gospel
• Liturgy Epistle and Gospel
• Not random, but predetermined cycles, movable and immovable
• Movable cycle begins on Easter Sunday
• Gospel of John from Easter to Pentecost
• Then Matthew (with some Mark) until Sept. 14
• After Sept. 14, Luke (with some Mark)
• Fixed cycle of dates of feast days and Saints’ memories
• Entire NT not read in church, Revelation never
• Entire Gospels can be read during first few days of Holy Week
• Entire book of Acts can be read just prior to the Resurrection service
• One year Bible is a good tool to read the whole Bible

Sunday of All Saints

1. Sunday of All Saints is the opportunity to honor all the saints, both those that have been recognized by the Church, and those known to God alone.

2. Byzantine Emperor Leo wished to build a church in honor of his saintly wife Theophano, but Church leaders felt it was too soon after her death to do that; so he built a grand church in honor of All Saints, and said that if his wife is actually a saint, then she is included.

3. This Sunday ends the annual cycle of movable feasts of the Triodion and Pentecostarion periods, i.e. Triodion, Lent, Holy Week, Pascha through Pentecost and Sunday of All Saints. It also signals the beginning of the eleven-week Sunday Matins Gospel cycle and the eight-week hymnological cycle.

4. Tomorrow, Monday, June 11, 2012, marks the beginning of the Fast in honor of the Apostles, which ends with the feast of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul on June 29.

Holy Weekend of Pentecost

Today is Pentecost Sunday, right smack in the middle of Holy Weekend of Pentecost. Yesterday morning was the Saturday of the Souls. Those fifty people who attended were able to pray for the welfare of their deceased loved ones and all Orthodox Christians who have died with the hope resurrection and life eternal.

Yesterday evening was the Vespers Service that inaugurated the celebration of the Great Feast of Pentecost. And this evening, at 5 PM, is that most important service, which we call Kneeling Vespers.

We call it Kneeling Vespers. But we shouldn’t think that it is important because the congregation will kneel. It may be distinctive because of the kneeling. But it is important because of the great blessings of the Holy Spirit that those who are in attendance may receive. Let me explain:

It is the time-honored tradition and practice of our Orthodox Christian Church, that seven profound and powerful prayers be offered by the bishops and/or priests on the day of Pentecost, to ask for the grace of the Holy Spirit to come upon the faithful in attendance, to cleanse and illumine them, to empower them and confirm them in holiness and virtue, and in short to bless their lives. These are profound, intense invocations of the grace of God. They are much like the part of the Divine Liturgy when the priest consecrates the holy gifts. For this reason everyone kneels while the prayers are offered.

This will be the first time the congregation will kneel in church since Pascha. We refrained from kneeling during the Paschal period in order to keep the idea of Pascha alive in our mind. Now, that period is over for this year, and we begin to kneel in church again. Kneeling Vespers is an annual event. It is as big and important as Easter itself.

In some places, these prayers are appended to the end of the Divine Liturgy on Pentecost Sunday morning, with the idea that people are already at church and probably won’t want to return again later in the day. That scenario makes the unjustified assumption that you all don’t like coming to church any more than on Sunday morning, and that you are unaware of, or simply don’t value, the significance of Pentecost enough to spend any more time on it. But that practice would make this Sunday morning exceptionally long; and anticipating this, many people simply don’t attend. [Which may explain today's lower attendance.]

But that is not the case here at St. Nektarios. You are educated in the faith, you are conscientious churchgoers. And for that reason, this morning’s service will not be unduly lengthened, and those profound and powerful prayers will be offered this evening starting at 5 PM.

Before the Ascension

Three days ago, on Thursday, was the annual remembrance and celebration of the Ascension of our Lord. The content and meaning of that event is expressed concisely in the so-called Apolytikion hymn of the feast, which is in today’s Missal.

Forty days after He rose from the dead, Jesus, our Lord and Savior, went back to where He came from, now having assumed our human nature and body. He took His disciples and followers to the Mount of Olives and He blessed them with His hands, and then some clouds sort of lifted Him and took Him up and away.

Prior to that, the Lord had spent forty days with the disciples, teaching them the higher and more mystical things about God the Father, about the working of grace of the Holy Spirit. He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. He explained to them how the OT events and prophecies were in fact referring to His crucifixion and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the establishment of the Church, whose mission would be to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins to all nations. By this we know that the Church’s understanding and interpretation of the Bible is correct, because it comes straight from Jesus. Jesus did not disclose to them arcane knowledge about the turn of world events or the end of the world, even though the disciples asked Him about that.

The disciples were somewhat dejected, anticipating the Lord’s departure. But He assured them that He would not leave them orphaned, but that He would send to them the Holy Spirit, and that He would be with them always till the end of time. He also told them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the coming of the Holy Spirit ten days later.

After the Ascension

After the Lord was physically taken up into heaven, the disciples stood looking up for a while, and then two angels in the form of men in white reminded them that Jesus would return the same way He had left. Then the disciples went back to Jerusalem, with great joy, to wait ten days for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

During that time, they prayed and worshipped God in the Temple, as it says in the Bible. They also prayed alot when there weren’t services. So, we can imagine that they were preparing themselves for Pentecost by fasting, noetic prayer and reading the Bible. Pentecost would be for them both baptism and chrismation and also ordination. I will say more about that next Sunday.

Holy Weekend of Pentecost

Speaking of which… We are all familiar with Holy Week and Easter. We put it on our calendar and we don’t mind attending more church services, because, after all, it is Holy Week. Well, next week is a kind of Holy Weekend of Pentecost. Saturday of the souls, Saturday evening Vespers of Pentecost, Sunday morning Matins and Liturgy, Sunday evening the Kneeling Vespers, and Monday of the Holy Spirit. These are great and holy days that ought to be on everyone’s calendar.

This very sanctuary was built for the glory God, precisely for such services to be conducted in it, and it was built big in order to accommodate more of us. It was pretty full during Holy Week, and it would be a real tribute and honor to our Lord if it were again full of worshiping Christians during Holy Weekend of Pentecost. Check your Missals for the exact schedule.

Momentous Events

Today is day 36 of Pascha, which means that in four days, namely this coming Wednesday and Thursday, we will celebrate the event we call the Ascension, which is when our Lord Jesus left earth and physically went to sit at the right hand of the Father in heaven, whatever that really means.

According to the Bible and the Church’s teaching, the Son of God miraculously became the Virgin Mary’s Son, Jesus. He lived on earth, and around the age of thirty He began a three year mission of establishing His Church, the Twelve Disciples and other followers, and of teaching and miraculous healing. This culminated in His arrest on trumped up charges of treason against the establishment, namely the Roman Govern­ment and the Jewish Nation. He was convicted and then publicly executed by crucifixion. He was buried. And a few days later His tomb was found empty, because He rose from the dead.

For the next forty days, He physically spent time with His followers and taught them the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven and the grace of God. He taught them how to regenerate believers by baptizing them, and how to offer the holy Eucharist to provide believers with His body and blood in Holy Communion.

Ascension

Jesus promised them to send the Holy Spirit from the Father, to lead them into all the truth, and to be with them and the Church till the end of time. Then, after forty days, when it was time to leave, He blessed His followers and filled them with unutterable joy, and He was taken up in a cloud into the sky, into heaven. And having the human nature that He assumed when He came to earth, He took it with Him and sat with it at the right hand of the Father. And He will come again, in a similar way as He left, at the end of time, on what is called the end of the world, the Day of the Lord and Judgment Day. On that day, the dead will rise, and the living will be there too. And all Christians are waiting for that day, and are taught to prepare themselves for it, through the acquisition and retention of God’s grace.

Celebration

Because these are momentous events in the history of humanity and important for our salvation, our Church remembers them and celebrates them every year, with special church services. Here at St. Nektarios, we will celebrate the last day of Pascha as well as the feast of Ascension starting this Wednesday, at 6 PM for one hour, and continuing on Thursday, starting at 9 AM, for two hours.

My task is to create a buzz about this, to under­score the cosmic significance of the events being remembered, and to advertise the benefits that come from festively remembering them from year to year. Prom, graduations and weddings pale in comparison to the ritual remembrance of Pascha, Ascension and Pentecost, the events that shook the world and saved mankind. Church services, here, are beautiful, exciting, and compre­hensible because they are conducted in English. The content of festive services is deep, profound, challenging, uplifting, hope-giving. That poetic and intellectual fare, coupled with the immortal food of Holy Communion, should be enough to attract any sensible person to attend.

The Pentecostarion

The fifty day period following Easter and leading to Pentecost is called, in ecclesiastic­al lingo, the Pentecostarion period.

There is a whole area of knowledge, a science, so to speak, called Liturgics, which deals with the study of religious ceremonies and ritual practices. We often use the word Liturgy to indicate the Divine Liturgy, like what we are in right now. The same word, Liturgy, can have a broader meaning, that includes all religious ceremonies and ritual practices of the Church. Things like church services, the rubrics that describe the exact content and order of those services, the church calendar, the lists of saints days and other holidays that will be celebrated.

So, the term Pentecostarion is used in discussing our Church’s liturgics. It can mean a couple of things. Obviously it has some­thing to do with fifty, and specifically the day of Pente­cost, which was fifty days after our Lord’s resurrection and each year fifty days after Easter.

There is a church book that contains all the special hymns to be sung in church from Easter till Pentecost, actually till the Sunday after Pentecost. That book is called the Pente­costarion. You recall a couple of months ago I described the book that contains the hymns used during the Lenten period. It is called the Triodion, and also the period of three weeks leading up to Lent is called, by association, the Triodion Period. A similar thing applies here too. The book is called Pente­costarion, not because it has 50 hymns, or the canons have 50 odes, but because it covers a 50-day period. And that period, by association, is also called Pente­costarion. So, we are in the middle of the Pente­costarion period.

Speaking about liturgics again, Pascha is a holiday of the highest importance. And Pentecost is of equal importance. So Pascha and Pentecost are on the same level. Associated with Pascha are a series of church services we know as Holy Week. Pentecost also has its associated services: Saturday of Souls; Great Vespers on Saturday evening; Matins and Liturgy on Sunday morning; Kneeling Vespers on Sunday evening, and Monday of the Holy Spirit. And this year, we will be doing all those services, which is something new for us here at St. Nektarios.

Halfway through this period there is a holiday called Mid-Pentecost. That would be this Wednesday. In some places that have a full liturgical cycle, there will be church services for that day. Forty days after Easter there is the feast-day to remember the Ascension of our Lord. That is a great feast as well. I will talk about that another time. On the day just before Ascension, there is a day called the Leave-taking of Pascha. That means that it is the last day to sing Christ is risen for the year. Here at St. Nektarios we will do a special service to mark the leave-taking of Pascha. It will be on that Wednesday evening, right before we do Great Vespers for Ascension.

Then for the next nine days the prevailing theme in church will be the Ascension, leading up to day fifty, which, as we said, is Pentecost.

This is the liturgical framework within which our Church celebrates these events that are crucial for our salvation. I will speak about the meaning of those events and the associated feast days in the Sundays to come.

Sunday of the Myrrh-bearers

Today is the third Sunday of Pascha. The specific theme for today is to remember the so-called Myrrh-bearers. These were the two men, Joseph of Arimathea and Nikodemus, who took Jesus’ body down from the cross, prepared it for burial, laid it in the sepulcher; and also the several women who, after the resurrection, visited Jesus’ tomb and found it empty.

Joseph of Arimathea was a wealthy man, an “honorable counselor” of the Jews, who had some sway with the Roman governor. Joseph was able to pull strings, so to speak, and get permission to take possession of Jesus’ body and to bury it, because otherwise it might have been disposed of dishonorably. It is said that Joseph was treated badly by the Jewish authorities for burying Jesus, that he was tied up and thrown into a pit. But Jesus appeared to him after He rose from the dead, to confirm His resurrection. Joseph escaped and went to his estate in Arimathea. He was a first-hand witness of the Resurrection.

Nikodemus was a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin; so he was aware of the motives and plots behind the scenes that led to Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. He is probably the source of that information in the Gospel accounts. Because he spoke openly about this and the resurrection, he was permanently removed from the Jewish Council.

There were many so-called Myrrh-bearing Women, who went back and forth to Jesus’ tomb several time and in different groups. That explains why the multiple accounts of them in the four Gospels vary so much. Each account in the Gospels describes a particular group or visit.

Patristic tradition has it that, when He rose from the dead, Jesus appeared first to His mother, the Virgin Mary, that the Angel (probably the Archangel Gabriel) removed the stone from the tomb specifically for her to see that it was empty. The evangelists did not explicitly describe Jesus’ first appearance to His mother, because they felt it would present a conflict of interest, namely the testimony of a family member, and thus diminish the credibility of their account. So they focus on Mary Magdalene and call the Virgin Mary “the other Mary,” or “the mother of James.”

Concerning Mary Magdalene, legend has it that sometime after Pentecost, she traveled to Rome and told Tiberius Caesar what Pontius Pilate had allowed to happen to Jesus. Some sources trace the red Easter egg tradition to this audience with Caesar. According to this account, Mary Magdalene, holding a plain egg, greeted Caesar and said, “Christ is risen!” He said, “It is just as likely that Christ rose from the dead as it is likely that the egg you hold will turn red.” And then the egg turned red, and Mary preached Christ to Caesar and the imperial household.

The term “Myrrh-bearers” is a misnomer and an incorrect rendering of the Greek word Μυροφόροι. The women prepared “spices and ointments” or “fragrant oils,” to anoint Jesus, not myrrh. Myrrh is a kind of gum or resin, not the fragrant oil that the women brought. Nikodemus is the one who brought “a mixture of myrrh and aloes.” The Greek word for myrrh is σμύρνα, not μύρα. Μύρα means ointments or fragrant oils. Φόρος is a suffix that means, “one who bears, holds, carries.” So, Μυροφόροι γυναῖκες, describes the women who brought ointments and fragrant oils to Jesus’ tomb.

Thomas Sunday

Today is Thomas Sunday. You will remember how on Easter Sunday evening, the Apostles were sort of in hiding in an upper room, probably the same one they had the Last Supper in a few days before. The doors were shut and locked. And Jesus came in without opening the doors and appeared to the Apostles. That is why they thought maybe He was a ghost. Jesus was not a ghost, or spirit; He was there in body. He ate something in front of them, in order to prove that He was not a ghost or spirit, but physically resurrected from the dead. Thomas came later, after the Lord had left. He found it difficult to believe it, and he wanted tangible proof that the Lord had risen from the dead.

That opportunity came the next Sunday, like today. As we heard in the Gospel reading, the Lord entered once again through the closed doors, and told Thomas to touch the scars on His hands and side, to confirm for himself that He was risen.

So, Jesus rose from the dead, physically. That is, His soul returned from Hades, after demolishing it, reentered His body, and He rose from the sepulcher, and there was no need for the stone to be removed for Him to exit. Now resurrected, His divine attributes are no longer hidden or suppressed. He demonstrated super-human abilities, like walking through doors, appearing in other forms, and other things. And yet, He ate with His Disciples. He did not need to eat in order to live, like we do now. He ate in order to prove that He is fully human as well as fully divine. The food He ate was completely consumed by the fire of His divinity. He had no need to go to the bathroom. All those baser functions were inoperative after the resurrection.

This resurrected physical state of the Lord is a preview of what lies in store for human beings after the general resurrection at the end of time. We will also have resurrected bodies that will be bright and spiritual, or not, to the extent that each individual has prepared themselves in this life.

The Lord purposely kept the marks on His body that were made by the nails and the spear. That does not mean that our wounds, physical and spiritual, will not be healed. The Lord purposely kept His scars as a kind of badge of His love for us and also to prove that it was He.

So, Thomas touches the Lord’s scars. His fingers were not burned off from touching the body of God, but rather his mind and soul were illumined, and he believed and proclaimed that the man he was touching was also his Lord and God.

This Sunday is sometimes called Anti-pascha, which means Sunday after Pascha. It is also called the rededication of the resurrection of Christ, which means a re-celebration of the resurrection. This re-celebration will happen each and every Sunday until we get to Palm Sunday next year.

Today is also known as the second Sunday of Pascha, the first one being Easter Sunday itself.

Today also marks the beginning of the eight-week cycle of the eight modes of our Church’s hymnography. This cycle will continue until the end of Lent next year.

And finally, this past week was Bright week and there was no fasting at all. As of this week, we resume our regular fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Pascha and Easter

This past week, which is called Great and Holy Week, we have observed the annual com­memoration of the events that led up to the death and burial of our Lord Jesus Christ. Saturday morning, the theme was the resurrection, when Jesus came back to life and rose from the tomb where he had been buried. And tonight, we are in the full-blown celebration of the resurrection; and we call our feast Pascha and Easter.

Pascha is a Hebrew word, and it means Passover. The Jews celebrate Passover, and it refers to the historical event when the Israelites were saved from the bondage of Egypt, and Moses led them out and they passed over the Red Sea, passed over from slavery to freedom.

Today, we Christians also celebrate Passover, the ultimate and spiritual Passover, where instead of Moses we have Christ, who opened the way for us to pass over from slavery to the devil to freedom in God, to pass over from death to eternal life. So, when we say Pascha, we ought to remember that it means passing over from death to life.

Easter is an English word that refers to the Resurrection of Christ. The origin of the word Easter is similar to that of east, which has to do with springtime, sunrise, and shining. Easter, as another name for Pascha, is much like the Greek word Λαμπρή, which is also another name for Pascha, and which means bright and shining.

Sepulcher

When Jesus was crucified, He died on the Cross sooner than expected. This indicates that He was in control and that He died when and because He wished to. He was buried in a tomb. Another word for tomb is sepulcher. In Jerusalem, the church that enshrines the site of the Lord’s burial is called the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Descent into Hades

While Jesus’ body was in the tomb, His soul went down into what is called hell or Hades. He went there by dying, like everyone before Him. Everyone else, however, even the holy people, (and I mean their souls), were being held there by the devil, like in a prison. So Jesus went down there and with the glory of His divinity, He smashed the prison bars and gates, and filled that place with His divine light and glory.

While it is difficult to speak of these events with complete certainty, what is universally endorsed is the teaching that Christ mortified death and destroyed hell, and He preached the Gospel in hell. Many Church Fathers maintained that Christ freed all who were held captive, while others thought that only the Old Testament righteous were liberated. Another group believed that only those who came to believe in Christ and followed him were saved. In any case, now, all who believe and are baptized do not go to Hades.

Many Orthodox authors think that in Hades there is an enduring memory of Christ’s descent there, and that all who were not baptized, when they die, receive the opportunity to believe and to be saved.

The Stone of the Tomb

When Jesus’ soul returned to his body, He rose and exited the tomb without the stone being removed. Later, an Angel came and removed the stone, and this caused the earthquake. The Angel removed the stone, not so that Jesus could get out, but so that the Myrrh-bearing women could see that it was empty.