Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life.
Yes, I know it is not Pascha yet. It is still Lent. In fact, we have just entered on the forty-day road to the Paradise of the New Adam, where there is no prohibition against reaching out to the Tree of Life, that is, the Cross, and plucking the First-fruit of Salvation hanging there, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I know we have just begun. We are not there yet. But our longing for the End that is the Beginning of all things simply overwhelms me.
‘To forgive all things in the Resurrection,’ how sweet this sounds, yet how impossible to perform. To say ‘Brothers’ to those that hate us, how unthinkable to us who have never succeeded in understanding how deep is the hatred within us that puts to death, every day, those around us (whom we simply want to hate), and even the Son of God, whose last prayer to His Father was, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!’
Unlike the sinner who knows he is a sinner and is ashamed to even draw near to ask forgiveness, we sin, and we sin boldly, and go to confess what trifles we deem our ‘sins’ while leaving covered and festering the putrid secrets of our inner deformities. He who is forgiven much, loves much, but the forgiveness we ‘humbly’ apply for is no medicine for those sicknesses and no antidote for those poisons we partake of, and hence we love little.
This is the time, the acceptable time, not to crouch behind our mirrors and fight on, shattering the world around us into splintered fragments, but instead to break those mirrors through which we love to see so dimly, and to come out into the light, yes, into the Light of Christ, which shines perpetually, even in this forty-day sojourn, to show us who and what we are, for though we divide time’s flow into seasons, the Resurrection is always now.
Let us be radiant (as we prepare ourselves) for the feast, and let us embrace one another (putting away our divisions). Let us say: ‘Brethren,’ even to them that hate us (and to them whom we hate), let us forgive all things in the Resurrection (because it has already unsealed the gates of Paradise), and thus let us cry out (even now, as we wait)…
Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life.
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