Great and Holy Friday

In a world composed of souls longing for love, fulfillment of hope, and victory over fear, what is more overpowering than the resurrection of Christ from the dead - the justification of every holy desire, and healing of every sorrow?

To those who live in dread of such happiness, calling hope the “opiate of the masses,” the Orthodox tradition responds with a very different dilemma: 

If faith is only possible in things unseen (as Saint Paul says in his Epistle to the Hebrews), how can Orthodox believers really have faith – for they have the witness of the Saints in every generation whose lives and deaths prove the reality of Christ’s promise. 

Many are the miracles wrought by their divine gifts, not only after departure from this life, but while still in it. Biographies of the Saints are replete with the accounts of such miracles. But one has only to visit a monastery to hear them first hand ... such as that shared by the Orthodox elder of a monastery in Greece, about one of his spiritual children who was ill with cancer:

As a member of the atheistic political party, this individual had wielded considerable political power against monasteries. Serious illness, however, brought her a very different outlook on life, as she joyously returned to the Christian faith.

One evening, as the woman related, her husband and son were discussing who would stay up with her during that night. Behind them the woman saw a third figure, unmistakably that of her guardian angel, who said to her, “I am the one who will watch over you this night.”

"That illness has filled heaven!” said Geronta Porphyrios, who also said our souls are saved in one of three ways: by ascetic sacrifice, by illness, or by doing our work with joy.

Indeed, those who take up their cross on one of these paths know miracles in many ways. Not just through the healings wrought by the holy relics of Christ’s True Cross. Not just through the fragrance exuded by the relics of the Saints, such as the other-worldly perfume emanating from the relics of Saint Catherine, which fills the church and reaches even to the courtyard outside. Not just through the miraculous myrrh of the holy icons - but in a thousand ways, miracles create faith within the secret soul of every believer ... miracles without which the world would not still be here.

“By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”  (Hebrews 11.3)

A major point of Christian understanding is that God created everything out of nothing …

Similarly, “All these people were still living by faith when they died,” continued Saint Paul, speaking about the Old Testament believers whose lives preceded the ineffable sacrifice of the God-man Christ on the Cross.

“They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth … Instead, they were longing for a better country - a heavenly one.” 

By faith, the parents of Moses hid him after he was born, unafraid of Pharaoh's edict against the firstborn males of Egypt, said Saint Paul, and by faith Moses himself "regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward." 

"By faith," Saint Paul continues, "Moses forsook Egypt, not fearing the king's anger; he persevered because he saw Him who is invisible." 

But Christ is no longer invisible – He who put on light as a garment now stands naked before judgment, accepting blows from hands that He himself had fashioned. The King of Glory is nailed to the Cross and the sun hides its rays, not bearing to behold God insulted, before whom all creation trembles ...

And a thief is the first to enter Paradise, for the eyes of his faith clearly see the divinity of the One who, having endured all, offers hope and victory over fear to all, His uncontainable love overflowing from hearts weeping with gratitude for the sacrifice that transfigures every tribulation of this fallen world - not only today, on Great and Holy Friday, but to the endless ages of ages ...