Remembrance is an important teaching and practice in the holy scriptures and in the divine liturgy. Orthodox Christians keep a daily and yearly note of commemorating saints and memorable victories over heresies and schisms and disasters, and we note them especially in our calendar by making fast and feast days out of them. Christ commands us to “do this in remembrance of me,” in participating in the Eucharist, not just as a symbol, but as a reality. Christ fulfilled the Jewish prophecies and scriptures so that we can inherit the “feast of feasts,” Pascha (Easter) and Pentecost – the major movable feasts of the Church. These are one of the most ancient feasts observed by Christians in the 2nd c. AD. The first Apostolic Council and the early controversies over the date of Pascha both dealt with the problem of Jewish adherents and Christians converts from Gentile or partially Jewish heritage. The Church in Ephesus and the local churches of Asia Minor celebrated Easter on a date that coincided with the Jewish celebration of Passover, which probably wouldn’t cause immediate suspicion in today’s Christian world. The Church in Rome, Alexandria, Corinth, and Palestine celebrated Pascha on the same fixed day. Bishops Victor of Rome and Polycrates of Ephesus came to the forefront to debate the dating of Easter for the whole Church. Metropolitan Hilarion doesn’t mention any motives behind the controversy that involved issues of authority or uniformity, but both sides seemed to have good arguments for their observance. The Ephesians were practicing a local tradition they attributed to the Holy Apostle John the Theologian. The Romans were following the shared tradition of remembering the day of the resurrection of Christ that begins on Saturday evening that continues into Sunday morning. Both churches wanted to give honor to God. St. Irenaeus of Lyons helped resolve the dating of Pascha. Eusebius Pamphilius remarked wisely, “the disagreement in regard to the fast confirms the agreement in the faith.”
Although it’s known by tradition that forty days of fasting for Pascha was widespread in the Church, there wasn’t always a completely uniform way of fasting in terms of length. Even abstinence from certain kinds of food varied by local tradition, according to St. Hippolytus of Rome in the writing called Apostolic Tradition. Sometimes only three days of fasting was enough to prepare for Pascha, and some churches didn’t allow certain fruits. By fasting during Great Lent for Pascha, we remember Christ’s sufferings and tribulations. It would be difficult to recall in our heart Christ or anyone we love if we were distracted by enjoyments and entertainments and the commotion of daily life. Through the Typikon and the holy fathers of the Church prescribes fasting to remember not only intellectually but physically we become involved in the remembrance of holy things. After fasting during “the pascha of the cross,” we celebrate with inner feasting and joy “the pascha of resurrection” along with some foods that we have denied ourselves – most importantly we’ve abstained from the passions that we have denied ourselves to do. There are two paschas in Holy Orthodoxy. These two paschas seem to help to resolve the issue of the dating of Pascha and its estrangement spiritually from Judaism and its association with the 14 of Nissan. To celebrate the resurrection of Christ on a Jewish day of Passover might cause offense to Christians who wish to remember the true type of the Resurrection – Christ Himself. The cross and the resurrection are combined mystically in the Eucharist at the Last Supper, although they happened chronologically in a different order. We fast first, then we feast like Lazurus did when he entered his heavenly home in Paradise, where he lived in his heart during his earthly suffering and daily struggles before the Rich man.
But the Old Testament prototypes help us to understand the Orthodox celebration of Pascha. The service began on Saturday evening and ended on Sunday morning – a Jewish and Byzantine way of keeping time. The beginning of the paschal lighting of candles symbolizes the reality of how Christ’s gentle light penetrates the gloomy chaos just as the resurrection comes through the cross. The Old Testament prophets are read out loud because they foretold of Christ as the Light of the world and the Lover of mankind. The connection between the two paschas is powerful. Oddly to our logic, love increases with trials and temptations just as the Theotokos and Christ experienced life. In the West, the Catalan, medieval mystic, Ramon Llull, wrote a religious book called the Lover and the Beloved that is a dialogue between the Christ and the Christian. A poem is written for each day of the year. Poem 9 reads, “Tell me, my lover, said the beloved, will you have patience if I double your misery? Yes, if you just double my love.” Poem 10 reads, “The beloved said to the Lover: Do you know yet what love is? Replied the lover. If I did not know what love is, would I know what hardship, sadness, and pain are?” And poem 13 reads, “Tell me, crazy for love, who is the most visible, the beloved in the lover or the lover in the beloved? And he said, the beloved is in love, and the lover is seen in sorrow, in weeping, in hardship and pain.” In the dizzying array of repetitious forms of the Latin root word am- meaning to love, to be a friend, we arrive at our mind’s heart, and we begin to remember by faithful hardships and fellowships. What we feel or grasp as “love” are often manifestations of fear, control, or trauma induced fawning. But through Christ’s resurrection, we conquer joyfully and with ease our fears, sins, and the last enemy – our death. The Orthodox Church incorporated the poems of Melito of Sardis into the paschal celebration. In his work On Pascha, he teaches poetically, “But he arose from the dead and mounted up to the heights of heaven. When the Lord had clothed himself with humanity, and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer, and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned and had been judged for the sake of the condemned and buried for the sake of the one who was buried, he rose up from the dead, and cried aloud with this voice: Who is he who contends with me!”
In this chapter, no mention is made of a direct corresponding festival between Pentecost and Judaism except through the images and prototypes of the Old Testament, and no mention of any controversies over the celebration of Pentecost between churches. One of the purposes of this feast is to remember the descent of the Holy Spirit. What we begin to discern is that God crazily empties himself by descending and going down to us over and over in history. Christ descends to earth in the form of our flesh and becomes a real man; then, Christ descends to Hades and conquers it. The Holy Spirit descends on Christ at his voluntary baptism out of love for us, not because he needed to be cleansed. The Holy Spirit descends as fire on the Apostles and the Theotokos in the book of Acts. God the Father’s kingdom of heaven in the age to come will appear descending from the sky. In a sense, the kenosis of the Holy Trinity -- the self-emptying and descending – could be described as a kind of suffering for our good. At the end of this chapter, Metropolitan Hilarion has a section on the views of the holy fathers of the Church in the 4th c. St. Basil the Great has written many homilies, and he teaches, “Each person receives a share of sufferings, but Christ’s life consisted of sufferings and sorrows.” The book called My Elder Joseph the Hesychast has a similar teaching to the parable of Lazurus and the Rich man as well as the view of the 4th c. holy fathers. Elder Joseph imparted his wisdom to his disciples at his deathbed and Elder Ephraim recounts that, “Elder Joseph taught us the following ‘equation’ he had deduced from his own experience: the amount of grace we are entitled to receive is proportional to the severity of a temptation we can bear with gratitude towards God” (p.606). Both the Rich man and Lazurus receive God’s loving light; they receive whatever is “due to them,” and that experience of His glory always shining is felt differently by each person. We are taught humility no matter what course we take in this life; we will have to face our conscience when all is uncovered. St. Gregory the Great teaches that the word mystery comes from the Greek word meaning to cover, hide, and conceal. A covering can be a protection, but it also means “to remove the veil” from our birth that associates pleasures, success, and riches with goodness and beauty and truth while we associate suffering with misfortune, rejection, and evil. A mystery is a hidden triumph. Real circumcision is a heart that can enter Christ’s life and the protection of the Most Holy Theotokos. We not only participate in Pascha through mental efforts that help us to identify with the Gospel characters we hear in the liturgical readings, but also, we offer our own sufferings and trials that will come either in this life or the next life.