The resurrection of Christ is the saving plan of the Holy Trinity, and that dogma rests also on the incarnation of Christ, His first coming. In Orthodox Christianity, there are two Passovers. The first, Holy Friday celebrates the Passover Crucifixion, and the second, Holy Pascha (Easter) celebrates the Passover Resurrection – with Christ’s Descent on Holy Saturday being in the middle of the two. The word pascha means a passing over in Aramaic. The Old Testament tells us that the angel of death passed by the homes of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt and that Pharaoh refused to free them just as Hades held onto all humanity in death. The exodus prefigures the resurrection of all people. The crucifixion, dying, and descent into Hades all precede the paschal joy of Christ’s resurrection and our own too. Likewise, our suffering must come before we experience real joy. Pascha is joyful because it celebrates a specific victory over death and hell; it saves our body and soul together. On Holy Pascha, Orthodox Christians begin to sing throughout the festal season, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.” Life is specifically given to people who have died and are waiting in the grave for life, and to those who are going to the grave – the so-called living. The typology of the Old Testament is linked to the New Testament by several key images. The Passover lamb links to the Eucharist, the Red Sea to baptism, and the exodus from Pharaoh’s Egypt to the freedom from Hades. So, the Eastern fathers did not write about these themes as a separate arrangement but as if it were one icon.
How do we experience and witness the resurrection if we were not there to see it? The Apostle Paul teaches that we do witness the same resurrection of Christ through faith by believing “in your heart.” Metropolitan Hilarion in Orthodox tradition describes that experience of trust and persuasion as “seeing with the noetic eyes [of the heart],” and not necessarily relying on the physical eyes. St. Symeon the New Theologian also answers that faith question by describing the experience as “beholding” and not believing with our logic. Faith has its own rules, understanding, and persuasion in the heart; it’s another kind of knowing lost on those who only see logical knowledge. When we hold something dear, we trust it and believe it and behold it as a witness. Being a witness of the resurrection today has a kind of personal and communal knowledge, or faith, that shares in the cloud of martyrs of the Church. In his Homilies on Romans, St. John Chrysostom describes faith as a kind of persuasion rather than just a mental acceptance based on reason or ignoring what is convincing. Nothing reveals more quickly a person’s honest belief and faith than facing up death itself within us and around us. Orthodox faithfulness also holds that we will resurrect like Christ. We trust and behold that what will happen to those in the tomb will happen to us in our own tombs. Faithfulness makes us “co-strugglers” with Christ in His suffering, death and resurrection, Metropolitan Hilarion writes. The Godman, Jesus Christ in Orthodox Christianity, is the summa of all theology and anthropology. This recapitulation of the created world is preached through a poem written by Melito of Sardis called On Pascha. He writes, “…in the man was Christ encompassing all things.” Christ is the reality of the type, the man of the lamb, the Word of the Law. In Melito’s paschal poem, Christ is the Victor and sole speaker with Hades; mankind doesn’t negotiate, fight, escape from Hades except through Christ’s word of freedom. The resurrection is tied to the freedom found in Hades. The victorious Christ has brought salvation to the dead and the dead are saved by rising with Him, teaches St. Gregory the Theologian on his Oration on Holy Pascha. If we suffer with Christ, if we live with Christ, and if we rise with Christ, then we become divine like him. This core teaching of salvation is called deification. It can mean making godlike or making God within us again.