Metropolitan Nicolae’s Meditation for the Holy Week.
In conditions completely different from other years, we have journeyed spiritually through the 40 days of Great Lent. The signs of fear of the new disease were evident already at the beginning of Lent. But we journeyed together in the Church on the Sunday of Orthodoxy and that of St. Gregory Palamas.
Already on the Sunday of the Holy Cross we discovered together in prayer the profound meaning of taking up the Cross and following Christ: taking up our calling as Christians in responsibility for our families, friends, and neighbors with patience, hope, and faith in God’s help.
On the Feast of the Annunciation we understood that we are being tested like the Theotokos, whose soul was pierced by a sword, unto our “becoming” as prayerful Christians, trusting in the intercessions of the Holy Virgin. And we continued Great Lent with the examples of humility and repentance of St. John of the Ladder and St. Mary of Egypt.
We have been encouraged to pray more in our own cells, in this isolation similar to their life in the wilderness, that we might gain spiritual understanding of the meaning of our earthly life.
And now we find ourselves at the Feast of the Lord’s Entrance into Jerusalem, of our meeting of the King of Peace who waits to be received into our souls. The Savior enters Jerusalem riding on a donkey in order to proclaim peace to all: the peace of God, which means reconciliation with God, with ourselves, and with our neighbors.
It is fitting that we too now follow the words of St. John Chrysostom, “bearing and waving not leafy branches, but bringing as gifts to Christ kindness, virtue, fasting, tears, prayers, vigil.”
Had the Antiochian Father gone through the isolation and desperation of an epidemic? More likely the great preacher had experienced in a profoundly spiritual way this feast which introduces the Week of the Lord’s Passion.
For we will see Him who came to bring man’s reconciliation with God accused of blasphemy against God, Him who came to bring peace and healing to our souls, spat upon and slapped like one unworthy to be called a Man. Him who came to bring us the true reconciliation born of love, crucified like a thief and enemy of His neighbors.
During this week it is fitting that we spiritually follow the Lord’s steps toward crucifixion, that we desire to defend Him before His judges, that we demonstrate our steadfastness in faith, and that we do not deny Him now, when we are being tested.
That we discover in loneliness and understand His crying out to the Heavenly Father! And that we too suffer with the Man Jesus, who suffered His passion for us and offered His life on the Cross as redemption for us! With confidence that He has passed through death, conquering it as God, with joy that the powers of hell have been shattered, with faith that in every Divine Liturgy we too partake of the light of the Resurrection, and with the hope that if Christ is risen we too will rise!
Tr by mitropolia.us
Photography courtesy of Doxologia
