/View.info/ BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN LOVE WITH THE LORD,
On the morning of Easter, our spiritual gaze is again directed to the Lord’s tomb, where three days earlier the lifeless body of the crucified and martyred for us and our iniquities, the Son of God and Man – the Lord, Redeemer and Savior Jesus Christ was laid.
The course of the events of the God-human history of salvation, for which we were preparing and which we experienced one after the other during the long penitential period of the holy Forty and Holy Week, directs us to the cold grave. Today, however, we go to the last earthly refuge of the God-man Christ not to anoint His pure body, like the myrrh-bearing women, because we know very well that this tomb is empty, and that is why we stand before it not with sorrow, pain and sadness , but with bright and festive joy – so that we can once again become partakers and witnesses of the Resurrection and ask, together with the evangelists: “… why are you looking for the Living One among the dead? He is not here, but he has risen” (Luke 24:5-6).
On this unattainable event for our ordinary human logic and even for the holy angels of God, all our saving Orthodox faith and our unshakable hope are based. It contains the main content of the preaching of the holy Church for two millennia. This is the Good News that the Savior commanded His apostles to spread among all nations, to all ends of the world (Matt. 28:19-20; Mark 16:15). A sacred and God-commanded mission, which after the first witnesses of the Resurrection – the immediate disciples of Christ, passes to all subsequent generations of His faithful disciples and followers.
We are also part of these new apostles and evangelists called by the Lord today, the modern witnesses of the Savior’s victory over hell, death and corruption, of His glorious Resurrection and the new era announced by Him – the era of reconciliation between earth and Heaven, between man and God , between the creation and the Creator. And it is our sacred duty to bear witness to the Light rising today from the empty tomb of the Lord – to preach zealously, tirelessly to evangelize and loudly glorify the coming of the “favorable year of the Lord” (Is. 61:2; Luke 4:19), which mankind eagerly craved throughout the long and anxiously anticipated period of the Old Testament.
Let us be worthy of this highest calling of ours. With our lives and deeds, let us testify every day to God’s great mercy to man, to the destruction of the works of darkness and to the celebration of Life, because in the divine-human person of our Savior “death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:54; cf. Is. 25:8) and no longer has authority over us who have received “adoption” (Gal. 4:5), and are already God’s friends (John 14-15). Let us never forget ourselves, and let us also remind others, that regardless of all the seemingly continuing dominion of death in our world, regardless of all the suffering and pain around us, there is an open way to eternal life and fullness of life (John 10:10), and in the place of the underworld and all its host before us are already dawning the dawn of the non-evening day and the gates of the Kingdom of God.
“I am the resurrection and the life,” testifies the Lord Himself and assures: “… he who believes in Me, even if he dies, will live” (John 11:25).
With this assurance, let us today, with pure and joyful hearts, joyfully celebrate the victory and the celebration of Life, achieved in the Resurrection, and drink to our fill from the “new drink”, which is … “miraculously flowed not from a barren stone, but from the fountain of incorruption , from the tomb of Christ, in whom we are confirmed” (irmos of Song 3 of the Paschal Canon).
May the peace and grace of our risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all!
HAPPY EASTER!
#Greeting #Holiness #Bulgarian #Patriarch #Neophyte #Resurrection #Christ
