By Fr. George Dorbarakis
“It is the day of Resurrection; let us be radiant, O peoples; Pascha, the Lord’s Pascha; for from death to life, and from earth to heaven, Christ God has led us across, as we sing the hymn of victory” (First Ode of the Resurrection Canon, Tone 1).
Saint John of Damascus, in the festal and triumphant first tone, offers us the outburst of his heart — an outburst of every believer who truly knows — for the feast of feasts, the Resurrection of the Lord. This is not, of course, the Passover of the Jews, during which they celebrate their passage through the Red Sea and thus their liberation from the slavery of the Egyptians — this event functioning as a prefiguration and prophecy of the Christian Pascha — but rather the Passover of the Lord, His Resurrection. By it the Lord, as the almighty God, having destroyed the kingdom of death by entering into it, granted eternal life to all the sorrowful souls of the dead — that is, He transferred them from death to life; and even more, He transferred all people from the earth, to which they were exclusively oriented, to heaven, where one can behold the face of God, where one now lives one’s true homeland, the Kingdom of God. For, according to the Apostle, after the redemptive work of the Lord, “we have no abiding city, but we seek the one to come,” which coming city is already experienced by the Christian in this world within the Church. “Therefore you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens of the saints and members of the household of God.”
In other words, the Resurrection of the Lord marked the final victory over death, in the sense that death, now abolished and destroyed, is no longer the end of man — it does not exist as such; the end of man is Christ Himself, that is, His uncreated light and eternal life. One dies, and where, humanly speaking, he thinks he is lost, he encounters Christ and falls into His embrace, and His light penetrates him. “Now all things are filled with light, heaven and earth and the things beneath the earth.” The Apostle Paul says it again so directly and vividly: “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Do you live here, in this world? You belong to Christ and live from Him. Do you depart from this world? From another place you continue to stand in Him, and His life continues to define you. Therefore, it does not surprise us when he says that for him life means Christ, and thus death is gain: “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
Yet the great Saint John of Damascus, before this supernatural and supreme mystery of the Resurrection of the Lord, guides us to the only proper stance: “let us be radiant.” Let us become bright and filled with light. Since everything is now flooded with the light of Christ, it is not possible for the faithful Christian not to appear wholly luminous as well. This is self-evident, yet not so easy. For it requires a positive turning of man toward Christ — that is, truly to believe in His Resurrection, and above all: to be continually and unceasingly engaged in the struggle to purify oneself and one’s senses from everything impure and impassioned, from every sinful thing. That is why his immediately following word is this: “let us purify our senses, and we shall behold Christ shining forth in the unapproachable light of the Resurrection, and we shall clearly hear Him saying, Rejoice.” Let us be purified with respect to our impassioned senses, and thus we shall see Christ shining in the unapproachable light of the Resurrection, and we shall hear Him with a loud voice saying to us, Rejoice.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.