Homily on the Beginning of the Indiction, or the Ecclesiastical New Year
By Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Mechev
By Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Mechev
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!
By the mercy of God, today we enter with you into a new ecclesiastical year. Each year, going from feast to feast, the Holy Church, together with all of nature, passes from beginning to end through the annual cycle of divine services.
For people living in the world, the arrival of a new year is usually associated with a burdensome feeling of regret over what one could have done and what has remained undone. Looking back upon the time that has been lived, a person inevitably thinks about what has been irretrievably lost in the past, what can no longer be returned or changed in the future.
For people who live a spiritual life, this feeling of the irretrievability of what has passed is foreign to them, because they live in a world where there are no temporal limitations, where the boundaries of the past, present, and future are overcome.
Recently we buried the Mother of God with you, and we did not merely “remember” Her burial, but truly buried Her; and in a few days we shall once again celebrate Her Nativity. This becomes possible because, when we celebrate the divine services, we enter a world in which the boundaries of time are abolished, because in the divine services we live in eternity. Through this participation in eternity, we can truly be present with events from which we, people of the twentieth century, are historically separated by a whole succession of centuries that have passed.
Overcoming the boundaries of time in the divine services and entering into the world of eternity, we do not enter it alone, but together with all creation. In the liturgical hymns there is constant mention of the participation of all creation in the joy experienced by a person as he partakes of eternity, and of its participation in the glorification of the Creator: “Let the heavens worthily rejoice, and let the earth be glad, and let the whole world, visible and invisible, celebrate” — thus it is said in the Canon of Pascha. And it is not only heaven and earth, but each of God’s creatures individually that participates in this universal hymn to the Creator.
In the “Psalms of Praise” (Ps. 148–150), which are read every day at Matins, we call upon the sun and moon, the stars and the light, the mountains and hills, the trees, animals, and birds, together with the heavenly angelic world, to take part in glorifying the Lord.
But nowhere, it seems, is this unity of man with all creation in the glorification of God expressed with such depth and power as in the “Song of the Three Youths,” which forms part of the last Old Testament reading appointed for Holy Saturday, each verse of which is accompanied by the refrain, “Sing praise to the Lord and exalt Him unto the ages.” Here creation is united and merges into one, in a single and eternal doxology: “…exalt Him unto the ages.”
Thus, every year, together with the whole world above and below, with the Church in heaven and with all of nature, we can be witnesses and participants in the events that took place “for us men and for our salvation.”
These events, pertaining to the divine economy of our salvation, although having occurred once in time, did not disappear irretrievably into the past. They took place when, in the words of the Apostle, “the fullness of time had come” (Gal. 4:4). In them the mystery of God’s love for man was fully revealed, the mystery of the redeeming sacrifice of “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). Therefore, in the temporal world they became immovable points of eternity, through which all creation passes, and to which we have the possibility of becoming participants through the divine services. In the divine services everything remains in the present, because in them everything is in eternity; therefore, there is no reason for us to grieve over the lost past.
Each such point in eternity, within our temporal world, is not only experienced by us at a definite moment in time, but also casts forth rays of its light, which are sometimes perceived long before the feast itself arrives and which continue to shine upon us after we have already passed through that luminous point.
In two weeks we shall celebrate the Exaltation of the Honorable and Life-Giving Cross of the Lord. The feast has not yet arrived, but in the divine services we already sense the approach of this luminous point.
Beginning on August 1, we hear the katavasia for the Exaltation: “Having traced the Cross, Moses…” The same thing takes place, and with even greater fullness, as the feast of the Nativity of Christ approaches. An entire month before its arrival, the divine services begin to prepare us to pass through this luminous point of eternity. Beginning with the feast of the Entrance of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple, we already sense that, together with the whole world, we are touching it, because on this day we sing the Nativity irmoi, “Christ is born.” And two weeks later, on the feast of the commemoration of Saint Nicholas, we sing the first stichera of the Forefeast: “Make ready, O cave,” “Rejoice, O Sion,” and “O Unwedded Virgin,” with which the stichera at “Lord, I have cried” and at the Aposticha of Great Vespers, as well as the Lity, conclude.
Particularly remarkable, in terms of preparing our souls to receive the coming feast, are the last two stichera. In the first of them we address the “city of Christ our God,” which is preparing to receive its Creator, “lying in a cave and in a manger,” and we ask it to open its gates to us, entering through which we may with spiritual eyes behold Him who “holds creation in His palm,” “wrapped in swaddling clothes as a newborn Child.” And in the second, as though having already entered through these gates and having seen the Unwedded Virgin, the Mother of God, the “Cause of our salvation,” we address Her directly, asking Her to reveal to us the great mystery of our salvation. The closer we come to the luminous point of the feast, the more brightly we are illumined by the light that radiates from it. Throughout the five days of the Forefeast, which conclude with the Eve of the Nativity of Christ, the divine services reveal to us with ever greater depth and fullness this great mystery into which the Holy Church is leading us, and finally the feast of the Nativity of Christ arrives, the point of eternity through which we pass. Here the boundaries of time are erased and the mystery of eternity is revealed, because, as Metropolitan Philaret says: “Christ even now descends from heaven, and in such nearness to us that we, like the shepherds or the Magi, may draw near to His divine manifestation.”
This point of eternity does not immediately leave us. Throughout the seven days of the Afterfeast, we continue to live by its reflected light. Moreover, if the light of eternity revealed in it has truly been reflected in our soul, then it becomes for us a step in our ascent toward eternal life, to which the Lord Jesus Christ calls us.
The Holy Church, through the temporal, brings us into communion with eternity. She leads each one of us along the path of his life, at the end of which he is to receive “in blessed repose eternal rest” and to enter into the eternal memory of God.
Let us therefore approach the divine services with greater attentiveness and reverence, and enter into them not as spectators or witnesses, but as participants. Then our entire life, too, will receive a new meaning and a new illumination. Truly living in the divine services, we may already here, on earth, possess “eternal rest”; we may be granted that, even during the days of our earthly life, the Lord will hold us in His eternal memory.
Our great happiness is that once again we enter into the annual cycle of the divine services and have the opportunity to pass through it once more together with the whole world. And our task is to make each year of life sent to us by the Lord truly a time of participation in eternity, an entry into that which, through the infinite love of God, was accomplished “for us men and for our salvation.”
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
