Second Terrace

God has gone up with a shout

Without leaving the bosom of the Father,

you share our humanity on earth, O sweetest Jesus.

Today, you ascend to heaven in glor--  from the Mount of Olives,

in your compassion raising our fallen nature

to place it with yourself at the right hand of the Father.

The bodiless powers in heaven are struck with fear and amazement,

and glorify your love for humanity;

with them, we on earth glorify your condescension for us and you ascension,

and we say: ‘O Lord, who fill your disciples

and the mother who gave you birth with ineffable joy,

by their prayers grant us also the joy of your elect
and the grace of salvation.”


-- Vespers of Ascension

God is Spirit

-- "Christ and the Samaritan Woman," Lucas Cranach the Elder (1532)

Holy Scripture is infinitely filled with Divine Truth. That isn’t surprising, as Christ is as spiritually present in the words of Scripture as He is physically present in the Eucharist.

Because Christ is the Source, the Meaning, and the Goal of all Scripture, then Scripture can be infinitely interpreted. There is no end to the Wisdom that Scripture expresses, as it is revealed by the Holy Spirit to the Body of Christ — the Church throughout time and space.

The Gospel for the Sixth Paschal Sunday, about Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan Woman, is filled with many, many teachings, even on a cursory view:
Jesus got thirsty (and hungry, and tired, and He felt pain), and asked human help for water.

Jesus offers, through His Friendship, “living water” for the thirst of the heart. In other words, He is the fulfillment of the deepest and most crucial human need and desire. He is the Spring of life, for which we all thirst.

“Eternal life” is not just “forever,” as in an indefinite extension of time. “Eternity,” more importantly, is a quality and condition that transcends time and space. It is communion with God — this is the true desire that motivates every human being, despite humanity’s frequent misdirection of desire.

Jesus identified her tragic situation out of His deified humanity. Recall that He submerged His divinity under His humanity. His knowledge of her failed marital situation did not come from His divine nature, but His deified human nature.

When the woman wondered about Jesus’ authenticity as a prophet, she deferred the issue to the coming of the Messiah — as both heterodox Samaritans and orthodox Jews had done for centuries.

In speaking with the outcast Samaritan Woman, it is obvious that Jesus doesn’t care about ethnic or cultural boundaries. There is only one ethnicity that Jesus cares about — and that is humanity. He doesn’t care about any of our “divisions,” whether they are cultural, political, even moral. He didn’t then, He doesn’t now.

“Worshiping the Father in spirit and in truth”: this is a promise that was fulfilled at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit as Person descended upon all humanity. The Holy Spirit glorifies and makes present Christ to all humanity, neither exclusively at the Samaritans’ Mount Gerazim, nor at the Jews’ Jerusalem. Every human is witnessed to in their heart about Jesus by the Holy Spirit — and that worship of the Father through the Son is exactly the worship that the Father seeks.

Jesus explicitly identified Himself as precisely that Messiah. “Messiah” means “Anointed One” — that is, anointed by the Holy Spirit at Jesus’ baptism on Theophany by John the Baptist. “Christ” is simply the Greek translation of “Messiah.”

“God is spirit”: the word “Spirit” is not limited to the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The whole Trinity is “spirit”: the Father is “spirit,” and so, obviously, is the Holy Spirit. Even the Son is “spirit” — indeed, He was spirit before the Incarnation, but even and especially after the Ascension He is spirit, but remains human as well.

So what does “Spirit” mean, then?

“Spirit,” first of all, means that God is beyond the limitations of matter. But the word also means that God is beyond all the limitations of “location.” Even the angels are limited — they are not “spirit” in the way that God is spirit.

Secondly, “spirit” means “life.” God is the source of all reality and all life. But in particular, God is the source of “noetic” life — that is, the spiritual life of angels and humans.

Thirdly, “spirit” is precisely what Love is.

Thus, God cannot be specified in matter, obviously, but God cannot be limited to Time or Space. The Father must be worshipped as He is — spirit. And He must be worshiped truly — not as a concept or artifice, or as part of Creation (which is a common human failing). Origen writes that “those who worship the Father in spirit and not [limited to] the flesh, in truth and not in types, are the true worshipers” (Commentary on the Gospel of John).

St Evagrius of Pontus writes this in his Chapters on Prayer:

“If you wish to pray, you have need of God ‘Who gives prayer to him who prays” (1 Kingdoms 2.9 LXX). Invoke Him, then, saying, ‘Hallowed by Thy Name, Thy kingdom come’ — that is, the Holy Spirit and Your Only-Begotten Son. For this is what He taught us, saying, ‘Worship the Father in spirit and in truth.’ He who prays in spirit and in truth is no longer dependent on created things when honoring the Creator but praises Him for and in Himself [i.e., God]. If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian.”

The “Kingdom” here is the bright presence of the Two Comforters — Christ, and the Holy Spirit Who glorifies and makes present Christ Himself. The Second and Third Persons of the Trinity usher us — in true prayer — into the worship of the Father.

Thus, there is no restriction of place for true prayer, which really is “worshiping the Father in spirit and in truth.” God is spirit — so the revolutionary news is that there is no limitation of Time or Space for this awesome, beautiful, peaceful, bright and glorious prayerful worship (or “worshipful prayer” — same thing).

Worship in spirit and in truth is true meaning of humanity. It is what you and I desire most.

Everywhere is Holy Ground. Every moment is the Eighth Day, the Day of Salvation. God as Spirit is already at the depth of your soul, in the embrace of every love, and in every occasion of beauty in Creation.

He is waiting for you. The Father seeks you, He desires you to meet Him in spirit and in truth.

on myrrh-bearing and the three days

The unnaturality of death

When Jesus died on the Cross, He experienced something profoundly “unnatural.” Because He is the Son of God, and because the Spirit completely deified His human nature — that is, His body and His human soul — He would never have died a “natural death.” In other words, He would never have died of old age or even of sickness. He got hungry and tired, yes: but disease and old age are legacies of the Fall, and that did not apply to the Son of God.

So for Jesus to die, He had to be murdered, the most unnatural death of all — which is exactly what the Cross is. The Cross is a symbol for humanity’s entire rejection of God. God, however, turned the Cross into a symbol of His overwhelming Love.But there is another reason why His death was “unnatural.” And this unnaturality is something shared with the entire human race. It is the reason why Jesus voluntarily accepted death.That “unnaturality” is the separation of the soul from the body. Death was never meant to be part of the order of things. But because of the Fall of humanity into sin and rejection of God (and His love, which is everything that God is and stands for), humans brought death upon themselves … because the rejection of God and His love is a profound rejection of what life is.

So if life is rejected, it falls apart. That is exactly what death is: a “falling apart,” or separation, of the soul from the body. Human death — at least, and maybe all death in biological life — was never meant to be the customary order of things.

And this is what Jesus voluntarily took upon Himself, so that He could overturn all the consequences and aftermath of the Fall — even death itself.

The descent

Both body and soul of Christ’s were human. His spirit is divine. His body remained in the Tomb, but His human soul (His “psyche”) and His divine spirit descended into the non-physical realm of death called Hell.

Hell is the source of all the signs of death. All the passions, all despair, all hatred and violence and domination, come from and are rooted in Hell.

Hell is the destiny, the endpoint, of all rejection  of God’s love. It is where every human soul that has rejected its own essence — which is to reflect divine Love and to participate in the beauty of its Being — ends up, because it is the bottom of the Abyss.

Hell is the dark domain of broken mirrors.

Jesus, after and precisely because of the Cross and Gethsemane, descended into this Hell to rescue humanity from this prison locked “by gates of brass,” as verses from Saturday evening Vespers repeatedly reminds us.

He announced to all this glorious invitation, as His hidden divinity is now revealed at the bottom of all existence, at the darkest point of death … the divinity that obliterates the authority of sin and death, and destroys Hell’s gates: “Come unto Me, all ye that are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light” (from Matthew 11.28-30).

Immediately after this moment, Jesus "led the host of captives" out. St Paul describes this moment explicitly in his letter to the Ephesians, “Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and He gave gifts to men.” In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that He had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is He who also ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things (4.8-9).

Whether all of humanity left with Him remains a mystery. But who would ever stay behind in Hell when Jesus Himself opened a way out?

The Body that remained

This descent takes place during the mysterious and dark Three Days, the Triduum, the interval between Good Friday and the Sunday of Pascha. The mystery of these Three Days is veiled in holy mysticism, analogous to the mysterious Ten Days between the Ascension and Pentecost.

During these Three Days, the Body of Jesus Christ remained in the Tomb.

Here is where things become radically different from the usual process of death. Here is where a radical change occurs within human history, within our time and space:

The Body of Jesus does not decay. It does not even begin to decay. It remains whole, unbroken (remember that His legs were not broken to hasten His death on the Cross, as were the legs of the two thieves).

It remains undefiled, uncorrupted.

This is important, because Jesus’ humanity — while vulnerable to the “sinless passions” of hunger, thirst, sorrow, and fatigue — was never “Fallen” humanity. It never participated in the sinful passions of Hell, the signs of death.

St Gregory of Nyssa writes that the human soul and divine spirit of Jesus never broke the connection it had with the body of Jesus. As every human soul in death “remembers” its body, even more so the soul of Jesus maintained the wholeness of His body, even in these Three Days of death.

The wholeness of Jesus’ Body in His tomb, His remaining “incorrupt” and never decaying, is an exceedingly important Sign of Jesus’ divinity and His totally divinized, resurrected humanity.

His incorrupt Body is the Sign that Jesus destroyed death's power of corruption. Indeed, it is a Sign in the here-and-now of the eventual triumph, at the Last Day, of Christ over all the "falling apart," the physical (and spiritual) decline and biological entropy, that had been going on since the Fall.

His Body did not decay.

That is why we remember this Sign at every Divine Liturgy. Following the Epiclesis, the celebrant lifts up the cubical Bread that is now the Body of Christ. He breaks it into four portions. And the portion labeled IC (of ICXC NIKA) he places into the chalice of the Blood of Christ.

And after this, the celebrant (or deacon) pours warm water into the chalice, saying “The fervor of faith, full of the Holy Spirit.”

This pouring of warm water is the potent Sign that Christ destroyed death even and especially in the act of suffering death, and that His Body did not suffer corruption even and especially as Christ suffered sinless passions, just as Scripture prophesied.

This is a correction of the teachings of the Sixth Century Aphthartodocetics and Phantasiasts, who insisted that Christ did not suffer hunger, thirst, sorrow, and fatigue. They taught that if He did, then His body would have to decay. The Orthodox Church responded, faithfully, that Christ took upon Himself all humanity in its reality and in its descent, as the Epistle to the Hebrews says: “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but One Who in every respected as been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4.15).

The Myrrh-bearers

It is heartbreaking that the decay of death was so ingrained, so customary, that Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus (who secretly visited Jesus at night in John 3), and the Holy Myrrhbearers took enormous risk in preparing the Body of Jesus.

After taking the Body down from the Cross, Joseph and Nicodemus wrapped it in a shroud, along with one hundred pounds of burial spices — a blend of aloes and myrrh (reminiscent of the myrrh brought by the Magi at the Nativity). They had to work quickly, as the Sabbath of Passover was drawing nigh (John 19.38-42).

No work — even the necessary work of burial — could be done on the Sabbath, especially this Sabbath, as it was a “high holy day” So the women who would do the final preparations of Jesus’ Body had to skip a day.

The women came — including, according to Holy Tradition, the Mother of God, Mary the Theotokos — on Sunday, the first day of the week. They brought even more spices to anoint the Body, and to prepare it against corruption and decay the best they could.

It is poignant that this was the loving human way to hold off decay, as long as might be possible.

But death always had its way.

Until this day.

It just seems right that these brave, heartbroken women who stayed faithfully with Jesus on the Cross, closer to Him than His Apostles, would be the first to hear the Angels (very much like the angelic choir at the Nativity), sing “Rejoice, O pure Virgin, again I say rejoice. Your Son is risen from His three days in the tomb, and He has raised all the dead. Let all people rejoice.”

They were the first to see the empty sepulcher, and the linen cloths that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had wrapped around the Body of Jesus — now lying empty and neatly folded.

The Myrrrh-bearers who were going, faithfully, to do their last ministry of love, were the first to receive the greatest reward, the greatest news that Christ is Risen, and that He is Risen indeed.