Sunday of Forgiveness

Great Lent

By Archimandrite Peter Vryzas

7 MIN

This day, we are entering Holy and Great Lent, one of the most blessed periods of the whole year, which is above all a time for the Christian to work on his heart and thus to exchange his temporary, vain life for the eternal, inconceivable life of our God Saviour.

Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Light of the world,¹ the true Light,² and He came into the world to make us all children of light,³ children of the day. Likewise, it can be said that Great Lent comes as a great light in the time of our life, because its spiritual atmosphere is stirred up by the grace of God. This is the period in which we can revive the grace of our baptism. We are all ‘partakers of the heavenly calling’,⁴ and during Great Lent the Church invites us to rekindle it, by leading us through paths which are harder than usual.

At the very outset of Great Lent, we commemorate the exile of Adam and Eve from Paradise. The first man, Adam, was created by God with great glory, as we read in Scripture: he was ‘crowned with glory and honour’.⁵ Yesterday we heard at Matins that God ordained Adam to be ‘lord over all visible things and to eat the food of angels’. But we know that from this state Adam fell into the sin of disobedience, for which he was expelled from Paradise and cast upon the earth. Through this Fall, Adam allowed death to enter the whole creation, which now groans together with him.⁶ If before the Fall, Adam was meant to be the centre of creation as the bearer of the fulness of divine life and the steward of creation, now he is the centre of creation as the cause of its corruption and death.

However, is Adam’s exile from Paradise truly his punishment from God? Is this the truth of God’s Revelation? If we examine God’s providence, we see that God does not punish Adam, but He constantly provides for Adam. And we learn this from the New Adam, Christ. Adam’s sufferings, his exile and the death that entered his life, are the consequences of his disobedience; but God allowed them to happen in order to prepare Adam for His coming. Christ Himself came to find our fallen forefather: He took upon Himself our human nature and united it to His divine nature, thus becoming the source of Adam’s salvation. Therefore, our Holy Church reminds us today of Adam mostly in order to turn our attention to the great salvation accomplished by the New Adam, which is Christ.

Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou

Alive from the Dead

Homilies on Great Lent

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In one of his beautiful texts, our Holy Father Silouan describes Adam’s state when he was banished from Paradise: ‘Adam weeps for the Paradise he has lost, saying, “O Paradise, my Paradise, my wondrous Paradise, nothing can console me on earth now that I lost you”.’ And Saint Silouan adds:

Adam lost the earthly paradise and sought it weeping. But the Lord through His love on the cross gave Adam another paradise, fairer than the old – a paradise in heaven where shines the Light of the Holy Trinity. What shall we render unto the Lord for His love to us?⁷
Saint Silouan

Indeed, what can we render unto Him for the great mercy He shows us and for that He cares for us unceasingly from morning till evening?

When Adam was expelled from Paradise, his repentance was not yet perfect, because he was lamenting the loss of the Paradise of delight. And he could not yet offer perfect repentance because he did not yet have perfect knowledge of God. Though he had been created with the ability to acquire perfect knowledge of God, perfect union with Him and love for Him, when he fell in Paradise, Adam did not yet possess this perfect knowledge. He did not acquire perfect, endless repentance until he met Christ in hell, for then he understood that he had sinned against SUCH A GOD. Seeing his Maker, Who had spoken to him in Paradise, coming down to hell, he was initiated into that which God had intended to teach him through His commandment in Eden. He understood what a God he had, and the love of God for him. Then, his repentance became ‘a hell of love’⁸ and he lamented for offending such a God as Christ.

Likewise, we cannot acquire true repentance until we begin to understand and know what kind of God we have and that when we sin, our sin is a personal act. Therefore, our repentance is a personal event. We acquire ontological, true repentance, which has no end on earth, when we know that we have sinned against such a God as Christ.⁹

The Lord revealed unto us a mystery which is indeed frightening, a mystery, by which even the angels were taught something new: that God so loves man that He is willing to descend even to hell in order to find him. God Who commanded the earth to bring forth thorns and thistles unto Adam took these thorns upon Himself when He wore a crown of thorns for the salvation of His creature. God Who said to Adam: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’,¹⁰ became Himself, sweating drops of blood in the garden of Gethsemane, ‘the bread which came down from heaven’.¹¹ God Who said to Adam: ‘Cursed is the ground for thy sake’,¹² the same God came and ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us’.¹³ God Who said to Adam: ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,’¹⁴ the same God took upon Himself the death of His creature and went down into the tomb, without however seeing corruption, for ‘God will not suffer His Holy One to see corruption.’¹⁵ Consequently, great is the love and gratitude that we owe to the Lord for the great salvation He has wrought into the world.

Great Lent begins with Adam’s expulsion from Paradise and ends with his encounter with the Risen Christ in hell. In the Orthodox Tradition, the mystery of the Resurrection begins from hell, from the meeting of Christ with Adam. Great Lent is therefore a journey from Adam’s exile to the great encounter that takes place on the night of Easter.

How can we also make this passage from our exile to the great encounter with our new Father, Christ, during Lent? The Lord reunited heaven and earth through the Cross, and the only way for us to be reunited with Him and for heaven and earth to be reunited in us, is through voluntary suffering. For this reason, Great Lent is given to us as a very blessed time when we can also undertake voluntary suffering for the sake of the Lord’s commandment.

If we do this with zeal, with honesty and in obedience to the Church, then, on Easter night, we will also be able to repeat the words of the hymnographer: ‘Yesterday I was buried with Thee, O Christ, today I rise from the dead together with Thee.’ The voluntary ascetic labours that we will undertake during this period work a great miracle in us: they reveal the place of our deep heart. For both our exile and our encounter with Christ are events that we live in our very heart. We experience our personal Passover, our personal Easter, every time our heart finds union with the grace of God. This is our passage from things temporary to things eternal, from things that are earthly to things heavenly.

Following the custom of our holy Fathers throughout the ages, let us now ask God to grant us during this period a new knowledge of the mystery of Christ’s love for mankind, that love which brought Him to earth and lifted Him up onto the Cross of shame for our sakes. If we could comprehend, be it only in part, what manner of God we have – a God Who does not punish but provides for man – we would take up with zeal all the voluntary ascetic labours of Lent out of a paroxysm of gratitude.

If during the course of this Lent we forgive others and, therefore, open our heart to grace, if we do all things in a humble and secret way, ‘not to be seen by men’,¹⁶ and if we turn all our heart to heaven, where our treasure is,¹⁷ then we will be able to work together with God for our spiritual renewal. For this is the will of God: to make a feast with the sons of men. He wants to make a feast during this period of Lent, and He sheds His grace abundantly in the Church, so that we may find this grace, amend our lives, and renew our relationship with the Lord, which is an inner relationship of the heart. Thus, we make our heart a temple of God, the footstool of the great King of kings. If we live this period in such a way, then, surely, we shall be vouchsafed to enter into the life-giving presence of our Lord at Easter, and sing a triumphal song, that Christ is risen, and none remains in the tomb.