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Prayer for the week
In Eastern devotion, resurrection and cross entwine, says Hugh Wybrew
We have seen the resurrection of Christ: worship we the Lord Jesus, the holy one, alone without sin. We adore your cross, O Christ, we praise and glorify your resurrection. For you are our God, you alone we acknowledge, your name only we invoke. Come, all who believe in him, adore Christ’s holy resurrection. For see, through the cross joy has come to the whole world. Always blessing the Lord, we praise his resurrection. For he suffered death, and by death has killed death. from the Easter canon of St John of Damascus IN ST JOHN’S Gospel, Jesus reminds his disciples that a woman in travail has sorrow, but, once delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish for joy that a child is born into the world. In a not dissimilar way, Western Christians are full of sorrow on Good Friday, but, at Easter, no longer remember the anguish of the cross, for joy that new life has come into the world. The liturgical separation of cross and resurrection tends to encourage their theological and devotional distinction. But death and risen life cannot be separated. In St John’s Gospel, they are the obverse and reverse of the same coin: it is on the cross that Jesus is glorified. When Judas leaves the supper to betray him, Jesus says: “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and in him God is glorified” (John 13.31). For St Paul, too, they are inherently paired: “For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, how much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life” (Romans 5.10). This prayer is characteristic of the Eastern Orthodox tradition in its praise of cross and resurrection intertwined. Part of the canon sung at matins on Easter Day and throughout Easter Week, it begins with the experience of Christ’s resurrection, and moves immediately on to the worship evoked by that experience. Yet, in the same breath, it adores and praises cross as well as resurrection. Without the cross, there can be no resurrection, and the meaning of the cross is displayed only in the new life of the risen Jesus. The Orthodox tradition lays greater stress on the divinity of Jesus Christ than much modern Western theology, as the latter is rightly concerned to emphasise the humanity Jesus shares with us. For the Christian East, Christ’s divine status is revealed in the resurrection. So this hymn worships and adores Christ as our God. This reflects what St Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5.18). God was at work in Christ’s death that overcame death, his death that made new life possible, not only for himself, but for all who have faith in him. The prayer calls us to adore Christ’s holy resurrection, and, at the same time, affirms that it is through the cross that joy has come to the whole world. The death of Jesus is the condition for his resurrection; his new life is to be found precisely in his willing self-offering. The same willingness to offer ourselves in the service of divine love is no less the ground of our new life in Christ. Canon Hugh Wybrew was formerly Vicar of St Mary Magdalen’s in Oxford. |
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