Paschal Encyclical, 2024
His Eminence Gregory, Metropolitan of Boston
Beloved Christians,
Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!
“When Thou hadst fallen asleep in the flesh as one mortal, O King and Lord, Thou didst rise again on the third day, raising up Adam from corruption, and abolishing death: O Pascha of incorruption! O Salvation of the world!”
The Exapostilation of the Matins of Pascha
With these triumphal words we celebrate the victory of our Saviour over death, which He accomplished through His own death and resurrection. What did this victory of Christ bring to mankind? It restored our nature to that state for which we were originally created, but which we had lost in the Garden because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and which we could in no way obtain through our own, human strength. Namely, incorruptibility. This is the word that the Church, from the beginning, taught us to use in order to sum up that original state, which we had lost through sin, and which Christ gave back to us through His death and resurrection. Disobedience to God brought separation from Him; and separation from Him brought death, first spiritual, and ultimately physical. And where death kept injecting its poison into human nature through its sting, that is — sin (1 Corinthians 15:55), there corruption reigned supreme, both spiritually and physically. Spiritual corruption is when the soul is corrupted by slavery to passions. And physical corruption is when our bodies ail, age, hurt, die and decompose. Both aspects of this state of corruption were the lot of the children of Adam, had Christ not come to rescue us from this bondage to corruption. For, spiritually, our Saviour’s soul was so entirely pure, that no sin ever came close to His all holy Soul, let alone exert any corruptive power over Him. That is why Christ’s all pure Soul, unlike the soul of any other human being, descended to Hades not as a captive, but as a liberator and a destroyer of Hades. And physically, our Saviour’s Body not only did not taste of physical corruption (something that every other human undergoes after death), rather He came back to life with His Body no longer subject either to death or even to the physical laws of nature (John 20:19). The following hymn summarises beautifully this double victory of our Saviour over corruption:
“Thy death doth change mortality, and Thine entombment transformeth corruption; for with Godlike might, the flesh Thou hast assumed dost Thou make immortal and incorrupt. For, O Sovereign Lord, to Thy flesh corruption came not nigh; and Thy soul was never forsaken in Hades’ vaults as something strange to Thee.”
Ode Five, Canon of the Matins of the Holy Saturday
Incorruption, then, is that spoils of war that our Saviour, as a mighty and victorious King, generously distributes to us. And we, by becoming members of His incorruptible Body, the Church, and by continually partaking of His Body and Blood in the Holy Mysteries, receive copious drafts of the medicine of incorruption flowing from Him. This way, the poisonous wound of corruption is dried up and healed in us, first spiritually, with our souls becoming purified, sanctified, and deified; and eventually, physically too, when our bodies will be raised on the Last Day, and will become incorruptible together with our souls.
But here we find a paradox. If our Saviour rose from the dead with an incorruptible Body, then how is it that after His resurrection He had on His Body the signs of His death on the Cross — the prints of the nails on His hands and His feet, and the wound of the spear on His side? He died in order to free us from corruption. And yet, when He arose from the dead, we see His Body still carry the physical wounds which are the signs of corruption, and accordingly, should have had no place on our Saviour’s incorruptible Body. Not only that, but He chose these very signs of His Passion, as we see from His conversation with the Apostle Thomas (John 20:27), to be the proof of the reality of His resurrection! What is the explanation of this apparent contradiction?
Our Saviour certainly did not have to carry the marks of His wounds on His Body after His Resurrection. But He willed to carry them, not only for a limited time, in order to convince His Apostles of the reality of His resurrection, but forever. But why? Our Saviour wished His wounds to remain on Him forever, so that they may be eternal witnesses of how much He loved us. In other words, our Saviour kept these marks of corruptibility on His incorruptible Body as the eternal sign that He loved us without bounds, even unto death. And so, both now, and tomorrow and unto the ages, our Saviour, Who sits with His glorified human nature at the right hand of the Father, carries the wounds of His Passion as perpetual signs of His love for mankind.
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As Mar Jacob of Serugh puts it in his customarily beautiful way:
“Since neither blemishes nor scars will remain at the end of the world,
It is evident that this was a miracle that came to pass.
His scars will not rise with him that has been wounded,
And so I behold here a wonder done as a stratagem.
All things pertaining to the Son are beyond explanation: Blessed is the Worshipful One, Who except through love cannot be spoken of!”
A Homily on New Sunday and on Thomas the Apostle
Maybe here find their fulfilment the words of the Prophet Esaias through whom our Saviour tells Sion (i.e. the Church) that far from ever forgetting us, He will memorialise us on His very hands:
“I will not forget thee, saith the Lord. Behold, I have painted thy walls on my hands, and thou art continually before me.”
Esaias, 49:15–16
Truly, what god is as great as our God? No god, falsely so called, has ever shown such love for his supposed creatures, as our true God has shown to us, who are the work of His hands.
Let us, then, have the remembrance of our Saviour, of His love and of His sacrifice always imprinted in our hearts, just as our Saviour has inscribed the very signs of His love-filled sacrifice for us on His own Body. Amen.
Beloved Orthodox Christians,
Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!
With much love in our Risen Saviour,
+ Gregory, Metropolitan of Boston
Pascha, 2024
