Ode 1: Song of Moses (Tone 1)
Irmos: The day of resurrection, let us be radiant, O peoples, Pascha, the Lord’s Pascha; for from death unto life, and from earth unto heaven, Christ our God has brought us over, as we sing the triumphant song.
Troparion 1: Let us purify our senses and then we shall see in the light unapproachable of the Resurrection Christ shining forth, and we shall clearly hear Him say “Rejoice!”, as we sing the triumphant song.
Troparion 2: Let the heavens, as is fitting, rejoice, and let the earth be glad; now let the universe entire, both seen and unseen, celebrate the feast; for Christ has risen, Christ our eternal joy.
Nikodimos points out how the
irmos is constructed by John from two passages from Gregory Nazianzen’s two homilies for Easter, his first homily (on Easter and his lateness) and the last. From the first homily John takes the opening words: “The day of resurrection, … let us be radiant.” From the last homily, John takes, “Pascha, the Lord’s Pascha”; in fact, as Nikodimos points out, in Gregory’s original homily, his words are: “The Lord’s Pascha, Pascha, and again I say Pascha, in honour of the Trinity.” John also takes from Gregory the explanation of the word
pascha, derived not from the Greek word,
paschein, to suffer, but from the Hebrew,
pesach, “Passover,” referring to the passing over from Egypt to Canaan, but spiritually “to the passage from below to above, and the procession and ascent to the land of the promise.” This makes the link with the first ode, Moses’ song of deliverance after crossing the Red Sea. A few words and an idea from Gregory provide John with the materials for his first
irmos, which sets the tone for the whole canon.
According to Nikodimos, the first of the troparia is based on the notion that human kind is a twofold being, with both bodily and spiritual senses: a theme close to John’s heart, as we have seen. More precisely, Nikodimos finds in Gregory’s last homily the notion that the paschal sacrifice is offered “for the purification of the senses.” Only if purified can we see Christ “the light unapproachable of the Resurrection.”
For the second troparion, Nikodemos again refers us to Gregory Nazianzen, this time his homily on the Theophany, where he quotes Psalm 95:11: “let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad,” and to the last homily for the rejoicing of the whole cosmos, seen and unseen. The whole universe, seen and unseen, refers either to the angels and human kind, or perhaps, Nikodemos suggests, even to the inanimate elements. We have seen that John, in common with other Fathers such as Maximos, affirms the truly cosmic dimension of Christ’s victorious resurrection.
The tone of triumph and rejoicing that runs through these troparia chimes in well with the theme of the biblical ode they accompany, the Song of Moses: “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously, the horse and the rider He has thrown into the sea. My strength and my song, He has become my salvation!” (Exod. 15:1-2). These are themes that are fresh in the memories of those who hear and sing this canon, for the Song of Moses is part of the vesperal liturgy of Holy Saturday.
Ode 3: Song of Anna
Irmos:
Come, let us drink a new drink, not one wondrously brought forth from a barren rock, but incorruption’s source, which pours out from the sepulchre of Christ, in whom we are established.
Troparion 1: Now all things have been filled with light, both heaven and earth and all things beneath the earth; let all creation sing to celebrate the rising of Christ, by which it is established.
Troparion 2: Buried yesterday with you, O Christ, and today, as you arise, I am raised with you. I was crucified with you; O Saviour, grant me glory with you in your kingdom.
The third ode is the Prayer of Anna. The reference to the “new drink” is possibly meant to recall that when Eli, finding Anna in the Temple, accused her of being drunk, she replied, “I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord” (1 Kgd. 1:15). More immediately it relates to the water Moses struck from the rock during the desert wandering (Num. 20:10-11), but this is “incorruption’s source,” echoing (or more probably the origin of) the communion hymn during Easter: “Receive the body of Christ, taste the immortal source, Alleluia.” “In whom we are established” is a reference to the beginning of Anna’s song: “My heart is established in the Lord” (1 Kgd. 2:1).
The first troparion returns to the cosmic theme, introduced in the first ode. With the Resurrection, light has come, not just to heaven and earth, but also to the region beneath the earth, Hades, which was redeemed by Christ’s descent there on Holy Saturday. Here we have a first allusion to the theme of the icon of the Resurrection, in which Christ is seen, breaking the gates of Hades, and bringing out those imprisoned there, beginning with Adam and Eve.
The second troparion, as Nikodimos points out, is derived from a passage in Gregory’s first homily: “Yesterday I was crucified with Christ, today I am glorified with Him; yesterday I died with Him, today I am given life with Him; yesterday I was buried with Him, today I am raised with Him.” But John has altered the order, unhistorically placing the burial before crucifixion. The reason, Nikodimos suggests, is that John is concerned with what happens to us, with whom resurrection precedes glorification. This sharing with Christ in burial and crucifixion has three references, Nikodimos suggests: first, to our ascetic burial with Christ through the Lenten Fast; secondly, to Christ’s identification with us in the Incarnation; and thirdly, to those baptized during Easter night.
Ode 4: Prayer of Avvakum (Habakkuk)
Irmos:
Now let the prophet Avvakum inspired by God keep godly watch as sentinel with us; let him point out an angel bearing blazing light, who with resounding voice declares, “Today is salvation for the world; for Christ has risen, as Omnipotent.”
Troparion 1: As a firstborn son, Christ appeared as a “male,” opening the virgin womb; as our food He is called “lamb”; as our Pascha free from stain unblemished He is named, and is designated, “perfect,” as He is true God
Troparion 2: As a. yearling lamb, blessed for us, the good crown, of His own free will and for all Christ our God was sacrificed, the Passover which purifies; from the tomb once again the fair Sun of Justice has shone for us.
Troparion 3: God’s forebear David dancing leaped before the sacred Ark; shadow was the Ark, but now seeing the fulfilment of the types, and full of God, let us God’s holy people rejoice; for Christ has risen as Omnipotent.
The fourth ode is the Prayer of Avvakum (or Habakkuk). But, as is often the case in the canons, the reference is more immediately to where Avvakum was standing when he made his prayer, which is found in Habakkuk 2:1: “I will stand on my watch, and get up on a rock” (LXX). But, as Nikodimos notes, John arrives at this reference by way of the opening of Gregory’s last homily. Gregory opens by quoting Avvakum’s words about standing at his watch, and says what he sees today, that is the day of Pascha: a vision of a man raised on the clouds, looking like an angel, with his clothes shining like lightning, crying out in a loud voice, “Today is salvation for the world…. Today, Christ is risen from the dead, let us be raised with Him.”
The first troparion dwells on Christ our Pascha, sacrificed for us (cf. 1 Cor. 5:7). The paschal lamb was to be “without blemish, male, a year old” (Exod. 12:5); John glosses this with Exodus 34:19, about the male that opens the womb belonging to God. He also recalls another passage from Gregory’s Easter homily: “for us the lamb is eaten.” With these references, John puts together his troparion, meditating on Christ’s sacrifice.
The second troparion continues this theme, laying stress on the voluntary nature of Christ’s sacrifice. Again, John draws on Gregory’s Easter homily, where he says of Christ as the paschal sacrifice: “a year old, like the sun of justice, setting out from there [heaven], circumscribed in His visible nature, and returning to Himself, and the ‘blessed crown of goodness,’ being on every side equal to Himself and alike; and not only this, but also as giving life to the circle of the virtues, gently mingled and mixed with each other, by the law of love and order.” Here are all John’s themes for this troparion. There is also a play on words, as Nikodimos points out, in that the word translated as “good” in the troparion, is pronounced exactly like the word Christ (christos/chrēstos).
The last troparion refers to David dancing before the ark (2 Kgd. 6:16-19). David celebrated what was simply a shadow of what was to come; Christians celebrate the fulfilment. “Full of God, let us rejoice”: for this Nikodimos refers to a passage in Gregory’s homily for the Theophany: “Let us celebrate, not as for a pagan festival, but divinely, not in a worldly manner, but in a manner that transcends the world.”
Ode 5: Prayer of Isaias
Irmos:
Come let us arise in the early dawn, and instead of myrrh, the hymn of praise we shall offer to the Master; Christ Himself we then shall see, the risen Sun of Righteousness, who causes life to dawn for all.
Troparion 1: Seeing your measureless compassion, those who were straitly contrained by the bindings and cords of Hades, pressing forward to the light, O Christ, they. move with joyful steps, loudly they greet an eternal Pasch.
Troparion 2: Let us go out bearing torches, and meet Christ as He comes from the sepulchre like a Bridegroom; with the Angels’ festive ranks, together let us celebrate, feasting with them the saving Passion of God.
The fifth ode, the Prayer of Isaias, begins, “By night my spirit watches for you, O God” (Isa. 26:9 (LXX)). John’s mind naturally goes to the myrrh-bearing women, the first witnesses of the Resurrection. The watching by night of the vigil, in which this canon is sung, is related to women coming to the sepulchre “in the early dawn” (Luke 24:1).
Isaias’s prayer closes by celebrating the redemption of the dead: “the dead shall be raised, those in the graves will come out, and those on earth shall rejoice” (Isa. 26:19). This theme is picked up in the troparia, the first of which returns to the theme of the redemption of Hades; John sees those who were bound pressing forward to Christ, as they are depicted in the icon of the Anastasis. The theme of rejoicing is tied to that of a wedding banquet, a favourite symbol of the coming of the Kingdom in the Gospel parables. Christ’s tomb becomes a bridal chamber, from which He emerges as in the verse of the psalm (Ps. 18:6). The bride He has made His own is the Church.
Ode 6: Prayer of Jonas
Irmos:
You went down to the deepest parts of the earth, and the everlasting bars you shattered, which held imprisoned those fettered there; O Christ, on the third day, like Jonas from the whale, you arose from the sepulchre.
Troparion 1: Unbroken you preserved the seals, O Christ, in your rising from the tomb, nor injured the locks of the virgin womb in your birth, and have opened to us the portals of Paradise.
Troparion 2: My Saviour, living victim, and as God unsacrificed, yet to the Father willingly offering yourself, you raised with yourself all Adam’s race, in your rising from the sepulchre.
The sixth ode is the Prayer of Jonas from the belly of the whale. The Lord’s reference to the “sign of Jonas,” the prefiguring of His death and resurrection after three days by Jonas’s three days in the whale (Matt. 12:29-30), provides the obvious link between the ode and the Resurrection, the subject of the Easter canon. Jonas himself says, “I went down into the earth, whose bars held me fast eternally” (Jonas 2:7 (LXX)), thus comparing his fate with descent into Hades. It is this that John picks up here: for Christ went down into the “deepest part of the earth” and shattered the bars that held fast those in Hades. Again, in this irmos, it is the theme of the Resurrection icon to which John returns.
The first troparion draws a parallel between Christ’s rising from the sepulchre without breaking the seals and His being born from the Virgin Mother of God without harming her virginity, her virginitas in partu, which the Fathers saw prefigured in the gate of the Temple in Ezekiel’s vision, which “shall remain shut, … for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it” (Ezek. 44:2), as Nikodimos points out. By passing through what remains sealed, Christ has opened for us the gates of Paradise.
The second troparion again draws on Gregory’s second Easter homily, this time a passage in which Gregory is comparing Christ’s sacrifice with sacrifices of the Old Covenant. These latter were not useless, a mere shedding of blood, “but the great and, if I may say so, in its first [i.e., divine] nature, unsacrificed sacred offering [athyton hiereion, exactly as in the troparion] was mingled with sacrifices of the law, and was a purification not for a small part of the world, nor for a brief period of time, but for the whole cosmos and for ever.” John picks up Gregory’s reference to cosmic salvation with his reference to “all Adam’s race.”
Ode 7: Prayer of the Three Holy Children
Irmos:
He who of old freed the young men from the furnace, becoming human suffers as a mortal, and through suffering He clothes the mortal with the glory of incorruption, the only blessed and most glorious God of our fathers.
Troparion 1: With fragrant myrrh, godly minded women hastened after you; the One they sought with tears as mortal man they adored with joy as the Living God; good tidings they then proclaimed of the mystical Pasch to your disciples, O Christ.
Troparion 2: Now as a corpse death lies before us and we feast, Hell’s destruction, and the first-fruits of the new eternal life: as we leap for joy, we sing praises to the cause, the only blessed and most glorious God of our fathers.
Troparion 3: How truly holy and all festive this night of salvation, night yet full of light, the herald of the day of light, night the messenger which proclaims the Resurrection, in which the timeless light from the sepulchre shone bodily for all.
The seventh ode is the Prayer of the Three Children (or young men) from the burning fiery furnace, where Nebuchodonosor (Nebuchadnezzar) had condemned them. The angel of the Lord appeared to them (whom Nebuchodonosor saw as a fourth man “like a son of God”), and made the centre of the furnace like a “whistling wind of dew” (Dan. 3:50 (LXX)). For the Fathers, the angel of the Lord was the Word of God, so John sees the saving of the three children as an earlier act of salvation by the Word, who later became incarnate, and through suffering gives human kind incorruption.
The first troparion returns to the myrrh-bearing women, only this time, as Nikodimos points out, they are understood in the light of the Song of Songs: “your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is oil poured out; therefore your maidens love you. Draw me after you, let me run after the fragrance of your oils” (Cant. 1:3). They are seeking with tears the one they love. Finding Him risen as God, they take the good tidings to His disciples. The second troparion continues this meditation: the women were seeking a corpse, but discovered the death of death.
The final troparion returns to celebration of the night, the night of salvation, the night of the Resurrection. Nikodimos again refers to a passage from Gregory’s second Easter homily in which Gregory contrasts yesterday, “beautiful” with its celebrations with candles and fires, with today, “even more beautiful,” since we celebrate the Resurrection itself, “no longer as something hoped for, but already happened and drawing the whole world to itself.” Nikodimos comments on how the Church begins the day in the evening, so that the day moves from darkness to light.
Ode 8: Song of the Three Holy Children
Irmos:
This is the chosen and holy day, the first of all Sabbaths, it is the Queen and Lady, the Feast of Feasts, and the Festival it is of Festivals, on which we bless Christ to all the ages.
Troparion 1: Come, let us share the new fruit of the vine, of gladness divine, on this resplendent and refulgent day of the rising of Christ, on this day of the Kingdom of Christ our Lord, which praises we sing to Him as God to all the ages.
Troparion 2: Lift your eyes around you, O Sion, and see, for behold they have come like beacons blazing forth with light divine from the West and from the North, from the East and from the Sea, your children come to you, blessing Christ in you to all the ages.
Troparion 3: Father almighty, Word of God, and Spirit, nature united in trinity of persons, transcending being, and transcending Godhead, into you we have been baptized, and we bless you to all the ages.
The Song of the Three Children is a song in which all creation is called on to praise God. This gives John the cue for these verses, which develop the theme of praise. The
irmos is drawn from Leviticus 24:36, which speaks of the “eighth day [as] a chosen and holy day for you”; Gregory’s second Easter homily, which praises Easter as “the feast of feasts and the festival of festivals”; and a passage from his homily on New Sunday where he says that “the queen of hours pays homage to the queen of days and bestows on her all that is most beautiful and pleasant.”
The first troparion starts with a reference to the “fruit of the vine,” of which Jesus said to His disciples at the Last Supper, “I shall not drink again, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt. 26:29). The Father’s kingdom is the Resurrection, says Nikodimos, following the interpretation of John Chrysostom. The second troparion picks up more directly the theme of the ode, seeing people coming from the four corners of the earth to praise Christ. The final troparion recalls the Lord’s final command in Matthew’s Gospel (28:19) to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Trinity. It is worth noting that the
irmos and all the troparia end by praising God or Christ “to the ages,” which underlines the eschatological nature of the Resurrection.
Ode 9: Songs of the Mother of God and of Zacharias
Irmos:
Enlightened, be enlightened, O New Jerusalem, for the glory of the Lord has risen upon you, dance now, O Sion, rejoice and be glad, you too rejoice, all pure Mother of God, as He arises, to whom you gave birth
Troparion 1: O divine! O beloved! O your sweetest voice! True the promises you made to us, to be with us evermore, even, O Christ, until time finds its end; this we possess as an anchor of hope, and we, the faithful, rejoice therein.
Troparion 2: O Pascha, great Pascha, great and most sacred Pascha, Christ! O Wisdom, O Word of God, and Power of God! Grant us, O Lord to partake of you yet more clearly in the day which has no evening, of your Kingdom.
The final ode consists of the two New Testament odes, the Song of the Mother of God and the Song of Zacharias, the father of St. John the Forerunner. The opening word—“Enlightened, be enlightened” (Phōtizou, phōtismos)—very likely contains a reference to baptism, the sacrament of
phōtismos, or enlightenment (as it is frequently called in the Fathers: John himself mentions this aspect of baptism in
Expos. 82.57), which was anciently celebrated as part of the Easter Vigil. The beginning of the
irmos is from Isaiah 50:1, interpreted as looking beyond the end of the exile (its historical reference) to the lasting redemption of the Resurrection. It is an occasion for dancing and rejoicing. The word for “rejoice” is cognate with that used in the
Magnificat (“my spirit has rejoiced in God my saviour”: Luke 1:44), which leads John to call on the “all-pure Mother of God” to rejoice in the Resurrection. The first troparion is an ecstatic recalling of the promise of Christ recorded at the end of Matthew, already alluded to in the last troparion of the previous ode. The final troparion John draws from the conclusion of Gregory’s second Easter homily: “But, O Pascha, great and sacred and cleansing the whole cosmos—for I will speak to you as to a living person! O Word of God, and Light and Life and Wisdom and Power! I rejoice in all your names.” And calling upon the Pascha, John prays to “partake of you yet more clearly in the day which has no evening, of your Kingdom.” The canon begins acclaiming the “day of resurrection,” which foreshadows the “day without evening” of the Kingdom.
*Canon translated by Fr Ephrem Lash,
The Services for the Holy and Great Sunday of Pascha (Manchester: Saint Andrew’s Monastery, 2000), 5-16; slight modifications and commentary by Fr. Andrew Louth in
St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 258-274.
