Holy Synaxis: The Entrance

Chapter Eight: Of what the first entrance of the holy synaxis and the ceremonies which follow it are symbols.

After the concise exposition of the views expressed by the blessed old man concerning holy Church, our discourse can proceed by making an even briefer interpretation, as we can, of the holy synaxis. According to the teaching of a certain grand man who is truly wise in divine matters, then, the first entrance of the bishop into the holy Church for the sacred synaxis is a figure and image of the first appearance in the flesh of Jesus Christ the son of God and our Savior in this world. By it He freed human nature which has been enslaved by corruption, betrayed through its own fault to death because of sin, tyrannically dominated by the devil. He redeemed all its debt as if He were liable even though He was not liable but sinless, and brought us back again to the original grace of His kingdom by giving Himself as a ransom for us. And in exchange for our destructive passions He gives us His life-giving Passion as a salutary cure which saves the whole world. After this appearance, His ascension into heaven and return to the heavenly throne are symbolically figured in the bishop’s entrance into the sanctuary and ascent to the priestly throne.

Chapter Nine: What is the meaning of the entrance of the people into the holy church of God.

The venerable old man used to say that the entrance of the people into the church with the bishop represents conversion of the unfaithful from faithlessness to faith and from sin and error to the recognition of God as well as the passage of the faithful from vice and ignorance to virtue and knowledge. For entrance into the church signifies not only the conversion of infidels to the true and only God but also the amendment of each one of us who believe but who yet violate the Lord’s commandments under the influence of a loose and indecent life. Indeed, when any person is a murderer, or adulterer, robber, haughty, boastful, insolent, ambitious, greedy, slanderous, resentful, inclined to outbursts and anger, a drunkard, and in a word—lest I weary my discourse by enumerating all kinds of vice—when someone is entangled in any kind of vice but should cease voluntarily to be held by its attention and deliberately to act according to it and changes his life for the better by preferring virtue to vice, such a person can be properly and truly considered and spoken of as entering with Christ our God and High Priest into virtue, which is the church understood figuratively.

*From Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality, edited by George C. Berthold (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), pp. 198-199. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.