The Death of Death
by Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos
Feast of St Zacchaeus the Apostle of Caesaria
Anno Domini 2020, April 20
THE RESURRECTION
of Christ is the greatest event in history. It is what distinguishes Christianity from every other religion. The other religions have mortal leaders, while the head of the Church is the risen Christ. The Resurrection of Christ is the renewal of human nature, the recreation of the human race, the living of eschatological reality. When we speak of the Resurrection, we do not separate it from the Cross, for the Cross and the Resurrection are the two poles of the redemptive experience, just as we pray in the Church, “through the Cross is joy come into all the world. Ever blessing the Lord, let us sing His Resurrection,” or just as we sing “We venerate Thy Cross, O Master: and we glorify Thy Holy Resurrection.”
In the Church we constantly speak of Christ’s Resurrection, which has great significance for the life of the believer. We do not believe in social revolutions, because the greatest good in the world came from the Resurrection and not from any human social revolution. Even if we correlate the Resurrection with true revolution, we find ourselves in the truth, from the point of view that through Christ’s resurrection man returned to his original position and rose still higher. The word for revolution is derived from a verb which means to come back to the former position. This rectification, the restoration of man took place through the Resurrection of Christ.
The Apostle Paul clearly proclaimed: “And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile” (1 Cor. 15:17). The truth and power of the faith is due to the shining fact of the Resurrection of Christ. Without this the Christians are “of all men the most pitiable (1 Cor. 15:19).
The Resurrection of Christ is celebrated by the Church from the moment of His descent into Hell, where He freed the souls of the righteous of the Old Testament from the power of death and the devil. It is in this way that our Church celebrates it. In the liturgical texts it is seen clearly that the celebration of the Resurrection begins from Good Friday, as we see in the Great Saturday service of matins, in which the funeral processions takes place. And the homilies of the Fathers on Good Friday are actually homilies of resurrection and victory.
This is also seen in the holy iconography of the Resurrection. The Church decided to regard the descent into Hell as a true icon of the Resurrection. To be sure, there are also icons which depict Christ’s appearing to the Myrrh-bearing women and the Disciples, but the icon par excellence of the Resurrection is the shattering of death, which took place at Christ’s descent into Hell when His soul with its divinity descended into Hell and freed the souls of the righteous people of the Old Testament, where they were waiting for Him as their Deliverer.
The portrayal of the Resurrection by the descent of Christ into Hell is done for many and serious theological reasons. First, because, no one saw Christ at the moment when He rose, because He came out of the tomb of the sepulcher “of a sealed tomb.” The earthquake which happened and the descent of the angel that lifted the tombstone took place in order for the Myrrh-bearing women to be assured that Christ had risen. Secondly, because when Christ’s soul with its divinity descended into Hell, it crushed the power of death and the devil, because by His death He conquered death. It can be seen clearly in the Orthodox tradition that by Christ’s death the power of death was completely destroyed. Moreover, in the Church we sing: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death…” His triumphal victory over death took place precisely at the moment when Christ’s soul, united with divinity, abolished death. Thirdly, by His descent into Hell Christ released Adam and Eve from death. Thus, just as by Adam came the fall of the whole human race, because he is our first ancestor, so through the raising of Adam we taste the fruits of the Resurrection and salvation. Because of the unity of human nature, what happened to the forefather happened to the whole of human nature.
For these reasons the most characteristic image of the resurrection of Christ is considered to be His descent into Hell, because furthermore, as we shall also see in what follows, the essence of the feast of the Resurrection is the death of death and the destruction of the devil: “We celebrate the death of Death, the annihilation of Hell,” we sing in the Church. The destruction of Hell and the death of death is the deepest meaning of the feast of the Resurrection.
*Excerpted from The Feasts of the Lord, pp. 241-243
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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