Easter has shone upon us

Easter stands out appreciably from the sequence of Orthodox holy days by virtue of its abundance of solemn ceremony. It is wholly directed towards eternity and revokes the inviolable laws of everyday life: there is no more death, and “life lives”. ... “I have just come back from church, from a wonderful Easter service”, Protopresbyter Alexander Shmeman noted in his diary, “and simply want to confirm what was written yesterday: yes, for this, in some sense, and only for this, was the Church left to this world. So that over and over again we could say: ‘It is good for us to be here...’”

A feeling akin to that described by Fr Alexander wells up in everyone who has come to church after preparing through fasting and prayer to meet the holy day. Of course the service is done differently in Moscow, St Petersburg and other large cities and in deserted villages; and we do it very differently in Glasgow, but this difference consists in the degree of harmony in the singing, the grandeur of the surroundings, the quality and quantity of gilding on the iconostasis. But essentially nothing is different, though – Christ has risen, and that means that there is something for us to believe in and to hope for.

The word “Paskha” comes from the ancient Hebrew word “Passah/Pesach”, which means “crossing-over”, or “deliverance”. Christians celebrate the Paskha of the New Testament, which fills the “deliverance” of the Old Testament with new meaning. Now it is not the memory of the ending of Egyptian slavery, but a celebration of the salvation of all mankind from sin and death.

Easter is, to a certain extent, a contradictory feast. The joy it contains cannot be separated from the memory of the great price at which redemption was bought – the sufferings and death of the Saviour. This is expressed very vividly in the Easter Troparion, which may be brief but is rich in meaning: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and to those in the tomb He has given life!” Here together stand resurrection and death, the grave and life, the trampling down of eternal evil and the gift of longed-for good.

Originally, at Easter Christians marked the sufferings and death of Christ – the Paskha of the Cross. The holy day was accompanied by fasting, and only then came the celebration of Christ’s resurrection – the Resurrection Paskha. Over time, Holy Week grew out of the first commemoration. Today it anticipates the Paskha and prepares us for it. It prepares us by recalling Christ’s Passion: the struggle at Gethsemane, the betrayal by Judas, the unjust trial before Pilate, the flogging and humiliation, the roar of the mob “crucify, crucify him!”, and finally, the crucifixion, death and burial.

After the Paskha of the Cross came the Paskha of the Resurrection. The night on which it was celebrated was radiant not just in a spiritual sense. According to the testimony of the early Christian historian Eusebius, a feature of the night-time Easter service was the lighting of a multitude of lamps in churches and city streets, thanks to which “this mysterious night became brighter than the brightest day”.

“Our sound fills the whole of the bright night”, says the fourth-century St Gregory of Nyssa, “with the Word of God, psalms, chanting, the singing of spiritual songs, which, flowing into the soul like a joyful stream, filled us with good hopes, and our hearts, enraptured by what we had heard and seen, were raised through the senses to the spiritual, and looked forward to unspeakable bliss”.

Originally, the celebration lasted seven days, which then turned into the present-day seven week celebration: in our time “Christ is risen” is sung in churches until the eve of the Ascension.

The most “important” Easter service, perhaps, is held at the place of Christ’s Resurrection in Jerusalem. But, if one can still with a little effort get to the Holy City, the wish to see how Easter was celebrated in Russia before, in the old times – even to gain a glimpse of it – that is a wish which cannot be fulfilled. All that remains are descriptions of a magnificent service at which the tsar was present.

After midnight, or even sometimes after one o’clock in the morning, from the Ivan the Great belltower a solemn peal of bells would ring out as a summons to worship. During the pealing the Patriarch with the senior bishops, archimandrites, superiors and priests who were to conduct the service with him would come out. After moving to the altar, the Patriarch and the rest of the clergy would be robed in their most magnificent vestments. When everything was ready for the beginning of the service, the Patriarch would send a clerk to the palace to notify the sovereign.

The majestic procession of the tsar to the service began, accompanied by a huge suite in precious, brilliant clothes. The sovereign was surrounded by greater and lesser nobles adorned with gold. Minor nobility, members of the tsar’s household, courtiers and clerks went in front. The sovereign himself wore a golden robe with chevrons of pearls and precious stones. After coming into the Cathedral, the tsar would kiss the icons and relics and stand in his usual place near the right column, close to the place of the Patriarch.

At this point the Patriarch in his vestments would come out from behind the altar and bless the sovereign. After that the procession with the cross would begin.

Everything afterwards would be as usual – the candles melting from the heat, the peals of bells, the exultant “Christ is risen!” and the hundred-voiced shout “He is risen indeed” in reply, the Easter greeting with the three-fold kiss and the exchanging of painted Easter eggs, the purely rhetorical proclamations of John Chrysostom’s words “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” But the service was only the beginning of the celebration.

On the first day of Easter, or even in the interval between the two services, the tsar would visit prisons and say to the criminals: “Christ has risen for you too”, and would make them gifts of clothes, food and money to break the fast. On the same day the tsar would treat beggars to food in his palace.

 Then the ceremonial receptions for prominent figures in the church and society and holy-day visits to Moscow’s monasteries, hospitals and charity homes would start, and the festival would continue amidst general rejoicing and celebration. It was as if the boundaries of caste had been erased by the joy of Easter. It is hard to imagine what was happening in Moscow at that time, but we can be certain that over those days heaven was a little closer to the earth, and earth to heaven.

Moreover, this last point is true even today. Centuries and millennia fly past like autumn leaves, but God knows nothing of time: any holy-day transforms the past and future into one limitless present, removes the boundaries between the everyday and the sacred, and brings us closer to heaven.

The Easter service differs strikingly from those for the other great feasts: everything is sung, nothing is read, and sung, moreover, to a very special, joyful motif not heard at any other time of the year; the service is clad in a bright-red colour, bright and truly glowing with fire. There is a reason (in its affinity of impression) that the Holy Fire has become the symbol of Easter in the present-day collective mind: the miraculous descent of this Fire has for several years in succession been broadcast ‘live’ on Russian television on Holy Saturday. Then the Holy Fire, brought from the Holy Land, is taken to various cities in Russia, from which icon-lamps begin to glow, red Easter candles are lit, and now the whole Russian Church, united by the Holy Fire, stands before the cave of the Resurrection in tremulous joy: “Christ is risen!”

For the whole of Easter Week the royal gates of all Orthodox churches are kept open. That is a sign that the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven are also open for us. For seven days over all of Russia there are processions with the cross around churches with readings of the Resurrection narrative from the Gospels. For a week the neighbourhoods resound with the ringing of bells. Time does not exist any more; there is a never-ending day of eternal life, illuminated by the Sun – Christ. “Easter has shone upon us! Easter!”

Of course, the cold of humdrum life will return. But we shall always await the next Great Day, because in his soul every human being knows that Easter – that is indeed real life, prepared by God for the righteous for ever.

Translated by Gleb Garazha and Stuart Campbell