The center, the day, that gives meaning to all days and therefore to all time, is that yearly commemoration of Christ’s Resurrection at Easter. This is always the end and the beginning. We are always living after Easter, and we are always going toward Easter. Easter is the earliest Christian feast. The whole tone and meaning of the liturgical life of the Church is contained in Easter, together with the subsequent fifty-day period, which culminates in the Feast of Pentecost, the coming down of Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. This unique Easter celebration is reflected every week in the Christian Sunday, which we call in Armenian “Harootyan or” (Resurrection Day). If you open a calendar, you will find that all Sundays are centered in that paschal mystery, the day of Resurrection. In fact, the English word Sunday is translated into Armenian as Giragi, which comes from the Greek Kyriaki heemera, meaning the Day of the Lord. Thus, in the Eastern Church tradition, the very name of the day [Giragi] represents the Pashcal mode of its celebration as Resurrectional.
Tied into this mode is the fact that Pentecost is the fulfillment of Easter. Christ ascended into heaven and sent down His Holy Spirit. When He sent down His Holy Spirit into the world, a new society was instituted, a body of people, whose life, though it remained of this world and was shared in its life, took on a new meaning. This new meaning comes directly from Christ’s Resurrection. We are no longer people who are living in time as in a meaningless process, which makes us first old and then ends in our disappearance. We are given not only a new meaning in life, but even death itself has acquired a new significance. In the Introit at Easter we say, “He trampled down death by death.” We do not say that He trampled down death by the Resurrection, but by death. A Christian still faces death as a decomposition of the body, as an end; yet in Christ, in the Church, because of Easter, because of Pentecost, death is no longer just the end but it is the beginning. It is not something meaningless which therefore gives a meaningless taste to all of life. Death means entering into the Easter of the Lord. This is the basic tone, the basic melody of the liturgical year of the Christian Church. Christianity is, first of all, the proclamation in this world of Christ’s Resurrection. The spirituality of our church is paschal in its inner content, and the real content of the Church life is joy. We speak of feasts; the feast is the expression of joyfulness of Christianity.
If we have a message, it is that message of Easter joy, which finds its climax on Easter night. When we hear, “Christ Is Risen,” then the night becomes in the terms of St. Gregory of Nyssa, “lighter than the day.” This is the secret strength, the real root of the Christian experience. Only within the framework of this joy can we understand everything else.[ii]
And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?" And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back; --it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, "Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen… [Mark 16:2-6]
Thus, we must continually say Lord, Glory to Your Resurrection!
[i] SEE Easter Homily of St. John Chrysostom on November 2.
[ii] Adapted from Excerpts from the lecture "The Sanctification of Life" on the Third Annual Church School Conference sponsored by the Metropolitan Council Religious Education Committee, A. Schmemann. July 1963.
Excerpt from: Samoorian, V. Rev. Fr. Ghevont. DOMAR: A Compendium of Directorium and Calendar of the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church according to the traditions of the Apostolic See of Jerusalem. Armenian Orthodox Theological Research Institute [AOTRI], 2006.
