From His Grace Bishop MAXIM

Biography of His Grace Bishop Maxim

Pastoral Thought of the Week

The Reality of the Resurrection

In the liturgical texts of the Paschal Resurrection service, we say that the Lord is risen and, in rising, He raises up the whole world with Him, “the human world,” in the words of the Synaxarion of Pascha. In the Orthodox Church, the icon of the Resurrection does not depict Christ smiling above the tomb, as if He had accomplished some individualistic feat, but rather presents Him with a face so joyful that it appears at the same time sorrowful. He is shown pulling up those “bound in shackles” and drawing out all of the condemned from death into life, and from darkness into light. And we sing at Pascha: “Now all things are filled with light—heaven, earth, and the infernal underworld.” When one lives within the Orthodox Church, one experiences this as reality, as ontological fact. And when we sing that “all the trees of the forest are rejoicing today; their nature has been sanctified because the Body of Christ was stretched out upon a tree,” this too is experienced as reality.