Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy
Trampling Down Death by Death
Essay on Pascha (Orthodox Easter)
May 11, 2005
Bright Week is over and I still haven't written any reflections about Pascha. Of course this collection of thoughts on the services of the Orthodox church throughout Lent would be incomplete without saying something about Pascha and the resurrection of Christ, the event that this season of preparation has been leading up to. But there's a reason; the simple fact is that the midnight celebration of the resurrection didn't move me. I was mostly just glad that it was over and I could go home and go to bed.
This, no doubt seems odd. Isn't Pascha what everything is leading up to? Isn't this particular Divine Liturgy particularly spectacular? Given the event that it celebrates, shouldn't this be the service that truly moved me? Well, Yes, yes, and yes; but it didn't. I have two thoughts about this.
First, in spite of the fact that this whole period from the Forgiveness Service (the service that begins Lent) to Pascha is filled with some of the richest worship services Eastern Orthodoxy has to offer, I didn't decide to participate in the Lenten/Pascha cycle for the emotional high; I don't believe that's the point of worship. Although worship may indeed feel good most of the time, the real reason we worship is because we need to. God commanded us to worship because there is something inherent in our nature that calls for it; we are incomplete if we don't worship. I suppose I read the phrase first in Geoffrey Wainwright, but I have seen it frequently since: At our heart we are not homo sapiens, “the clever creature,” nor homo erectus, “the creature who crawled out of the mud and got up on our feet; we are homo adorans, the creature who needs to worship, and specifically, to worship the God who created us.
This is one of the great differences between Orthodox and Protestant worship. In the attempt to clean up the gross and abhorrent abuses of Medieval worship (and please note that I did not say Roman Catholic worship—most of the abhorrent abuses were cleaned up at the Council of Trent; the problem was more a Medieval problem than a Roman problem), Protestantism inadvertently made worship a thoroughly this-world affair. Since it's reality (in the Protestant sensibility) was in this world, the sacraments became peripheral and the sermon became central. With the centrality of the sermon came the centrality of the preacher. With the focus on the preacher—stubbornly facing the congregation planted firmly in this world rather than facing the altar (which had been transformed into a this-worldly communion table rather than a heavenly altar, because the service was so thoroughly this worldly)—the line separating worship and entertainment suddenly became unmanageably thin. Going to the Protestant Easter Extravaganza under the big top (actually, they call it “the Pavilion”) in the city park across from downtown and not “getting a blessing” or “being moved,” or at the very least “enjoying it,” would have been a real failure on the part of the liturgical ringmaster, because the focus of the extravaganza down under the big top is inevitably on the interaction between the performer and observer. Being what it is, it cannot very well address the deepest longings of homo adorans, and therefore seeks, like a man-made “balm in Gilead,” to merely soothe a sin-sick soul. But Orthodox worship, even in all its drama and grandeur, is still worship. As a result, getting the proverbial Protestant “blessing” is secondary to the obedience to the simple command of Christ that not only soothes, but heals the sin-sick soul. It is therefore adequate . . . no, not merely adequate, but profoundly and finally fulfilling (in the truest sense of the word) to say, that I was there and prayed the Divine Liturgy at Pascha. And it is not at all contradictory to add a personal note, saying that it was a pain in the neck (or more accurately, a pain in the calves and feet)! (!!!)
My second thought about my Pascha experience is that a great deal of “the Pascha experience” doesn't occur in that one worship service, but rather in the following week, known as Bright Week. Fasting is forbidden in Bright Week, even on Wednesday and Friday, traditional days of Fasting in Orthodoxy. While the rather morose confessional prayer of St. Ephrem and the penitential hymns of Lent have been going through one's head for over six weeks, now the glorious, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and giving life to those in the tombs!” is dancing above and below your thoughts, largely because everyone kept singing it every ten or twelve minutes (three times in a row each time, no less!) throughout the two or two and a half hour service. (After a hundred minutes, who keeps count anyway.) A season of preparation leads naturally into a season of celebration. Within that context, a single off-night, isn't that big of a deal in the larger scheme of things.
But in spite of the lack of the “wow!” factor, I still have some thoughts on the service itself. First, there was a palpable sense of accomplishment when all the lights were turned on and the doors opened. I'm not talking about my accomplishment, but rather Jesus Christ's accomplishment in defeating death and proclaiming victory. That sense was very real. When we entered the church after the procession, all the floodlights in the altar area were turned on and all three doors (the Royal Doors and the two Deacons Doors) were flung wide open. There was way more light than necessary; it was wastefully and gloriously bright, and for the first time I could see just about everything that went on behind the scenes. Walking into the church after the procession, I truly had the sense that Christ accomplished what he set out to do and opened the gates to heaven for all of us.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before all that there was a dark (nearly to the point of dismal) church building and a procession.
At the beginning of the service the church still had the familiar Lenten feel, the lights turned low, the looming shadows, and in the darkness, the candles glowing prominently near the front of the church. Shortly after the service proper began, everyone lit candles and then marched in procession around the church building. The crowd ended up on the front steps where scripture was read, hymns were sung and the priest pounded on the door declaring the death of death's power and demanding to be let in. All of this was mostly lost on me. The crowd was extraordinarily large (at least the Orthodox have this in common with the Protestants on Easter), and there was a bit of a breeze. As a result I could barely hear the priest and the singing of the choir was distant and indistinct. It was also very cold and I didn't wear a heavy coat, so I felt a kinship to Mark (the Gospel writer) who witnessed the events of Jesus at Gethsemane indistinctly and from a distance, wearing only a linen sheet that was eventually taken from him when he tried to run away (Mark 14:51). As I stood there not able to hear a thing, my mind wandered, and I figured that he probably did a lot of shivering that night too as he tried to sneak back to the house with at least a shred of dignity, given the fact that he didn't have a shred of anything else!
The church was also very full. Lot's of people I had never seen before were there, no doubt doing their annual duty. There was also extended families that had come home for Pascha. The effect was this mass of crying babies, whispering, restless people, and movement in and out of the nave. It was hard to pay attention. Normally as the service progresses the worshiper is able to focus and sink more deeply into prayer; this particular night was quite the opposite. The later it got the more noisy and restless the place became.
As a result of these two factors (that most people were completely cut off from the procession and were therefore chatting around the periphery, and the service itself was noisy and restless) this service had more of a sense of “spectator sport” than anything thing else I have seen in an Orthodox worship service. But Orthodox liturgy has never played to the spectators as spectators; the clergy continued doing their thing and the choir continued chanting, in a sense, oblivious to the ruckus out in the nave. It wouldn't have mattered much whether the nave was empty, or full of indifferent people, or simply crowded and restless, the liturgy would have been prayed. The liturgy was the one constant of the night and the worshiper could float in and out of its rhythm . . . or not . . . because the service was, as I said above, not about the worshiper, but rather about the worship being offered to God.
This is an idea I would have objected to before I became acquainted with Orthodoxy. The idea of objective worship is not a concept that Protestantism has embraced. The Reformation foundation included many things: The doctrine of scripture alone and justification by faith are the best known, but equally influential was Luther's “for me” orientation in both theology and worship. Luther was not denying the objective character of salvation and revelation, but he despised the sort of objectified religion which turned scripture into a dead letter, salvation into a magical formula, and worship into an empty exercise. Instead he emphasized that Christ died for me, that God spoke for me, etc. Worship throughout Protestantism felt the influence of Luther's “for me” perspective and the subjective side of worship became central. This is precisely why Protestants come to worship seeking to be blessed: the thing that makes it real is not the act in and of itself but rather the subjective response to the act. In seminary we studied this subjective response at great length, although not generally using the terms “subjective” and “objective.” Rather, we spoke of the Holy Spirit working in the hearts of the worshiper, and because of the mysterious work of the Spirit, often the worshiper would come away from worship with something completely unexpected, or that the congregation would be particularly moved on a Sunday when the pastor was not prepared. And then, in spite of the nod to the Holy Spirit's work, we spent the remainder of the semester learning in detail how to manage and direct all these subjective elements. In Bible College I don't even remember much of a nod to the work of the Holy Spirit, except in Systematic Theology class; Worship and Preaching classes were all about maximizing the impact of the elements of the worship service on the worshiper.
But this whole conversation, beginning with Luther's “for me” and then through all the variations that the theme has taken over the centuries within Protestantism, is quite foreign to Orthodox worship. Worship is not rooted in the subjective experience of the worshiper, but rather in the objective act of worship. It mattered little that baby Bobby in front of me cried through much of the service and old Thelma and Louise behind me complained about everything, talking more than baby Bobby cried. What mattered is that the Divine Liturgy of Pascha, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, was prayed.
This doesn't mean that the Orthodox care little about the subjective experience of God in the life of the believer. Far from it! In fact, if anything, they take it far more seriously than the Protestant because their conception of God's sphere is so much larger than the Protestants'. That little hour every Sunday morning (or the excruciatingly long two and a half hours in the wee hours of Pascha) is not primarily the place where God works in the believers hearts, after all, so the Orthodox don't get too worked up about whether that is happening at that point. Worship, after all, isn't about me, it's about God, and my Christian duty is to be there on Sunday morning offering this spiritual work, this heavenly sacrifice, to God. If I'm faithful in this objective duty, God will be faithful to me, the subject of his love. For the average Protestant who maybe says a quick prayer at meal times and bedtime and goes to church once a week, God only has a one hour window to do the whole God thing. If it doesn't take then, the poor Protestant is in trouble. The Orthodox, on the other hand, don't have a chance with God. For ninety minutes every week they offer their expected service to God. This leaves God with a whopping 167½ hours a week to do the whole God thing, shaping the heart, igniting the will, transforming the life, etc.
Of course what I say is a caricature of both Protestant and Orthodox spirituality, but the essence of the difference described is true. Both traditions see worship as a doorway between heaven and earth. The difference is that Protestants tend to think this is when God comes out to us while Orthodox think (and say every Sunday morning) that this is when we go in to God. In short, if I was waiting for God to show up for me at St. Thomas on Pascha, it was a pointless vigil, but that's not what it was about. Since I was following Christ back into heaven, led by the Spirit of Truth who leads us into all truth, there was a completely different spin on the night's events. I may not have been a very good hiker on that particular trek into heaven on this particular night, but the Church still made the trek, worshiping around the throne of God.
And since all the doors were open and the floodlights were on, even though I may not have made it all the way, I still had a clear view of the festivities. Now that's grace that overcomes human frailty and failure; that's grace I can live with!
Copyright © 2005 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
You are free to distribute as long as attribution and web address is included.
Site support by C T E K