Category Archives: Days and Seasons

“Today Hell Cries Out Groaning….”

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This 8th-century panel painting, now at the Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai, Egypt, is the oldest known painted depiction of the dead Christ on the cross. We see Gestas, the unrepentant thief, on the left; Dismas, the Good Thief, was probably on the right (which is now missing; we can see the first letter of his name in the space beside Christ). At the foot of the Cross, there are 3 soldiers gambling for Christ’s seamless robe. On the Cross, Christ is wearing a tunic, known as a “stola,” a garment worn by those who had permission to speak to the emperor. Christ has the boldness to speak to God, his Father, on our behalf because of His Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection and his battle with Death on the Cross.

Today, hell cries out groaning: “I should not have accepted the Man born of Mary. He came and destroyed my power. He has shattered the gates of brass. As God, He raised the dead that I had held captive.” Glory to thy Cross and Resurrection, O Lord.

Today, hell cries out groaning: “My dominion has been shattered. I received a dead man as one of the dead, but against Him I could not prevail. From eternity I had ruled the dead, but behold, He raises all. Because of Him do I perish.” Glory to thy Cross and Resurrection, O Lord.

In these hymns from Holy Saturday, we hear Hell cry out in agony as Christ enters and destroys it from the inside out. Truth exposes the Liar. Light shines in the Darkness. Life confronts Death. The gates of Hell are torn down and the chains broken. Only those who want to remain in Hell are still there.

Christ fought Death and the Devil, the Liar, on their own turf. In the ancient world and the figurative language of the Bible, three places belonged to the Death and the demons: deep water, the desert, and the air. Christ went down into the deep water at His baptism and then went out into the desert for forty days. In both places he confronted the enemies of God. But how did He fight them in the air?

Early Christians thought Christ had to die on the Cross because crucifixion was the only way to die in the air. Raised on the Cross, Christ was able to fight the powers of Darkness in their own territory and thus enter Hell. St. Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: “… if the Lord, by His death, broke apart the wall of partition divinding people (Ephesians 2:14) and called all the nations to Him, how could that happen except on the Cross? For it is only on the cross that a man dies with his hands spread out. Whence it was fitting for the Lord to spread out His hands, that with the one He might draw the ancient people, and with the other those from the Gentiles, and unite both in Himself. Furthermore, if the devil, the enemy of our race, having fallen from heaven, wanders about in the air (Ephesians 2:2) … well, by what other kind of death could this have come to pass, than by one which took place in the air, I mean the cross? Being lifted up on the Cross, He cleared the air of the malignity both of the devil and of demons of all kinds, as He says: I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven; and made a new opening of the way up into heaven as He says once more….”

Having slain Christ on the Cross, Death and Hell thought they had won their battle. But once Christ had entered Hell, they discovered their mistake and realized that what they had thought was their ultimate victory was instead their ultimate defeat.

Want to read more about this? Read The Victory of the Cross by James R. Payton, Jr. or On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius of Alexandria.

40 Martyrs of Sebaste

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The feast of the Forty Martyrs falls on March 9. There is an intentional play on the number forty being both the number of martyrs and the days in the fast. Because the celebration of the 40 Martyrs falls during Great Lent, the endurance of the martyrs serves as an example to the faithful to persevere to the end (i.e. throughout the forty days of the fast) in order to attain heavenly reward (participation in the Resurrection).

The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste were a group of Roman soldiers in the Legio XII Fulminata (“Armed with Lightning”) whose martyrdom in AD 320 for the Christian faith is recounted in traditional collections of records of the martyrs.

They were killed near the city of Sebaste, in a region known as Lesser Armenia (the present-day Sivas region of Turkey), victims of the persecutions of Licinius, who after AD 316, persecuted the Christians of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire. The earliest account of their martyrdom is given by St. Basil the Great (AD 370–379) in a homily he delivered on their feast day (March 9). The celebration of the Forty Martyrs is thus older than Basil himself, who preached about them only fifty or sixty years after their deaths.

According to St. Basil, forty soldiers who had openly admitted that they were all Christians were condemned by the prefect and sentenced to be exposed naked upon a frozen lake near Sebaste on a bitterly cold night so that they would freeze to death unless they renounced their Christian faith; if they renounced their faith, they would be welcome to warm themselves in the hot baths on the lakeshore. One of the soldiers yielded and, leaving his companions, sought the warm baths near the lake which but one of the guards who was set to keep watch over the martyrs saw a brilliant light surrounding the naked soldiers on the lake and he stripped off his clothes and announced that he was now a Christian. He joined the remaining thirty-nine and so the number of forty remained complete. (The soldier who denied his faith was killed, however, by the shock of the warm water after being so cold out on the ice. The icon above shows the apostate soldier entering the bathhouse while the newly-converted guard strips off his clothes to join the other 39 soldiers out on the ice.)

At daybreak, the stiffened bodies of the confessors, which still showed signs of life, were burned and the ashes cast into a river. Christians, however, collected the precious remains, and the relics were distributed throughout many cities; in this way, veneration of the Forty Martyrs became widespread, and numerous churches were erected in their honor.

There is a pious custom of baking “skylarks” (pastries shaped like skylarks) on this day, because people believed that birds sing at this time to announce the arrival of spring

Lent: Paradise Lost/Regained

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The Expulsion of Adam and Eve, a detail from the reliquary of St. Isidore in Leon from AD 1063 or earlier.

Lent. Both Eastern and Western Christians read the opening chapters of Genesis and commemorate the expulsion of our first parents from the Garden in the opening days of Lent. The eating of the forbidden fruit and the expulsion from the Garden is the great disruption, the disintegration of harmony between God and humanity, humans and the world, as well as between humans and other humans. We turn on each other, bickering and arguing and blaming each other and external circumstances as we try to escape the consequences of our actions and turn our backs on taking responsibility for our choices.

Lent is all about the restoration of that harmony between people, between people and the world, between people and God. We stop killing to maintain our own existence by eating the fruits and vegetables that Adam and Eve were allowed to eat in Eden; we stop eating meat or other animal products to restore the harmony we enjoyed with them in Eden. In several liturgical hymns, Adam is said to have sat weeping outside the gates of Paradise to the trees inside the Garden, “Pray for me by the music of the rustling of your leaves!” This cry underscores the interdependence of humans and the rest of creation and that creation is a living, dynamic entity itself that suffers because of the sin of humanity.

Lent is also about the restoration of harmony between people. We forgive each other. We exchange the Kiss of Peace. We put all our differences and disagreements in perspective by remembering our common mortality. We embrace one another and call even those who hate us our brothers and sisters, forgiving everything in our anticipation of the resurrection (as another liturgical hymn proclaims).

By re-establishing harmony between people, this mutual forgiveness re-establishes harmony between God and humanity as well. We cannot hope to be forgiven if we do not forgive. By owning up to what we have done and who we are and by refusing to be angry and jealous with others–which leads to the death of relationships as well as the physical death of others, including the animals and physical world around us–we begin to experience now the joy we are promised will be ours in the Resurrection.