I would like to share the following meditation on the
resurrection with you.
—Enrique
People condemned God to death;
with His Resurrection He condemned them to immortality. For striking Him, God
returned embraces; for insults, blessings; for death, immortality. Never did
men show more hate towards God than when they crucified Him; and God never
showed His love towards people more than when He was resurrected. Mankind
wanted to make God dead, but God, with His Resurrection, made people alive, the
crucified God resurrected on the third day and thereby killed death! There is
no more death. Immortality is surrounding man and his entire world.
With
the Resurrection of the God-Man, the nature of man is irreversibly
led toward the road of immortality and man's nature becomes destructive to
death itself. For until the Resurrection of Christ, death was destructive for
man; from the Resurrection of Christ, man's nature becomes destructive in
death. If man lives in the faith of the Resurrected God-Man, he lives above
death, he is unreachable for her; death is under man's feet. Death where
is thy sting? Hell, where is thy victory? And when a man who believes in
Christ dies, he only leaves his body as his clothes, in which he will be
dressed again on the Day of Last Judgment.
Before the Resurrection of the
God-Man, death was the second nature of man; life was first and death was
second. Man became accustomed to death as something natural. But after His
Resurrection the Lord changed everything: and it was only natural until
Christ's Resurrection, that the people became mortal, so after Christ's
Resurrection it was natural that the people became immortal.
Through sin, man becomes mortal
and temporal; with the Resurrection of the God-Man, he becomes immortal and
eternal. In this lies the strength, in this lies the power, in this lies
the might of Christ's Resurrection. Without the Resurrection there is no
Christianity. Among the miracles, this is the greatest one; all other miracles
begin and end with it. From it sprouted the faith and the love and the hope and
the prayer and the love toward God.
Originally written by Dr Justin
Popovick, available from http://www.orthodox.net/pascha/pascha-arch-justin.html
No comments:
Post a Comment