In the church calendar there are Great holidays - and there is the Greatest, towering over the entire annual circle of services: the Bright Resurrection of Christ. For the next forty days we will meet each other with words of Easter greetings, reminding ourselves and our neighbors of the main event of the New Testament: the Son of God, who gave his life to atone for human sins, rose from the dead. This realization makes us Christians - after all, “if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain, your faith is also in vain” (Cor. 15:14).
Every year, in order to prepare ourselves for the coming Easter joy, we go through the strict and saving time of Great Lent. Someone overcomes the trials that come in these weeks with the utmost awareness, with concentration and intense prayer, while someone simply with patience and good-naturedness accepts whatever the Lord has prepared for him for this time. This year, the time leading up to Easter has been particularly difficult. A new pestilence, which has engulfed almost all countries, has changed the course of events that we are accustomed to. Again, as in times already forgotten, people are dying en masse; Our personal freedom is also significantly limited - most of us cannot go to church on any convenient day, pray at the service and take Holy Communion. This circumstance causes different feelings: anxiety, embarrassment, protest…
But soon everything will change. Because the Holy Fire again descended in the Jerusalem Church of the Holy Sepulcher - and Easter has come. This means that everyone who believes in the Lord God still has time to correct their paths and be in time for what we have to do. With the Resurrection of Christ, the world has been renewed - and the feeling of renewal, the proximity of salutary changes enters our life. It is difficult to describe in words, but it is not difficult to feel it - you just need to mentally stop, stop experiencing events that have already happened and worry about what might happen. Easter is not something that happened only once, many centuries ago; this is the triumph of life over death, which resounds over the world here and now, in these holy days. It is impossible to understand this with the mind alone; only the heart can comprehend it.
'Death! Where is your sting? Hell! Where is your victory? ' (Cor. 15:55). Christ, who is the Way and the Truth and the Life, rose from the dead, opening the way to salvation for each of us. Temples will reopen and be filled with believers. The man-made restrictions that bound believers in their daily ministry of love will fall. And again we will hasten to meet each other with the joyful News:
Christ is Risen!
Indeed, Christ is risen!
