| Winter Pascha
– the Middle in the Beginning
It seems completely logical that people should want to “begin
at the beginning,” regardless of what they are doing. It is a
reasonable habit of thought and hard to find fault with. This same
habit of thought, however, can be completely frustrated with the
structure and flow of the Church’s liturgical year. The church
year begins on September 1, reflecting both early Jewish reckoning
and later Byzantine practice - but there is no particular feast of
the Lord associated with the September beginning. Neither do the
feasts of the Lord proceed through the year with a smooth historical
flow.
The Nativity (birth) of Christ on December 25 is the first feast
of the Lord to occur in the Church year, and might seem a logical
beginning itself. However, the Nativity is not the beginning but a
later part of a string of feasts that begin on March 25 (the
Annunciation) and include other events associated with the
conception and birth of Christ. Understanding the Feasts of the
Church and their relationship to our spiritual life is best served
by forcing ourselves to begin in the middle - or to accept the fact
that the true beginning of our faith is to be found not in a flow of
history but in the disruption of history - in the event of
Pascha when history was exploded in the destruction of death and
Hades. All feasts, like the spiritual life itself, flow from Pascha
and the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection.
The icons associated with the Feasts of the Lord often reflect
this reality. The
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icon of Pascha shows Christ in the midst of Hades,
with death bound in chains beneath the sundered gates of Hell, and
Adam and Eve taken by the hand to be led into freedom. All of this
action takes place with the background of black darkness, a symbol
of the emptiness of death and Hell.
This symbol of Hell’s darkness is carried over into other
icons of the feasts of Our Lord. The icon of Christ’s Nativity
shows the cave in Bethlehem as a black darkness. The icon of His
Baptism (Theophany) depicts the river Jordan flowing in a setting
of darkness. The crucifixion is frequently painted with the same
setting.
The purpose of the icons is to point us to the unity of Christ’s
action. Pascha is its key. All that Christ does
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 summed
up in Pascha. The darkness of death and Hell refers not just to
the literal place of departed Spirits into which Christ descended
at his death, but to the whole of fallen creation. The tendency of
our lives to move away from God and into the chaos of broken
relationships and the despair of sinful actions is its own kind of
Hell. Christ has descended into the whole of our life, including
all of its brokenness and leads us from that point into the
brilliance of his holy resurrection.
Christ’s work “begins in the middle” because that is
where He finds us - in the middle of sin and death - in the dead
ends of our own self-constructed hell. Each of His feasts is
related to that middle because every action of Christ is directed
towards our salvation.
It is in light of this that the feast of the Nativity is called
the “Winter Pascha.” The celebration of Christ’s birth is
more than an historical remembrance. Christ’s birth is an
entrance of God into the middle of fallen human life, the entrance
of eternity into fallen history. That entrance is not just a
preparation for our salvation but is salvation itself born into
our world. “God became man,” the Fathers write, “that man
might become god.” God became what we are that we might become
what He is.
The proclamation in the service of
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The
Mission