Patriarch Theophilos of Jerusalem 

on the Holy Light

In an interview with the National Herald, Patriarch Theophilos of Jerusalem answered a few questions of interest regarding the annual miracle of the Holy Light (Holy Fire) which is celebrated in the Holy Sepulchre every Holy Saturday afternoon.

Regarding this Holy Light which although many say is a great miracle of Orthodoxy, others propose various theories to debunk this miracle, Patriarch Theophilos says the following:

"All the various perspectives and theories regarding the Holy Light come from people who are in complete ignorance, they have no religious sentiment even when they are disputed, and they do not want to receive the mystery of the divine economy, namely the Incarnation, beyond which I think all other things are redundant."

SYNAXARION

 GREAT AND HOLY SATURDAY

Taking the Savior down from the cross. Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem. Photo: Anton Pospelov/Pravoslavie.ru

Of all the days the Holy and Great Forty Day Fast is the most distinguished, but more than the Holy Forty Day Fast the Holy and Great Passion Week is exalted, and more than the days of Holy Week Great and Holy Saturday is the most exalted. This week is called great not because these days or hours are more exalted but because the great, portentous and extraordinary deeds of our Savior were accomplished during this week, but especially on this day.

10 Reasons I Believe the

 Holy Light Is a Miracle 

Introduction

For nearly seventeen centuries an annual event has taken place at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Holy Saturday (according to Orthodox Christian reckoning) that is today reported by media outlets around the world and hailed by tens of millions as one of Christianity's greatest miracles. The event is known to non-Orthodox as the ceremony of the "Holy Fire", while Orthodox prefer to call it "Holy Light" because they claim without hesitation it has a divine origin and supernatural qualities.

A Prayer Before the All-Holy Sepulchre

By Fr. Mitrophanes, Guardian of the Holy Sepulchre

Lord Jesus Christ our God, Who art Risen from the dead, receive our prayers and supplications and also my pilgrimage to Thine All-Holy Tomb; and raise us up, Who art Risen from the dead, granting Thy resurrection to all, and raising all who have fallen. To bring us into communion and show us Thy Resurrection, Thou didst descend into Hades. To illumine our darkness, Thou camest as Light into the darkness and dispelled the darkness of Hades, and as an arrow and lightning and uncreated tongues of fire the Holy Light of Thy Resurrection illumines our darkness and purifies our vision. Thou art our Resurrection from the sufferings of life.

HOLY SATURDAY

On Great and Holy Saturday the Orthodox Church commemorates the burial of Christ and His descent into Hades. It is the day between the Crucifixion of our Lord and His glorious Resurrection. The Matins of Holy Saturday is conducted on Friday evening, and while many elements of the service represent mourning at the death and burial of Christ, the service itself is one of watchful expectation.

Commemoration of Holy Saturday

On Great and Holy Saturday the Church contemplates the mystery of the Lord's descent into Hades, the place of the dead. Death, our ultimate enemy, is defeated from within. "He (Christ) gave Himself as a ransom to death in which we were held captive, sold under sin. Descending into Hades through the Cross ... He loosed the bonds of death" (Liturgy of St. Basil).

HOLY SATURDAY

 'WITH FEAR AND TREMBLING'

The epitaphion, in Russian plaschanitsa, or symolic winding sheet of Christ.

Miraculously, Orthodox Christianity has preserved the essence of "the faith once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). By the sheer grace of God, it has maintained the apostolic faith in the face of extraordinary pressures, from persecution and martyrdom to Western secularism and pluralism. Without that grace, Orthodoxy would have disappeared before the end of the first millennium. And with it would have disappeared "true belief and "true worship."

THE HOLY FLAME

THE GREATNESS OF THE MIRACLE, AND THE HELPLESSNESS OF THE SKEPTICS

Why do atheists and skeptics want to destroy faith?

The Holy Edicule after the descent of the Holy Fire

During the long history of Christianity, there has never been a single miracle that skeptics and atheists have not tried to disprove. They have used and still use every possible means in this bat­tle. Even St. John Chrysostom talked about those [the chief priests and Pharisees] who denied the miracle of the Resurrection, saying, “But note, I pray thee, their plotting, how ridiculous it is.

GREAT AND HOLY SATURDAY

THE FORGOTTEN FEAST

by Daniel Manzuk

Procession around the church with the winding sheet (epitaphion) at the Holy Saturday Matins service. Photo: St. Mary Magdalene Church, Fenton, MI

It is a tragic fact that today Holy Saturday is viewed by many as an unimportant “day off” between the sorrow of Good Friday and the joy of Pascha. This is absolutely false.

THE ORTHODOX CELEBRATION 

OF GREAT AND HOLY SATURDAY

By Fr. Alexander Schmemann

Great and Holy Saturday is the day on which Christ reposed in the tomb. The Church calls this day the Blessed Sabbath. The great Moses mystically foreshadowed this day when he said: God blessed the seventh day. This is the blessed Sabbath. This is the day of rest, on which the only-begotten Son of God rested from all His works. . . . (Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Saturday)

By using this title the Church links Holy Saturday with the creative act of God. In the initial account of creation as found in the Book of Genesis, God made man in His own image and likeness. To be truly himself, man was to live in constant communion with the source and dynamic power of that image: God. Man fell from God. Now Christ, the Son of God through whom all things were created, has come to restore man to communion with God. He thereby completes creation. All things are again as they should be.

Jesus In Hades and the Sign of Jonah

Jesus and the Sign of Jonah (Matthew 12:38-41)

Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, "Master, we would like to see a sign from thee."

But he [Jesus] answered and said unto them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and, behold, a greater than Jonah is here."

St. Amphilochios of Iconium: 

On the Burial of Our Savior

by St. Amphilochios of Iconium

Delivered on Great and Holy Saturday

Let us commemorate today the solemnity of the burial of our Saviour. He has undone the bonds of death of those who were in hades, filled hades with His splendour, and roused from sleep those lying there; and we on earth rejoice exultant, recalling to mind His Resurrection, and now we fear death no more, for it shall not prevail against immortality. "Because Thou wilt not," says the Scripture, "give Thy Holy One to see corruption" (Ps. 15:10).

The Lord In Hades

By Right Reverend Theognostus, Archbishop of Novgorod

Our Lord Jesus Christ descended into Hades with His soul united with the Divinity, at this same time when He, after His removal from the cross, reposed with His body in the tomb. In Hades all the souls of the people who died suffered affliction up to the time of the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. No ray of the heavenly light ever penetrated to them, they were alien to every joy; their destiny was continuous sorrow. The devil fully ruled over them and as a relentless tyrant tormented them with the various means peculiar to him.

The Liturgical Theme of Holy Saturday

By Sergei V. Bulgakov

On Great Saturday the Holy Church remembers the sojourn of Jesus Christ in the flesh in the tomb, His sincere descent into Hades, the introduction of the thief to paradise, the sitting on the throne with the Father and Spirit and together with them will indicate beforehand the approach of the great event of the Resurrection of Christ. In the exclusive, special services of Great Saturday the Holy Church, pouring out tears of love and gratitude for the One Who laid down His life for His friends and enemies and Who in the flesh reposed in the tomb, calls out to everyone and all to this holiest and most precious tomb -- the expectation of all nations, calls out to both heaven and earth, both angels and men to Him; surrounds itself with the bright clouds of the ancient witnesses who had foreseen Him for a thousand years and with the councils of New Testament heralds, who here as if giving answer before the Crucified One in his universal sermons about His expiatory cross, death and resurrection. All the divine services of Great Saturday represent a wonderful, unexampled combination of the most opposed feelings - sorrow and joyfulness, grief and joy, tears and bright singing.

OUTSIDE OF EDEN

Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, characterized the human situation in terms of ”being thrown into the world”. Thrown into the world, literally headfirst, we eventually crawl to our feet, and begin to ask, ”Where in the world are we?  What time is it?” We spend the rest of our lives trying to find out. Our answers to those questions are to be found in the season of Great Lent. Cheesefare Sunday, the last preparatory Sunday before the start of Lent, recallsAdam's Expulsion from Paradise, ”Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis 3:23-24).

IN DEFENSE OF THE HOLY FIRE

This article was originally published in Russian on this site on Holy Saturday 2008, the day before Pascha [Easter].

Last year [2007] in the Russian-language Internet, a whole campaign was conducted to discredit the miracle of the Holy Fire. On the eve of Pascha, a certain young man, a member of the Atheist Society of Moscow, published a suitably atheistic article, an “exposé " of the Holy Fire; comments on this exposé by persons of like mind with him inundated at that time nearly all Orthodox forums. On the eve of the present Pascha [2008], other anti-Orthodox forces plus various schismatic sites have again raised the same pile of criticisms supposedly compromising belief in the Holy Fire, using as an occasion some arbitrary and unjustifiable interpretations of quotes from Jerusalem Patriarch Theophilus during his recent [2008] meeting with journalists from Russia.

St. Epiphanios of Salamis: 

The Lord's Descent Into Hades

By St. Epiphanios of Salamis

Something strange is happening - there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness.

The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep.

The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and He has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began.

What Christ Accomplished on the Cross

by Hieromonk Damascene

The Horror of Nature at the Death of Christ

by St. Nikolai Velimirovich

"The earth quaked, rocks were split" (Matthew 27:51).

O, what a terrible reproach against mankind! Even dead nature recognized Him Whom men were unable to recognize. All mute things trembled and began to protest, each in its own way and in its own language. The mute earth quakes - that is its language. The stones split apart - that is their language. The sun withholds its light - that is its language. All of creation in its own way protested. For all of creation is submissive to Him, as it was to Adam at one time in Paradise, because all of creation recognizes Him as it did Adam in Paradise.

Two Powerful Old Testament Images of Christ On the Cross

Below are two readings from the Old Testament I propose to be added in the Orthodox service books for Great Friday or Holy Saturday. They are little known images or shadows of the Cross that powerfully show Christ victorious on the Cross.

The first describes the Prophet Balaam's vision of the Cross. This one is easily overlooked. The key to understanding this passage are knowing three things.

St. John Chrysostom on the Holy Cross

"The Cross of the Lord is unpleasant and sorrowful to the ear, but it consists of joy and gladness. It is the originator not so much of suffering as much as of passionlessness. For Jews the Cross is temptation, for pagans it is madness, but for us believers it reminds us of our salvation. When in church one reads about the Cross and one is reminded of the sufferings on the Cross, the faithful are indignant at the Cross and let out a plaintive wail and murmur not at the Cross but at the crucifiers and unbelievers. For the Cross is the salvation of the Church, the Cross is the praise of those who hope on it.

The Miraculous Opening of Graves After the Crucifixion

by St. Nikolai Velimirovich

"Tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised" (Matthew 27:52).

O, what a great sign! The dead bodies of holy men and women recognized Him, Who, on the cross, died in pain; but the dead souls of the elders of the Jews did not recognize Him.

The Pain of the Mother of God

by Saint Silouan the Athonite

When the soul abides in the love of God - how good and gracious and festive all things are! But even with God's love sorrows continue, and the greater the love the greater the sorrow. Never by a single thought did the Mother of God sin, nor did she ever lose grace, yet vast were her sorrows; when she stood at the foot of the Cross her grief was as boundless as the ocean and her soul knew torment incomparably worse than Adam's when he was driven from Paradise, in that the measure of her love was beyond compare greater than the love which Adam felt when he was in Paradise.

Why The Good Thief Was Pardoned

by St. John Maximovitch

And one of the malefactors which were hanging railed on Him, saying, "If thou be Christ, save thyself and us." But the other rebuked him, saying, "Dost thou not fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss." And he said unto Jesus, "Lord, remember me when Thou contest into Thy kingdom." And Jesus said unto him, "Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise." (Luke 23:39-13)

"My God, My God, 

Why Have You Forsaken Me?"

By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos

Christ's fourth saying on the Cross is the cry: "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matt. 27:46). This saying must be interpreted in an Orthodox way, within the interpretive analysis of the holy Fathers of the Church, because otherwise it can be considered heretical. This is said because there are some scholastics and rationalists who try to interpret these words of Christ by maintaining that, if only for a few seconds, the divine nature abandoned the human nature on the Cross in order for Christ to feel the pain, the suffering of His abandonment.

The Hours of Great Friday 

By Sergei V. Bulgakov

As the fulfillment of the liturgy is an image of Golgotha's sacrifice or the commemoration of the death of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, so on the same day of the sacred commemoration of this worldwide event a full liturgy is not served, neither the Divine Liturgy nor the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, as a sign of the deep lamentation and fervent contrition of believers on this day.

What the Church Teaches Us 

On Great Friday

By Sergei V. Bulgakov

The terrible night is recreated by the morning worship service of Great Friday. The darkness of nature, the darkness of the black rage of the Judeans who were seeking to kill the Savior, the mortal grief of the Redeemer in the darkness of the Garden of Gethsemane, then the extreme degree of His humiliation already betrayed by the disciple and seized by the enemies, -- all this aggravates the horror of this night. Before the mind's eye pictures in the temple were presented one after the other and replaced by another more sorrowful, by another more awful and by another more amazing.

On the Passion of the Saviour

By Saint Ephraim the Syrian

I am afraid to speak

and touch with my tongue

this fearful narrative

concerning the Saviour.

For truly it is fearful

to narrate all this.

Sermon for Great and Holy Friday

CATECHESIS 73: 

On the Saving Passion of our

 Lord and Master Jesus Christ

by St. Theodore the Studite

Given on Great and Holy Friday.

HOMILY ON GREAT FRIDAY, 

GIVEN AT THE EVENING SERVICE

St. Ignatius Brianchaninov

The Crucifixion. Fresco by Dm. Mironenko.

And all the people that came together to that sight, beholding the things which were done, smote their breasts, and returned (Lk. 23:48).

St. Ephraim the Syrian on the Holy Cross

"The Cross abolished idolatrous adulation, enlightened the whole universe, gathered all the nations into one Church and united them with love. The Cross is the resurrection of the dead. The Cross is the hope of Christians. The Cross is the staff for the lame. The Cross is comfort for the poor. The Cross is the deposing of the proud. The Cross is the hope of those who despair. The Cross is food for the sailors. The Cross is haven for the bestormed. The Cross is the father for orphans. The Cross is comfort for those who mourn. The Cross is the protector of children. The Cross is the glory of men. The Cross is the crown of elders. The Cross is light for those sitting in darkness.

"Like A Lamb Lead To The Slaughter"

 St. Nikolai Velimirovich

"Like a lamb lead to the slaughter" 

(Isaiah 53:7).

Throughout the many centuries of time the discerning Prophet Isaiah foresaw the awesome sacrifice on Golgotha. From afar he saw the Lord Jesus Christ led to the slaughter as a lamb is lead to the slaughter. A lamb permits itself to be led to the laughter as it is led to the pasture: defenseless, without fear and without malice. Thus, Our Lord Christ was led to the slaughter without defense, without fear and without malice.

Great And Holy Friday 

Introduction 

On Great and Holy Friday the Orthodox Church commemorates the death of Christ on the Cross. This is the culmination of the observance of His Passion by which our Lord suffered and died for our sins. This commemoration begins on Thursday evening with the Matins of Holy Friday and concludes with a Vespers on Friday afternoon that observes the unnailing of Christ from the Cross and the placement of His body in the tomb. 

Commemoration Of Great And Holy Friday 

On this day we commemorate the sufferings of Christ: the mockery, the crown of thorns, the scourging, the nails, the thirst, the vinegar and gall, the cry of desolation, and all the Savior endured on the Cross.