Categories: hymns, feast-days
Date: 12 March 2007 08:08:57
O Lord, save Your people, and bless Your inheritance.
Grant victory to Your people, over their adversaries.
And by virtue of Your Cross preserve Your habitation!
Gospel Reading: Mark 8:34-9:1
Yesterday we celebrated, through hymnography, procession and prostrations, the Veneration of the Cross. The cross we prostrate before is covered and surrounded by flowers: not sure of the significance (I'll have to find out!) but to me it commemorates life: Christ died on the Cross, but through it we have new life: we are reborn, all of creation is reborn. It is a blossoming of all, through the blood of Christ. This page, from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, explains further the significance of the feast, an explanation of the icon, and a selection of hymns. The commemoration reminds us not only of the approach Good Friday, and the entire Easter sequence, but also of our calling to bear our cross and to remember that we have been crucified with Christ. And as the sermon Father gave made mention, although the cross was an instrument of torture and a symbol of shame, for us Christians it has become our glory, our hope, our salvation: Christ has indeed destroyed death:
Now the flaming sword no longer guards the gates of Eden;
it has mysteriously been quenched by the wood of the Cross!
The sting of death and the victory of hell have been vanquished;
for You, O my Saviour, have come and cried to those in hell:
"Enter again into paradise."