It is my hope that as we enter into this Great and Holy week, that you, my readers, will join with me in thinking about the meaning of what we recall. It is important, I believe, that we don’t just participate in the services of this week without understanding their implication for our lives. We are called not to remember some past events but, rather, to understand what these events mean for our present life. When this week is over, it should not be that we just go back to our normal life. Life should change in some way each time we celebrate these events.

We are called to understand that when the world rejected its Savior, when He died on the Cross, normal life came to an end and it is no longer possible. For there were normal men and women who shouted “Crucify Him!” Who spat at Him and nailed Him to the Cross! And they hated and killed Him precisely because He was troubling their normal life. It was indeed a perfectly normal world which preferred darkness and death to light and life. Jesus’ death caused the irrevocable condemnation of what is considered a normal world or a normal life. His death indeed revealed the true and abnormal nature of human life as it was and is without the Light of God’s revelation, Jesus. The way that Jesus lived and died is God’s revelation to humankind about the meaning and purpose of this earthly life.

The Pascha of Jesus signifies to those who believe in Him, an end to a world that is only guided by human wisdom – a world without faith.

The word Pascha means Passover or passage. The Feast of Passover was and is for the Jews the annual commemoration of their whole history as salvation – a passage from the slavery of Egypt to freedom from exile into the Promised Land. It is also the anticipation of the ultimate passage — into the Kingdom of God.

Christ, we believe is the fulfillment of Pascha. He performed the ultimate passage: from death into life, from this normal world into a new world, into the new time of the Kingdom. He opened the possibility of this passage to us.

Living in this world we can already be not of this world, we can be free from slavery to death and sin and partakers of the world to come.

But for this to happen, we must perform our own passage, we must put on Christ, condemning the old Adam in us. And thus Pascha is not an annual commemoration of a past event. It is this Event itself that must lead us to a new way of living, inspiring us to desire a deeper union with our God by a transformed life.