Although not a major feast in our Church, we do observe, on the Saturday before Willow Sunday, the . Why was it that after three and a half centuries of Christianity this miracle – the raising of Lazarus – should suddenly take on the public and ritualized form of a feast? Why should its observance just as suddenly be taken up throughout the East? At this point recognizing a distinct Eastern Church’s conception of all the feasts becomes crucial to understanding their function. For example, an Arian probably would not have denied that Lazarus was raised from the dead when Christ said, “Lazarus, come forth”. What he would have denied was that Christ performed this miracle on the basis of his own true and eternal divinity. As a specifically Eastern Church feast, then, the Raising of Lazarus represents more than Christ’s power over death: it is a manifestation of the divine and human natures which make salvation from death possible. John Chrysostom’s homilies on the Raising of Lazarus (c. 390) show this was how the feast was understood during the period of its widespread adoption. In these homilies John spoke of the miracle in terms of Christ’s revealing first his human nature, then his divine nature. He also referred repeatedly to the relation and equality of the Son to the Father, eventually even addressing a rhetorical question to “the heretic.” Chrysostom’s exegesis of the Raising of Lazarus was almost exclusively concerned with the Eastern Church’s conception of the nature of Christ vis-à-vis the Arian conception. Thus we see already that the Feast of the Raising of Lazarus involved much more than Jerusalem’s topography. Further conclusions can be drawn about the Cyrillian Feasts as a group.

Palm/Willow Sunday was also first recorded by Etheria between 381 and 384. It was localized at Jerusalem during the mid-fourth century and, like the Feast of the Raising of Lazarus, it spread throughout the Eastern Empire during the last two decades of that century. The feast commemorates Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem, an event which would culminate in the salvation of mankind. It marks the first day of Holy Week which, as it was observed in Jerusalem, was a long and elaborate program that topographically and chronologically reproduced the last events in Christ’s life, death and resurrection according to Scripture and Tradition. It took on the form of a series of feasts, each day being marked by special religious ceremonies, Scriptural readings and processions to parts of the city and countryside.