Acts 2.1-11

John 7.37 – 52, 8.12

You will remember that on the evening of Great and Holy Friday – at the end of the Matins of Great and Holy Saturday, when we came back into the Church after processing around it three times, and we passed under the shroud (the icon of the corpse of God, dead in the flesh, Mk 15.42-47), and we came, mystically, into the LORD’s Tomb, the destination of our Lenten journey the last seven weeks – that there, mystically inside the LORD’s Tomb, we heard the LORD Himself crying out to us through His prophet, Ezekiel: ‘I will open your graves and lead you up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel…I will put My Spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land.’ [Eze 37.12-14]

This is the ‘work’ of the Father the LORD came to do. The LORD’s Ascension into Heaven completed that work of the Father. With His sweat on the Cross (Gn 3.19; St Isaac of Nineveh, Homily 29), He uprooted the thorns and thistles of death and corruption (Gen 3.18) that had taken root in the human heart, rendering it desperately corrupt and deceitful above all things. (Jer 17.9) Having destroyed death by His death on the Cross, in His Holy Resurrection the LORD Jesus Christ emptied the tomb of death and He bestowed Life upon all those in the tombs. The LORD’s empty Tomb means, I think, that He cleansed the temple of our body at its root, in the sanctuary of our heart. This was foreshadowed, most certainly, when He cleansed the Temple of the money-changers and said: ‘My house – the human heart – is a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves!’

And, in His Holy Resurrection, the LORD made the desert of our soul a fragrant Garden, for He made it to blossom as the rose, as Isaiah foretold. (Isa 35.1). And this, surely, was foreshadowed by the fragrance of the myrrh that filled the house when it was poured out on His most pure feet by Mary Magdalene (Jn 12.3), from whom He had cast out seven demons (Mk 16.9); and as the prophets, if you will, had ‘fore-smelled:’

‘While the King is at his table, my spikenard (from the honeysuckle family; an aromatic plant with therapeutic qualities; it grows in the Far East high up in the Himalayan mountains!) sends forth its fragrance,’ sings the Song of Songs. [Sng 1.12] ‘And the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.’ [Sng 4.11]

And the prophet, Hosea: ‘His branches shall spread [might these be the arms of the Heavenly Bridegroom spread out on the Tree of the Cross to embrace the world?]; His beauty shall be like an olive tree, And his fragrance like Lebanon.’ (Hos 14.6)

Might it be that the Myrrh-bearers knew the Angel’s word to them of the LORD risen from the dead was true, and that Mary Magdalene, Peter and John knew that there was more to the LORD’s empty Tomb than its simply being empty because of the other-worldly fragrance that filled it?

For, the empty Tomb was not filled with the stench of death but with the sweet fragrance of a Garden not of this world (some of us have smelled this fragrance from the myrrh that flows from certain miracle-working icons)! For, the story of Mary Magdalene met by the risen LORD in the Garden tells us that His Tomb is now the Gate that opens onto the Garden of Eden, the Garden that the holy fathers tell us is the human heart from which flow springs of living water pouring forth from the Fountain of Life Who is in the deep, beyond all things – this is our heart! (Jer 2.19, Prov 4.23)

But, the LORD’s Tomb was also filled with Light! For is it not remarkable that when Mary Magdalene, St John and St Peter came into the LORD’s empty Tomb on the morning of His Resurrection – the Tomb, understand, that should have been dark because it had no windows, and it was enclosed inside the mountain – they could see everything inside, the linen cloths neatly folded, the turban laid off to the side, clearly telling us that it was illumined by some light not of this world, for it most certainly was not illumined by the light of the sun!

All of this that took place visibly, historically, on this side of the grave had its origin not on this side of the grave but on the other side, in the deep, beyond all things (the description of the human heart given by the prophet Jeremiah, according to the Septuagint – Jer 17.9). That is, the destruction of death, the rooting out of the deceit that made us desperately corrupt in the root of our being, the emptying of the tomb of death so that it was transfigured into a bridal chamber where life, where eternal life is conceived, the Life of God that is immortal (Wisd 1.15), all of this took place not in some realm outside of us, but inside us, in the depths of our own heart!

This marvel that happened was in no way an unheard of thing. For in the beginning, God breathed into Adam’s face whom He had raised to life from the dust of the ground, the Breath of Life, the Holy Spirit, and Adam became a living soul. He was clothed in the Glory of the Holy Spirit. What the LORD Jesus Christ did in the depths of our heart by His death and burial on Pascha Night was nothing ‘new’; for what He did was to restore us to our original beauty, to our original goodness and purity, our original virginity and likeness to God, so that the Holy Spirit, as it was meant to be in the beginning when God created man, could now come and abide in us from whom He before had fled. For ‘the Holy Spirit of Wisdom will not enter a malicious soul, nor dwell in the body that is a slave to sin. The Holy Spirit will flee deceit and depart from thoughts that are without understanding!’ (Wisd 1.1-3, cf. Eze 10.18&11.23)

What was new, however, was this: that it is now the Son of God who lives in us. But this is what God had intended for us in the beginning, when the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters, the waters of our soul, preparing the world for His descent into the waters of the Woman to conceive in Her sacred Womb the mystery of the Son of God incarnate so that He would become one flesh with us that we might become one Spirit with Him.

In the Most Beloved, Holy Virgin Mary, that has happened. The ‘only-begotten God, He Who is in the bosom of the Father’ (Jn 1.18), became flesh in Her womb. Coming forth from the Holy Virgin, He raised up the tent of His Body of flesh and blood, which He now shares with us (Heb 2.14), and now He Himself – not an angel, not a messenger, but the uncreated creator God Himself dwells among us as one of us (Jn 1.14), having become absolutely one with us not only in His conception and birth of the Virgin but now also in His death, by which He has become a partaker of our flesh and blood (Heb 2.14) even to the point of death on the Cross (Phil 2.8) by which He has destroyed our death. And, to those who receive Him and believe in Him, He breathes on them His Holy Spirit so that it is no longer they who live but Christ who lives in them – making them to be ‘gods’ by grace or, as one of the holy fathers says, gods ‘by adoption!’ They become children of God born not of blood, nor of the will and desire of man, but children of the Holy Spirit of God born from above!

This is the work Our LORD God and Savior, Jesus Christ, accomplished on His Cross and in His Tomb, in the tomb of our heart. And what was that work? It was the work of ‘opening our graves,’ as we heard from His prophet, Ezekiel, that went forth to the far corners of the world as a divine Melody (Ps 19.1) on the night of Great and Holy Friday, emanating from inside His Tomb: ‘Behold! I will open your graves!’

Therefore, when the holy disciples stood on the mountain and watched Him ascend bodily into Heaven, what were they seeing? They were seeing the King of Glory, the Great King, going up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet! (Ps 47.5) They were seeing the ‘King of all the earth’ leading those who would follow Him up from their graves to bring them into the Land of Israel, the Land of their inheritance, which is not the Land of Canaan. It is the Kingdom of Heaven.

And in the Mystery of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, moving over the face of the waters (Gn 1.3), descends into the waters of our soul with the sound of a mighty, rushing wind (Acs 2.2), like the Father breathing into the face of Adam, to conceive in our heart, now cleansed and purified by the Holy Pascha of Christ our God, the New Man, to raise us from the dust of death (Ps 22.15) as a new Creation in the New Adam, the LORD Jesus Christ risen from the dead and ascended into Heaven in Glory. Having torn out the old heart of stone, the heart that was dead in sins and trespasses, He has created in us a clean heart that lives in the Way of the Righteousness of God (Ps 119.40), i.e., in Jesus Christ.

And, in answer to the Psalmist’s prayer of old (Ps 51.10), He has put in us a new and right Spirit (Eze 11.19 & 36.26). Now, in the power and goodness of the Holy Spirit poured out on us from the Father of Our LORD Jesus Christ from on high, our hearts having been cleansed, made empty of all unrighteousness, all death and corruption, and made more fruitful than Paradise filled with the Light and the Fragrance of the LORD’s Tomb, brighter now than any royal chamber and become now the Fountain of our Resurrection, we who were paralyzed and crippled in the hidden man of our heart, have been made strong so that we can take up our beds, our cross, and follow Our LORD Jesus Christ from our graves that He has opened, and follow Him in His Ascension into the Land of our inheritance, the Heavenly Kingdom of the Father, whose King is Our own Heavenly Bridegroom, the LORD Jesus Christ!

This is why, dear faithful, when we stand in the Church, we say that we are standing in the LORD’s Temple of Glory, and we think we are in Heaven – for so we are! For the Church is the Body of Christ that was crucified, dead and buried, and risen from the dead, and is now ascended in glory, seated in Heaven at the Right Hand of the Father, as the King of all, the LORD of both the living and the dead. And those who have been baptized into Christ, and who have put on Christ, have put on His Holy Spirit, the wedding garment of the LORD’s own Glory that He had before the world was; for those who have been baptized into Christ have become the Bride of Christ whom the Heavenly Bridegroom cherishes as His own Body. (Eph 5.32)

If we could but behold the mystery that has taken place in the depths of our soul here in the mystery of the Holy Orthodox Church, the mystery of the Body of Christ who is all in all, the Great Mystery of the Spirit and His Bride, we would tremble with joy, and fall down to our knees in the fear of God, and pour out our hearts in love and thanksgiving to the LORD, God and Savior Jesus Christ who has raised us from our graves and into the eternal life of His own Glory as partakers of His own divine nature. In the fear of God, with faith and love we draw near – not in presumption but because He Himself calls us, He commands us, to draw near and to taste and see how good the LORD is, to whom be all glory, honor, and worship now and ever and unto the ages of ages! Amen! Most Holy Theotokos, save us! Glory to Jesus Christ!

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