Bridegroom Matins
April 13, 2025
If you were reading your daily assigned Gospel readings, you’ll remember that we’ve been here before about eight weeks ago. The two weeks before we began Great Lent six weeks ago, the Church, through Her assigned daily Gospel readings, led us from the LORD’s Entry into Jerusalem to His Cross and Burial. And that’s where we began Great Lent.
Six Sundays ago, we stood in front of the Holy Doors, that were closed, the curtains drawn. We were standing invisibly with the Myrrhbearing women in front of the LORD’s Tomb that was sealed by a very large stone.
Over the last six weeks, through the ascetical disciplines of the Fast, the Cross the LORD commands us to take up if we would follow Him, we have followed the Holy Myrrhbearing women as they turned downward, as it says [Lk 23.55] to pray in the mystical stillness [hesychia] of God’s Sabbath Rest, according to the commandment, as it says [Lk 23.56]. We followed the Myrrhbearing women, as Isaiah says [Isa 42.16f], by a way we did not know; we followed them downward on paths we have not known. It is the hidden path of the inner Exodus of the Bible that leads into the tomb of our own heart as to the tomb of Lazarus.
Yesterday, the risen LORD Jesus Christ came to each one of us in the tomb of our heart and He has called out to each one of us by name, as He called out to Lazarus by name: ‘Come forth!’ Deny yourself, take up your cross, and descend with this LORD Jesus by a way you did not know, on a path you have not known, the inner path of the Biblical Exodus, the better and changeless Path that ascends to God in His Heavenly Kingdom.
With this Sunday evening’s service of Bridegroom Matins, we step onto that hidden Path to enter the Promised Land – the LORD’s inheritance, which is our own soul – and to watch with wonder our Joshua cleanse our deep heart of all idols and dark spirits that lurk there.
Yesterday, with the raising of Lazarus, Great Lent came to an end. We have crossed mystically the Jordan. With the raising of Lazarus, we have ‘come forth’ not back into the wilderness of this earthly life rooted in death but into the mystery of the heart where we are deep, beyond all things [Jer 17.9], where we are rooted in the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who by His death has destroyed death and given life to all those in the tombs!
This is the hidden, invisible reality depicted by all these events of yesterday and this morning and now this evening as we enter Great and Holy Week. In prayerful participation in the liturgical rites of the Church, we are passing over from this visible earthly life above the ground – this life beset by afflictions, provocations, temptations, seductions, diversions and enticements, deceptions and delusions in the shadow of death and the darkness of our own grave; we are passing over mystically into the invisible mystery of our heart beneath the ground, in the deep, beyond all things where Christ God, our King of all, is working His salvation in the midst of the earth [Ps 74.12] – the earth of our body, the dust of our death!
I mean for you to see that the visible images of these liturgical services that show the LORD bringing Lazarus forth from his tomb are an icon, a mirror, that reflects back at us what is happening even now in the hidden deep of the heart. We are not ‘remembering’ a history that happened way back when. We are entering into that history today. It becomes the history of each of us if we follow the Myrrhbearing women on that path we did not know, the Path that is the LORD Jesus Himself leading us down, mystically, into the tomb of our own heart, as we work to put to death what is earthly in us, to crucify the passions of the flesh so that we may belong to Christ, in order that we may hear Him calling out to each of us by name, with a great voice – the same ‘voice’ with which He cries out on the Cross! ‘Come forth!’
It is in on this way we did not know in the invisible, spiritual realm of the hidden man of our heart that the LORD Jesus Christ led us this morning into the earthly Temple of the earthly Jerusalem, only to depart from it! Where is He going?
Where are we going this week if we come to the visible services of Great and Holy Week and follow the LORD? Descend with the Myrrhbearing women downward into the closet of your heart, and there stand in prayerful attention in the presence of the Christ in you, and see if you are not being led into mystical depths you did not know to behold the Joy and Wonder of Christ’s death and resurrection not as a religious story but as the spiritual reality of your own soul being raised from death to life in the death and Resurrection of Christ our God!
We must understand that the Orthodox Church is not a human institution. She is the very mystery of Christ God incarnate on earth, the mystery of the crucified and risen Christ God incarnate on earth. Therefore, enter this visible Church and you have entered into the invisible Church of the heart. In the secret closet of your heart, attend to the Church’s worship prayerfully, attentively, reverently, and follow the Holy Spirit who is present in Her worship – like water carried in a sponge – into the invisible Church of the Kingdom of Heaven in the deep, beyond all things, where man, made in the Image and Likeness of God, was made to live and move and have his being.
Therefore, all the liturgical imagery of these services is much more than poetry. They are icons, liturgical icons, icons of smell, rubrical icons of movement, spoken icons as well as icons of color and paint. They draw in your mind a picture, an image, of the mystery of God hidden from the ages. They are icons; they are mirrors [not windows!]; they reflect back at you the unseen reality of Heaven that is within you.
Behold, the Bridegroom comes at Midnight! What, who, is the mystical reality depicted in this poetic image, this poetic mirror?
Midnight is that instant when the old day passes over into the new day. But, in this earthly life that rises from the dust of death and returns to it, the new day is but another day much like the old day, all the days of our life strung like pearls on a necklace that begins and ends in death.
But, midnight is also an ancient mythological image for the head of the serpent swallowing its tail, the uroboros; an image of this earthly life devouring itself, devouring you, in order to sustain itself, producing the ‘circle of death,’ which the world in its delusion likes to call the ‘circle of life.’ For death is what defines this earthly life, and empties it of all purpose and meaning.
Therefore, the Bridegroom comes at Midnight. He comes into this world that He Himself created, and which the serpent stole in the hope of devouring it for himself. He comes precisely into that hour, in that very instant, that ‘twinkling of an eye,’ when the old is forever seeking to escape the serpentine coils of death and to pass over into the new hoping it is passing over into life, only to discover that it forever fails because it is forever returning back into the maw of the same old serpent.
The Bridegroom comes at Midnight. He comes to that instant that holds the soul forever in the power of the devil in the prison-house of death and – as Moses, and the Psalmist and the prophets foretold – He crushes the head of the serpent even as the serpent is biting His heel. And by His death on the Cross – the consummate epiphany of His great love for mankind, the Heavenly Bridegroom weds Himself to His bride, the soul. He pours into Her womb the living waters of His Holy Spirit. And because His is the death voluntarily chosen in perfect obedience to the Father, He destroys death. For understand, obedience and death do not go together! That’s why He destroys death! He crushes the head of the serpent; He transforms the Tomb into the Bridal Chamber, and He transforms Midnight into the Door that opens onto the New Creation in which the devil and death are vanquished utterly. His Body becomes the wedding garment, the Robe of Light, of the uncreated and healing Light which is the Life of the soul. It is but the wedding garment of old that clothed His Bride in the beginning. He restores Her to her original beauty. She becomes one Spirit with Him who became flesh of her flesh and bone of her bones; and He takes her with Him to dwell with Him in His Sabbath Rest, the Bridal Chamber, in the Heavenly Temple of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
But dear faithful, the icon of midnight reflects another reality hidden within us. It is that timeless point in our soul at which we choose to turn either to the west to chase after the idols, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, or to turn to the East, to the Light of Christ’s Holy Resurrection that shines from one end of the heavens to the other so that no one is hidden from the warmth of His love! [Ps 17/18.5]
Living in this Light, we live in the deified history of Christ God incarnate. In His victory over death, the present moment that is always dying into the past, always hemorrhaging into the dust of death, is stopped and taken up into the Blood of the incarnate God, our Resurrection and our Life, to whom be glory, honor and worship, now and forever! Amen!
