PALM SUNDAY. THE LORD COMES TO BETHANY
April 5, 2026
Philippians 4.4-9
John 12.1-18
Our Gospel this morning begins: “Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was whom he had raised from the dead.” Six days before the Passover would be Sunday, Today, the day after Lazarus was raised from the dead, the Day of the LORD’s rising from the dead.
Today, then, He comes invisibly to us in Bethany, an Aramaic word that means, ‘house of depression or misery.’ Is not the world we live in a Bethany? As in this morning’s Gospel, this world is filled with those seeking to kill both Christ and the Lazaruses He has raised from death to life in the baptismal Font of His Church. But, in Bethany, in this world of misery and depression, Christ, risen from the dead, Christ, the Resurrection and the Life, Christ, victor over sin, death, and hell is invisibly present. He is in our midst! Into the house of this world, this house of misery and depression, God has come in the flesh and dwells among us. In the flesh, He has suffered death on the Cross; and in the same flesh, He has risen from the dead, destroying death by His death.
And now, Bethany becomes a Jerusalem, the possession of Peace, the house that holds Christ risen from the dead even as it is held by Christ in His Bride, the Church, who holds in Her womb the Body and Blood of Christ, Her Son and Her God, risen from the dead. In His Church, Christ risen from the dead is in Bethany, in this world of misery and depression, like a seed, like a measure of yeast making the dough to rise, working His salvation, His healing and His deliverance, in the midst of the earth.
Now, Matthew and Mark tell us that when the LORD came to Bethany, He entered the house of Simon the leper. One thinks immediately of the pre-Communion prayer: “O LORD, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest enter the house of my soul all leprous and sinful.” So, when our Gospel continues: “There, in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, they made for Him a supper,” it seems quite clear that the mystical substance beneath the historical veil of this morning’s Gospel, that gives to the veil its distinctive shape, outline and color, is the Great Supper of the one Divine Liturgy taking place in heaven and on earth: invisibly in Heaven, visibly in this visible Temple on the corner of 38th and 54th in Bethany, and invisibly in the believers’ heart, in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper [cf. the Liber Graduum, 12].
The Great Supper of the Divine Liturgy is the Holy Eucharist that, as St Luke records, “a certain man made, and he sent his servant to say to all: “Come; for all things are now ready.” [Luk 14.16-17] This Great Supper, according to St Matthew, is the Marriage Feast for the King’s Son [Mt 22.2]. It is the Holy Eucharist that proclaims the LORD’s death till He comes [1 Cor 11.26]. It is the marriage Feast that celebrates Holy Baptism, when repentant sinners are married to Christ and united to Him in His death and Resurrection as members of His Bride, the Church. Dear faithful, the Holy Eucharist is the Bridal Chamber [Friday Matins, Sixth Week of Lent, LTS 306].
Our Gospel this morning tells us that “Lazarus was one of those who sat at table with the LORD.” And many Jews were there, it says. They came, it says, not for Jesus’ sake only, but to see Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Dear faithful, who do inquirers and seekers come to see when they come to the Orthodox Church? They don’t see Jesus because He is present invisibly. They come to see you. All of you who have been baptized are Lazaruses whom Jesus has risen from the dead! They come to see you, to see in you if the Church’s Paschal proclamation, Christ is risen! is real, if it is incarnate in you in a joy, a peace, and a love even for the enemy that clothed you in your baptism, and that the misery and depression of this world cannot extinguish, or if it’s just another vacuous religious claim like all the others. You are the sign that Christ is risen from the dead, destroying death by His death; you are His witnesses!
For, dear faithful, so what if Christ is risen from the dead! What would you expect of a man who is God? What has that to do with us who are but dust and ashes! But, what if His Resurrection in the flesh means that He is risen from the dead in our flesh and blood [Heb 2.14]. Does that not mean that, because He is raised from the dead, we are raised from the dead?
This is the joy of Pascha that is proclaimed already Today, six days before the Passover, when Jesus comes to Bethany, the House of misery and depression, and raises Lazarus from the dead. For, already, six days before the Passover, six days before the Savior’s victory over hell on the Cross, already, in Bethany, in the House of misery and depression, His “great voice” with which He will cry out on the Cross is heard in the depths of hell when, with the same “great voice,” He calls Lazarus forth from the dead [LT 491]. Already, six days before the Passover, “Christ is at the door. So do not be sad, O Bethany. For He will change your sorrow into joy by raising Lazarus from the tomb” [LTS 304]. Behold, “Christ is hastening to Jerusalem to suffer death for our sake in the flesh, granting immortality to mortal men who believe in Him” [LTS 305]. “Of His own will, He is slain on the Cross in order to save from corruption me who am dead” [LTS 302].
Therefore, we cry out on this day, six days before the Passover, we cry out in Bethany, in the confident hope of faith: “O Christ, I dwell in the tomb of sloth, and I stink from festering wounds of sin. Raise me up and save me, that I may come to meet Thee with palm branches.” [LTS 296] They are now become tokens of the almighty power of the Savior’s Cross, Christ’s weapon of victory by which He smites the devil who holds us in his power through the fear of death. When we therefore hold our palms and branches high and sing out: “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the LORD!” we are proclaiming the almighty King’s death on the Cross by which He slays the tyranny of the wolf, and by which He has bound hell, slain death, and given life not just to Himself but to all those in the tombs.
Like the chief priests and the elders of the people in the house of Simon the leper this morning, the world in its unbelief seeks to kill Christ and all whom He has raised from the dead in Holy Baptism, not knowing that He is the LORD of Glory, the Son of God in whose Name is our Life, who in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth and with His hands stretched out the heavens like a curtain. Obviously, they are ignorant that all these will perish, but He remains. They will all grow old like a garment; but He will fold them up like a cloak – as He did the linen cloths that wrapped His corpse in the Tomb – and they will be exchanged for the wedding garment of the Heavenly Spirit. The corruptible will put on the incorruptible, the mortal the immortal. For the One who was crucified is the LORD of Glory whose years will not fail. And risen from the dead, He now sits at the Father’s Right Hand, having made His enemies His footstool" [Heb 1.10-13].
So, if Bethany is the House of misery and depression, why should we not say that it is the “house of the harlot,” the house of the woman of porn, whose house is a house of misery and depression because it is the house of the devil, the house of death whose way goes down to hell? Therefore, the LORD raising Lazarus from the dead proclaims, six days before the Passover, that the devil’s power is already breaking because the house of death, the harlot’s house, has been broken into and it has been forced to give up Lazarus four days dead. Let us therefore note that it is in this joy of the LORD’s victory over hell already begun in His raising of Lazarus from the dead, that a harlot comes into the house of Simon the leper, in Bethany, to anoint the feet of Christ, as the LORD says, for His burial; that is, she is proclaiming His death.
She is weeping, but now we can see that hers are not the tears of bitter grief without hope. They are the tears of a visceral contrition welling up from her heart that has experienced the Savior’s merciful love for mankind that is sharper than any two-edged sword, that pierces all the way into the heart not to condemn but to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart, not to cast out but to diagnose the sins that have slain her, the passions that have killed her in order to heal the division of soul and spirit, to burst her bonds, and to call her forth from out of her imprisonment in the tomb of her transgressions, to repentance as Lazarus was called forth from the Tomb.
If, as the LORD says, the harlot is preparing the LORD’s body for burial by washing His feet with her warm tears of contrition, and wiping them with her hair, and anointing His feet with myrrh, then she is proclaiming His death; she is proclaiming her salvation by the almighty power of His mercy and compassion; for by His death He crushes the head of the serpent that has bound her in the lust of harlotry. He opens her grave and raises her up from the house of death that goes down to hell and He leads her onto the better and changeless Path that ascends to God. As He transfigures Bethany into Jerusalem, He transfigures the harlot into a “wise and holy harlot.” In Holy Baptism, He marries her; and in the Living, “nuptial” Waters of the Font, He cleanses her of her sins. He clothes her with His wedding garment. And now He calls out to her to draw near in the fear of God with faith and in love and to come into the house of Simon the leper where He is present, in Bethany, to the marriage Feast of Holy Eucharist; and He gives to her Himself in His Body and Blood, the Resurrection and the Life that came forth from His side pierced with a spear as blood and water, as the “incarnation” of His uncreated Life that is the Light of men. And He transfigures her into one of the “wise virgins.”
Dear faithful, having been buried with Christ through Baptism, and having been granted immortal life by His Resurrection, from the house of Simon the leper in Bethany Today, we now go forth into Holy Week as harlots who have been redeemed and cleansed, clothed in the wedding garment. We carry our palms and branches as tokens of Our LORD’s victory by which He has destroyed our death by His death and given us life, proclaiming at the marriage feast of the Divine Liturgy – as so many ‘wise and holy harlots’ transfigured into ‘wise virgins,’ as so many Lazaruses raised from death to life in the Church’s sacramental mysteries – proclaiming His death till He comes, His death by which sin, death, and hell have been destroyed, His death by which we have all been delivered from the house of the harlot, the house of death, from the corruption that is in the world through lust, in the joy of His Holy Resurrection found already here, Today, even here in Bethany, here in this world of misery and depression. Amen!
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Matthew 21.18-43
Shortly, we will venerate the Icon and sing the beautiful Hymn of Light: ‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; and I have no wedding garment that I may enter! O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’ What is the Bridal Chamber? What is the wedding garment?
Do you know that your Holy Baptism, when you were united to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection, is the Spiritual Marriage of the Church? Raised from the Font, the heavens were opened to you. You were clothed in the Robe of Light, which was Christ Himself. This is the ‘wedding garment.’ When you drew near the Chalice in the fear of God, with faith and love, you partook of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb.
From the moment of your baptism, when heaven was opened to you, have there not been moments in the worship of the Church when the beauty of the Church’s hymns and prayers, the fragrance of her incense, the serene countenance of the holy icons gazing down on you, the spiritual nobility and majesty of the Divine Liturgy, seized your soul and opened to you, if only for an instant, a spiritual Beauty not of this world, and there stirred within you, as it did in Solomon, a visceral love for that Beauty and a longing to make the Wisdom of God your spouse? (Wisd 8.2)
Might this be a vision of the bridal chamber that was opened to you at your baptism?
‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior! And I have no wedding garment that I may enter!’ As Lazarus was clothed in grave clothes, soiled and stinking from his being four days in the tomb, do we not see, if ever a vision of the bridal chamber is opened to us, that we have no wedding garment? Our garments are soiled and stinking grave clothes.
The wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism is Christ the LORD. The LORD, says the Psalmist, is my life and my salvation. And St Paul says, Christ is my life. Christ Himself says to Mary and Martha: I am the Resurrection and the Life.
From this, we can see that the garment is an image of the life we are living; and there are two garments, two lives we may choose to live or choose to put on as we choose to put on a garment. There is the garment of the life of this world that is passing away, sewn with threads of corruption spun from the passions, from the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, from covetousness, which is idolatry. Its patterns and designs are cut out from the lustful thoughts and impure images, the fantasies and desires that occupy the mind.
Then there is the life of Christ, the wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism. If I have no wedding garment that I may enter the sacred bridal chamber of the Heavenly Bridegroom, can you see that it’s because I have given my soul to many husbands; I have chosen Caesar to be my king; I have given myself to the idols of the passions—gluttony, lust, greed, anger and the rest—and that the garments I have chosen to wear are the grave clothes of the corruption that is in the world through lust and covetousness?
‘Despising the divine commands, my soul,’ Mother Church calls out to us at Friday Matins of last week, ‘by thine own choice, thou hast surrendered thyself to corruption. Sunk in slumber through thy many trespasses, thou hast covered with filth the garment that God wove for thee, and made thyself unfit for the wedding of the King. Therefore, cry to the Savior: Tear in pieces my sackcloth and clothe me with gladness.’ (LTS 306)
You have chosen to come to this Bridegroom Matins service. You have chosen to come into the presence of the Bridegroom. You have chosen to draw near the Bridal Chamber; and the Bridegroom comes to us in our filthy grave clothes as He came to Lazarus in Bethany. I think we may say that in the beauty of these Bridegroom Matins, we hear Him crying to each one of us: ‘Come forth!’ Rouse yourself in the tomb of your heart. Hear, feel, the Bridegroom’s voice calling to you. Leave the grave clothes, the garment of this worldly life behind you. What keeps us from putting on the garment of the Savior’s divine commandments? Is it not our own choice to keep wearing the grave clothes of this life? I love those who love me, says the Bridegroom. Those who seek me diligently will find me! Nothing prevents us from choosing to heed the Bridegroom’s call, to rise up and come forth in the repentance of a broken and contrite heart, that the Bridegroom may illumine the vesture of our soul and save us and receive us, clothed again in the wedding garment of our baptism, into the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Resurrection. Amen!
Behold the Bridegroom comes at Midnight!’ Midnight is that ‘instant’ when, ‘in the twinkling of an eye,’ (1 Cor 15.52) the old passes away and the ‘dead are raised incorruptible, and we are changed.’ This change doesn’t just happen. It happens because the Bridegroom comes at Midnight and consummates His union with us, the children of flesh and blood, in the ‘bridal chamber.’ But the Church shows the Bridegroom consummating His union with us in the tomb. For there, having shared in our conception and birth through His Virgin Mother (Gal 4.4), He now shares in our death (Heb 2.14) in the flesh He received from Her, and it is in that instant that ‘we are changed.’
We find the divine mystery of Midnight, then, in the bridal chamber; and we find the bridal chamber in that ‘point’ in our inner man where we are dead. The bridal chamber, that is to say, is found in our heart, ‘for the real death is within, in the heart, and is concealed, and it is the inner man that perishes.’ [Macarius Hom XV.39, 125]
If the bridal chamber is in the heart, then it is in our true ‘self’; for ‘the heart is deep, beyond all things, and it is the man.’ [Jer 17.9] In the bridal chamber, then, we come upon our true self as the image of God. In this image, we yearn to attain to the likeness of God. And this character of the imago Dei which, as Origen wrote, constitutes our very essence, itself reveals that, by nature, we yearn to be one with the Bridegroom in the bridal chamber of our heart; but if Christ is Himself the Image of God in whom we came to be and in whom we move and have our being, then we are given to see that the bridal chamber of our heart comes to be and has its essence and movement from outside itself, in ekstasis, in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD Jesus Christ our God and Savior.
Illumined by the light of this doctrine of the Church, we begin to know ourselves. We see that the essential movement of our heart is the erotic yearning to belong not to ourselves but to the Bridegroom who comes at Midnight.
And so, when the mind that has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom in its heart learns that the Bridegroom is coming at Midnight, it rouses itself. It hastens to descend into the bridal chamber of the heart to cry out: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, O God! Through the Theotokos, have mercy on me!’ For the soul, if she only knows about God in her head, she is still dead and her heart is still stone. The soul who longs to live is the soul who longs to know God directly; but ‘there is no direct knowledge of God without an exceedingly great love, and such love does not come from the head. It must come from the heart.’ [Art of Prayer 20] And so the soul hastens to descend with her mind into the bridal chamber of her heart, for she longs to receive Him and to cleave to Him, to become bone of His bones and flesh of His flesh, so that it is no longer she who lives but the Bridegroom who lives in her.
And the Bridegroom comes. He comes to us in our own flesh and blood through the woman [Gal 4.4]. He comes to us in the Bridal Chamber of the All-Holy Virgin’s sacred womb, in the inmost sanctuary of His Living Temple. Knitting Her pure blood into the ‘schema,’ the ‘garment’ of man [Phil 2.8], He clothed Himself in our flesh and blood and was no more ashamed to call us ‘brethren.’ [Heb 2.11]
And when the soul darkened and weighed down by her many sins, learns that He has come into the ‘house’ [Lk 7.37ff.] of her own flesh and blood [Heb 2.14], she comes to Him with an alabaster jar of perfume, and she stands behind Him weeping. She wets His pure feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair. She kisses them, she pours perfume on them, and through her tears, she prays to Him softly: ‘Thy bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; but I have no wedding garment that I may enter. O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’
And the Savior, ‘spellbound as it were by goodness, love and longing, relinquishes His utter transcendence’ [St Maximos Philo 281] to the point of death on the Cross. Partaking of our death, the Bridegroom breathes out His Spirit on the Cross [exepneusen, Lk 23.46] and destroys the death that separated us from His love in the bridal chamber of our heart;’ [Heb 2.14-15, Rom 8.39]. His Body was ‘placed in the tomb,’ the Tomb was ‘changed’ into the Bridal Chamber, ‘and the Sabbath dawned,’ says St Luke [epephosken, Lk 23.54]. And in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD’s Tomb, the soul was enlightened, and the heart that before was a tomb sealed off by a stone was ‘changed’ in that instant into a bridal chamber and into a heart of flesh, a living heart!
The wedding garment? It is Christ Himself, whose Light we put on when we were raised from the Font, having united ourselves to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection. Can you see, then, that the Baptismal Font is the bridal chamber? And can you see that the Bridal Chamber is the Church? For the Church is Christ’s Body that He received from the pure blood of the Virgin, and in this Body, we are fashioned anew as children of God in the mystery of His Sabbath Rest, in the Tomb of our death that has received the Body of Him Who Is the Resurrection and the Life. When we pursue the Bridegroom in the baptismal Font, we receive His Seed into our dead, stony heart, and in that instant, our heart is ‘changed’ into a heart of flesh, a living heart; and we are ‘changed’ from children of blood born of the desires of the flesh into children of God born from above in the Love of the Holy Spirit.
From an ancient Christian text, we come upon this ancient biblical rubric of the Church: ‘By striving in the visible Church, we enter the invisible Church of the heart and the invisible Church of Heaven.’ (Liber Graduum XII) In the coming week, on the loom of this biblical rubric, we will weave the sights, sounds, movements, smells, all the elements of creation, both visible and invisible, into a wedding garment that can be seen, heard, smelled, and touched with the bodily senses. Who would not want to be clothed in this wedding garment who has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom? For ‘He is the Beautiful and the Good whom all things seek at every opportunity, and there is no being who does not participate in Him, and He attracts the [erotic] desire of all who are drawn towards Him, and He thirsts to be thirsted for, He longs to be longed for, and He loves to be loved!’ [Philo II 280-81]
And if we would clothe the hidden man of the heart with the death of Christ made visible for us in the rites of Holy Week, then would we come invisibly into that ‘Midnight’ when the Bridegroom comes, and we are changed. We become like the children with the palms of victory. They are the emblems of the Cross of Christ our King. And on Pascha Night, we follow, mystically, our King who goes forth from the Tomb like a Bridegroom in procession. He is raising us from our graves and bringing us to our own land into the Jerusalem on high as His prophets foretold. [Eze 37.13-14]
For, if we have received into the bridal chamber of our heart, in the sacramental mysteries of the Church, the Seed of the ‘heavenly man,’ then we carry the Bridegroom’s death in our mortal body. [2 Cor 4.10] That is, we carry the Bridegroom’s love in our body—for His death is the supreme manifestation, the final Incarnation of His extreme humility and compassion in which He created the world, and in which He recreated it when we had fallen. And if we tend that Seed and cultivate it through the ascetical disciplines of the Church, the Cross of Christ the Church gives us to take up if we want to follow Him—for they are the ‘flower of abstinence that grows from the wood of His Cross’ [LT 231]—then yearning for the Bridegroom begins to grow in us into a tree of life, and love for the Bridegroom begins to reign in our mortal bodies. We tend that Seed by taking up the ascetical disciplines of the Church, our cross, our ‘palm of victory.’ By the Grace of the Holy Spirit that shines in them, we strive to be obedient to sin and its carnal desires no more. We strive to lose our life for His sake; that is, in our love for the Bridegroom, we now present our bodies to Him as instruments of righteousness and no more to sin as instruments of unrighteousness. [Rm 6.12-13] Now the Bridegroom’s death is swallowing our death; now our mortal and perishable bodies are putting on the immortal and imperishable ‘wedding garment’ of the Bridal Chamber; now the Life of the Bridegroom begins to manifest itself even now in our mortal bodies [2 Cor 4.10]. It manifests itself in the hope that begins to form in us from the Seed of God’s love poured out into our hearts in the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Church. This is a real and living hope; and it is the pledge of our inheritance, which is our own land that is not of this world. It is the kingdom of heaven with all its glorious riches, found through the doors of Midnight in the deep, beyond all things, in our deep heart, in the mystery of the bridal chamber. Amen!
