Dying and Rising with Christ
Vassilios Papavassiliou
Ancient Faith Publishing
Chesterton, Indiana
Meditations for Holy Week: Dying and Rising with Christ
Copyright © 2014 by Theodore Christopher Vasilis
All Rights Reserved
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version, © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.
Published by:
Ancient Faith Publishing
(formerly known as Conciliar Press)
A Division of Ancient Faith Ministries
P.O. Box 748
Chesterton, IN 46304
ISBN 10: 1-936270-88-9
ISBN 13: 978-1-936270-88-0
A Guide to Great and Holy Week
PART I: The Bridegroom Service
4 Increase Your Talent of Grace
6 For Healing of Soul and Body
PART II: The Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection
9 The Suffering Servant and the King of Glory
10 The Royal Hours and the Deposition
12 The Descent into Hades and the Resurrection
Holy Week, or Great Week, is the heart of the Christian Orthodox Faith and the center of the yearly cycle of Orthodox feasts. Every year, our churches are packed at Holy Week, and come the last three days, they are bursting at the seams with both those who go to church every Sunday and those who attend only on special occasions. Holy Week brings the pious and the not-so-pious together in a way the most ambitious missionaries can only dream of. But Holy Week does not stand alone: It follows on from Great Lent, and the themes of the latter half of Great Lent are continued in the first half of Holy Week.
Holy Week begins with the first of three Matins services known as the Bridegroom Service. This service belongs to Great and Holy Monday but is usually celebrated on the evening of Palm Sunday. Each liturgical day of the Orthodox Church begins at sunset—the evening prior to the day in question. This practice of reckoning the evening as the beginning of the new day is an ancient Jewish tradition the Church has preserved in its system of worship. In the Creation narrative of Genesis, we read, “So the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen. 1:5). Therefore, each Sunday begins with Vespers on Saturday evening, followed by Matins in the morning (in monasteries, it is held in the small hours of the morning).
However, in Holy Week, the usual pattern of holding Vespers in the evening and Matins in the morning is typically reversed. Thus in many parishes the evening services of Holy Week are Matins services, ...
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About Meditations for Holy Week: Dying and Rising with ChristCombining liturgical and devotional insights with a warm, accessible style, Archimandrite Vassilios offers these meditations on the services of Holy Week—helping the reader enter fully into this most rich and intense period of the Christian year. Including many hymns and readings from the liturgies, he reflects on the “profound depth of these seven great and holy days of our Orthodox Church,” that offer reintroduction to “the very essence of Christian Orthodoxy.” |
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