Orthodox Great Lent: time for rediscovery, reflection on history

rev. cosmin antonescu

Orthodox Great Lent:

time for rediscovery, reflection on history

For some of you, the time of the Great Lent, or the 40 days of fasting previous to the Resurrection of our Lord, started few weeks ago; for some other Christians, it never started and probably will never start because of your convictions.

No matter what way you choose to participate in the Resurrection of our Lord, I wish to all of you, from the bottom of my heart, that the love of God and the Holy Spirit to fill your hearts with joy and love for God and one another.

For the Orthodox Christians, the Great Lent will start Monday and end at the Holy Pascha, April 27.

On Easter, we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened once for all in the history, but also as something that happens to us every year. Christ gave us the gift of life through his Resurrection. This gift alters our attitude towards everything in this world, including death. Because of that, at Easter time we rediscover every year whose children we are, whereas Lent is our preparation for that rediscovery.

For some people, fasting consists in a symbolic “giving up” of something; for some others, it is a scrupulous observance of dietary regulations. The fasting includes both of them but is not limited to them. For the Orthodox Christianity, the purpose of fasting is to rediscover our calling as images of God, as children of God. To understand better, I will make a comparison between Adam, the first man, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The mistake that Adam and Eve made in paradise, by eating from the forbidden tree, is not simply that they eat from a fruit and disobeyed God for which they were punished. But they changed the very relationship between themselves and the world. The world was given to man as food, as means of life. In itself, food has no life and cannot give life. Only God has life and is life. Thus to eat, to be alive, to know God and be in communion with him are one and the same thing.

The unfathomable tragedy of Adam is that he ate for its own sake. More than that he ate apart from God in order to be independent of him. He believed that food had life in itself and that he, by partaking of that food, could be like God. To put it very simply, he believed in food. This is the sad part of the humanity history.

But the bright side is more important. Christ is called in the Holy Bible as the New Adam. Why? Because he came to repair the damage inflicted on life by Adam. You remember from the Holy Bible that before the Lord Jesus started to preach “He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry.” (Matthew chapter 4, verse 2).

Hunger is that state in which we realize our dependence on something else. We have the sensation and we realize that we don’t have life in ourselves. It is the time when we face the ultimate question: on what my life depend? We can say that Satan came to two hungry men — Adam and Christ — and said: Eat, for your hunger is the proof that you depend entirely on food, that your life is food.

Adam believed and ate; but Christ rejected the temptation and said: Man shall not live by bread alone but by God. He refused to accept that cosmic lie which Satan imposed on the world. By doing this, Christ restored that relationship between food, life and God which Adam broke. Lord Jesus rebuked Satan with the word of God, that’s why the central part of Great Lent Services is the word of God.

That’s why the prayer of the Church is always biblical, expressed in the language, images and symbols of the Holy Scriptures. One can say that the 40 days of Lent are, in a way, the return of the church into the spiritual situation of the Old Testament — the time before Christ, the time of repentance and expectation. Because of that in this time of 40 days, at the church services we read the Book of Psalms twice a week, instead of once as usual.

We also read at church services the entire books of Genesis — which gives us the framework of our faith. Isaiah reveals once more the great mystery of salvation through the sufferings and sacrifices of Christ and the Proverbs, which summarize the ethical teachings of the Old Testament, of the moral law and wisdom, without whose acceptance man cannot understand his alienation from God. ¬†I invite all of you who desire to experience the Resurrection of Christ here on this earthly life to join us in prayer and worship. We must rediscover our body as the temple of his presence. We must recover a religious respect for the body, for food, for the very rhythm of life. To find an orthodox church near you to attend services, visit the Web site at www.orthodoxyoungstown.org.

XThe Rev. Cosmin Antonescu is pastor of Holy Trinity Romanian Orthodox Church, 626 Wick Ave., Youngstown.