All for Christ and Only for Christ

 

In the Epistle reading today from the Letter of the Holy Apostle to the Hebrews, we have a description of the conduct of the saints during their earthly lives, their sufferings and their heroic efforts to conform themselves to the Christ, Who had not even yet come into the world. Their loving endurance of all kinds of sufferings and adversities had led them to a place in the glory of that Christ, Whom they never saw, but only discerned indistinctly and from afar.

As we have been saying, the Divine Liturgy shows to us the Life of Christ from the beginning of the world to the consummation of all things. In this symbolic world, we see and experience Christ living and acting in His Church, especially in the saints, those who lived before His birth in Bethlehem of Judea, but also all those who have been conformed to Him through His Body, the Church, in the ages since His ascension into Heaven. Indeed, in the Divine Liturgy, the whole Church is always assembled together in its journey to ever greater participation in the Kingdom of Heaven. At the very beginning of the Liturgy, we proclaim our common destination: "Blessed be the Kingdom of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

If we turn our eyes to the heart of the Liturgy, we can see most clearly what is asked of us, in order to inherit that Heavenly Kingdom. It is true for our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, as it is for most Churches of Byzantine heritage, that, even if people don't know anything else about the meaning and significance of the Divine Liturgy, they know that the Great Entrance represents the burial procession of the Lord. The burial procession of the Lord is the centerpiece of the Divine Liturgy, because by it we are led to the Lord's life-giving tomb to share in His resurrection through communion in His Body and Blood.

Thus, in the Great Entrance of the Liturgy the prepared gifts of bread and wine are an icon, a sacred image, of the dead body of Christ. This same image will become in truth the risen Body of Christ in the consecration of the sacred gifts.

Yet, the Great Entrance is a good opportunity to reflect on the path of the Lord into suffering and death, because this is the path of all the saints. It must be our path as well, because there is no path but Christ. The Great Entrance is a commitment moment. There is the image of the Lord being carried to the tomb. Are we ready? Do we love the Lord Jesus enough to follow Him to suffering and death? Are we ready to show the same heroic endurance that Paul describes in the epistle reading, pertaining to those saints who had gone before him?

If we reflect further, we will quickly realize that these very salient questions were all the more apparent in the first ages of Christianity, for then, in the Early Church, every Christian was called to take his or her life in hand. Every attendance at the Divine Liturgy was a life and death decision, because being a Christian was a capital crime. Every person who attended the Holy Liturgy was ready to literally lay down his or her life in witness to Christ. Because all the attendants at the Liturgy were under the same threat of death, many of them were closer, more intimate with one another than with the members of their own natural families. Many thousands of them did indeed lay down their lives in witness to Christ.

Those same martyrs and many more since then are attendants at every Divine Liturgy since, along with the angels and the great prophets and saints that Saint Paul mentions in the epistle reading today. They are here among us to help us in making the selfsame commitment to Christ: All for Christ and only for Christ.

It is a serious commitment to be sure, but the yoke is easy and the burden is light. If we commit to follow the Lord Jesus to suffering and death, then it is a certainty that we will see the glory of the Resurrection, both in the Divine and Holy Liturgy, wherein we will be strengthened and nourished with it, but also in the fullness of the Heavenly Kingdom when this world passes away.

The key is our mind and our heart. If we raise our minds and our hearts to the things that we experience here, our minds and hearts will remain attached to those same eternal things there, in the Kingdom's fullness. It is a simple thing to continually renew our attention, to bring back our concentration to the contemplation of the Life of Christ, to "lay aside all earthly cares" as the Liturgy admonishes us to do.