John Brady

April 20, 2023

Give me this stranger

 
Krug Resurrection.jpg


Holy Week and Pascha are, liturgically, about the same every year, but each year brings us new impressions, memories, and (we hope) insights and growth.

This hymn from Matins of Holy Friday has haunted me since hearing it again this year:

SEEING THAT the sun had hidden its rays and the veil of the Temple had been rent 
at the death of the Saviour, 
Joseph approached Pilate and pleaded with him crying and saying,
Give me this stranger, 
   who from his youth has wandered like a stranger.
Give me this stranger, 
   whom his kinsmen killed in hatred like a stranger.
Give me this stranger 
   at whom I wonder, beholding him as a guest of death.
Give me this stranger 
   who knoweth how to take in the poor and strangers.
Give me this stranger 
   whom the Jews in envy estranged from the world.
Give me this stranger 
   that I may bury him in a tomb, 
   who being a stranger hath no place whereon to lay his head.
Give me this stranger, 
   to whom his Mother, beholding him dead, shouted crying, 
   “O my Son and my God, even though my vitals be wounded, 
   and my heart burns, as I behold thee dead, yet trusting in thy Resurrection, I magnify thee.”
In these words the honorable Joseph pleaded with Pilate, 
took the Saviour’s body, and with fear wrapped it in linen and balm, 
placing thee in a new tomb, O thou who grantest to all everlasting life and the great mercy.

This Resurrectional hymn, a kind of Paschal Creed, is very familiar, but its weaving together of the Cross and the Resurrection into one triumphant work have struck me especially this season.

HAVING BEHELD the Resurrection of Christ,
let us worship the holy Lord Jesus, the only sinless one.
We worship thy Cross, O Christ,
and we praise and glorify thy holy Resurrection;
for thou art our God, and we know none other than thee;
we call on thy Name.
Come, O ye faithful: let us venerate Christ's holy Resurrection,
for, behold! through the Cross joy has come into all the world.
Let us ever bless the Lord, praising his Resurrection,
for by enduring the Cross for us, 
he has destroyed death by death!

Behold! Through the Cross, joy has come into all the world!

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image: Christ's descent into Hades, by Fr. Gregory Krug

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About John Brady

Occasional thoughts, mostly about the Orthodox Church.