Christ is Risen!
On this beautiful Bright Tuesday, brothers and sisters, with the glory and aura of the Lord’s Resurrection so freshly radiating in our souls, I wish to share with you the penetrating and profound words of St. Justin Popovich, a Serbian Orthodox theologian who reposed in 1979 and was canonized as a Saint of the Orthodox Church in 2010.
May his inspiring words raise our souls in profound gratitude to the love and mercy of God Who has done all things for us!
“Man sentenced God to death; by His Resurrection, He sentenced man to immortality. In return for a beating, He gives an embrace; for abuse, a blessing; for death, immortality. Man never showed so much hate for God as when he crucified Him; and God never showed more love for man than when He arose. Man even wanted to reduce God to a mortal, but God by His Resurrection made man immortal. The crucified God is Risen and has killed death. Death is no more. Immortality has surrounded man and all the world. By the Resurrection of the God-Man, human nature has been led irreversibly onto the path of immortality, and has become dreadful to death itself. For before the Resurrection of Christ, death was dreadful to man, but after the Resurrection of Christ, man has become more dreadful to death. When man lives by faith in the Risen God-Man, he lives above death, out of its reach; it is a footstool for his feet: ‘O Death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory? (I Corinthians 15:55).”