The Resurrection — the Harrowing of Hades

Chapter XI

Pascha

The Feast of Feasts — Passover, Holy Week, and the empty tomb

A Protestant who has only ever known Easter Sunday morning has known lilies, a full church, the best choir of the year and the pastor's best sermon, followed by brunch. What he has not known is a tradition in which the Resurrection is not a morning but a night; not a service but a week; not one feast among several but the fixed point from which every other date in the year is counted. In an Orthodox parish the thing begins ten weeks out, tightens through seven weeks of fasting, and then runs continuously from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon without really stopping. At around half past eleven on Saturday night every light in the building is put out. Somewhere near midnight one candle comes through the doors of the sanctuary, the whole congregation goes outside into the dark holding unlit candles, and a few minutes later several hundred people come back in through doors that have been shut against them, singing a single sentence about death that they have not sung for a year. This chapter is about what that sentence claims, where the Church got it, why the date is almost never the same as the one on the office calendar, and what the icon on the stand by the door is actually a picture of.

The first thing a Protestant notices is that nobody says Easter. The signs outside the church say Pascha, the greeting cards say Pascha, the priest says Pascha, and the reason is not that Orthodoxy prefers foreign words for their own sake. Pascha is Greek, Πάσχα, an indeclinable noun that Greek took over from Aramaic paschā, which is Hebrew pesach, Passover. It is the word the New Testament uses, and it uses it about twenty-nine times, and every single occurrence means the Passover: the feast the disciples ask about in Mark 14:12, the feast Jesus goes up to in John 2:13, the feast Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 5:7. When the Church of the first centuries wanted a name for the annual commemoration of the death and rising of Christ, it did not coin one. It used the name of the Jewish feast, unaltered, and it has never stopped. That is why most of Europe still calls the day by a form of the same word — Pâques in French, Pasqua in Italian, Pascua in Spanish, Paști in Romanian, Пасха in Russian, Påsk in Swedish. English and German are the outliers.

Where the English word came from is a smaller and less exciting question than the internet usually makes it. The only ancient source for it is the Venerable Bede, writing in Northumbria around 725, in his treatise on the reckoning of time. Listing the old English month-names, he says that April was called Eosturmonath, and that it was named after a goddess called Eostre to whom the Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in that month; the Christian festival, he says, kept the old name. Bede is the only witness to Eostre's existence. Jacob Grimm later reconstructed a continental equivalent, Ostara, from the German Ostern, and some modern scholars accept the goddess as genuine while others think Bede reasonably but wrongly inferred a deity from a month-name. The honest position is that we do not know. What should be said clearly is that nothing sinister follows either way. Bede was not describing a compromise with paganism; he was explaining why his own countrymen used a native word where everyone else used a Hebrew one. Orthodox Christians in English-speaking countries say Pascha not because Easter is a tainted word but because Pascha still has Passover inside it, and that is the claim they want to make every time they open their mouths.

The Fathers had their own confusion about the word, and it is worth knowing because it shows how early the theology was settled. Greek-speaking Christians who did not know Hebrew heard in Pascha their own verb paschein, to suffer, and concluded that the feast was named for the Passion. The equation appears in Melito of Sardis, whose homily On Pascha was written around 160 to 170 and is the oldest surviving Paschal sermon we have; it appears in Irenaeus and in Tertullian, and it was still circulating in the fourth century. Gregory the Theologian, in his Oration 45 on Holy Pascha, corrects it: the name, he notes, is Hebrew, and it means a passing over, and Greek speakers had simply assimilated it to a word of their own that sounded similar. Gregory was right on the philology. But the reason the mistake was so easy to make, and so slow to die, is that the Church had never regarded the Passion and the Passover as two subjects. To a fourth-century Greek bishop it was not strange that the word for Passover should mean suffering, because the lamb of the Passover was the thing that suffered.

That is the whole claim of the feast, and it can be put in a sentence. The Resurrection is not a separate holiday that happens to fall near Passover. It is Passover, kept by the Church on the ground that the thing Passover was for has now happened, and the lamb has been identified by name.

Once that is granted, the shape of the Orthodox year follows from it. The calendar has two cycles running at once. The fixed cycle carries the feasts tied to dates — the Nativity on 25 December, Theophany on 6 January, the Annunciation on 25 March, the Dormition on 15 August. The movable cycle carries everything reckoned from Pascha, and it is much larger than a Western Christian expects. Ten weeks before Pascha the Church opens a service book called the Triodion and does not close it until Holy Saturday. On the night of Pascha it opens another, the Pentecostarian, which carries the fifty days to Pentecost and the week beyond. The eight-week cycle of musical tones in which every Sunday of the year is sung restarts on the Sunday after Pascha. The Sunday epistles and Gospels are numbered from Pentecost, which is itself numbered from Pascha, so that a parish bulletin in October will say Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost and thereby tell you, if you care to count backwards, exactly when Pascha fell. The Orthodox year has a movable spine, and the vertebra it hangs from is this night.

The ranking is explicit. Orthodoxy numbers twelve Great Feasts, and the Nativity of Christ is one of them. Pascha is not on the list. It is not left off because it is minor; it is left off because the list is of feasts, and Pascha is in a category by itself, called in the service books the Feast of Feasts and the Festival of Festivals. The Paschal Canon says so in the eighth ode, and the phrase is not a flourish but a rubric: everything else in the year is measured against this and found to be smaller. A Western Christian should feel the contrast honestly. In Britain and America the cultural centre of gravity of the Christian year moved to Christmas at some point in the nineteenth century and has stayed there; Easter is a Sunday, Christmas is a season. In Greece, Romania, Russia, Serbia and the Arab Middle East it did not move. Pascha is the night people fly home for.

There is one more piece of evidence that a Protestant reader has already been living with without noticing. The Orthodox do not regard Sunday as the day of rest relocated. They regard it as a weekly Pascha, and the languages say so: the Greek Kyriakē means the Lord's day, and the Russian voskresenye, the ordinary word a Russian uses for Sunday in a train timetable, simply means resurrection. Every Saturday evening the Church serves a vigil whose hymns are resurrection hymns, in which one of eleven resurrection Gospels is read in rotation, and the cycle of tones that governs the music of that vigil is counted from Pascha. So the annual feast is not an anniversary dropped into an otherwise ordinary year. It is the full-scale version of what the Church does fifty-two times a year in miniature, which means that a Protestant who has gathered on Sunday morning all his life has been keeping a small Pascha every week and calling it church.

On usage: Orthodox Christians in North America say both words and nobody is corrected for saying Easter. Parish signs advertise Easter services because that is what the neighbourhood understands, and the festal greeting cards say Pascha. The service books in English generally use Pascha, and the full title in the rubrics is the Holy and Great Sunday of Pascha, or Great and Holy Pascha.

Everything the Church does in Holy Week is an argument about one chapter of the Old Testament, and the argument is only visible if the chapter is read slowly. Exodus 12 is not a general statement that God saves His people. It is a set of instructions of almost fussy specificity, and the Church's claim is that the specificity is the point: that the instructions were written to fit an event that had not happened yet, and that when the event happened it fitted them down to the detail of which bones could be broken. A Protestant reader who has heard Christ called the Lamb of God all his life has usually not been shown the instructions. They are worth going through in order.

The animal is chosen on the tenth day of the first month and kept alive in the household until the fourteenth (Exodus 12:3, 6). It is to be without blemish, a male of the first year, taken from the sheep or the goats (12:5). It is killed at evening on the fourteenth — the Hebrew idiom is between the two evenings, which in later practice meant the afternoon, and in the Temple period the lambs were slaughtered in the court from roughly mid-afternoon onward. The blood is caught and applied with a bunch of hyssop to the two doorposts and the lintel of the house (12:7, 22). The flesh is roasted with fire, not boiled and not raw, and eaten the same night with unleavened bread and bitter herbs (12:8, 9). Nothing is to be left until morning; what is not eaten is burned (12:10). It is eaten standing, dressed to travel, in haste (12:11). Nobody carries any of it outside the house, and no bone of it is broken (12:46, repeated at Numbers 9:12). And the promise attached to the blood on the door is that when the destroyer goes through Egypt, the house marked with blood will be passed over (12:13, 23).

Two details in that list are worth a moment before we get to the fulfilment. The first is that the Septuagint, which is the Old Testament the Orthodox Church reads and the one this site follows, does something interesting with verse 13. The Hebrew uses the verb from which the noun pesach is formed — I will pass over you. The Greek translators rendered it with a verb of covering or sheltering, and left a verb of passing by at verse 23, evidently hearing in the Hebrew idiom a promise of protection rather than mere avoidance. English translations of the Septuagint differ over how to render it. The second detail is the hyssop. Exodus 12:22 specifies a bunch of hyssop for applying the blood, and hyssop is a small, soft-leaved herb, an odd instrument for anything. Of the four evangelists only John mentions hyssop at the Cross, and he mentions it in exactly the place where a reader of Exodus 12 would want it: the sponge of sour wine is put on hyssop and held up to the mouth of the dying Christ (John 19:29).

The myrrh-bearing women, and the angel on the stone

The fulfilment, verse by verse

The identification is not a later inference by the Church. It is made in the New Testament, by several writers, in different registers. It begins with the Forerunner, who does not say that Jesus is like a lamb but points at a man walking past and gives him the definite article.

Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!John 1:29, NKJV

Paul makes it flatly, in a letter written in the mid-fifties to a congregation of Greeks in Corinth with no obvious interest in Jewish festivals, and he makes it in passing, as something they already know. He is arguing about a moral scandal in the church, tells them to purge out the old leaven, and gives the reason in a subordinate clause: for indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us (1 Corinthians 5:7). Then he draws a conclusion that is grammatically an imperative — therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (5:8). It should be said that scholars disagree about whether that sentence refers to an annual Christian Pascha already being kept in the 50s or is a metaphor for the Christian life as a whole. The wording will carry either reading. What it will not carry is any suggestion that Paul had to work to connect the Cross with Passover; he assumes the connection and builds on top of it.

John is the most deliberate of the four. His chronology places the crucifixion on the day of preparation, so that Christ dies in the afternoon while the Passover lambs are being killed. He says the Supper takes place before the feast of the Passover (13:1); he notes that the accusers would not enter Pilate's headquarters lest they be defiled and so be unable to eat the Passover (18:28); he dates the sentence explicitly — now it was the Preparation Day of the Passover, and about the sixth hour (19:14); and he says the coming Sabbath was a high day (19:31). Then he does something no other evangelist does. He reports that the soldiers broke the legs of the two thieves and did not break the legs of Jesus, and he stops the narrative to tell you why he has told you.

For these things were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled, “Not one of His bones shall be broken.”John 19:36, NKJV

There is a real question about which Scripture John means, and the honest answer is that it may be both. The command not to break a bone of the Passover lamb is at Exodus 12:46 and Numbers 9:12; the promise that the Lord keeps all the bones of the righteous man, not one of them being broken, is at Psalm 33:20 [34:20]. John's wording is closer to the Psalm and his subject is unmistakably the lamb. Commentators have argued the point for centuries without resolving it, and the Church's hymnography uses both.

The chronology, however, is genuinely contested, and a chapter like this should say so rather than tidy it. Mark, Matthew and Luke present the Last Supper as a Passover meal: the disciples ask where they are to prepare the Passover, and they prepare it (Mark 14:12-16). John, as we have seen, has the crucifixion falling on the day of preparation, which would put the official Passover meal on the Friday evening, after the death. Scholars have proposed many ways through: that the Synoptics and John are using the word Passover with different extensions, the wider festival week against the meal itself; that two calendars were in use, one Pharisaic and one Sadducean, or a solar calendar of the kind found at Qumran, so that different groups killed lambs on different days; that John has adjusted the chronology theologically; that the Synoptics have. No proposal has carried the field. What the Orthodox services do is hold both without harmonising them. The Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Thursday celebrates the Mystical Supper as the Passover, and the services of Holy Friday place the death at the hour of the lambs, and no service book explains how the two fit.

One long-running division between East and West grows directly out of this question. The Orthodox use leavened bread in the Eucharist; the Latin Church since the ninth or tenth century has used unleavened wafers. The Byzantine argument was partly Johannine — that the Supper preceded the days of unleavened bread — and partly symbolic, that the risen Christ is living bread and not flat bread. It became one of the loudest charges traded in 1054 between Cardinal Humbert and Michael Keroularios, and Leo of Ohrid had already written against the azymes before that. It is an unedifying chapter of history, but it is evidence of how much weight the calendar of Passover has carried.

Why the Church reads Scripture this way

A Protestant reader may find all of this unfamiliar not because he disputes any single identification but because the method itself is strange to him. He is used to reading the Old Testament for history, for law and for prophecy — for predictions in words that are then matched to events. What he is watching here is different: events, objects and institutions in the old covenant being read as advance drawings of Christ, with no prediction in words attached. This is called typology, and two things should be said about it. The first is that the Church did not invent it; it learned it from the New Testament, which uses the technical vocabulary openly. Paul calls Adam a type of the One who was to come (Romans 5:14); he says the events of the Exodus happened as types for us and were written for our instruction (1 Corinthians 10:6, 11); Peter calls baptism the antitype of the flood (1 Peter 3:21); Hebrews calls the Law a shadow of the good things to come (10:1). Paul even reads Sarah and Hagar as two covenants and says outright that he is speaking figuratively (Galatians 4:21-31).

The second thing is that Christ is reported as having done it Himself, and as having taught the apostles to. He compares His death and rising to Jonah in the fish (Matthew 12:40), His crucifixion to the bronze serpent lifted on a pole (John 3:14), His flesh to the manna in the wilderness (John 6:31-51), and His body to the Temple (John 2:19-21). On the road to Emmaus, on the afternoon of the Resurrection, Luke says that beginning at Moses and all the Prophets He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself (Luke 24:27). Luke does not record the content of that exposition. The Church has always understood its own typological reading of the Old Testament as, in substance, an attempt to say what was said on that road.

The clearest single statement of the principle is Paul's, and it is short enough to memorise. Writing against those who were judging the Colossians over festivals and new moons and sabbaths, he says that these are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ (Colossians 2:16-17). The Greek word behind substance is sōma, body. A shadow is not a lie and it is not a coincidence; it is the shape of a real body cast on the ground by a real light, and the shadow is accurate. That is precisely the status the Orthodox tradition gives the Passover, the Temple, the sacrifices and the priesthood. They were not cancelled as errors; they were fulfilled as drawings. And it is worth noticing that the very passage a Protestant is most likely to quote against the Orthodox observance of festivals is the passage that supplies the theory of it. Paul's argument is not that the shadows are worthless, but that a man who has the body has no business being judged by someone still measuring shadows.

Typology also has a known failure mode, and the Church argued about it seriously. Push it far enough and the literal sense of the Old Testament evaporates into allegory, every detail becoming a cipher for something spiritual, which is roughly what happened in parts of the Alexandrian tradition and which is why Origen, for all his brilliance and his enormous influence, remained a contested figure and was condemned in the sixth century. The reaction came from Antioch — Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia insisted on the historical sense and were suspicious of allegory, and Theodore in turn overcorrected and was himself condemned at the Fifth Council in 553. What the Church settled on is narrower than either: the events happened, in history, as described; and they were shaped by God to prefigure Christ. John Chrysostom, trained at Antioch, is the model — he will spend a homily on what the text plainly says and then show the figure without dissolving the history. Typology in the Orthodox sense is therefore not a licence to find whatever one likes in the Old Testament. Its controls are the New Testament's own identifications and the Church's liturgical use, which is conservative and repetitive and does not innovate.

Where the typology is chanted

None of this stays in the commentaries. It is sung, and the place to watch it happen is the Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Saturday, which in its structure is the ancient baptismal vigil of the Church. Fifteen Old Testament readings are read in sequence. The third is Exodus 12:1-11, the institution of the Passover, read verbatim in the middle of the vigil. The sixth is Exodus 13:20-15:19, the pillar of cloud and fire, the sea divided, Israel walking through on dry ground, the Egyptians drowned, and the Song of Moses at the end of it — and this reading is not merely read. Its final verses are chanted with the congregation answering each one with the refrain Let us sing to the Lord, for gloriously has He been glorified.

The Red Sea is read at a baptismal vigil for a reason Paul states in so many words. Writing to Corinth he says that our fathers were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, and were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea (1 Corinthians 10:1-2). Baptism is the crossing: water on one side of which a man is a slave in Egypt and on the other side of which he is not, with the pursuing army drowned behind him. That is why the first ode of every canon in the Orthodox books — hundreds of them, sung all year — is built on the Song of Moses at the sea, and why the Paschal Canon itself opens on that ode with the line that Christ our God has brought us from death to life and from earth to heaven. It is also why Romans 6 is the epistle of the Holy Saturday Liturgy. Paul there describes baptism not as a symbol of a decision but as a burial: as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death, buried with Him, and united with Him in the likeness of His resurrection (Romans 6:3-5). Read that epistle aloud on Holy Saturday morning, in a church containing a bier with a funeral cloth on it, and the argument makes itself.

The fourth of the fifteen readings is the entire book of Jonah, which takes about ten minutes and is one of the strangest things a visitor will ever sit through in a church. It is read because of a sentence of Christ's: as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40). Jonah is not a prediction in words; it is a man swallowed by death and vomited out alive, and Christ Himself identified it as the sign He would give. The connection is then carried into the hymnography permanently: the sixth ode of every canon is built on Jonah's prayer from the fish's belly, and the sixth ode of the Paschal Canon sings that Christ descended to the lowest parts of the earth, shattered the everlasting bars that held the prisoners fast, and on the third day rose from the grave like Jonah from the whale. The typology of section two and the icon of section eight are, at that point, the same sentence.

And the last piece of it is a date. Leviticus 23:10-11 commands that when Israel comes into the land and reaps the harvest, the first sheaf is to be brought to the priest and waved before the Lord on the day after the Sabbath of Passover week — that is, on a Sunday. Paul says that Christ is risen from the dead and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep (1 Corinthians 15:20), and the word he uses is the word for that sheaf. So the Resurrection did not merely happen near Passover. It happened on the festival day of the firstfruits, and the day the Law appointed for it was the first day of the week.

The first serious quarrel in Christian history that we can document in any detail was not about the Trinity, the canon, or the authority of bishops. It was about when to keep Pascha, and it very nearly broke the Church in the second century. The dispute is called the Quartodeciman controversy, from the Latin for fourteenth, because the churches of the Roman province of Asia — Ephesus, Smyrna, Laodicea, Hierapolis, the cities of Revelation 2 and 3 — kept the Pascha on the fourteenth day of the lunar month of Nisan, whatever day of the week that fell on. Rome, Alexandria, Palestine and Corinth kept it on the Sunday following. Both sides thought they were doing what the apostles had done, and neither side was inventing a tradition. The Asian practice put the Christian Pascha on the same day as the Jewish Passover and read it as the day of the Lamb's death; the other practice put it on the day of the Resurrection and would not move it off Sunday.

Around 154 or 155 the aged Polycarp of Smyrna, who had known John, travelled to Rome and discussed the question with Bishop Anicetus. Our source is a letter of Irenaeus preserved by Eusebius, and what it says about the outcome is the most important sentence in the whole affair. Neither could persuade the other. Anicetus could not get Polycarp to abandon what he had always kept with John and the other apostles, and Polycarp could not get Anicetus to change what he had received from the presbyters before him. So they remained in communion, Anicetus gave Polycarp the Eucharist in his own church out of respect, and Polycarp went home still keeping the fourteenth. Eusebius records the exchange in the fifth book of his Church History (V.24), and it is one of the clearest pieces of evidence we have that in the second century two churches could keep the feast on different days and still be one Church.

Forty years later Victor of Rome tried to end the arrangement. Synods were held in various provinces, most of them favouring the Sunday observance; Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, wrote back on behalf of the Asian churches in terms that are worth noticing, because he does not argue from convenience but from a list of graves. He appeals to Philip and his daughters buried at Hierapolis, to John who leaned on the Lord's breast and lies at Ephesus, to Polycarp, to Thraseas, Sagaris, Papirius and Melito, and says that all of these kept the fourteenth and that he himself, the eighth bishop of his family, will not depart from it. Victor's response, as Eusebius reports it, was to attempt to cut off the churches of Asia from the common unity and to write letters declaring them excommunicate. And then he was publicly rebuked, by name, by the man the East and West both revere as a defender of orthodoxy.

Irenaeus of Lyons, who himself kept the Sunday observance, wrote to Victor and told him bluntly that this was not the way. Eusebius says Irenaeus argued that the variation went far beyond the date — that even the length of the pre-Paschal fast differed from place to place, some fasting one day, some two, some forty hours, and that this diversity had existed among the presbyters long before their own time and had not broken the peace. Eusebius adds that other bishops rebuked Victor sharply as well. Whether Victor's excommunication ever actually took effect is not clear; Eusebius's Greek has been read both ways, and historians differ over whether a formal rupture occurred or whether the attempt collapsed under the weight of the protest. What is not in doubt is the principle Irenaeus asserted and made stick: that a difference of observance is not by itself a difference of faith, and that the bishop of Rome does not get to end the discussion by decree. Quartodeciman practice survived in pockets for another two centuries and was eventually condemned by local councils, and its disappearance was gradual rather than legislated.

What Nicaea actually settled

Almost everyone who has read anything about the calendar has been told that the First Council of Nicaea in 325 decreed that Pascha falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. That formula is what the Orthodox Church keeps, and it is what the West kept too until 1582, but it is worth being exact about where it comes from, because it does not come from the surviving acts of the council. Nicaea's twenty canons do not include a canon on Pascha. What we have instead is a letter of the Emperor Constantine, preserved by Eusebius in the Life of Constantine (III.18-19), and the council's own synodal letter to the Church of Alexandria, preserved by the historian Socrates (Church History I.9). Those documents order three things: that the whole Church keep the feast on one day; that it be kept on a Sunday and not according to the reckoning of the Jews, whom Constantine's letter discusses in language a modern reader will find ugly and which should not be softened; and that the see of Alexandria, which had the astronomers, should compute the date and that Rome should announce it to the West.

The familiar formula is the Alexandrian computation that prevailed afterwards. Alexandria used 21 March as the nominal equinox and a nineteen-year lunar cycle to fix the paschal full moon, and after a century of disagreement with Rome over particular years the Alexandrian system won. It was given its final Western form by Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk working in Rome around 525, whose tables carried the system into Latin Christendom and incidentally gave Europe the practice of numbering years from the Incarnation. So the rule is genuinely ancient and genuinely conciliar in intent. It is not, however, a Nicene canon, and a careful Orthodox writer will say that rather than repeat the slogan.

One further proviso is often quoted as though it were Nicene: that Pascha must always fall after the Jewish Passover. As a formulated rule this is a Byzantine canonical gloss, associated especially with the twelfth-century commentator John Zonaras, and it is not found in the Nicene documents. It does, however, describe what the Julian computation almost always produces, and it reflects the concern the council did express about not depending on the Jewish reckoning. It should be cited as what it is: a medieval interpretation of an ancient decision.

Two calendars, and why they diverge

The Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, assumes a year of 365.25 days. The actual tropical year is about eleven minutes shorter, which is a trivial error and an accumulating one: the Julian calendar gains roughly one day on the sun every 128 years. By the sixteenth century the equinox was falling around 11 March by the calendar rather than 21 March, and in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII issued the bull Inter gravissimas, dropped ten days out of that October, and changed the leap-year rule so that centurial years are leap years only when divisible by 400. The Gregorian calendar is a good piece of astronomy. It was also promulgated by a pope in the decade after Trent, and the Protestant states of Europe refused it for a century and a half — Britain and its colonies did not adopt it until 1752 — which is worth remembering before anyone concludes that Orthodox resistance to it was mere obscurantism.

The Orthodox Paschalion, the table by which the date is found, still runs on the Julian reckoning, and it diverges from the Western date for two separate reasons that are often run together. The first is solar: the Paschalion treats 21 March in the Julian calendar as the equinox, and 21 March Julian is now 3 April on the civil calendar, so the Orthodox rule cannot produce a date before that. The second is lunar: the nineteen-year cycle used to locate the paschal full moon has itself drifted, and the tabular full moon now runs four or five days behind the real one. The combined effect is that Orthodox Pascha falls between 4 April and 8 May on the civil calendar, while Western Easter falls between 22 March and 25 April. Sometimes they land together. Sometimes they are a week apart. Sometimes, when the Western date catches an early full moon that the Orthodox tables have not yet reached, they are five weeks apart.

The fixed calendar is a separate question, and here the Orthodox world genuinely divided. In May 1923 a Pan-Orthodox Congress met in Constantinople under Patriarch Meletios IV and adopted a calendar devised with the help of the Serbian astronomer Milutin Milanković: the Revised Julian calendar, which uses a leap rule based on a 900-year cycle and is astronomically more accurate than the Gregorian, though the two agree on every date until the year 2800. Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Poland, Albania and later Bulgaria adopted it for the fixed feasts, along with most of the diaspora and the Orthodox Church in America. Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Georgia, the monasteries of Mount Athos and a number of smaller bodies did not, and still keep the Julian calendar, which is why Russian Christmas falls on 7 January — it is 25 December, thirteen days later on the civil reckoning.

The decisive fact for this chapter is what the 1923 congress did not do. It left the Paschalion alone. So with two small exceptions the entire Orthodox world, new-calendar and old-calendar alike, keeps Pascha by the old reckoning. A Greek parish in Chicago that celebrates the Nativity on 25 December along with its neighbours will celebrate Pascha on a date its neighbours have usually never heard of, and the inconsistency is deliberate: the fixed feasts were felt to be a matter of local discipline, while the date of Pascha had been settled by an ecumenical council and was not thought to be in any one church's gift. The exceptions are the autonomous Orthodox Church of Finland, which keeps the Western Paschal date, and the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church.

It has to be said plainly that the 1923 reform caused lasting damage. In Greece and Romania the change was resisted by clergy, monastics and large numbers of laity who regarded it as an unauthorised alteration made under pressure and as a step toward compromise with the West, and the resulting Old Calendarist bodies are still out of communion with the churches they left. There are Old Calendarist jurisdictions in Greece with their own bishops and parishes a century later. The arguments on both sides are not really about astronomy. The reformers argued that the fixed feasts had drifted noticeably out of their seasons and that unnecessary strangeness was a barrier to the Church's witness. Their opponents argued that a synod of some churches had no authority to alter what the whole Church had held, that the reform was pushed by a patriarch with an ecumenical agenda, and that liturgical unity is a real good and had been broken to obtain a technical improvement nobody had asked for. A reader should know that this is a live wound and that Orthodox Christians of good faith are on both sides of it.

In practice, the two dates coincide about one year in three or four. They coincided in 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2017, and again in 2025, when both fell on 20 April — a coincidence that attracted attention because 2025 was the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of Nicaea, and which produced a fresh round of proposals for a common date from Rome and from Constantinople. They are due to coincide again in 2028 and 2031. In other years the gap is one week, or four, or five: in 2027 Western Easter falls in late March and Orthodox Pascha in early May. There have been serious attempts at a settlement, most notably a consultation at Aleppo in 1997 sponsored by the World Council of Churches and the Middle East Council of Churches, which proposed keeping the Nicene rule but computing the equinox and the full moon astronomically at the meridian of Jerusalem. Nothing came of it. A practical note for a Protestant with Orthodox friends: do not assume. Look the date up on an Orthodox calendar, because in most years the two Paschas are different weekends and in some years they are more than a month apart.

Nobody arrives at Pascha cold. The approach is ten weeks long and it is built with some care, and the care shows in the order of the readings. Four Sundays before the fast begins the Church opens the Triodion, the service book of the pre-Lenten and Lenten period, and starts preparing. The first of the preparatory Sundays gives the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18:10-14), and the week that follows it is deliberately fast-free: no abstinence on Wednesday or Friday, which are fast days for the whole rest of the year. The reason is the parable. The Pharisee's boast is that he fasts twice a week, and the Church answers by suspending the fast for one week so that nobody enters Lent with the wrong arithmetic in his head. The second Sunday gives the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), which is the Father running. The third is Meatfare Sunday, the last day on which meat is eaten until Pascha, and its Gospel is the judgement of the nations (Matthew 25:31-46) — the sheep and the goats, sorted on the question of who fed the hungry. The fourth is Cheesefare Sunday, the last day for dairy and eggs, and its Gospel is Christ on fasting in secret and on forgiving men their trespasses (Matthew 6:14-21).

Set those four in order and the Church's argument is visible before a single meal has been skipped. You are told first that fasting can damn you; then that the Father is already running down the road; then that you will be judged on what you did with food and clothes and prison visits; then that unless you forgive, none of it counts. Only after all four does the fast begin. It is a striking sequence for a tradition that Protestants are often told is preoccupied with external works, and a reader who wants to test the charge should test it here, because this is where the Church sets its own agenda for the season.

Cheesefare Sunday ends with Forgiveness Vespers, and it is the service most converts remember from their first year. It begins in the ordinary way and in bright vestments. Partway through, the tone of the music drops into the plaintive mode used through Lent, the clergy withdraw and return in dark vestments, and the hangings on the icon stands and the altar are changed while the service continues, so that the room turns dark around the congregation while they are standing in it. A Great Prokeimenon is chanted. Then, at the end, the rite of mutual forgiveness: the priest prostrates before the people and asks their forgiveness, and then the entire parish forms a line and every person asks every other person, face to face, by name, with a bow or a prostration. Forgive me, a sinner. God forgives, and I forgive. It takes a long time in a large parish, and it is not ceremonial. You will find yourself in front of the person you have been avoiding, and there is no way around them but through. There are no ashes in the Byzantine rite and no mark on the forehead. Lent begins with a transaction between persons.

The next day is Clean Monday, which is the first day of Great Lent and is named for what it is for: a clean start, and in the strict reckoning a day of complete abstinence. The Greek Kathara Deftera is a public holiday in Greece, where the customs attached to it are cultural rather than liturgical and should be named as such — the flat unleavened lagana bread, shellfish and olives and taramosalata, which are permitted because they have no blood, and kite-flying, which has nothing to do with anything and is simply what Greeks do that afternoon. The Slavic tradition has no kites and marks the day in church.

The Great Canon

On the first four evenings of Lent the Church serves Great Compline, and at each of them a quarter of the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete is chanted. Andrew was born in Damascus around 660, was a monk in Jerusalem, a deacon in Constantinople, and finally archbishop of Gortyna in Crete, and he died about 740. The canon that carries his name runs to something near two hundred and fifty short stanzas, and it is the longest text of its kind in the Byzantine books. It is also read entire, in one sitting, at the Matins of Thursday in the fifth week — which, like most Matins, is usually served the previous evening — together with the Life of St. Mary of Egypt read in two parts. That service is known in Greek practice simply as the Great Standing, and it runs three hours or more.

What the Great Canon does is the best demonstration available of the reading method described earlier. It goes through the Old Testament and the New, person by person, and applies every one of them to the singer's own soul in the first person. Adam's expulsion, Cain's murder, Lamech's boast, the pitch on Noah's ark, Ham's mockery, Abraham's departure, Lot's wife, the brick-making in Egypt, Reuben's crime, Dathan and Abiram, David's adultery and repentance, Ahab and Jezebel, Manasseh, then the Samaritan woman, the Canaanite woman, Zacchaeus, the thief. There is no historical distance permitted anywhere in it. Each stanza is answered by the congregation with Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me, and a prostration, so that a person standing through the whole of it makes several hundred prostrations. Its opening line sets the register.

Where shall I begin to lament the deeds of my wretched life? What first-fruit shall I offer, O Christ, for my present lamentation?St. Andrew of Crete, the Great Canon, first troparion of Ode One

The weekday services

Great Lent changes the structure of the week, and the most important change is that the Divine Liturgy is not served on weekdays at all. The reasoning is ancient and it is austere: the Eucharist is a paschal celebration, and a day of strict fasting is not a festal day. But the Church also did not want to leave the faithful without communion for five days a week for seven weeks, and the solution is the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. It is not a Liturgy in the strict sense; there is no anaphora and nothing is consecrated. It is Vespers, with readings from Genesis and Proverbs, into which is inserted the communion of the people from Gifts consecrated at the Liturgy of the previous Sunday and reserved on the altar. It is served on Wednesdays and Fridays of Lent and on a few other days, and Canon 52 of the Quinisext Council of 692 prescribes it for every Lenten weekday except Saturdays, Sundays and the Annunciation.

The Slavic service books attribute the Presanctified Liturgy to St. Gregory the Dialogist, the pope known in the West as Gregory the Great, who had served as papal representative in Constantinople before his election in 590. Historians do not think the attribution can stand: the rite is Constantinopolitan in structure and its elements are older than Gregory's residence there, and Greek books generally do not carry the ascription. The service itself is strange and beautiful and quite unlike anything a Protestant has seen. Psalm 140 [141] is chanted at the outset with the censing; between the two readings the priest turns to the people holding a lit candle and the censer and says Let the light of Christ illumine all, and everyone goes down to the floor. Then Psalm 140 again, slowly, with prostrations at each verse — Let my prayer arise in Your sight as incense, and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice. The Cherubic Hymn is replaced with Now the powers of heaven serve invisibly with us, and when the Gifts are carried through the church the people do not stand; they prostrate, because what is passing is not bread but the Body of Christ already consecrated. More and more parishes serve it in the evening, as its structure assumes, which means a full day of fasting before communion.

Every Lenten weekday service ends with a short prayer attributed to St. Ephrem the Syrian, said with prostrations. It is the single most-used text of the season, and most Orthodox Christians can say it from memory by their second Lent.

O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power and idle talk. But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to Your servant. Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions and not to judge my brother, for blessed are You unto the ages of ages. Amen.The Prayer of St. Ephrem, said at every Lenten weekday service

The prayer is universally called St. Ephrem's and is almost certainly not by him in this form; it is not found in his Syriac corpus and is a Greek composition of uncertain date. The attribution is traditional, which is a different thing from being false, and the Church has never made anything depend on it. The accompanying practice also varies: the common Slavic usage is three great prostrations at the three petitions, twelve small bows with O God, cleanse me a sinner, and then the prayer again with one prostration. Greek practice differs in detail.

On the Friday evenings of the first five weeks the Church sings the Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos — in four instalments on the first four Fridays, and entire on the fifth, which is why the following day is called the Saturday of the Akathist. The hymn is a virtuoso piece: twenty-four stanzas whose initial letters run through the Greek alphabet in order, alternating short kontakia and long oikoi, each of the latter ending with the refrain Rejoice, Bride unwedded. Its date is somewhere in the fifth to seventh centuries and its authorship is unknown; it has been attributed to Romanos the Melodist, to Patriarch Germanus and to Patriarch Sergius, and none of the attributions is secure. The introductory verse, To you, Champion Leader, do I your city ascribe the prize of victory, is traditionally connected with the deliverance of Constantinople from the siege of 626, and historians generally treat that connection as a later association attached to an existing hymn. The word akathistos means not sitting: the congregation stands throughout.

The five Sundays

Each Sunday of Lent carries a commemoration, and the series is not decorative. The first is the Sunday of Orthodoxy, which keeps the restoration of the icons in 843 under the Empress Theodora and the Patriarch Methodius, after more than a century of iconoclasm; the people carry icons in procession around the church and the Synodikon of Orthodoxy is read, with its anathemas against those who reject the images and its acclamations of those who defended them. The second is the Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, added to the calendar after his glorification in 1368, and it is there because his defence of the uncreated light and of real human participation in God was understood as the doctrinal continuation of the first Sunday: the first says God can be depicted because He became flesh, the second says God can be genuinely partaken of because His energies are Himself.

The third is the Veneration of the Cross, at the midpoint, when the cross is carried out on a tray strewn with flowers and basil and set in the centre of the church for the week, and the people come and prostrate before it and are given a flower. The hymn is Before Your Cross we bow down in worship, O Master, and we glorify Your holy Resurrection. Its function is stated openly in the hymns for the day: a traveller halfway through a long road is shown the tree he is walking toward, so that he can finish. The fourth Sunday is St. John Climacus, abbot of the monastery at Sinai, who died about 649 and whose Ladder of Divine Ascent, in thirty steps for the thirty hidden years of Christ, is read aloud in monasteries throughout Lent. The fifth is St. Mary of Egypt, whose Life was written by Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, who died in 638: a prostitute of Alexandria who went to Jerusalem with a shipload of pilgrims for the traffic, found herself unable to enter the church at the feast of the Cross, and went across the Jordan into the desert, where she lived forty-seven years alone and was discovered by the monk Zosimas at the end of her life. The last Sunday before Holy Week belongs to her, which is a decision worth pausing over.

Woven through the weeks are three Saturdays of the Souls, on which the departed are commemorated by name in enormous lists, and the feast of the Annunciation on 25 March, which always falls within Lent or in Bright Week and has its own complicated rules for whatever it collides with. And Lent proper does not run to Pascha. The reckoning in the Triodion itself is that the forty days end on the Friday of the sixth week; the Vespers of Lazarus Saturday opens by announcing that we have completed the forty days that bring profit to our soul, and then asks to be granted to see the holy week of the Passion. Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday are a two-day feast standing between, and Holy Week is a separate and stricter fast of its own. A reader who has been told that Lent is the forty days ending on Easter has the arithmetic of the Byzantine rite wrong, and the misunderstanding matters, because it is what makes Holy Week look like the end of something rather than a distinct thing that begins.

On the fast itself. The rule in the books is monastic and it is severe: no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no fish with backbones, and on stricter days no wine and no olive oil, for the whole of Lent, with shellfish, wine and oil permitted on certain days and fish allowed on the Annunciation and Palm Sunday. Greek, Slavic, Romanian and Antiochian practice differ in detail, and Antiochian parishes in North America commonly follow a published relaxation. What is universal is that the rule is a target and not a law of physics: it is adjusted by a priest or confessor for the sick, the pregnant, the elderly, the young, and for converts who have never fasted in their lives and would do themselves harm by starting at the top. Anyone who tells a catechumen to keep the full monastic rule in his first year is giving him bad advice.

Holy Week in an Orthodox parish is not a series of optional extras around a Sunday. It is roughly fifteen services in eight days, each of which advances the narrative, and the week is designed to be attended rather than sampled. A visitor should also know at the outset why the schedule looks wrong. In the Byzantine rite the liturgical day begins at sunset, so almost every service named for a day is served the evening before: the Matins of Holy Friday is served on Thursday night, the Matins of Holy Saturday on Friday night. Parish calendars usually print both names, which is confusing for one year and obvious thereafter.

The week opens on Lazarus Saturday with a full Divine Liturgy. The Gospel is John 11, the raising of a man four days dead, and the hymns hold two things together deliberately: that Christ weeps at the tomb, showing that He is a man, and that He raises the dead with a shouted command, showing that He is God. The Trisagion at that Liturgy is replaced by the baptismal hymn from Galatians 3:27, As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ, which is one of the traces left in the books by the ancient practice of baptizing on this day. Historically the day also has a hard edge to it that the hymns notice: John says that the raising of Lazarus is what finally decided the council against Jesus, and that from that day they plotted to put Him to death (John 11:53), and that they planned to kill Lazarus too (12:10). The miracle is the cause of the Passion. In many parishes the children spend the afternoon weaving palm crosses for the morning.

Palm Sunday is the only feast of the year that sits in the middle of a fast, and it is kept as a feast: bright vestments, fish permitted, palms and bay leaves blessed and distributed, and in Russian, Ukrainian and other Slavic churches, where palms do not grow, branches of pussy willow instead, which is why the Russian name for the day means Willow Sunday. The palms are taken home and kept behind an icon for the year. And then, that same evening, everything turns. The service that night is the first of the Bridegroom Matins, and from this point until Saturday midnight the parish is in the Passion.

The first three nights

On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evenings the Church serves the Matins of Great Monday, Great Tuesday and Great Wednesday, known as the Bridegroom services from the icon carried out at the beginning of each. It is a particular image and worth looking at carefully, because it is not the image most Christians would choose for a bridegroom: Christ stripped and bound, wearing the purple robe of mockery and the crown of thorns, holding a reed for a sceptre, hands tied. The title in Greek is ho Nymphios, the Bridegroom, and what the Church is saying by putting that title on that picture is that this is what the love of God looks like when it comes to collect the bride. The troparion is sung three times at the beginning, slowly, while the icon is carried into the middle of the church.

Behold, the Bridegroom comes in the middle of the night, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching; but unworthy is he whom He shall find heedless. Beware, then, O my soul, and be not overcome by sleep, lest you be given over to death and be shut out of the Kingdom. But rouse yourself and cry: Holy, holy, holy are You, O God; through the Theotokos have mercy on us.Troparion of the Bridegroom Matins; English renderings vary slightly between service books

The themes run in sequence. Monday takes Joseph sold by his brothers into Egypt, as the type of the innocent man betrayed for silver, together with the barren fig tree that Christ curses on the way into the city. Tuesday takes the ten virgins and the talents, which is where the Bridegroom troparion belongs and where the watching of the night is pressed. Wednesday takes the sinful woman who anointed His feet, set against Judas going to the chief priests, and the hymns place the two side by side — a prostitute spending a fortune on Him and an apostle pricing Him at thirty pieces. At each of these services an exapostilarion is sung that is among the best-known short texts in the Byzantine repertoire.

I see Your bridal chamber adorned, O my Savior, and I have no wedding garment that I may enter there. Make the robe of my soul to shine, O Giver of Light, and save me.Exapostilarion of the Bridegroom Matins

Tuesday night, at the Matins of Holy Wednesday, comes the Hymn of Kassiani, and in Greek practice it is the service of the week that fills the church with people who will not be seen again until Friday. Kassiani, or Kassia, was a ninth-century Constantinopolitan noblewoman who founded a convent and composed hymns, and she is one of very few women whose compositions stand in the service books used by the whole Orthodox Church. The hymn is written in the voice of the woman with the alabaster jar — she speaks of the multitude of her sins, of the night that is for her a goad of licentiousness, of taking the myrrh-bearer's part and bringing oil before the burial, and she asks Him who bent the heavens to bend down to her grief. It is long, it is chanted in the plagal fourth tone, and in Greece cantors are judged by it for the rest of the year.

Holy Wednesday is also the day of Holy Unction in most parishes. The sacrament of anointing, the Euchelaion, is served for the whole congregation rather than for a single sick person: seven epistles, seven Gospels and seven prayers, ideally with seven priests, each priest anointing in turn, with the first epistle being James 5:14-15, the passage that institutes it. Then everyone in the church, sick or not, comes forward and is anointed with the blessed oil on the forehead and hands. Practice differs on the day. Greek parishes generally serve it on Wednesday afternoon or evening; Russian cathedral practice has often placed it on Holy Thursday; Antiochian parishes in North America commonly keep Wednesday evening. The point is the same wherever it falls. Before the Passion is read, the whole body of the parish is treated as a body of sick people and oiled.

Holy Thursday

Thursday morning brings the Vesperal Liturgy of St. Basil the Great — Vespers joined to the Liturgy — commemorating the Mystical Supper. It is the one day in the year on which the Liturgy commemorates the institution of the Liturgy, and the Cherubic Hymn is replaced by a text sung in the first person to Christ: Of Your Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant, for I will not speak of the Mystery to Your enemies, nor will I give You a kiss as did Judas, but like the thief I confess You. The same text is used as a pre-communion prayer all year. In cathedral and monastic practice the day also carries the Niptir, the washing of feet, in which a bishop or an abbot washes the feet of twelve clergy while John 13 is read and acted out; it is kept at the Patriarchate in Jerusalem and on Athos, and in a minority of parishes. In many places this is also the day on which the Lamb is prepared and dried that will be reserved through the coming year for the communion of the sick.

Thursday evening is the longest and heaviest service of the week short of the Vigil itself: the Matins of Holy Friday, known everywhere as the Twelve Gospels. Twelve readings of the Passion are taken from all four evangelists in narrative order, beginning with the farewell discourse of John 13:31-18:1 and ending with the setting of the guard at the sealed tomb (Matthew 27:62-66). Between them are sung antiphons and troparia. The people stand for each Gospel holding lit candles, and in many places the custom is to tie a knot in a thread or make a mark for each one, the candle being carried home afterwards still burning if possible. After the fifth Gospel, during the singing of the fifteenth antiphon, the priest takes up a large cross bearing the body of Christ, carries it in procession through the church while the bell tolls, and sets it upright in the centre of the nave. The fifteenth antiphon is the text most quoted from the whole of Holy Week, and it deserves to be given in full.

Today He who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the Cross. He who is King of the angels is arrayed in a crown of thorns. He who wraps the heavens in clouds is wrapped in the purple of mockery. He who freed Adam in the Jordan is struck on the face. The Bridegroom of the Church is transfixed with nails. The Son of the Virgin is pierced with a spear. We worship Your Passion, O Christ. Show us also Your glorious Resurrection.The fifteenth antiphon, Matins of Holy Friday (the Twelve Gospels)

Notice the grammar of it, because the whole of Orthodox Christology is in the construction. Every line pairs an act of God with an indignity done to a body, in the same sentence, with no softening in between. The one who hung the earth on the waters is the one hanging on the wood. This is not a description of a good man dying nobly, and it is not the death of a divine nature that cannot die. It is the Church saying flatly that the person being nailed up is the person who made everything, and that the two statements are about one man.

Holy Friday

Holy Friday is the only day in the year on which the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated anywhere in the Orthodox Church. The altar is bare. What is served in the morning are the Royal Hours: the First, Third, Sixth and Ninth Hours chanted together in one long sequence, each one given a prophecy, an epistle and a Gospel, so that the Passion is heard a second time in a single morning through the eyes of the prophets. Isaiah 52 and 53 are read, and Zechariah's thirty pieces of silver, and Psalm 21 [22] with its divided garments and cast lots. The name comes from Constantinople, where the emperor attended.

At about three in the afternoon — the ninth hour, the hour at which the Gospels place the death — Vespers is served, and this is the Apokathelosis, the Taking-Down from the Cross. During the Gospel, at the words describing Joseph of Arimathea's request for the body, the priest goes to the cross standing in the middle of the church, removes the body from it, wraps it in a white linen cloth and carries it into the sanctuary. Then the epitaphios is brought out. This is an embroidered or painted cloth, sometimes very old and very fine, depicting the dead Christ laid out for burial with the Mother of God and the myrrh-bearers around Him; it is carried out over the heads of the clergy, censed, and laid in the kouvouklion, a carved wooden canopy over a bier, which the women of the parish have spent the day covering in flowers. It sits in the middle of the nave. People come up all evening and kneel and kiss it and go under the bier, and children are passed under it by their mothers.

The noble Joseph, taking down Your most pure Body from the Tree, wrapped it in clean linen with sweet spices, and laid it in a new tomb.Troparion sung at the Apokathelosis and at the Vespers of Holy Friday

Friday night the church fills again for the Matins of Holy Saturday, the service of the Lamentations. Its core is Psalm 118 [119], the long psalm of the Law, chanted in three sections around the bier, with a short verse of lamentation inserted after each verse of the psalm — about a hundred and eighty of them altogether, in three stases, each with its own melody. They are the funeral of God, sung as a village funeral is sung, and the tunes are the most widely known music in the Orthodox world; people who do not come to church come for this. After the Lamentations comes the resurrection Evlogitaria, then the prophecy of Ezekiel 37:1-14, the valley of dry bones, read over a bier — a piece of liturgical placement that needs no explanation — then the epistle and the Gospel of the sealing of the tomb.

In a grave they laid You, O my Life and my Christ, and the armies of the angels were sore amazed, as they sang the praise of Your submissive love.First stasis of the Lamentations, Matins of Holy Saturday; English versions differ considerably

Then the procession. The epitaphios is lifted on its poles and carried out of the church at eleven at night or later, with the cross and banners in front, the people following with candles, the bells tolling slowly. In Greece it goes through the streets of the town, often behind a municipal band playing funeral marches, and in small towns the processions of two or three parishes meet at the square and stop and salute one another. In Slavic practice it circles the church, commonly three times. When it returns, the bearers hold the epitaphios up in the doorway at head height and the entire congregation passes underneath it, one by one, into the church — walking under the body of Christ to get in. It is not subtle and it is not meant to be.

Holy Saturday morning

Saturday morning is the most neglected service in the week and, historically, the most important one in it. What is served is Vespers joined to the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, and what it is, underneath, is the ancient baptismal vigil of the Church of Constantinople, kept nearly intact. In the early centuries the catechumens who had been preparing all through Lent were baptized at this point, during the long readings, and everything about the service still assumes it. Fifteen Old Testament readings are read in order while, in the old arrangement, the bishop was in the baptistery.

Genesis 1:1-13 — the creation of the world
Isaiah 60:1-16 — Arise, shine, for your light has come
Exodus 12:1-11 — the institution of the Passover
Jonah, the entire book
Joshua 5:10-15 — the first Passover kept in the promised land
Exodus 13:20-15:19 — the pillar of fire, the Red Sea, and the Song of Moses, chanted with the refrain Let us sing to the Lord, for gloriously has He been glorified
Zephaniah 3:8-15
3 Kingdoms 17:8-24 [1 Kings 17] — Elijah and the widow's son raised
Isaiah 61:10-62:5
Genesis 22:1-18 — Abraham and Isaac on the mountain
Isaiah 61:1-9
4 Kingdoms 4:8-37 [2 Kings 4] — Elisha and the Shunammite's son raised
Isaiah 63:11-64:5
Jeremiah 31:31-34 [38:31-34 LXX] — I will make a new covenant
Daniel 3 — the three young men in the furnace, chanted with the refrain O sing to the Lord and exalt Him above all forever

Read the list as a whole and its argument is plain. It begins at creation and ends with three men walking unburnt in a furnace with a fourth figure beside them. In between are the Passover, the sea crossing, Jonah in the fish, a boy dead and given back to his mother, a second boy dead and given back to his mother, a father with a knife over his son on a mountain, and the promise of a covenant written on hearts. Two of the fifteen are sung rather than read, with the congregation answering each verse, which means that twice in the morning the whole church joins a reading in progress. It is the entire economy of salvation laid end to end on the morning between the burial and the Resurrection, and it takes about two hours.

Then the epistle, which is Romans 6:3-11 — buried with Him through baptism into death — and then the thing the service is famous for. Instead of the Alleluia, the chanters begin Psalm 81 [82]:8, slowly and repeatedly: Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You shall inherit all the nations. And while it is sung the church is changed. The dark hangings come off the icon stands, the black or purple covers come off the altar and the analogia, white ones go on, the clergy change into white vestments, and the servers go through the whole building strewing bay leaves, laurel and rose petals — by the handful, thrown, so that they land on everyone's head and on the floor with a noise. In a large parish this takes a couple of minutes and is thunderous. Then the Gospel is read: Matthew 28:1-20, the first resurrection Gospel of the year, over a church that is now white and knee-deep in leaves, on Saturday morning, some fourteen hours before midnight.

In place of the Cherubic Hymn this Liturgy uses a text borrowed from the far older Liturgy of St. James — Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and stand with fear and trembling, and take no thought for anything earthly — which English-speaking Protestants will recognise, because Gerard Moultrie's translation of it has been in Anglican and free-church hymnals since 1864 and is sung to the French carol tune Picardy. It is one of the few places where a visitor from a Protestant background will find himself on entirely familiar ground in the middle of an entirely unfamiliar service.

So the Resurrection is announced twice, and the quieter of the two announcements is the older one. Saturday morning, to a half-full church, with laurel leaves in the aisles and Matthew 28 read over a bier that is still standing there, is what the Church of the fourth century did; the midnight service that everyone comes to is a later development grown up alongside it. The parish that serves both is saying that the Resurrection is not an instant that struck at midnight, but a fact that has been true since the previous afternoon, and that the tomb in the middle of the nave has been empty for some hours before anybody is told.

Lazarus Saturday, morning: Divine Liturgy. John 11. The raising of Lazarus, and the baptismal hymn in place of the Trisagion. Children weave palm crosses afterwards.
Palm Sunday, morning: Divine Liturgy with the blessing and distribution of palms and bay, or willow branches in Slavic practice. Fish permitted. A feast inside a fast.
Palm Sunday, evening: Bridegroom Matins of Great Monday. The icon of Christ bound and crowned with thorns is carried out. Joseph sold into Egypt; the barren fig tree.
Great Monday, evening: Bridegroom Matins of Great Tuesday. The ten virgins and the talents. The troparion of the Bridegroom at midnight.
Great Tuesday, evening: Bridegroom Matins of Great Wednesday. The sinful woman with the ointment set against Judas. The Hymn of Kassiani.
Great Wednesday, afternoon or evening: Holy Unction for the whole parish: seven epistles, seven Gospels, seven prayers, anointing of everyone present. Russian practice often places this on Holy Thursday.
Great Wednesday, late evening: In some parishes, the Presanctified Liturgy or the Matins of Holy Thursday. Practice varies.
Holy Thursday, morning: Vesperal Liturgy of St. Basil: the Mystical Supper. Of Your Mystical Supper replaces the Cherubic Hymn. In cathedrals and monasteries, the washing of feet.
Holy Thursday, evening: Matins of Holy Friday: the Twelve Gospels. The Passion read from all four evangelists. After the fifth Gospel the Cross is carried out and set in the middle of the church. Three hours or more.
Holy Friday, morning: The Royal Hours. First, Third, Sixth and Ninth Hours together, with prophecies, epistles and Gospels. No Liturgy is served anywhere in the Orthodox world on this day.
Holy Friday, about three in the afternoon: Vespers of the Apokathelosis. The body is taken down from the Cross and the epitaphios is laid in the flower-covered tomb in the centre of the nave.
Holy Friday, evening: Matins of Holy Saturday: the Lamentations, sung in three stases around the tomb, then the procession with the epitaphios around the church or through the streets, and the passing under it at the door.
Holy Saturday, morning: Vesperal Liturgy of St. Basil. Fifteen Old Testament readings; Romans 6; the changing of the cloths to white and the strewing of bay leaves at Arise, O God; the Gospel of the Resurrection.
Holy Saturday, about 11 p.m.: The Midnight Office. The canon of Holy Saturday; the epitaphios is taken from the tomb into the sanctuary; the lights are extinguished.
Midnight: The Paschal Vigil: Come, receive the light; the procession outside; Christ is risen sung for the first time; the doors opened; Paschal Matins with the Canon of St. John of Damascus and the Paschal Homily.
Immediately after Matins: The Paschal Divine Liturgy, with the Prologue of John read, often in several languages. Communion, the blessing of the artos, and the breaking of the fast, usually between 2 and 3 a.m.
Pascha, afternoon: Agape Vespers. John 20:19-25 read in as many languages as the parish can muster. Short, informal, and often followed by egg-cracking.

Schedules vary and a visitor should ask. Most North American parishes anticipate Matins to the previous evening, as described here, but some Greek parishes serve the Holy Saturday Vesperal Liturgy on Saturday morning at nine and some at seven; Antiochian parishes often begin the Paschal Vigil earlier than midnight; a few Greek parishes dismiss after Paschal Matins around 1 a.m. and serve the Liturgy later on Sunday morning, which is a modern accommodation and is not the older practice. In monasteries the whole week is longer and later, and nothing is abbreviated.

The Vigil begins quietly and with almost nobody there. At around eleven on Saturday night the Midnight Office is served — the canon of Holy Saturday chanted again, slowly, by the cantors and thirty or forty people, in a church still hung in dark cloth with the flowered bier standing in the middle of it. At the ninth ode the priest and the servers go to the bier, lift the epitaphios, carry it through the Royal Doors into the sanctuary and lay it flat on the altar table, where it will remain until the leave-taking of Pascha nearly six weeks later. The bier is taken away. Then everything is put out: the hanging lamps, the candle stands, the chandeliers, the candles people are holding. In a Greek or a Slavic village church, and on Athos, the darkness is total and lasts several minutes, and there is no sound in it. In many North American parishes the lights are only dimmed, for reasons of insurance, which is a loss.

Then the Royal Doors open and the priest comes out carrying a single lit candle, taken from the lamp that burns on the altar, and sings an invitation that is three lines long and is the reason a thousand people have come.

Come, receive the light from the light that is never overtaken by night, and glorify Christ, who is risen from the dead.The invitation at the Paschal Vigil. Greek: Deute labete phos ek tou anesperou photos

What follows takes about ninety seconds and is the part nobody forgets. The people nearest the front come up and light their candles from his, and then turn and light their neighbours', and the flame moves outward through the building faster than a person can walk, hand to hand, until the whole church is lit by several hundred candles and nothing else. It is worth noticing what the rite is careful not to do. The fire is not struck, and it is not brought in from outside. It comes out of the sanctuary, from the lamp that has been burning in front of the altar all through the dark days, and every person in the building receives it from another person. Nobody lights his own.

Then the whole congregation goes outside. The cross goes first, then the banners, then the lanterns and the censer and the Gospel book, then the clergy, then everyone — several hundred people with lit candles walking out of a church at midnight into a churchyard, a car park or a city street. Slavic practice takes the procession around the outside of the building, commonly three times, with the bells rung continuously in a manner that is not solemn at all. Greek practice usually goes to a platform, a flight of steps or a stand set up in the yard. In either case the crowd outside is larger than the crowd that was inside, because Pascha is the night when everyone comes, and the people at the back cannot hear and do not mind.

Outside, in the open air, Paschal Matins begins. The priest censes the cross and the icons and the people, and then intones, for the first time since the previous year, the sentence that the entire structure exists to say — and the congregation sings it back, and then sings it again, and then keeps singing it, interleaved with the verses of Psalm 67 [68]: Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered; as smoke vanishes, so let them vanish; as wax melts before the fire.

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.The Paschal Troparion. Greek: Christos aneste ek nekron, thanato thanaton patesas, kai tois en tois mnemasi zoen charisamenos

That sentence repays a moment's attention before the night moves on, because its middle clause is doing something a translation can blur. Thanatō thanaton patēsas: the first word is a dative of instrument. He trampled death by means of death — not in spite of death, not after death, not having escaped it. His own dying is the instrument with which death was destroyed. This is not a resurrection story in which a good man is rescued from a bad end; it is a claim that the bad end was the weapon. The reason why will be given, in the Church's own words, twenty minutes later in the Paschal Homily, and it is the reason the icon of the feast looks the way it does.

Here the practices diverge, and a reader planning to attend should know which he is likely to see. In Greek use, the Resurrection Gospel — Mark 16:1-8, the women coming to the tomb at the rising of the sun and finding the stone rolled away — is read outside, on the platform, before anyone goes back in, so that the news is delivered in the open air to a crowd standing in a street. In Slavic and in Arab use, the procession comes round to the closed west doors of the church and stops there, and the doors stay shut. The priest knocks. In many Slavic and Antiochian parishes what follows is a dialogue built out of Psalm 23 [24]:7-10 — the voice outside demanding that the gates lift up their heads and the everlasting doors be lifted so that the King of glory may enter, and a voice from inside the darkened church asking who this King of glory is, until the answer comes back that He is the Lord of hosts. Then the doors are thrown open and the entire crowd walks in to a building that has been lit up behind their backs while they were outside: every lamp, every chandelier, white cloths on everything, and the bells going.

It should be obvious what is being staged, and the staging is exactly the icon of the feast. A crowd stands in the dark outside a shut door, and a voice inside will not open, and the demand made at the door is the demand of Psalm 23 [24] — lift up the everlasting doors — which the Church has read since at least the second century as the words spoken at the gates of Hades. When the doors come open the people are not merely entering a church. They are walking through the broken gates on which, in the icon, Christ is standing.

The Paschal Canon

The rest of Matins is the Paschal Canon of St. John of Damascus, who died about 749, a monk of St. Sabbas in the Judaean desert and the most consequential hymnographer in the Byzantine tradition. A canon is a set of odes hung on the nine biblical canticles: the first on the Song of Moses at the Red Sea, the sixth on the prayer of Jonah in the fish, the eighth on the song of the three young men in the furnace, the ninth on the Magnificat. That structure matters here, because it means the Paschal Canon is still hanging on Exodus and Jonah, the same two readings that were read out at the vigil on Saturday morning, and the reader who followed the typology earlier in this chapter can now hear it being sung at one in the morning. The canon is sung with the clergy censing the entire church over and over, walking through the congregation, calling out Christ is risen! to each section of the crowd and being answered.

It is the day of Resurrection. Let us be radiant, O peoples. Pascha, the Lord's Pascha. For from death to life and from earth to heaven has Christ our God brought us, as we sing the song of victory.Paschal Canon, Irmos of Ode One

Ode three takes the rock in the wilderness — come, let us drink a new drink, not one brought marvellously out of a barren stone, but the fountain of incorruption pouring from the tomb of Christ — which is the same typology Paul uses at 1 Corinthians 10:4. Ode six goes down with Jonah: You descended into the nethermost parts of the earth and shattered the everlasting bars that held the prisoners fast, O Christ, and on the third day, like Jonah from the whale, You rose from the tomb. Ode eight supplies the phrase that ranks the feast and that gives this chapter its subtitle.

This is the chosen and holy day, first of sabbaths, king and lord of days, the feast of feasts and the festival of festivals, on which we bless Christ unto the ages.Paschal Canon, Ode Eight

At the end of Matins come the Paschal stichera, sung with the verses of Psalm 67 [68] again, and at the last of them the whole congregation exchanges the kiss of peace. The text tells them to, and it tells them exactly how far it extends: It is the day of Resurrection, let us be radiant for the feast, and let us embrace one another. Let us say, brethren, even to those that hate us: let us forgive all things on the Resurrection. Fifty days earlier, at Forgiveness Vespers, the same parish went through the same line asking each other's pardon before a fast. They now go through it again, having kept the fast, at one o'clock in the morning, with the fast over and the reason for it standing open in front of them.

The Homily

Then the priest goes to the ambo and reads a sermon he did not write. It is the same sermon in every Orthodox church in the world on this night, in whatever language, and it is the only sermon of the year that is prescribed rather than composed. It is short — five minutes — and it is read standing, and in most parishes the people stand for it and are silent, which they are not for anything else at that hour. It is called the Catechetical Homily of St. John Chrysostom. The attribution is traditional and it should be flagged as such: the text is transmitted among Chrysostom's works and has been read as his for well over a millennium, but its authenticity is not certain and some scholars place it among works attributed to him rather than among his securely genuine writings. Nothing in the night depends on the answer. What follows is the standard English rendering, given at length because it is the centre of the whole structure.

If anyone is devout and a lover of God, let him enjoy this beautiful and radiant festival. If anyone is a grateful servant, let him enter rejoicing into the joy of his Lord. If anyone has wearied himself with fasting, let him now receive his recompense. If anyone has laboured from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward. If anyone has come at the third hour, let him keep the feast with thanksgiving. If anyone has arrived at the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings, for he shall suffer no loss. If anyone has delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near without hesitation. If anyone has arrived even at the eleventh hour, let him not fear on account of his delay.The Paschal Homily, traditionally ascribed to St. John Chrysostom, read at Paschal Matins

For the Master is gracious and receives the last even as the first; He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour just as to him who has laboured from the first. He shows mercy upon the last and cares for the first; to the one He gives, and to the other He is gracious. He both honours the work and praises the intention. Therefore all of you, enter into the joy of your Lord: both the first and the second receive your reward. Rich and poor, dance together. You who fasted and you who did not, rejoice today. The table is fully laden: let all feast sumptuously. The calf is fatted: let no one go away hungry.The Paschal Homily, continued

Stop there for a moment, because that is the part a Protestant reader should weigh hardest. The sermon that crowns seven weeks of the most demanding fasting in Christendom explicitly, by name, invites the people who did not keep it, and it does so twice over. You who fasted and you who did not. The Church has just spent the whole of Lent describing the fast as necessary and now announces at midnight that admission is not being charged at the door. Chrysostom's line about the Master honouring the work and praising the intention is the closest thing the Orthodox tradition has to a summary of how it thinks effort and grace fit together, and it is read aloud, annually, to everyone, at the high point of the year.

Let none lament his poverty, for the universal Kingdom has appeared. Let none bewail his transgressions, for pardon has dawned from the tomb. Let none fear death, for the death of the Saviour has set us free. He that was held by death has annihilated it. He descended into Hades and took Hades captive. He embittered it when it tasted of His flesh. Isaiah foretold this when he cried: Hades was embittered when it met You below. It was embittered, for it was abolished. It was embittered, for it was mocked. It was embittered, for it was slain. It was embittered, for it was overthrown. It was embittered, for it was fettered. It took a body and encountered God. It took earth and met heaven. It took what it saw and fell by what it did not see. O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns. Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the tomb. For Christ, being raised from the dead, has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen.The Paschal Homily, conclusion

Two things in that ending are worth unpicking, because both are frequently mangled. First, the refrain. The homily says Isaiah foretold it, and a reader with a Protestant Bible who goes looking for Hades was embittered in Isaiah will not find it, and may conclude that the sermon has misquoted Scripture. It has not. The line is Isaiah 14:9 as the Septuagint reads it, where Hades below is embittered at meeting the fallen king of Babylon — the Greek verb is epikranthē — and the homily takes it as the voice of the underworld encountering Christ. This is precisely the kind of case where the Orthodox Old Testament and the Protestant one differ, and where the liturgical text follows the Greek. The second quotation, O death, where is your sting, is Hosea 13:14 as Paul quotes it at 1 Corinthians 15:55.

Second, the argument. The homily is not saying that Christ overpowered death. It is saying that death overreached and was caught. It took a body and encountered God; it took what it saw and fell by what it did not see. Death had a lawful claim on every man who had sinned, and it exercised that claim on one man who had not, and in doing so it took what it had no title to and forfeited everything else. That is the reasoning behind trampling down death by death, and it is also, precisely, the picture in the icon of the feast. Whether a reader finds the argument satisfying is another matter — it is an account of the Atonement that runs through victory and ransom rather than through penal substitution, and a Reformed reader will notice the difference immediately. But it should be met in its own terms, and this is the form in which the Orthodox Church actually states it: not in a textbook, but in a sermon read at midnight to everyone present, whether or not they fasted.

The Liturgy, the greeting, and the afternoon

The Divine Liturgy follows immediately, with no break. Its antiphons are replaced by paschal verses, the Trisagion by the baptismal hymn, and the Gospel is not a resurrection narrative at all: it is John 1:1-17, the Prologue. In the beginning was the Word. The Church reads the eternal generation of the Son on the night the Resurrection is announced because the point of the night is not that a corpse revived but that God became man in order to do this, and the Prologue is where that is stated most compactly. In a great many parishes it is read in several languages in turn — Greek, Slavonic, Arabic, Romanian, English, Spanish, whatever the congregation contains — with the priest and deacons alternating verses. Then communion, which is where the fast actually ends: not at the table afterwards, but at the chalice. Then the artos is blessed, the loaf is set on its stand, and the people go out at two or three in the morning.

From this night until the leave-taking of the feast, Orthodox Christians greet each other with a sentence instead of a greeting, and in traditionally Orthodox countries it replaces hello in shops, in offices and on the telephone for forty days. In Greek: Christos anesti — Alithos anesti. In Slavonic: Khristos voskrese — Voistinu voskrese. In Arabic, which is what a visitor will hear in an Antiochian parish: al-Masih qam — Haqqan qam. In Romanian: Hristos a înviat — Adevărat a înviat. In English: Christ is risen — Truly He is risen, or Indeed He is risen, depending on the jurisdiction. The form is fixed and it is not a pleasantry. It is a proposition, and the reply is an assent to it.

There is one more service, and it is the one most visitors miss. On Pascha afternoon, usually around noon or one o'clock, the Church serves Agape Vespers — the Vespers of Love — at which the Gospel is John 20:19-25, the risen Christ coming through locked doors to the disciples, and at which it is read in as many languages as the parish can produce. Greek, Church Slavonic, Arabic, Romanian, Georgian, Spanish, Korean, Tagalog, American Sign Language; children read, and visitors are pressed into service, and nobody minds much if the Latin is bad. The reason is theological rather than sentimental: the confusion of tongues at Babel is treated in the Church's hymnography as one of the wounds that the Resurrection and Pentecost undo, and the parish demonstrates the undoing by reading one Gospel in fifteen languages in a room. It is short, cheerful, half-full of people who have had four hours of sleep, and it is usually followed in the yard by people cracking red eggs against each other.

Timings, honestly. In a North American parish the Vigil commonly runs from about 11:15 p.m. to somewhere between 2:30 and 3:30 a.m., of which the Midnight Office is twenty minutes, Paschal Matins about an hour and a quarter, and the Liturgy about an hour and a half. Nothing is expected of a visitor: you may stand at the back, you may leave when you need to, and children are noisy throughout and nobody minds. Non-Orthodox do not receive communion, which is a matter of the Church's discipline about who is in communion with whom and is not a judgement on anyone's faith, and a visitor may receive the blessed bread distributed at the end like everyone else.

At three in the morning the parish eats, and what it eats is specific to where its grandparents came from. In a Greek parish it is magiritsa, a soup made from the offal of the lamb that will be roasted on a spit later that day, thickened with egg and lemon — which sounds unappetising to an American and is the taste of Pascha to a Greek — with tsoureki, a braided sweet bread flavoured with mahlepi and mastic, traditionally in three strands and traditionally with a red egg baked into the top of it. In a Russian or Ukrainian parish it is kulich, a tall cylindrical cake iced on top, and paskha, a pyramid of sweetened curd cheese pressed in a wooden mould stamped with the letters XB for Khristos Voskrese, eaten together and usually with ham and horseradish. In a Romanian parish it is pască, a round cheese-filled bread, and drob. In an Antiochian parish there will be ma'amoul, semolina shortbread stuffed with dates or walnuts, and the greeting will be in Arabic. All of it is broken out of boxes in a parish hall at an hour when nobody has eaten dairy for seven weeks.

The eggs are dyed red, and the Church gives the interpretation directly: the shell is the sealed tomb, the red is the blood of Christ, and the cracking of it is the tomb broken open. The cracking is done as a game — two people knock the ends of their eggs together, the one whose shell survives goes on to the next opponent, and the whole exchange is conducted in the paschal greeting rather than in ordinary speech. The Greek name for it is tsougrisma. And there is a second, entirely mundane explanation which is also true, and both can be held at once: eggs are forbidden for the whole of Lent and hens do not observe the fast, so by Holy Week a traditional household had a great many eggs it could not eat, and hard-boiling and dyeing them preserved them and marked which were which.

The story usually told about the red eggs should be handled carefully, and this chapter will handle it the way the site handles everything of this kind. The story is told that after the Ascension St. Mary Magdalene travelled to Rome and obtained an audience with the Emperor Tiberius, and that she held out an egg and said Christ is risen; and that the emperor answered that a man could no more rise from the dead than that egg in her hand could turn red; and that it turned red while he was speaking. It is a good story and it is told in Orthodox homes and Sunday schools everywhere. It is not in the Gospels, it is not in any early Father, it is not in the ancient Lives of the Magdalene, and it does not appear in the sources until a very long time after the events it describes. It is pious tradition, and careful Orthodox writers say so out loud. The older and better-attested things about Mary Magdalene are different: the Church gives her the title Equal to the Apostles, celebrates her as the first witness of the Resurrection, and preserves a tradition, mentioned by Gregory of Tours in the sixth century, that she ended her life at Ephesus near St. John. It is worth adding that the documentary trail for Christian paschal eggs generally is medieval rather than ancient, and that the claim sometimes made that the earliest Mesopotamian Christians dyed them red is repeated far more often than it is sourced.

The artos is the one paschal object most visitors notice and nobody explains to them. It is a tall round leavened loaf, stamped on top either with the icon of the Resurrection or with a cross and the letters IC XC NIKA — Jesus Christ conquers. It is blessed with its own prayer at the end of the Paschal Liturgy, set on a stand in front of the icon of Christ, and left there for the whole of Bright Week, carried in the daily processions around the church; on Bright Saturday it is broken up after the Liturgy and distributed to everyone. The prayer of blessing says what it is for: it stands in the church during the days when the risen Christ was appearing bodily to the disciples, in the place where He would be standing. It is not the Eucharist, it is not a substitute for the Eucharist, and it is eaten as a blessing, the way blessed bread is eaten at the end of any Liturgy. In Slavic usage the same word is used; the Greek artoklasia, the breaking of five loaves at a festal vigil, is a different rite altogether and should not be confused with it.

The blessing of the paschal basket is chiefly a Slavic, Carpatho-Rusyn, Polish and Ukrainian custom, and a Greek visitor to a Ukrainian parish is as surprised by it as an American is. The basket is lined with an embroidered cloth and packed with what the family will eat when the fast breaks: eggs, kulich, the cheese paskha, butter often moulded into a lamb, salt, horseradish, sausage or ham, and a candle stuck in the middle of it. The baskets are set out in rows in the church or on the lawn, the candles lit, and the priest walks down the rows sprinkling them with holy water — generously, so that everyone is soaked as well. It looks like a folk custom with a blessing attached, but the prayers say something more precise than that. The Church has a specific prayer for the blessing of meats at Pascha, and what it is blessing is the resumption of ordinary eating after a long abstinence. That is a theological act. The fast was never a statement that food is bad; the blessing of a basket of sausage on Pascha morning is the proof.

The Holy Fire

Every year on Holy Saturday, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a ceremony takes place that a Protestant reader will almost certainly have heard of in a distorted form, and it deserves an accurate description and an honest assessment. The facts of the rite are these. The church is packed with thousands of people, mostly Orthodox pilgrims, many of them Greek, Russian, Romanian, Arab and Armenian. The lamps in the Edicule, the small chapel built over the tomb itself, are extinguished and the chapel is sealed; historically the Ottoman authorities and now the Israeli police search the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem before he enters. He goes in alone, or with the Armenian Patriarch present at the entrance, carrying unlit bundles of candles. After some minutes he comes out with the candles burning, and the flame is passed by hand through a crowd of thousands, so that within a minute or two the whole basilica is full of fire. Lamps are then flown by special aircraft to Athens, Cyprus, Moscow, Bucharest, Tbilisi and elsewhere, met at the airports by bishops and government officials, and distributed to parishes in time for the midnight service.

The history is long and it is not simple. Descriptions of a light or a lamp kindled at the Sepulchre on Holy Saturday go back at least to the ninth century: the Frankish pilgrim Bernard the Monk, writing about 870, describes an angel coming and lighting the lamps. Muslim writers describe the ceremony from the tenth century onward, including the scholar al-Biruni around the year 1000, who reports it as a wonder, and the thirteenth-century writer al-Jawbari, who explains it as a contrivance involving a treated wick. In 1238 Pope Gregory IX condemned the ceremony as fraudulent. Modern reporting runs the full range from devout accounts of candles igniting spontaneously in the crowd to sceptical accounts and at least one widely circulated claim by a critic that the fire is lit from a hidden lamp.

The thing a reader most needs to know is what the Church has done with all of this, and the answer is: nothing. There is no council, no canon, no creed and no catechetical requirement that mentions the Holy Fire. It is not a dogma, it has never been proposed as one, and no Orthodox Christian is required to believe anything about it in order to be in good standing. In consequence Orthodox opinion genuinely ranges. Many receive it as an annual miracle and regard the testimony of a millennium of pilgrims as weighty evidence. Others, including clergy and scholars, regard the ceremony as a solemn liturgical rite of lighting whose value does not depend on a physical marvel; the American hierarch Bishop Auxentios published an academic study of the rite and its sources which treats it in that historical register. Both positions are held by people in full communion with each other. A Protestant reader who has been told that Orthodoxy stakes its credibility on the Holy Fire has been misinformed, and a reader who has been told that no serious Orthodox believes in it has also been misinformed.

Bright Week and the fifty days

The week after Pascha is called Bright Week, or Renewal Week, and for seven days the Church behaves as though the ordinary rules have been suspended, because it believes they have. The Royal Doors of the iconostasis and the deacons' doors beside them stand open for the whole week, and the curtain behind them is drawn back, so that anyone standing anywhere in the nave can see the altar. The rest of the year those doors are shut for most of the service. For this one week the sanctuary is open and unguarded, and what that is a picture of needs no gloss: it is the tomb with the stone rolled away, built into the architecture of the room. There is no fasting at all during the week, Wednesday and Friday included, which is one of only a handful of fast-free weeks in the year. The ordinary daily offices are replaced by the Paschal Hours, a short sung sequence that is almost entirely resurrection hymns, and in many households the morning and evening prayers are replaced by them too. A Christian who dies during Bright Week is buried with the paschal funeral service, in which Christ is risen is sung over the coffin. On Bright Friday the Greek calendar keeps the feast of the Life-Giving Spring; on Bright Saturday the artos is broken and distributed, the doors are closed again, and ordinary time resumes.

The Sunday that follows is called Antipascha, which does not mean against Pascha but in place of Pascha — the feast repeated, the eighth day. It is also St. Thomas Sunday, and its Gospel is John 20:19-31. The Church's judgement on Thomas is not what a Protestant might expect. The hymns do not scold him; they call his unbelief good and blessed, on the grounds that his demand to put his hand into the side produced the most physical evidence anyone was given, and that his confession, My Lord and my God, is the highest thing anybody says to Christ in the Gospels. The eight-week cycle of tones restarts on this day and runs through the year from here.

Because no memorial services are held during Bright Week, the commemoration of the dead resumes immediately afterwards, and in Russian and Ukrainian practice it resumes with Radonitsa, kept on the Tuesday of St. Thomas week. The name is from a word for gladness. Families go out to the cemeteries, tidy the graves, have the priest serve a short memorial there, and greet their dead with the paschal greeting — Christ is risen — leaving red eggs on the graves. Under the Soviet regime it was one of the few observances that could not be prevented, because it happened outdoors in a graveyard and looked like a family visit. It is the clearest possible demonstration of what the feast is thought to be about: the greeting is addressed to people who are dead, on the assumption that the sentence applies to them.

The feast itself lasts forty days. Christ is risen is sung at the beginning of every service and replaces the usual opening prayers at home; the invocation of the Holy Spirit, O Heavenly King, is not said at all between Pascha and Pentecost. The Sundays are given names and their Gospels are taken almost entirely from John, read straight through: Thomas, the Myrrh-bearing Women, the Paralytic at the pool, the Samaritan Woman at the well, the Man Born Blind. Halfway through comes Mid-Pentecost. The leave-taking of Pascha falls on the Wednesday of the sixth week, the thirty-ninth day, when the whole Paschal service is sung one last time and the epitaphios is taken off the altar; Ascension is the next day, the fortieth; Pentecost is the fiftieth.

Why nobody kneels

From the night of Pascha until Pentecost the Orthodox Church does not kneel and does not make prostrations, and the rule is not a pious custom but a canon of an ecumenical council. The twentieth canon of the First Council of Nicaea, in 325, is short enough to quote entire, and a Protestant reader should notice that this is one of the twenty canons the council actually did issue, unlike the paschal rule discussed earlier.

Forasmuch as there are certain persons who kneel on the Lord's Day and in the days of Pentecost, therefore, to the intent that all things may be uniformly observed everywhere, it seems good to the holy Synod that prayer be made to God standing.Canon 20, First Council of Nicaea, 325

The reasoning is given by St. Basil the Great in his treatise On the Holy Spirit, written in 375, where he lists the practice among the Church's unwritten traditions and explains it at chapter 27. Standing is the posture of the resurrection; on the day of the Resurrection and through the fifty days the Church stands upright as a reminder both of the grace given to it and of the age to come, in which there will be no more falling down. The Quinisext Council in 692 repeated the prohibition in its ninetieth canon and defined its limits from Saturday evening to Sunday evening. And the practice is older than either: Tertullian, writing at the beginning of the third century, already knows it as an established rule for the Lord's day and for the season of Pentecost. So the refusal to kneel for fifty days is among the best-attested continuous customs in Christianity, and it is one that the Reformation traditions, which generally have strong instincts about kneeling, have not inherited.

The point worth carrying away is the one about posture, and it runs against a common Protestant assumption that what the body does in worship is indifferent. In this tradition it is not indifferent; it is doctrinal. To kneel is to confess that one is a penitent under judgement, which is true on most days and is the right thing to do on them. To stand is to confess that one has been raised with Christ, which is what the fifty days are for. The season ends precisely where it began, with the body: at Vespers on the evening of Pentecost the Church serves the Kneeling Prayers, three long prayers of St. Basil, and the entire congregation goes down onto the floor together for the first time in fifty days. It should be said that the canon is imperfectly kept — many Orthodox kneel in paschal season out of habit or devotion, and Greek and monastic practice is usually stricter about it than parish practice in the diaspora — but a visitor who notices that nobody is kneeling at a Sunday Liturgy in May is not seeing casualness. He is seeing a decision made at Nicaea.

Where practice differs, and it differs a great deal. The red eggs and the artos are common to everyone. The paschal basket is Slavic, Polish, Carpatho-Rusyn and Ukrainian, and is unknown in Greek practice; magiritsa and tsoureki are Greek and unknown in Russian practice; the kulich and the moulded cheese paskha are Russian and Ukrainian; pască and drob are Romanian; ma'amoul and the Arabic greeting are Antiochian. Radonitsa at the graves is Russian and Ukrainian, and a Greek will never have heard of it. Kite-flying on Clean Monday is Greek and is not liturgical at all. None of this is doctrine, and a convert who finds himself in a parish whose grandmothers came from somewhere else should expect the food and the domestic customs to be different and the services to be the same.

On Pascha night there is an icon on the stand in the middle of the church that everyone venerates on the way in, and a Protestant visitor who glances at it will not recognise what it is a picture of. He is expecting the image he has seen on a thousand Easter bulletins: Christ in white stepping out of the mouth of a cave, a stone rolled aside, soldiers asleep or recoiling, a banner with a red cross on it, dawn breaking. That image is Western and it is late. It developed in medieval and Renaissance European painting and became standard there; Piero della Francesca's and Raphael's versions are the famous ones. It is not the Orthodox icon of the feast and never has been.

The reason given is exact, and it is a reason about evidence. Nobody saw the Resurrection. All four Gospels report the tomb found empty, and they report appearances of the risen Christ afterwards; not one of them describes the rising itself, and there was no witness to it. Orthodox iconography is disciplined about this. It will paint what the Gospels report — and it does, in a separate icon of the Myrrh-bearing Women at the empty tomb with the angel on the stone, which is used on the third Sunday after Pascha and which is the closest thing in the tradition to the Western picture. But for the feast itself it paints something else: not the moment nobody saw in the garden, but what the apostolic preaching and the Creed say was happening in the place nobody could see. The icon is called the Anastasis, the Raising-Up, and in English it is usually called the Descent into Hades or, in older Western usage, the Harrowing of Hell.

Reading the icon

Christ stands in the centre, larger than everyone else, in an almond or circular mandorla of light, and He is usually painted in white or gold rather than in the red and blue He wears in most icons — these are garments of glory, not the clothes He was buried in. Often He carries the cross, held not as an instrument of execution but like a staff or a standard, or a scroll. His robes are shown in motion, blown back, because He has just arrived. This is a man who has come down into somewhere at speed.

Under His feet are two rectangular panels laid across each other, and a viewer who does not know the convention reads them as a platform. They are not. They are the two leaves of the gates of Hades, torn off their hinges and lying flat, and Christ is standing on them. Below and around them is a black pit, painted as a cave of solid darkness with no light-source in it, and scattered in that darkness is the hardware of the place: bolts, hinges, bars, broken chains, padlocks, keys, sometimes the nails, all rendered small and precise, as though somebody had taken a door apart and thrown the pieces down a hole. In many versions, especially the Russian ones, a bound figure lies in the pit — Hades personified, an old man or a dark shape, being trussed hand and foot by angels while the rescue goes on above him.

And then the detail on which the whole icon turns. Christ reaches down to a bearded old man rising out of a stone sarcophagus on one side, and to a woman rising out of another on the other side; these are Adam and Eve, and they are always identified in the inscriptions. He does not take them by the hand. He takes them by the wrist. This is not accidental and it is not a stylistic mannerism — Byzantine painters knew the difference perfectly well and used both grips elsewhere for different purposes. A handclasp is mutual; two people who take each other by the hand are doing something together. A grip around the wrist is what you use on a person who cannot grip back. In most versions Adam's own hand hangs open and limp inside Christ's fist, and Eve's hands are veiled in her mantle or held out empty, and her wrist too is taken. They are being hauled out of their graves by someone who is not waiting for their cooperation.

That detail should be weighed carefully by a Protestant reader, because it cuts directly against what he is usually told Orthodoxy believes about grace. Orthodoxy does teach synergy — the real cooperation of the human will with the grace of God, throughout a life of repentance — and it teaches it firmly and will not surrender it. But the feast icon of the Orthodox Church is not a picture of synergy. It is a picture of a dead man being pulled out of a hole by the wrist because he is dead and cannot lift himself, and the Church has been painting it that way for more than a thousand years. Whatever cooperation means in Orthodox theology, it does not mean that Adam helped.

Behind Adam and Eve stands a crowd, and every figure in it is identifiable. On one side, usually behind Adam, are the kings, crowned and robed: David and Solomon, standing together in their sarcophagi, and often Moses with the tablets of the Law. Among them, gaunt and in camel hair and pointing, is John the Forerunner, and he is there for a specific reason — the Church's hymns say that he went before Christ into Hades as he had gone before Him into the world, and preached there to the dead as he had preached at the Jordan to the living. On the other side are the prophets and the righteous of the old covenant, sometimes with Abel, the first man murdered, in the front rank holding a shepherd's crook. The crowd is not a generalised multitude. It is a named list, and the names are all from before the Incarnation.

That is itself a claim and it is a startling one. The people being rescued in the Orthodox icon of the Resurrection are not Christians. There is not one apostle in the picture, no martyr, no bishop, no baptised person of any description. The first beneficiaries of the Resurrection, in the Church's own visual summary of it, are Adam, Eve, Abel, Moses, David, Solomon and the prophets — that is, the entire human race from the beginning down to the day before yesterday, the ones who died without hearing the Gospel because there was no Gospel yet to hear. What the icon says the risen Christ did first, before appearing to anyone alive, was to go down and get four thousand years of dead people.

The Scripture behind it

The descent is in the Creed — He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried — and in the ancient baptismal creeds of the West it is explicit, He descended into hell. It rests on a small number of New Testament passages, and a fair account should admit that they are among the harder ones. Peter says that Christ was put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit, by whom also He went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly were disobedient (1 Peter 3:18-20), and a few lines later that for this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit (4:6). Paul, quoting Psalm 67 [68]:18, says that when He ascended on high He led captivity captive, and then asks what ascending implies — that He also first descended into the lower parts of the earth, and that the One who descended is the same who ascended far above all the heavens (Ephesians 4:8-10).

Peter's sermon at Pentecost argues the case from Psalm 15 [16]:10: God raised Him up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it, for David said You will not leave my soul in Hades, nor allow Your Holy One to see corruption (Acts 2:24-31). Hebrews says that He shared in flesh and blood so that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage (2:14-15). Colossians says He disarmed principalities and powers and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them (2:15). And the risen Christ in Revelation says that He was dead and is alive forevermore, and that He has the keys of Hades and of Death (1:18) — which are the keys the icon paints lying broken in the pit.

There is one Gospel verse that reports the harrowing as a public event and it is very strange. Matthew says that at the moment of the death the veil of the temple was torn, the earth quaked, the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the graves after His resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many (27:51-53). Matthew supplies no names, no follow-up and no explanation, and commentators have struggled with it for two millennia. Whatever else is said about it, it is the earliest written statement that the death of Christ emptied graves, and the Church's icon is a picture of that sentence.

Honesty requires a further note about sources. Some of the specific imagery — the gates, the bronze bars, Hades and Satan arguing with each other about what they have just let in — does not come from Scripture. It comes from the second part of the Acts of Pilate, the apocryphal work known as the Gospel of Nicodemus, probably of the fourth or fifth century, which stages the descent as a drama with dialogue. Orthodoxy does not treat it as Scripture and nothing doctrinal rests on it; what it shows is that the tradition of the descent was already vivid and detailed well before anybody painted it. The icon type itself is likewise not apostolic and should not be presented as though it were. The earliest surviving examples are around the eighth century — a fresco at Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome, and images in the ninth-century Chludov Psalter — and the fully developed classical version is middle and late Byzantine; the most famous of all, in the funerary chapel of the Chora monastery in Constantinople, dates from about 1315 to 1321. The doctrine is old. The picture is medieval. Both statements are true and the Church has never needed to confuse them.

What the icon claims

Set the icon beside the troparion everyone has been singing all night and they turn out to be the same sentence in two media. Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life. Every element of the picture is in that line. He is risen — the figure in the mandorla. Trampling down death — the doors under His feet. By death — the fact that He is down there at all, which He could only reach by dying. Upon those in the tombs bestowing life — Adam and Eve coming up by the wrists out of two stone boxes, and the crowd behind them waiting their turn. The Paschal Homily's argument of the previous section is the same argument again: death took a body and encountered God, took what it saw and fell by what it did not see, and the Septuagint of Isaiah 14:9 supplied the word for what happened to it.

So the Orthodox icon of the Resurrection contains no risen Christ walking in a garden, no angel sitting on a stone, no fainting soldiers, and — this is the thing to hold on to — no empty tomb. It contains a pair of doors lying flat, a dead man being pulled up by the wrist, and a hole full of broken locks. What the Church is saying by painting that and not the other thing is that the Resurrection is not, in the first place, an event that happened to Jesus. It is an event that happened to death. Christ's own rising is the beginning of it and not the whole of it, and the proof offered in the picture is not that a tomb is empty but that the doors of the place are off their hinges and cannot be shut again.

On variants and on borrowing. Russian iconography from the fifteenth century onward often expands the scene, adding the ascent of the righteous toward paradise, the good thief with his cross at the gate, and angels binding the demons with chains, and the Dionysius and post-Rublev schools produced some of the finest examples. From the seventeenth century, under Western influence, images of Christ rising from the tomb with a white banner also entered Russian and Greek church art, and they can still be found painted on Orthodox walls and printed on Orthodox calendars. Iconographers generally regard these as borrowings from Western religious painting rather than as part of the tradition, and the recovery of Byzantine iconography in the twentieth century — associated with Photios Kontoglou in Greece and with Leonid Ouspensky and the Russian emigration in Paris — largely restored the Anastasis to its place. A visitor who sees the Western image in an Orthodox church is not seeing a different doctrine; he is seeing the effect of three centuries of art history.

Everything above can be read without ever going, and it would still be worth knowing. But the chapter should end on the night itself, described exactly, because the accounts a Protestant is likely to encounter are either travel writing or advertising and this is neither. Here is what the hours are actually like.

A church full of candles, and no other light

You arrive at about a quarter past eleven and there are forty people in the building. The Midnight Office is being chanted by two men at a stand, and it is quiet and slow and hard to follow, and the flowered bier is still standing in the middle of the floor with people kissing it on their way past. The church smells of beeswax and incense and of flowers that have been cut since Thursday and are beginning to go over. Between half past eleven and midnight the room fills up, and then goes on filling — the aisles, the narthex, the steps outside, the parking lot. Families come in with children who are asleep on their fathers' shoulders and who will be woken deliberately in twenty minutes. Teenagers stand outside talking. Old women who have been there since ten have chairs against the wall. Everybody is holding an unlit candle, and many of them have brought lanterns with glass around them so that the flame will survive the drive home.

Then the lights go out, and the sound of a crowded room dropping to nothing in about two seconds is a thing you have probably never heard. The dark lasts long enough to be uncomfortable. When the doors of the sanctuary open and one candle comes through them, every head in the building turns; the flame goes to the front row and then it moves, hand to hand, across five hundred people, and the whole room comes up out of the dark in roughly a minute and a half. People cup their hands around their neighbour's flame. Wax runs onto fingers and nobody moves. Somebody's hair catches for a second and somebody else puts it out. Children are lifted up to reach.

Then everyone walks outside, and this is the part that surprises visitors most, because it is not a symbolic gesture or a short walk to the porch. The entire congregation leaves the building at midnight and stands in the open, several hundred people with candles in a car park or a street or a churchyard, and traffic stops, and neighbours come out to look. The bells are rung badly and loudly. In the cold the candles blow out and are relit from the person next to you, over and over. The singing outdoors is thin at the edges of the crowd, because the people at the back cannot hear the chanters, and they sing anyway, half a beat behind. Then the procession comes back to the doors and the doors are shut, and there is knocking, and a voice, and then the doors go open and everybody pushes in at once to a building that is blazing with light and hung in white, and for about ninety seconds it is chaos.

What follows is two more hours of standing, and this is where an honest account has to say what a devotional one leaves out. It is hard. The Paschal Canon at half past one is glorious and it is also long, and you will be tired, and the Liturgy that follows it does not begin until the Canon is finished. The congregation thins from about two o'clock. Some people leave after the homily to go home and start cooking, and a few came only for midnight and are gone by half past twelve, and everybody knows this and the Church does not pretend otherwise; the same sermon that has just been read aloud is the reason nobody polices the door. Around two the priest comes out with the chalice, and the people who have been fasting for seven weeks receive communion, which is where the fast ends. The eating that happens afterwards is a consequence, not the event.

By half past two or three the parish is in the hall or out in the yard with tables, and there is soup and bread and cheese and red eggs and lamb and far too much of everything, and the noise is indecent for the hour. Children are up at three in the morning with the full approval of their parents, once a year, and they know it. Men who have not been in the church since last Pascha are there and are welcomed without comment. Nobody says hello; they say Christ is risen, and wait for the answer, and get it. People drive home at four with a lit candle in a jar on the dashboard and use it to make a smoke cross over the lintel of the front door, which is a custom, not a rubric, and which is also — a reader who has followed this chapter will notice — a mark made with fire over the door of a house on the night of the Passover.

And it is worth being exact about what the Church is claiming when it sings that sentence, because the claim is narrower and harder than the atmosphere might suggest. It is not claiming that the memory of Jesus is powerful, or that love outlasts death in some general way, or that spring follows winter, or that hope is renewable. The candles are not a metaphor for the human spirit. What is being asserted, flatly and without any fallback position, is that a particular man who was executed outside Jerusalem under a named Roman governor, and whose corpse was wrapped and buried by named people on a Friday afternoon, was alive again in a body on the Sunday, is alive now, and in the process broke the mechanism by which everyone else dies. Every single thing in this chapter depends on that being a fact — the seven weeks without meat, the Julian calendar, the fifteen readings, the doors under Christ's feet in the icon, the refusal to kneel until Pentecost, the red eggs left on graves at Radonitsa. If it is not a fact, none of it is a beautiful symbol; it is a very large and very old mistake, kept up at enormous cost.

The Orthodox tradition has never offered a second position in which the liturgy retains its value as poetry. It has no such position to offer, and neither did the apostle who first put the alternative in writing.

And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty… And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! … If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.1 Corinthians 15:14, 17, 19, NKJV

That is the whole wager, and it was stated in the fifties of the first century by a man who had met people who said they had seen it. Everything the Church built afterwards — the calendar with its movable spine, the seven weeks of fasting, the twelve Gospels read standing on Thursday night, the tomb on the church floor on Friday, the leaves thrown through the building on Saturday morning, the shut doors at midnight — is an elaborate structure erected on top of a claim about a weekend, and the structure exists to make sure that a congregation walks through the claim from the inside once a year instead of merely assenting to it from a pew.

Which is the thing a Protestant reader might most usefully take away. He has known the Resurrection as a Sunday morning: lilies at the front, the brass, the choir at full strength, the sermon of the year, and lunch. None of that is false and none of it should be sneered at. What he has probably not known is that there is a tradition in which the Resurrection is not a morning but a night; not a service but a week; not an annual reminder but the fixed point from which every other date is measured. And he can go and see it. In most North American parishes the service will be largely or entirely in English, the doors are unlocked, nobody will ask him what he is doing there, and he is not required to be Orthodox in order to stand at the back of a dark church at midnight holding an unlit candle and find out what happens next.

If he does go, he should know the form. At some point a stranger will turn to him and say, in Greek or Slavonic or Arabic or English, that Christ is risen. It is not a greeting and the correct response is not thank you. He is being asked whether he agrees.