TREMBLING AND ECSTASY
Reflections of the Night of the Resurrection
On the night of the Resurrection, before the ‘Christ is Risen’, we recite outside the churches the most succinct, almost incomplete, account of the evangelist Mark, who wrote the first of the Gospels around three decades after the events of the divine dispensation. Three women, the myrrh-bearers—one of whom was most likely Jesus’ mother—depart in haste from the tomb of Jesus, carrying in their hearts the angel’s message: ‘He has risen; He is not here.’ Despite his urging, they say nothing to anyone. They are overcome with ‘trembling and ecstasy’. Thus, abruptly, the Gospel reading ends—with trembling, ecstasy, and the silence of the astounded women.
Trembling, as awe, because they had just taken an unexpected leap into the unknown, and at the threshold of another reality, they had received a word that surpassed the laws of nature and overturned all of history. Along with them our poet Nikos Gatsos sings: ‘Today Hades has been opened, Golgotha has become a bridge, and on the shore of death you follow an ineffable path.’
Ecstasy, as an existential shudder and a forgetting of the self, because suddenly and unexpectedly the shore of death became the boundary between the tangible and the untouchable, where the traces of the dead and risen One create an unutterable passage, introducing a new condition of existence.
Silence—not only because such a subversive message requires rational processing, but also because it stands at the boundary between the spoken and the unspeakable, where one does not know what or how to say. Along with them, St John of Damascus gives voice to the inexpressible: ‘Now all things are filled with light—heaven and earth and the netherworld.’
One wonders whether today’s world can succumb to the same fear, the same ecstasy, the same silence. Our world experiences trembling—not before the resurrection, but before death. And it experiences ecstasy—not from the vision of God, but from the vision of the ego, which eventually becomes our tomb. The dominant ego, detached from nature and from the community of ‘we’; the fragile ego that, through fantasies of grandeur, launches itself into infinity only to shatter into countless pieces—like that old Challenger, which exploded spectacularly as a flying Babel, its fragments dancing unredeemed in space. Space became a tomb. Thus, existentially unredeemed, in the grave of spiritual poverty and pettiness of soul, of vanity and greed, of artificial joy and every kind of addiction and illusion, modern man—guilty and embittered, without mourning or joy—skirmishes with his ultimate enemy, death, yet with a deep, often unspoken hope within him.
This hope seems to revive with the mournful flowers of every Holy Week. The sacred Passion unfolds the full spectrum of human drama, with God Himself as the central figure and great poets as the chorus leaders. Toil, sorrow, anguish, betrayal, injustice, martyrdom, death, burial—behold humanity in the face of the God-man. However, the end is anything but tragic. It is the victory of the buried and life-giving Body over the ultimate enemy, the victory of love over the forces of decay—the only meaningful victory, for it tolerates no defeated part; it swallows up defeat itself.
Perhaps that is why, amid the helplessness of our times, believers and non-believers alike, those who have fasted and those who have not, hasten to hear ‘Christ is Risen’ with a red egg in our pocket, a golden candle in hand, and to relive the expectation: that the tombstone of life, of justice, of goodness and beauty is not the final act of the drama—for the one who suffered, dead and estranged, yet closest to our heart, is the One who painted the earth with flowers.
On every such night, it is not merely religious feeling that is awakened—something that can both solace and deceive. What awakens is the deeper self—soul, body, and senses—which longs to submit to the light. And the entire Church, on such a night, leaves the temples to proclaim to the world what it most desperately needs without realising it: that there is another ineffable route—and it is not the way of success and goal achievement. It is the route of life that leads to the resurrection—the ‘life toward resurrection,’ as Paul Ricoeur would say— that allows us to realise that we have been forgiven and unconditionally loved by God. Only then will every kind of tomb become heaven.
Archimandrite Chrysostom,
Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Faneromeni, Naxos