Movement V

  • Remember Me: The Good Thief and the Last Word on Repentance

    *Remember Me: The Good Thief and the Last Word on Repentance*
    _Movement V, Post 2 | Seeking Theosis_

    🕯️ The Faces of the Fast series began on the first day of Great Lent with Adam sitting outside the gate of Paradise.

    The gate had just closed behind him. He sat in the dust. He wept. And God had compassion on him.

    Today, Holy Saturday, the Lenten portion of the series ends.

    It ends with a man dying on a cross asking to be remembered. And being told by the man dying beside him that today he will be in Paradise.

    The gate that closed on Adam is opened again. Not for a patriarch or a prophet or a person of demonstrated virtue. For a dying thief. With hours left. Asking for the most human thing in the world.

    Remember me.

    We began with the gate closing. We end with it opening.

    That is the whole of the Gospel in the arc of a Lenten series.

    The last Lenten reflection is on the blog today. Short because Holy Saturday is a day of silence. But the silence is not empty.

    Tomorrow the stone moves.

    Χριστὸς Ἀνέστη. Christ is RIsen. That is where all of this has been going. 🕯️

  • |

    She Stood There: The Theotokos at the Foot of the Cross

    She Stood There: The Theotokos at the Foot of the Cross

    🕯️ Thirty-three years before Golgotha, Simeon held the infant Jesus in the temple and said to Mary:

    “A sword will pierce through your own soul also.”

    She did not know then what the sword would look like.
    Today she knew.

    St. John Chrysostom says the sword was real. The pain of watching her son crucified was not spiritualised away or made bearable by some special divine protection. She felt what any mother would feel. The theology of the Incarnation does not exempt the Theotokos from human suffering. If anything it intensifies it. Because she knew, with a clarity no one else had, exactly who it was dying on that Cross.

    She knew He was the Son of God.

    And she stood there watching the Son of God die.

    And she did not leave. Not until He gave her somewhere to go.

    Good Friday reflection on the blog. On the Theotokos at the foot of the Cross. On the sword that was promised and the standing that received it.

    She stood there. And today we stand with her.