PASCHA
What I say to you, I say to all: Watch! Mark 13.33a
Through His Resurrection Christ defeated death. He is the Prince of life. The exceeding power of death, which is a power to which we are all, naturally, subject, was not strong enough to overcome Him, because He is the holy Source of life itself. Emptying Himself to the point of Crucifixion, Christ redeemed humanity, restoring her to the paradisiacal form according to which she was originally created: In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace (Ephesians 1.7).
The Resurrection, which is not simply a historical event, but rather the perpetually active, heavenly axis around which God’s salvific economy revolves, is an unlimited source of transformative power that renews and redeems. It waters the roots of our faith and breaks apart the oppressive force of death that continually seeks to encroach upon our lives and imprison us within its iron bars: The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8.2).
When we are oriented toward the Resurrection, we open ourselves up to an unlimited source of heavenly power that will continuously release a forceful and steady stream of God’s divine gifts, into our lives, according to each of our individual needs. Buttressed by God’s divine, supernatural energy, divine and supernatural energy that He has given to each of us in a personal and deliberate manner, we are no longer trampled by the destructive economies of the devil.
With the vivifying power of Christ’s holy Resurrection rushing through our lives, cleansing and purifying everything foreign to its Living Source, the areas of inward occupancy that perpetuate our surrender to sinful activity (despite our desire to resist it), are exposed and we are liberated from the authorities to which they are subject: We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6.12).
Progressively free from the passions that formerly kept us locked in vicious, never ending cycles of shame, self-loathing and despair, and the compulsive, reality-avoiding, self-medicating activity that uncontrollably springs out of them, our ability to use these divine gifts for the extension of God’s kingdom will increase. The Holy Spirit reveals these gifts on a yearly basis and will organize their visibility and activity in our lives, according to our spiritual maturity and ability to appropriately use them for the benefit of others.
The Lord has repeatedly told us that He wishes to share His life with us—If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him (John 14.23)—and reveal in our hearts eternal mysteries that are, from the rest of creation (including even the angels), concealed: Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! (1 Corinthians 6.3). To enter into His life, therefore, which is the life of the Resurrection, we must become sensitive to the prophetic voice of the Holy Spirit.
We are in a, very real, confrontation with the devil, who seeks to distort, disfigure and, ultimately, destroy, the redemptive plans of Christ, the Prince of life (Acts 3.15). His weapon, both in Eden and in our times, is the power of death. In the New Testament, Paul talks about the power of death, explaining that the last enemy that will be destroyed is death (1 Corinthians 15.26). It is a relentless power that seeks to shatter the (biblically derived) protective boundaries and preventative limits that remain in place, within our world.
It is for this reason that Christ, addressing the times of accelerated and destructive change in which we are currently immersed, entreats us to be vigilant and watch: Take heed, watch and pray; for you do not know when the time is (Mark 13.33). The power of death, which seeks to absolutely ingratiate itself into, so as to completely overtake, the public sphere, is, however, overcome by the worshipers who walk in the Spirit, who operate—within their personal domains and within society—according to grace, and who submit themselves to God’s holy laws with love, reverence and awe (Hebrews 12.28).
Through His Resurrection Christ defeated death. With its vivifying power rushing through our lives, cleansing and purifying everything foreign to its Living Source, the exceeding power of death, which is a power to which we are all, naturally, subject, will be overcome, because Christ, the God in whom we are rooted, disarmed principalities and powers and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them (Colossians 2.15) through the power of the Cross.
Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.
He is in our midst and ever shall be.
Christ is risen! Truly He is risen.
Amen +
Author of You Are Mine and Apocalypse, Sister Anastasia writes on the role of the ancient, ascetic Church in a rapidly changing, modern world.
Photo by Annamaria Kupo on Unsplash
Χριστός Ανέστη dear sister! I've been blessed to recently recieve your book from a hieromonk who urged me to really read it. Thank God for what you do and may this season overcome you with joy in our Risen Lord!
So good Sister!
The Resurrection is not a relic of history but a ‘perpetual eruption’—God’s life bursting through death’s brittle façade, pulsing through sinew and soil, transfiguring the very atoms of our despair. You write of Christ as the “Prince of Life,” and indeed, His rising is no mere reversal of decay but the sanctification of matter itself: the God who took flesh now hallows flesh eternally, turning tombs into wombs, graves into gateways.
This is the heart of incarnational mysticism I explore in Desert and Fire: redemption worked not ‘around’ the body but ‘through’ it. When Paul declares death’s defeat (1 Cor 15:26), he speaks not of abstraction but of cells and spirit interknit—the same mystery by which Christ’s scars remained risen, glorified yet tangible. To “walk in the Spirit” (Gal 5:16) is thus to let Resurrection’s current electrify our dust, our daily acts of prayer, labor, and love becoming conduits for the “vivifying power” you name.
The devil’s lie is always gnostic: that death’s shadow can eclipse the body’s sacredness. But the empty tomb refutes him. Every Eucharist, every act of mercy, every whispered ‘Kyrie’ is a defiance—a claim that flesh, redeemed, becomes the battleground where principalities fall (Col 2:15). The Cross was not a detour; it was the ‘way’—blood and splintered wood birthing a Life that now courses through our veins, burning away the “never-ending cycles” of shame like chaff.
Your call to vigilance is, in essence, a call to ‘embodied fidelity’: to let the Resurrection’s “steady stream” carve channels in our habits, our loves, our very bones. For the “protective boundaries” against death’s encroachment are not abstract laws but lived realities—the knees bent in prayer, the hands lifted in worship, the heart’s slow surrender to the God who makes His home in our cracked clay (John 14:23).
Death’s “relentless power” shrivels before the smallest act of incarnate love. So let us live as Resurrection’s flesh-and-blood icons—not ethereal souls, but “saints in skin”, radiating the unkillable Life that has already swallowed every grave.
Christ is risen—in our midst, now and ever. Amen.