Fr. Harry Linsinbigler Greetings, everyone! Welcome to Made to Be a Kingdom: How God Forms Us as His Sacred Royal Family. I’m Fr. Harry Linsinbigler, together with Fr. Anthony Perkins. Fr. Anthony, can you please give us a quick run-down as to where we left off last time?

Fr. Anthony Perkins: Yeah! So the main topic that we’re going into is the two kingdoms. You presented this wonderful image about the wheat and the tares, and about how you have a combination of these two things developing even in the midst of the Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. You were talking about getting us ready to deepen the discussion by talking about the way the Lord harrowed Hades, the gates of [hell] won’t—didn’t, haven’t, can’t—prevail against him. And we were going to then talk about how we get involved in this, because he’s our Leader, but how is it that we participate in—and not just benefit from—his actions.

And, man, for me, Fr. Harry, the way that I understand all these things is always liturgical. I think of the rituals and the movements in Bridegroom Matins. As with all matins services, right there pretty much at the beginning, you’ve got the six psalms. These six psalms, the tradition is to have pretty much all the lights out except what’s necessary to read the six psalms in the middle of the church, and maybe the priest so that he can read his matins prayers. And then all of us are contemplating death, but there during Holy Week in the Bridegroom Matins, you’ve got the full gravity of what is happening around us as we contemplate death is the Lord going to his death. So at least there you have this mingling, this combination of us contemplating death, us contemplating his death, and then recognizing that the ontology becomes the same because we live in him.

But there’s more! There’s more. I have no doubt that each of these services reveal a bit more to us about these two kingdoms and how the wheat ends up being separated. How is that, Fr. Harry?

Fr. Harry The Bridegroom services in particular are telling us how we fit into this whole picture, and how Christ fits us into this whole picture before we hit Great and Holy Saturday. So he arrives as King of kings into Jerusalem, received by his disciples, by the people of Jerusalem, as the King. But he also at that time was offering himself on that tenth day of Aviv, of Nisan, of the Hebrew month of Nisan, the tenth day of it, as the spotless Lamb that was about to go to sacrifice, to be the Passover, the eternal Passover.

So how does he fit us into that, to this whole plan in the meantime? Well, the Bridegroom services are precisely about that. A lot of people think, “Boy, the triumphal entry of the King of kings—and then we’re going into Bridegroom services,” and a lot of people think that that’s pretty strange, that we’re focusing on Christ as a Bridegroom right after Palm Sunday, and we kind of go into that mode, and they think it’s kind of disjointed, but it’s quite the opposite of disjointed; it actually tells us exactly how we fit into this whole picture and has us participating once more into this whole picture.

By the way, I will also say, not just Bridegroom Matins but Bridegroom Presanctifieds are heavily meaningful during this time. They’re just kind of somehow bumped to second place a lot of times, but they also are heavily meaningful. So it’s important to understand that Bridegroom services are looking forward to Pascha. “Behold, the Bridegroom comes in the middle of the night” refers to Christ rising out of hell in his resurrection. So we see this, for example, in the Paschal odes, in the Praises of the Resurrection Matins; we say, “You are risen from the tomb, coming as from the bridal chamber to save the world. Lord, glory to you!” Likewise, in the Paschal verses of Matins: “O Pascha, ransom from sorrow! For today, shining forth from the tomb as from a bridal chamber, Christ filled the women with joy, saying: Proclaim the glad tidings to the apostles!”

And the most poignant verses on this, however, we find in Ode Five of the Canon of Paschal Matins, where we sing the following ancient hymn: “With torches in our hands, let us go to meet Christ as he comes from the grave like a bridegroom (or as a bridegroom), and with the festive ranks of angels let us together feast on God’s saving Passover.” It is important to note that in this case it is a reference to a Scripture where it sometimes uses “Passover” about the day, but often it’s referring to the Passover lamb.

So here we have this combination again, but we have something added to it, added to Palm Sunday, and that is Christ as a Bridegroom. So what does this mean? Oftentimes people are familiar with the icon of the Bridegroom, in which Christ definitely has a king’s crown on, but it’s quite different than what was expected by the world.

Fr. Anthony: Yeah. Just in case people aren’t familiar, it’s because it is the crown of thorns. This is a profound and affective icon.

Fr. Harry Yes, and so in order to understand why St. John said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” we must first understand that Christ is the Paschal Lamb of God, who was sacrificed to become food for the faithful, as it says in the first resurrection St. Basil Liturgy on Holy Saturday in the Cherubic Hymn.

So what is all this business about him being a Bridegroom? Well, first and foremost we have the reading of the Bridegroom, the Bridegroom reading on Tuesday’s Presanctified Liturgy. It’s where we find the actual reading of Christ being the Bridegroom, where he tells the parable of the virgins and so on. We have that, but the most important aspect of it is: What is he the Bridegroom of? Whom is he marrying? And this is the utmost important aspect of this—he’s marrying the Church. So in the last episode, we discussed about how Matthew 16 really is talking about what’s going on in Holy Week.

And that Church is his Bride. He is the Bridegroom, and the Church is his Bride. So we discussed the Church as the Body of Christ, but we also discuss it as the Bride of Christ, for the two have become one flesh. So it’s his body, but it’s also his bride, and so we see this in the wedding service, combined in the wedding service, and with Scripture itself, where the two become one flesh and the man takes on his bride as his body, and this reflects first and foremost, as St. Paul says, the Church; it’s an icon of the Church. So that is whom Christ is coming to become one flesh with, to marry, is his Church, to establish his new and everlasting kingdom.

When is he doing it? He’s doing it this week, and so we have that reflection of “Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, or in the middle of the night” as the reference that we’re already looking forward to that resurrection. But consequently, we’re also looking forward to that wedding, where Christ unites the Church with himself, in that bridal chamber of the tomb. So this is all very, very connected. As we see, no longer—now we see, this is no longer disjointed, that this is very much a flux of the salvation story in this Holy and Great Week, and we’re participating in it in these Bridegroom services, where we’re reading all the things that took place with Christ. We hear them in the services and in the readings in the services, but also through all the verses in the services of the week as to what all this means, and that we’re participating in this, anxiously, as his Church, and as his Church, too, as it were, celebrate our anniversary with Christ. Pascha is the celebration of our anniversary with Christ as being his Body and his Bride.

Fr. Anthony: Father, here you said something that was just so powerful. His tomb—his tomb—is the bridal chamber?

Fr. Harry Yes!

Fr. Anthony: So the bridal chamber is this—I don’t know—a place of a liturgical space, where a wedding takes place. So the union takes place, and you’ve got it moved to a tomb?

Fr. Harry Yeah. Yeah! Right, and, again, the services throughout identify that the bridal chamber is the tomb. Some people who are more concrete listeners would already be thinking, “Boy, this is really creepy, that a graveyard is the place where…”

Fr. Anthony: Yeah, and others are now wanting destination weddings! [Laughter] But let me tie together something. So before you mentioned, in the last show, about how, in your parish’s practice on Palm Sunday, during the great entrance, you’ve got the people who have their willows and their palms, and they’ll put them in the path of the procession. And we’ve got that—so liturgically we’ve got that combination of forms.

Man, one of the prayers that we say every time we celebrate Liturgy is, once we’re in, we remember the Noble Joseph and how they prepared his body and wrap it and things, and then, along with that, we’ve got this little meditation that we pray: “More beautiful than paradise, and more radiant than any royal chamber, your tomb has shone forth, O Christ, as a life-giving font of our resurrection.” So it doesn’t say—unfortunately they didn’t change it just for the show, but the themes are there, that it has become the royal chamber, also the place where the Church and Christ are combined in resurrection. This is amazing, Fr. Harry!

Fr. Harry Yeah, he’s building his kingdom, right here in our midst!

Fr. Anthony: On the tomb! [Laughter]

Fr. Harry And now… So if that’s the consummation of the wedding, that’s the bridal chamber, when was the wedding? So this is where we’re moving to. We move from— As the Bridegroom services progress—and again, I wish that our Presanctified services weren’t sacrificed almost for the Matins, but it’s… I myself actually do Matins, but Tuesday evening I do the Vesperal Presanctified, because it has the reading for the Bridegroom in it. And then I go back to Matins the next night.

But already we see this progressing thematically towards the moment of the wedding. So already Thursday night we start to see, even though it’s Bridegroom services, all of a sudden there’s a shift in the Matins, the focus. And the focus has become the wedding. And the wedding—when did it take place? It took place precisely on Holy Thursday evening, otherwise known as the eve of Great Friday, because, biblically speaking, it happened when the new biblical day of Great Friday had begun. So we tend to think of it as the Holy Thursday Liturgy, and especially since it’s often placed in the morning most often nowadays, but this is the celebration. This is the wedding-feast.

But first, before the wedding-feast happens—and this we see in the beautiful hymnography—it gives us the timeline of how the Church thinks of this progression, of when this actually took place and what happened when it did take place. And before, however, I want to go… I want to go back to the book of Daniel before we get into Holy Thursday. In the book of Daniel 9:26:

And after the 62 weeks, messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself and the people of the prince, who is to come, shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end it shall be with a flood until the end of the war, desolations are determined.

And verse 27 says:

Then he shall confirm a covenant with many for one week, but in the middle of the week he shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering, and on the wing of abominations shall the one who makes desolate, even until the consummation which will be determined will be poured out on the desolate.

Many tend to think of this as end-times type stuff, which it is—it inaugurates the last days—but it’s referring us to this great occurrence, of where… And the desolate being poured out on the desolate—of course, we have that image of Satan himself and the fallen angels in their binding, and conquering of the enemy kingdom.

The New Testament identifies—back to our story; I know that was a little sidebar, but the New Testament identifies Thursday—in other words, Wednesday evening through Thursday evening, according to the Hebrew reckoning—as the first day of unleavened bread, the 14th of Nisan/Aviv, according to the lunar calendar. And it is the day on which, in the afternoon, in between the two evenings, the Paschal lamb was slaughtered for the Passover meal in the evening, at the very beginning of 15 Nisan, in other words, according to Hebrew reckoning.

Since there were some who questioned—there are some who speculate, particularly in the fundamentalist sort of Protestant world on—did this happen on Tuesday in the week, for example, and all these sorts of things. And you kind of get off course as to what the point of this whole thing is. We know, from Matthew 26:2: “You know that after two days it is the Passover, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified,” Mark 14:1: “After two days, it was the Passover of unleavened bread,” Luke 22:1: “Now the feast of unleavened bread drew near, which is called the Passover,” that it couldn’t have been Monday or Tuesday that it happened, because Scripture has given us this timeline, and Christ’s own words kind of give us this timeline. But anyway… And by the way, their argument is that Sunday wasn’t really the day of resurrection—is where they went with that. So we can lay that aside; it’s easily disprovable with worries. And that’s a distraction anyway.

So now, the first day of unleavened bread of course refers to the day on which all leaven was purged from the house so that the feast of Passover and the unleavened bread could be celebrated starting at mid-afternoon of 14 Nisan, which landed on Thursday. Many are wondering: why unleavened bread? Well, this kind of goes back earlier. In the book of Exodus it said because it’s the bread of haste. What does that mean? Because they were fleeing rather quickly? Yeah, I mean, obviously they had to go and so they didn’t have time to make leavened bread. But it had a deeper biblical significance before that, and that deeper biblical significance came with the condemnation of Sodom and Gomorrah, where Lot and Lot’s wife made cakes for the visiting—for their heavenly visitors, and they were unleavened cakes, because it had to be made fast.

So Lot and his wife thought they were making cakes quick because the angels, the heavenly visitors, were there, and they had to make it quick, but little did they know that it was for a different reason. It was for an exodus out of Sodom, for which that bread of haste was made. So God commanded that for the Israelites as a connection to a thing that happened in the past and connected those two events, which were eternally significant, once again. And the same thing happens in the New Testament here on Holy Thursday, where we have unleavened bread, the feast of unleavened bread falling on Thursday, and the Last Supper happening there.

We have on that Great and Holy Thursday night again, which is, properly speaking, biblically speaking, the eve of Great and Holy Friday [which] has already begun. So what happens as we look at Holy Thursday? In the readings and in the services, we have references going back, connecting these older occurrences to this particular Last Supper. I’m just looking to see… And so the thing is—and we won’t have enough time this particular episode to probably speak about all this that we need to speak about, but we will go into detail on this in the next episode also, but first we’ll get the overview—that on Great and Holy Thursday night, that night, that Last Supper actually had two parts. The first part—and this is very significant that it’s a Vesperal Liturgy that’s held, because what does a Vesperal Liturgy do? It brings an end to the previous day, and right in the middle of it, it inaugurates the next day, liturgically speaking, biblically speaking; that’s what Vespers does. So that it’s a Vesperal Liturgy that’s held is significant also because Christ himself—it was a Vesperal Liturgy.

In it, he brought the old covenant to an end and inaugurated the new and everlasting covenant. A lot of people think that the Last Supper was a Passover meal, and they’re right: on the first part of it, it was a Passover meal—it was the final Passover, ending, bringing and end and a completion to the old covenant Passover, and inaugurating the new and everlasting covenant thereafter. So, again, we don’t have exactly time to go into all the passages, because I kind of want to connect all these dots. So this is—thereafter…

It says, “After the supper—after the supper—then he took bread.” So during the supper, they’re having the Paschal lamb, they’re having unleavened bread, they’re having the wine, as it were—but after that, he inaugurates the new covenant. And this is when he takes the bread, the artos. So azima: he took the unleavened bread before, to have the Passover. When they were finished that, though, he took the bread, broke it, and gave thanks; he took the leavened bread, artos, broke it and gave thanks. And then “again, after supper”—so even in the words of the Liturgy—“again, after supper, he took the cup.” So the cups of the Passover are done. A lot speculate, “Well, was it the fourth cup of the seder that was the cup…” No, no, the Passover was already done; the final Passover was accomplished. This is the new and everlasting covenant that he is establishing here. So he took the cup and gave thanks.

Because this is the wedding-feast of the Church that he has on Great and Holy Thursday night, which means what? He united himself bodily with the Church, which at that time was the apostles, with the disciples, and made them one body with him, before he went to the cross. So this is very important. Before he goes to the cross the next day, he unites himself as one body. He spills his blood, and he offers his body and first his blood as food for the faithful before he offers his body and blood upon the cross for the salvation of mankind the next day.

So that means the Church was already united to him when he went to the cross and when, after that, he descended into Hades, he preached to the dead, which was further uniting more of the Church to him, because he was taking on with—he was preaching to those in prison so that they might come with him in his resurrection. And all who would hear would come with him voluntarily, and they also would be united to that Church. So he united himself to the disciples on earth on Great and Holy Thursday; he united further to him, while he was in that tomb, the souls of the departed, before his resurrection. As we know, many of them were raised with him, as we read in the gospel of Matthew, or right after his resurrection they came with him.

So it really was a bridal chamber, whereby he was united with— He had begun the Church. They were united with him, they went to the cross, into the grave, into Hades, and back up again in the resurrection, “beaming forth from the tomb” as a body of resurrection. So the Church is a body of resurrection, as the Bride of Christ.

I hope I didn’t go too fast for everybody, but I wanted to give kind of an overview, and we’ll go more into detail in the next…

Fr. Anthony: Fr. Harry, that is so powerful, because we all know as Christians: “Look, I know that I die with Christ, I’m resurrected with Christ”—we know this from our services, our baptismal service, and so on—but we may not appreciate the eucharistic part of it. It is so powerful, your point about the Vespers is the transition from one day to the next, from the service of Vespers, even, to the service of the Liturgy.

But there’s only one—there’s only one Mystical Supper. We commemorate it in time, several times, but it’s really only one, just like there’s only one Body of Christ. And so what you’re saying is that it was vital that it took place before his death so that we could join him in his death and therefore in his resurrection. So there my western mind, I describe it as a mechanism, but it’s so much more, that we’re united in him through this incredible action. Ah, Fr. Harry! Thank you so much for that.

So what do we have to look forward to… How can you add more to this?

Fr. Harry [Laughter] So we’re going to go a little bit more into detail on some of these things, and also talk about post-resurrection and what this means. For example, as you mentioned, there’s one Mystical Supper, and so when Christ encounters the disciples at the road to Emmaus, what happens there is that Mystical Supper is then made present to them. And so he’s incorporating more into this resurrection body by having them in the breaking of the bread. Obviously, they recognize him here, but they were not at the Last Supper, so he’s incorporating them into that one Mystical Supper by making it present—just as he does for us today.

Fr. Anthony: Oh, that is so awesome!

Fr. Harry So we’re going to go more into that kind of stuff in the next episode.

Fr. Anthony: Okay. I honestly—I can’t wait, and also, because when we’re recording this, it builds my anticipation for this coming Holy Week. Ah, Fr. Harry, thank you so much for your witness and for sharing the fruits of your study. God bless and spread it!

So, everybody, we ask for your prayers as we continue to do this, and, until the next time, Godspeed!