On this Great and Holy Saturday, we are so close to Pascha, but we are not quite there. In a sense, we are in the same position as St Mary Magdalene when she saw Jesus Christ outside the tomb. Christ told her in the Gospel of St John, chapter 20, verse 17: “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” That is our situation too on this Great and Holy Saturday: we cannot yet touch Christ.

During these three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection, when living human beings could not touch Christ, He descended into hell. There, St Peter tells us in First Peter, chapter 4, verse 6, Christ “preached the Good News to the dead.” Christ was reaching out to touch all of the dead, including Adam and Eve, as set out in that beautiful icon in which Christ brings the first couple out of hell. As the Epistle to the Romans, chapter 14, verse 9 says: “Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.”

For vespers this evening, the Church has chosen many readings from the Old Testament to stress the continuing importance of the Old Testament. Remember, what we Christians know today as the Old Testament was the Bible of the first century and still is, of course, an important part of the Bible today. Let’s consider three of these readings on how the Lord prepared His people for the coming of Jesus Christ.

The first passage, from the book of Exodus, chapter 12 is “one of the chapters of the Old Testament upon which the [Church] Fathers meditated most profoundly” [Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament III, p. 56.] The Lord told Moses and Aaron to tell the Hebrew slaves to kill and eat a lamb and spread the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and lintels of their houses, so that death would pass over their houses, while the first-born of the Egyptians were being killed. The Orthodox Study Bible calls these actions of the Hebrew slaves eating the lamb and smearing its blood on their houses, “the Lord’s Pascha.”

St Augustine has explained that: “[The word] pascha is not, as some think, a Greek word but a Hebrew [word]; yet most conveniently there occurs in his name [pascha] a certain [similarity] between the two languages. Because in Greek [the word for] ‘to suffer’ is pschein. For this reason, pascha has been thought of as a passion. But ... In Hebrew pascha means ‘a passing over;’ [and] the people of God celebrated the pascha for the first time when, fleeing from Egypt, they ‘passed over’ the Red Sea. So now,” preached St Augustine, “that prophetic [image] has been fulfilled in truth when Christ is led as a [lamb] to the slaughter. By His blood … we are freed from the ruin of this world … [and] we pass over from the devil to Christ and from this tottering world to His most solidly established kingdom…. [Thus] we pass over to God who endures so that we may not pass over with the passing world,” concluded St Augustine [Tractate on the Gospel of John 55.1].

This first Passover for the Hebrew slaves is still celebrated today by Jews throughout the world in the festival of Passover; and we Christians, remember that the Crucifixion of Christ passes over to His Resurrection. We are each empowered to pass over from sin to blessing, from worldly concerns to life with a Living Christ. How and why did this happen? What is God trying to tell us by this true story which has been told again and again for many thousands of years?

The second reading from chapter 3 of the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah, in the seventh century before Christ, advances God’s plan. The Jewish Passover experience becomes, and I quote, “a judgment …for the gathering of the nations” in which the Lord promises, quoting again, “I shall transform for the people a language for her generation for all to call upon the name of the Lord, to serve Him … And I will leave among you a gentle and humble people, who will show reverence to the name of the Lord.” In other words, the Lord offers to all people, the ability to communicate and love each other and to love Him. This reading from the prophet Zephaniah concludes: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Cry aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem. Be glad and rejoice with your whole heart…. The Lord, the King of Israel, is in your midst …. The Lord your God is with You. He shall bring gladness upon you and will renew you with His love.” So ends the Biblical quotation. We know now that for many centuries, the Lord has kept this promise that He “will renew [us] with His love.” We are not alone in whatever challenges we face in our lives, because the Lord renews us each day with His love.

The third and final reading I have chosen from the Church’s readings for tonight is from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61. Isaiah says to his listeners: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me; He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to summon the acceptable year of the Lord….”

St Cyril, a fourth-century Patriarch of Alexandria, offers two helpful interpretations of this phrase “the acceptable year of the Lord.”  St Cyril reflects that “‘acceptable’ is the year in which [Christ] revealed His glory through the divine miracle [verifying His] message.” Furthermore, “‘acceptable’ is that year in which we were [each] received [into the Church], when we took kinship with [God], having our sins washed away through holy baptism and becoming partakers of the divine nature through the sharing of the Holy Spirit.” Those two interpretations fit together beautifully, because once we believe that Christ “revealed His glory” in the Resurrection, we are invited to join Him in “becoming partakers of the divine nature through the sharing of the Holy Spirit.”

After Jesus Christ had been baptised in the Jordan River and fasted and defeated the devil in the desert, He began His ministry by teaching in the synagogues of Galilee. He read from the scroll these words from Isaiah chapter 61; and then in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 4, verse 21, He told the congregation: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” The fourth century Biblical scholar, poet and hymn writer St Ephrem the Syrian links these words from Isaiah and from Jesus Christ to us. St Ephrem wrote: “God anointed [Jesus Christ] with the Holy Spirit. Therefore, after being incarnated and clothed with a human body … He has received the Spirit and has been anointed with the Spirit, because He has received the Spirit for us and has anointed us with it,” concluded St Ephrem [Commentary on Isaiah 61.1].

We know that Jesus Christ was anointed with the Holy Spirit as He rose from His baptism in the Jordan. But now St Ephrem is pointing out that Jesus “received the [Holy] Spirit for us and has anointed us with it.” When we were baptised and made the choice to unite ourselves to Christ, we each received the Holy Spirit. That Holy Spirit is operational throughout both the Old and the New Testaments. It is good that the Church is reminding us tonight that the full power of the Holy Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—reaches out to the living and to the dead in both the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible.