St. Nicholas Orthodox Church
Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese
9100 Youree Drive, Shreveport, LA 71115
Meditation for Great and Holy Wednesday

In our Christian faith we talk a lot about life and death. Christ dies, so that we might live. In baptism, we die with Him, so that we might be raised with Him. He overcomes the death of sin, and ultimately, as the Resurrection and the Life, He will raise us up again after our physical death and overcome that death, too.

There’s another kind of death of which we can speak, a that’s the death of repentance. It’s the death St. Paul speaks of when he says that he “dies daily,” and when he says that he has died to the world, and the world to him. It’s what the Lord speaks of when He says we must deny ourselves, and take up our cross daily, and follow Him.

Tonight the hymns refer to the sinful woman who anoints the Lord as for burial. The beautiful hymn of Kassiani, which speaks of this woman, describes how she went from being “fallen in many sins,” to offering Christ a “fountain of tears.” She was raised up by Him and given new life, but first she was buried, as it were, in deep repentance. She wept. She cried, “Woe is me!” and lamented her way of life. She confessed her sins. She sighed in depths of her heart, and wiped the Lord’s feet with her hair. She begged for mercy.

This is a description of the death of repentance, which is a death of the ego. It’s a death of self-humbling, self-abasing. When we voluntarily die that death, and bury our pride and self-will by honest confession of our sinfulness and brokenness, we join that sinful woman at the Lord’s feet.

Then we die to all false consolations that the world offers. We die to vain hopes that there is some other way out., some way to save face. We die to the delusion that we can save ourselves, somehow.

The sinful woman who repents is contrasted with Judas, the betrayer. She dies the death of repentance, but he is unwillingly to die that death. When he is rebuked by the Lord, he is indignant, and from that moment goes quickly to betray him. The woman through her painful repentance is crucified together with Christ. Judas refuses the way of crucifixion, and so he ends up crucifying the Lord. In the end, these are the only two options: either we are crucified with Christ in repentance, or we end up crucifying Him.

In tonight’s Gospel reading the Lord says, “Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses, it, and he who hates his life in the world will keep it for eternal life.” We are that grain of wheat that falls into the ground. Of course we will one day die the physical death. That is inevitable. But the Lord speaks here about hating one’s life. Why? Not so that we will try to die physically any sooner, but so that we will daily die the death of repentance.

Loving our life in this sense means preferring to remain as we are, trying to preserve our little fool’s paradise. Hating our life in this world means acting swiftly, decisively, without self-pity to dive into the abyss of repentance, which is the same as diving into the abyss of God’s mercy. Then we weep over our sins, knowing our fallenness like that sinful woman, and, like her, we are once again raised up by Christ.

Only then, when the grain of our life is buried in the soil of sincere repentance, can our life truly become fruitful. May God grant this to us. Amen.

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