Lazarus Saturday Morning
These are based on talks I gave for many years at Holy Week services at Saint Nicholas, Cedarburg, and now have published in this Blog for the last five years. If you’ve read them before, you won’t find much new here – though each year I try to improve them a bit (I hope), as I ponder and try to understand a little more – and there’s always more to be learned from these wonderful stories.
I’ll try to get them posted on the day before the services described – and I’ll try hard to be brief. Promise.
Why does the Orthodox Church provide us with these multiple Holy Week services? Because this is a Divine Drama, the foundational Drama in the history of the world, and we need to know the whole plot. As with any drama, if we don’t arrive till near the end, it will be hard to understand what it’s all about.
Why am I providing all these commentaries?
1 Because, unlike most churches, Orthodoxy covers the whole Week, morning and evening, with liturgical services.
2 Because we don’t live in the old Orthodox world. There everything pretty much shuts down for Holy Week, so people can get to church. Not here – not even for Western Holy Week, let alone ours. However, I am not writing these articles as a substitute for attending the Holy Week services. Please be in church as much as you can. Or if and when you can’t, I hope you can watch them Live-stream. Even so, few can attend them all. These Posts can fill in for the services you miss.
3 Because so much happened so quickly during Holy Week, as reflected in our worship services, that it’s almost impossible to take it all in. I’m trying to explain, as best I can, what might pass us by. In the 33 years since I became Orthodox, each year I’ve been able to absorb a little more of our Holy Week worship. Preparing these talks has helped me to dig ever deeper and begin to understand, for the first time in my long life, all the events of this blessed Week. Let me say clearly that I feel I’m still barely at the edge of the Mystery of it all. I’m trying to share what little I know.
As we proceed through the Week, please read the appointed passages from the Scriptures. You can easily find the texts online from:
1 The Greek Archdiocese – https://www.goarch.org/chapel/
2 The Antiochian Archdiocese – https://www.antiochian.org/liturgicday Also, at the bottom of these pages you’ll find the full texts of all the Holy Week services. (God bless those who put them online. That took a lot of effort.)
3 Or, since I list the passages here, you can actually still do it the old fashioned way: Pick up your printed Bible and read it!
Anciently now was the time (and on Athos still is) when hermits came out of their cells, down from the hills, and joined with the community for this Holy Week: “Come down, all you who dwell in the desert places and caves, and greet with hymns Him who comes to you seated upon the colt of an ass, the Lord of glory.” (from Ode 4 of the Matins Canon for Thursday before Lazarus Saturday)
Therefore please, as best you can, join with them. Put other things aside and give some time to this Holy Week. You will be greatly blessed by it. I know I have been, year after year after year.
Lazarus Saturday Morning Divine Liturgy
Be sure to listen to this powerful hymn sung by the Boston Byzantine Choir.
from the Arabic Tone 6, by Metropolitan Athanasios Atallah of Homs – arranged by Bishop Basil of Wichita (from Orthodox Christian Chants site)
Actually the Saturday of Lazarus is not Holy Week, which begins with Palm Sunday.
Epistle: Hebrews 12:28-29; 13:1-8
1 “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.” Despite all that happens or ever happened or ever will happen, His kingdom is unshakable. Not even death could destroy it.
2 “Let brotherly love continue.” “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus showed hospitality to Jesus. They lived in Bethany (long since gone, now), about two miles east of Jerusalem, and when He was in the area He stayed at their house, as He would during Holy Week. Little did they imagine they were entertaining God unawares!
Who knows what graces we turn away when we fail to be hospitable? (Consider something as simple as ignoring visitors at church.) If they had not been hospitable, friends of Jesus, would Lazarus have been raised? Would Martha and Mary been among the first to see the Risen Lord?
Holy Gospel: John 11:1-45
The raising of Lazarus took place actually some time before Palm Sunday, on a previous trip to Bethany. Christ was across the Jordan when messengers came from Mary and Martha saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” Jesus waited before going to Judaea. His disciples were more than perplexed by this, though they did understand that His life would be in danger in Judaea. When the Lord finally said He would go to Lazarus, Thomas cried, “Let us also go that we may die with Him”. He is no “doubting Thomas” here!
Icons by permission of Saint Isaac’s Skete at skete.com
When they arrived, Lazarus had been dead and in the tomb four days. Custom (for very practical reasons) was to bury the dead by sunset the day they died. Martha the ever-active one ran to meet Jesus, with both faith and accusation. “Lord, if You had been here my brother would not have died.”
Disappointment, even anger with God, is often a sign of faith. Lord, I know You could have done it. Why didn’t You?
The world today is in such a mess. So many people suffering and dying needlessly before their time. It feels like everywhere everything is headed in the wrong direction. “Lord, if only You were here…”
Jesus answered in words that have rung through the centuries: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he die, he shall live. Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.”
“…shall never die.” Beginning with the New Testament, Christians often speak not of death but of “fallíng asleep (kimissis, κίμισσις) That is what death is to the believer: We fall asleep on this side with Christ and wake up on the other, still with Christ.
Mary, the contemplative one, said the same as Martha: “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” And so it is with us: Christ has conquered death. He promised to be with us “to the end of the age”. So why does He still let us die? Why is the world still what it is? Why?
Jesus went to the tomb and saw them all weeping. John says He “groaned in spirit”.
And then “Jesus wept”.
Only twice is it written that He wept. He wept now at the tomb of Lazarus. And then soon again at another kind of “death” that He foresaw: “Now as He drew near, He saw the city [Jerusalem] and wept over it, saying, ‘If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children within you, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”: Luke 19:41-44
What He had known would happen was finally happening: His people were rejecting Him.
Why did Jesus weep today? I think because He “so loved the world”. The suffering and despair and hopelessness of mankind – today of Mary and Martha – was almost too much for Him to bear. Though soon He would bear it for us.
And I’ve always wondered (I don’t know but I’ve wondered) if in a way He wept also for himself. He so loved the world He had made. He loved being here with His dear Mother, and sharing life – friendship, meals, fellowship with His disciples whom He loved. He saw the anguish His death would cause them – and especially to her, for she alone knew Who He Is and what His death would seem to mean: the end of all hope. And also He saw before Him His 
own suffering: the inner agony that lay ahead of Him in Gethsemane, and then His death in the most excruciating way. Did He groan and weep over that too? because this was going to be hard, very hard. He would sweat blood in Gethsemane. For He was not only God; He was also Man, fully human. Sometimes people forget that.
“See how He loved him”, the people said.
“Still groaning in Himself”, John says, He came to the tomb: “Take away the stone!” Martha said, “Lord, he has been there four days, there will be corruption, literally “a very bad smell”. Jesus said, “Now you will see the glory of God.” He prayed. Then He cried, out “Lazarus, come forth!”
Lazarus came out bound in his grave-clothes, his face wrapped in a cloth. “Loose him, let him go.” A sign, a prefiguring, an assurance of our general Resurrection at the end of the age
Tomb of Lazarus in Bethany, c 1895
Laszarus’ second life on earth
Lazarus’ first tomb near Bethany (now called Al Eizaryia), is a place of pilgrimage to this day.
He then went to Cyprus where he started the first church and became bishop. His second tomb – after he had died a second time! – was long said to be at Larnaca on Cyprus. And sure enough, in 890 it was discovered beneath Agios Lazaros (Saint Lazarus) Church there, bearing the inscription ”Lazaros four days dead, the Friend of Christ” (What a beautiful title!)
Agios Lazaros Church, Larnaca today (Johannes Grobe at Creative Commons)
In 1972, during a renovation of the church, more of his relics were discovered beneath the altar. Lazarus – now waiting with us for the general resurrection, his second resurrection.
Encompassed by Resurrection
So, as it turned out, the disciples experienced the first fearsome Holy Week surrounded by resurrection – the raising of Lazarus earlier, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ at the end, just as He had foretold them, “according to the Scriptures”.
Holy Week in the Orthodox Church is encompassed by resurrection: Lazarus’ rising at the begininng, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ at the end.
Every week in the Orthodox Church is encompassed by resurrection: every Sunday in the Church we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. At Saturday evening Vespers and Sunday Matins and Divine Liturgy, the chief Troparion is always about the Resurrection. The Priest begins the dismissal at all these services with “May Christ our true God, who has risen from the dead…”. If you want to hear a multitude of Resurrection hymns, on an eight week cycle, come regularly to Saturday Vespers and Sunday morning Matins.
And during the Forty Days of Pascha, again and again and yet again:
from “Orthodox Christian Chants”
The Orthodox Church is the “Church of the Resurrection”.
Life can sometimes be dark like Holy Week, and we know that at the end of our lives, unless Christ returns soon, all of us will die like Lazarus. (In my case, He’d better move fast. My time is running out.)
However, so we will never forget or despair, we have a blessing that Martha and Mary and Lazarus and the Apostles and Christ’s Holy Mother did not have. He has shown us what is coming.
“Do not be amazed at this, for the time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear His voice and come out…” John 5:29-30
When we die, we die with Christ. After we die we will live with Christ. And at the End of all things you and I will hear His voice call out to us, as He called to Lazarus, “Come forth!” – and we also will see the glory of God.
Next Post will arrive later today (Friday), covering: 1) Saturday evening: Vespers of Palm Sunday, 2) Introduction to Holy Week.