ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

Bishop Basil of Amphipolis

Sermon at the  Pentecostal Liturgy, Vicariate Conference, May 27, 2007

Chapter 7 of the Gospel of John tells how Jesus went up from Galilee to Jerusalem to take part in the Feast Tabernacles, and the passage we heard this morning tells of what happened ‘In the last day, that great day of the feast …’ Jesus stood and cried: ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’ And at this point the Evangelist adds his own comment: ‘But this he spake of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified.’

The Feast of Tabernacles was one of the three great feasts of Ancient Israel, along with Passover and Pentecost. It is also called the Feast of Booths, because during it the people made for themselves booths out of branches in the countryside and lived in them to commemorate their sojourn in desert, during which they received the gift of the Law. It also commemorated the miracle of the water that sprang forth when Moses struck the rock in desert of Rephidim and satisfied the thirst of the people. Because of this, the liturgy for the Feast of Tabernacles, which was essentially a harvest celebration, also included prayers for the coming of the rain that would mark the beginning of the new agricultural year.

It looks, therefore, as if the Church has assimilated the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles to its own Feast of Pentecost by choosing this passage, with its reference to the Spirit, to be read today. This assimilation is confirmed by the fact that on the Church’s Feast of Mid-Pentecost, on Wednesday of the fourth of the seven weeks between Pascha and Pentecost, the Gospel passage chosen to be read is from this same chapter of John, just a few verses before today’s passage. It begins: ‘Now about the midst of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple, and taught.’ The mid-point of Tabernacles is equated with the mid-point of the fifty days of Pentecost.

These days we are used to distinguishing clearly the forty days of Easter that run from Pascha to Ascension from the ten days that follow before Pentecost. But the early Church didn’t make this distinction. They thought of the whole fifty days as a single prolonged feast of the Resurrection of Christ, a celebration that would not be completed until the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost itself.

What are we to understand this fifty-day feast during which even today one does not kneel in Church? The first time we kneel in Church will be this evening with the ‘kneeling prayers’. In the early Church these fifty days were a completely fast-free period. Today we give ourselves only one week’s fast-free celebration after Easter, while previously it was the fifty days as a whole.

We need to bear in mind the way the Feast of Tabernacles is linked liturgically to these fifty days. The Feast of Tabernacles, with its commemoration of the sojourn in the desert, when the people received the Law, and the miracle of water gushing out of the rock to quench their thirst. Christ is the Rock from whom living water flows. We only have to think of the scene at the crucifixion when ‘there came out blood and water’. But we also need to go right back to the very beginning of the fifty days, to East midnight, when we read the first verses of the Gospel of John. In the seventeenth verse of that first chapter we read: ‘For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.’