Today is the Blessed Sabbath, the day on which our Lord and Savior rested in the tomb following His salvific labors on behalf of all, and for all. Yet it is precisely within this suspended moment in time that the sorrow of Great and Holy Friday is transformed into joy. For while He rests bodily within the confined space of the tomb, His soul descends into Hades, where he tramples down death by death, raising fallen Adam and all the righteous men and women who died before His coming. It is this event that we see depicted in the icon of Pascha. The Resurrection itself--having occurred outside the bounds of time and space--cannot be depicted. It can only be experienced in the hearts of the faithful.
The Resurrection is indeed the fulfillment of Christ's redemptive work already accomplished on this day. Sunday is both the First Day and the Eight, because it is the image and reflection of eternity. It is rightfully celebrated by the Church as the Lord's Day, yet it is wrong to suggest--as do the sabbatarians--that the New Testament Church has ceased to honor the Sabbath. The seventh day remains the day of fulfillment: both of the pre-existent Christ's work of creation at the beginning of time, and--more significantly--of His sacrificial work of redemption through which the fallen human race is re-created and restored to Paradise.
It is imperative that we remember as well that just as the original creation was the result of the outpouring of the superabundant love of God, even so was Christ's sacrificial suffering upon the Cross the ultimate manifestation of that divine love that sustains and vivifies the entire order of creation. As St. John the Theologian assures us, God is love, and so it is impossible to become partakers of the Divine Nature and communicants of life eternal unless we ourselves abide in this love, ever striving to purify our hearts of every sinful passion and egotistic desire, that we may in the end prove ourselves worthy to behold Christ's glorious Resurrection on the third day.
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