On Palm Sunday

From the blog Again and Again...

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With today’s celebration of Palm Sunday and yesterday’s of Lazarus Saturday we enter into the week of the church calendar when we remember those events which directly led up to the Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection; the days and events which are at the very center of our faith and define us as Christians.

In order for us to really understand what is happening on Palm Sunday; in order for us to really understand what will happen a week from today on Easter Sunday and in order to fully understand and grasp and appreciate why in the Orthodox tradition we don’t refer to next Sunday as Easter Sunday but Pascha, we must understand what happened in the Old Testament; we have to understand what happened long ago with the people of Israel.

The Israelites found themselves living in Egypt. And after they had already been there for many years the Egyptians started persecuting the Hebrews and a order was given that every male infant was to be drown. It was a terrible, terrible time for the people of God. And yet it was during this very persecution that we read in the book of Exodus of the birth of a famous child who was spared this drowning. Although it was the Egyptian Pharaoh who gave the orders for the drowning of the male children it was the Pharaoh’s own daughter who found a small baby floating in a basket in the river and had compassion on him. She named him Moses and she raised him. Moses was someone who didn’t like to see injustice. Once when he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew he killed the Egyptian man. Later, when he saw two Hebrew men fighting he went to settle the argument but one of them said to Moses, “Are you going to kill us like you killed the Egyptian?” Moses became afraid. He thought no one knew that he had killed the Egyptian man but, in fact, word had spread and even the Pharaoh knew about it and was angry. And so Moses fled Egypt...

Complete article here.