Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Congratulations with the feasts of the Raising of Lazarus and the Entrance of our Lord Jesus Christ into Jerusalem, as well as with the conclusion of Great Lent!

All four evangelists tell us about our meek Saviour entering Jerusalem sitting on a donkey, not long before His death on the Cross. Of course, Christ had visited the Holy City many times, but never had He been greeted in such a manner as this time. The reason for this unusual entrance was the miracle that the Lord Jesus Christ, a true human being while at the same time being truly God, worked in Bethany. How could the people not meet and confess as the King of Israel and the Savior of the world the Man who, with His voice alone, raised from the dead the four-day-old, already stinking and decaying Lazarus?

The synoptic evangelists, Saints Matthew, Mark, and Luke, relate that when the Apostles brought the donkey to the Saviour, they first cast their garments on the animal and then sat the Lord on top. When meeting their heavenly King, the people spread their garments along the way, while others cut down branches and spread them before Him. The Holy Apostle and Evangelist John says nothing about the people spreading anything on the road, but only mentions that the people took palm branches and went forth to meet the Saviour. Today we, like the ancient Jews, meet our Lord with bundles of branches as a sign of the victory of Christ over death.

The Liturgical texts of today’s feast repeatedly say that the bundles of palm branches represent our Christian virtues which we have cultivated with such care during the course of Great Lent: our fasting, prayer, spiritual reading, our abstinence from all that is vile on the internet, our almsgiving, our stillness or silence, our prostrations, our frequent attendance at church services. Dear Brothers and Sisters, all of these wonderful virtues have sprouted in you and now appear as tender spring shoots, covering and adorning your souls, just as once upon a time the garments of the apostles covered that donkey which our meek King mounted. Through the prayers of the Holy Apostles, may He also mount our souls!

Despite our lenten struggles and those fruits which we have brought as gifts to the Lord today, there are still, without a doubt, some sins or passions in our hearts with which it is very difficult, or perhaps even impossible, for us to deal independently. Let no one fall in spirit because of these sins, for it is not we that save ourselves, but our Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s cast down our sins before Him, as the Jews spread their garments on the road, so that He may, with His divine strength, trample and obliterate them.

priest Alexis