Easter 2024: What we celebrate today Holy Monday

Holy Week is something unique in the church year. The importance, after all, of the world-saving events, according to St. John Chrysostom, is why the name of the holiest week of the year as "Great".

In the liturgical act of the Church, the beginning of the next day is made from the afternoon of the previous one. So, therefore, the Masses held on the evening of Holy Week, concern the events of the following day. Our texts, following this practice, will describe the next day's events, but will be in the Sequence of the day they are published.

Every day on skai.gr - with the help of Archimandrite Fr Filoumenos Roubis, general secretary of the Holy Archdiocese of Athens - we will give the "stamp" of the day for the whole Holy Week until Easter Sunday. Also, Mrs. Evelena Kardamila, Ph.D candidate in Folklore, will "travel" us to the customs and traditions in every corner of Greece, which have their roots deep in time.

On the morning of Great Monday, the Presanctified Divine Liturgy is celebrated. As Archim explains. Dear Roubis, today we have the habit of communicating at rare intervals. However, in the first centuries of the Church's life, the faithful received communion at every Liturgy, that is to say necessarily every Sunday and every Saturday and in the middle of the week, as many times as the Divine Liturgy was celebrated. Basil the Great testifies that the Christians of his time regularly took communion four times a week.

If again it was not possible to celebrate the Divine Liturgy in the middle of the week, then the faithful kept portions from the Holy Communion of Sunday and communed alone in the middle of the week. In the Monasteries, and especially in the deserted places, where the monks were not allowed to attend Masses other than Sunday, they did the same as the lay people. That is, they kept portions of the Holy Communion from Sunday or Saturday and communed privately. The monks, however, formed small or large groups and all had to come and partake during these private Communions.

Thus a small Order began to form. All together they prayed before the communion and all together they thanked God, who deserved them to receive communion. If there was a priest, he offered them Holy Communion. This was done after the Vespers Service or the Ninth Hour Service (3 p.m.), because the monks usually ate once a day, after Vespers. Little by little, they wanted to include their Communion in the context of a Mass, reminiscent of the Divine Liturgy. In this way, a type began to take shape, which evolved into the current form of the Pre-sanctified Divine Liturgy.

The parable of the ten virgins

On Holy Monday in the evening, the Orthros of Holy Tuesday is chanted. In the Synaxari of the day we read that on this day the parable of the Ten Virgins is commemorated.

The Gospel containing this parable is read on Holy Tuesday morning at the Divine Liturgy. Christ spoke this parable shortly before the voluntary Passion. The last teaching of Christ before the Last Supper is contained in the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew and is purely eschatological. It refers, that is, to the kingdom of heaven and to the second presence of Christ.

At the beginning are placed the two well-known and related parables: the parable of the Ten Virgins and the parable of the talents, or rather "of the hidden talent", and then follows the well-known passage of the coming judgment. The hymns of this day speak of all three of these events.

The faithful are called to follow the example of the five wise virgins, who were alert, and to avoid the example of the five babies, who were raging. The readiness of a whole life of the wise virgins is praised, that is, the long duration of their penance and virtue.

One, perhaps, of the most beloved Troparies and dear to Christians is the one that is chanted from Palm Sunday afternoon until Holy Tuesday afternoon, during the Orthrus, that is, the first three days of Holy Week: "I see your Bride ». This is inspired by the parable of the Ten Virgins. In a modern Greek rendering, he says the following: “My Saviour, I see the marriage house adorned, but I have no proper clothes to enter into. Brighten the garment of my soul, Thou who givest light, and save me.'

The teaching of parables is like a mother's voice

"Christ, when he tells these parables, does not care about the discipline of man. She doesn't scold him like he's the bad kid. On the contrary, the teaching of parables resembles a mother's voice", points out the general secretary of the Holy Archdiocese of Athens.

And he adds: "Parables call to repentance. To repent means to turn my mind to God. "If the mind is turned to God, immediately then the heart and will of man are also turned to God. Then the will, as the executive organ of the inner man, will only do what is in accordance with God's will and what is written in God's law (St. Nikolaos Velimirovich)"".

Source: skai.gr