Orthodox Christians Celebrate Easter Tonight

Eastern Orthodox Christians throughout Southern California celebrate Easter tonight in nearly 2,000-year-old rites of sacred pageantry and tradition.

For Antiochian, Coptic, Greek, Romanian, Russian and Serbian Orthodox Christians, the Resurrection of Christ comes a month after Roman Catholics and Protestants commemorated Easter.

This has been Holy Week for more than 40,000 Orthodox Christians across Southern California, and nowhere is its observance more dramatic than amid the splendor of shimmering icons in the gilded Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sophia in Los Angeles.

Hundreds of the faithful entered the cathedral Wednesday with its brilliant chandeliers of Austrian crystal and stained-glass windows of stern-faced apostles, where they were anointed with oil on their foreheads, cheeks and hands. The anointing with oil, known as Unction, is a sacrament of physical and spiritual healing. It is also intended as a preparation for receiving Communion on Thursday and today.

“I’m very sentimental now. I can’t even talk,” Los Angeles resident Voula Siafaris said after the ritual. “It’s for us a special day.”

Mary Stamos attended the service with her husband, Andy, and adult son, Nick. “I feel the healing that comes from the grace of Lord Jesus,” she said.

For Alexis Barba of South Pasadena, it was a time to share her religious heritage with her 8-year-old son, George. “I like to celebrate Holy Week and show my son my religion that I grew up with as a child,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t want to come to church. I just lead a very busy life, like racehorses.”

Throughout Orthodoxy, Holy Week observances including those on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, which marks the Crucifixion, point to the single defining event of Christianity--the belief in the Resurrection of Jesus.

The Very Rev. John S. Bakas, dean of St. Sophia Cathedral, said Holy Week is “a human expression of the inexpressible.”

“In human body language we are able to touch divinity, in a sense, participating in transcending time and space. For a few moments,” Bakas said, “we participate in the Passion of the Lord.”

Russian, Serbian and other Orthodox Christians also commemorate their belief in the Resurrection in equally moving rites.

For many tonight, churches still darkened from the solemn observance of Good Friday come alive after midnight tonight with candlelight amid chants and ancient prayers and the proclamation, “He is risen!”

Greek Orthodox services include the triumphant hymn, “Christos Anesti, Christ Is Risen!” Indeed, the Greek church also calls Easter by the name, “Lampra,” or the brightest day of all.

“There is no greater exultation on earth than the Orthodox liturgical experience of our Lord’s glorious resurrection,” said the Very Rev. Protopresbyter Alexander G. Leondis of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

Orthodox Easter this year comes one month after Western Christianity’s observance of the Resurrection. The Orthodox church follows a decree of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, which said that Easter must be celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox, but always after the Jewish Passover in order to maintain the biblical sequence of events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Marking the sacred observance, Archbishop Spyridon, spiritual leader of more than 1.5 million Greek Orthodox in America, said in his Easter message, “We sorely needed a God enfleshed and entombed that we might live.”

Part of that living, Bakas said, is living for others. This is especially true, he said, at a time when the neighborhood around St. Sophia, near Normandie Avenue and Pico Boulevard, includes so many non-Greek immigrants from Central America.

“The light of the Resurrection must be shared with our neighbors,” he said in an interview. “We can no longer be an isolated ethnic community. True light shines upon all those who seek it.”

Bakas said the cathedral has joined with nearby St. Thomas (Roman Catholic) Parish and other groups in “Genesis Plus,” a program to revitalize and improve the neighborhood. With a $300,000 federal grant channeled through the city of Los Angeles, he said, Genesis Plus will join in job creation efforts.

For Bakas, such efforts are a visible manifestation of an Easter faith.

“When we say Christ is risen, it isn’t just a personal exclamation, but really a communal exclamation, a universal exclamation of brotherhood,” he said. “The church is concerned about the individual, the community, and the health of the planet.”

‘The light of the Resurrection must be shared with our neighbors. We can no longer be an isolated ethnic community. True light shines upon all those who seek it.’

--The Very Rev. John S. Bakas of St. Sophia Cathedral, blessing the oil for Holy Unction.