A Drop of Pascha to Sweeten the Fast: The Canon of the Third Sunday of the Great Fast (Veneration of the Cross)

The Canon for the Third Sunday of the Great Fast, the Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross, comes as a shock.  We know Sundays are always mini-Paschas, celebrations of the Resurrection, even in the depths of the Fast. (So they always have full canons, rather than the penitential three-ode canons found during weekdays, for which the Triodion is named.)  We have continued to sing the resurrectional hymns from the Octoechos throughout the Fast.  Yet the Canon for this week hits us with unbridled Paschal joy, for the ikoi come from the great Paschal Canon that we gloriously shout out during Paschal Matins.

The Cross is the great reverser: through the Cross, a Person bearing the deathless divine nature dies; through the Cross, we deathbound men gain deathlessness. So perhaps we should not be surprised that the Cross brings a burst of joy in the middle of the somber Fast, just as its feast on September 14 is a day of fasting n the midst of the year's longest gap between major fasts.  (It is three months from the end of the Dormition Fast to the beginning of the Nativity Fast, while the gap from Pascha to the beginning of the Apostles' Fast is only eight weeks.)

This drop of Paschal sweetness is an aid for the journey, coming just before the mid-point of the Fast, this coming Wednesday.  (The Roman Rite has a similar refreshment next Sunday, Lætare Sunday, also known as Rose Sunday, or, fittingly, Refreshment Sunday.)  The ikoi of the Paschal Canon link the beginning of the Fast—for they are sung during the Ceremony of Forgiveness at Forgiveness Vespers, the first service of the Fast—with the end, the glorious Paschal morning, with this Sunday as a chain between them.

So today, let us revel in this drop of Paschal sweetness before diving more whole-heartedly into the penance of the Fast, which will increase even more before the end.  For, though this coming week brings Mid-Lent, next week brings the Great Canon, exhausting in its prostrations, and, soon after that, the gauntlet of Holy Week.  Drops of sweetness are few in the Fast—today's Canon, the Annunciation, and Palm Sunday—but let us not disdain to delight in them.  For the Lord does not want us merely to suffer: even in the midst of the struggle of the Fast, we should, as we will hear St. Paul tell us in a few weeks, "Rejoice in the Lord always" (Phil 4:4; Epistle of Palm Sunday).  So let us rejoice in the Paschal foretaste today.

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