Christ is Risen—let there be everlasting joy!

What it this everlasting joy that St John of Damascus wrote about in the Paschal Canon and which the Church calls the whole world, visible and invisible to celebrate joyfully?

This everlasting joy is our future, the heavenly bliss of Christ's heavenly kingdom. This joy is for Christ's followers—it is for all true Christian believers. It is the final and highest goal of our labors in this life.

This heavenly and everlasting joy began on earth from the time of Christ's Resurrection, affecting those who were closest to Him.

The first person to experience this unprecedented, unutterable and incomparable divine joy was the Theotokos at the very moment of the Resurrection.

The Lord mentions more than once to His disciple and to the His followers that after His death, He will rise again on the third day.

Is it possible therefore He did not tell His beloved Most Pure Mother? Could He leave her disconsolate at the time of her greatest sorrow when she more than anyone suffered at the foot of the Cross, looking upon Him, the Crucified One, shedding His blood?

According to the testimony of Church tradition, the Mother of God, knowing Her Divine Son would rise on the third day, did not leave His grave and therefore was witness to the actual Resurrection of Christ. It was fitting, explains St. John Chrysostom that she, who more than anybody loved the Lord and who suffered the most, should be the first to rejoice at seeing the Risen Christ.

After the Mother of God, the everlasting joy we have spoken of, was experienced by the myrrhbearers, apostles and all the remaining disciples of Christ. The Lord appeared to them during the course of forty days after His Resurrection, filling them with divine joy. It is difficult, if not impossible for us to imagine what bliss accompanied these appearances of the Saviour. From the Gospel narrative describing the appearance of the Risen Lord to two travelers on the road to Emmaus, Luke and Cleopas, we learn how their hearts burned within them and became like wax when Christ appeared to them.

Our Lord did not abandon His followers but continued to give them this everlasting joy when He sent His disciples the Comforter from His Divine Father. The grace of the Comforter began to be poured upon us in the Orthodox Church, in its Mysteries.

The grace of the Holy Spirit in its various forms and miraculous manifestations became a source of great heavenly joy, a fountain of everlasting joy in the lives of holy people.

This grace regenerated and made holy people dwellers in the heavens and made them earthly angels. They acquired its power through perfect love for Christ, day and night filled with joy that is found in the Heavenly Kingdom. That is why St. Isaac the Syrian says perfect love for Christ is paradise on earth with all its blessedness. Not in vain did the Holy Apostle Paul say the grace of the Holy Spirit is the reward of our future inheritance—it is everlasting joy, which in all its fullness will be revealed to us in the future life, especially after the Last Judgment. Moreover, the saints were not left on earth without experiencing everlasting joy—that same joy which the Mother of God, the myrrhbearing women and the apostles experienced at the appearances of the Risen Christ.