The Festal Preaching

Beyond the Marian homilies, Andrew’s wider body of festal sermons, preserved in Patrologia Graeca 97: homilies on the Raising of Lazarus, on Palm Sunday and the Lord’s entry into Jerusalem, on the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and on other feasts of the year — the work of a working bishop preaching across the liturgical cycle to his Cretan congregation, and a substantial monument of early-eighth-century Byzantine homiletics.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

A Preacher of the Liturgical Year

Andrew’s homilies are not confined to the feasts of the Theotokos. The collection of his orations in Patrologia Graeca 97 preserves sermons across the whole liturgical year — for the feasts of the Lord, for the days of the Triodion and Holy Week, for the great commemorations and the Cross — so that the preacher’s corpus mirrors, in prose, the same calendar that his canons and stichera cover in verse (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; the homilies in PG 97). These are the sermons of a diocesan bishop: composed to be delivered to the congregation of his cathedral at Gortyna on the feast days, they join high rhetorical art to the pastoral aim of forming a people in the meaning of the mysteries they celebrate (see Archbishop of Crete).

Lazarus and Palm Sunday

Among the best-known of the festal homilies are those for the threshold of Holy Week — the Raising of Lazarus (Lazarus Saturday) and the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday). These two feasts, standing at the hinge between Great Lent and the Passion, were natural occasions for a preacher of Andrew’s penitential cast: Lazarus called from the tomb is the pledge of the general resurrection and the figure of the soul raised from the death of sin, and the Entry into Jerusalem opens the week of the Lord’s saving suffering. Andrew’s homilies on these days unfold their typology and summon the hearer to enter the Passion with the right disposition — the same movement from sin to life that governs the Great Canon, now preached in prose on the very days when Lent gives way to Holy Week (the homilies in PG 97; OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4).

Palm Sunday and the Entry into the Passion

The homily for Palm Sunday, the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem, marks the boundary at which Lent gives way to Holy Week, and it carries a characteristic double movement. On the one hand it celebrates the feast itself — the King who comes meek and riding upon an ass, the crowds with their palms, the children crying “Hosanna” — fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah and opening the week of salvation (Zechariah 9:9; Matthew 21; John 12). On the other hand it turns, as Andrew always turns, toward the hearer’s own soul, asking with what disposition he will follow the Lord into the coming days of His Passion: whether he will stay faithful with the children who cried Hosanna, or fall away with the crowd that days later cried “Crucify.” The feast of joyful entry thus becomes, in the preacher’s hands, a summons to enter Holy Week rightly — to go up to the Passion not as a spectator but as a penitent (the homilies in PG 97; cf. Matthew 21).

Here again the unity of Andrew’s work is visible. The preacher of Palm Sunday and the poet of the Great Canon do the same thing: they take a public event of salvation and press it inward, until the congregation finds itself implicated, questioned, and called. The festal homily, like the Canon, is finally about the hearer’s own soul and its journey toward the Cross and the Resurrection.

The Exaltation of the Cross

Andrew also preached on the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September 14), the feast of the lifting-up of the Cross for the veneration of the faithful. His homily on the Exaltation is a developed meditation on the Cross as the instrument and trophy of salvation — the tree by which the tree of Eden’s transgression is undone — and it is notable enough to have drawn modern scholarly attention: his Homilia de exaltatione s. crucis has been the subject of a critical editio princeps in the Harvard Theological Review, an indication that Andrew’s homilies remain live texts for Byzantine scholarship and that their manuscript tradition is still being edited (the editio princeps of Andrew’s Homilia de exaltatione s. crucis, CPG 8199 / BHG 434f, Harvard Theological Review). The Cross-homily belongs to the same theological world as Andrew’s hymnody, where the Cross is the centre of the economy of salvation toward which the Great Canon, in its Gospel odes, finally turns.

The Rhetoric of the Festal Homily

Andrew’s sermons belong to a distinct genre with its own conventions — the Byzantine festal homily (panēgyrikos logos), the high-style oration delivered on a feast to unfold its meaning and to move the congregation. Such homilies are not expository in the modern sense; they are works of liturgical rhetoric, rich in apostrophe (the preacher addresses the feast, the figures of the day, the congregation, even the Cross or the Virgin directly), in accumulation of titles and images, in the typological linking of the day’s event to the whole of Scripture, and in a deliberately elevated and ornamented diction. Andrew is a master of this manner, and his homilies are studied by Byzantinists partly as exemplary specimens of early-eighth-century festal preaching (Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven, on the genre and its conventions; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Homily,” “Andrew of Crete”). The same rhetorical fertility that piles up troparion upon troparion in the Great Canon piles up image upon image in the sermons; the poet and the preacher are recognizably one mind.

This means the festal homilies are not best read as quarries of historical or doctrinal information, but as what they are — solemn liturgical orations meant to be heard on the day, to lift the congregation into the feast and to fix its meaning in their hearts. Their power is cumulative and rhetorical, and it is best felt in the setting for which Andrew made them: a cathedral on a feast day, the bishop preaching to his own people the mystery they had gathered to keep.

Lazarus and the Theology of the Tomb

The homily for Lazarus Saturday deserves a closer look, because its theme is so near the heart of all Andrew’s work. The raising of Lazarus from the four-day tomb (John 11) stands, in the Orthodox calendar, on the very threshold of Holy Week: it is the Lord’s last great sign before His own Passion, given (as the liturgical texts say) “to confirm the general resurrection before His precious Passion.” For a preacher whose deepest subject is the soul dead in sin and called back to life, the raising of Lazarus is the perfect text. The tomb of Lazarus is the tomb of every soul buried under its sins; the Lord’s cry, “Lazarus, come forth,” is the cry that calls the dead soul out; the unbinding of the grave-clothes is the loosing of the bound conscience. The same movement that governs the Great Canon — from death to life, from the tomb to the resurrection — is preached, on Lazarus Saturday, over an actual tomb in the Gospel (the homilies in PG 97; cf. John 11). Andrew’s festal preaching and his penitential hymnody are, at bottom, the same gospel told twice: the dead are raised, the buried image is recovered, the soul is called forth.

This is the unity beneath the variety of the festal corpus. Whether Andrew preaches the Cross, the Entry into Jerusalem, the raising of Lazarus, or the feasts of the Mother of God, the underlying movement is always the descent of God into death and corruption and the raising-up of humanity with Him — the economy of salvation that the Great Canon asks each soul to make its own. The feasts are the public, cosmic enactment of the very thing the Canon asks the private soul to undergo.

The Homilist Behind the Hymnographer

The festal preaching is worth dwelling on because it corrects the common impression of Andrew as only the poet of the Great Canon. He was, in his own day and in the manuscript tradition that followed, a major homilist — one of the significant preachers of the early eighth century, whose sermons were copied, attributed, and preserved alongside those of Germanus of Constantinople and John of Damascus (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.). The same gifts are at work in the sermons as in the hymns: a deep saturation in Scripture, a fluent command of typology, a rhetorical richness in the high Byzantine manner, and always the pastoral turn toward the hearer’s own soul. The homilies and the canons are two faces of one ministry — that of a bishop who taught his people the mysteries of the faith both in the words they sang and in the words he spoke to them from the ambo.

References

Andrew of Crete, festal Homilies (on the Raising of Lazarus, Palm Sunday, the Exaltation of the Cross, and other feasts). J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 97.
Cunningham, Mary B. (ed.). “Andrew of Crete’s Homilia de exaltatione s. crucis (CPG 8199; BHG 434f): Editio princeps.” Harvard Theological Review — the critical edition of Andrew’s homily on the Exaltation of the Cross.
Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete.” (Andrew as homilist; the corpus of festal sermons in PG 97.)
Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 4 — on Andrew’s preaching across the feasts.