The Feast as It Is Kept

The Sunday of Orthodoxy is the First Sunday of the Great Fast: a procession with icons, the proclamation of the Synodikon, and — in many places — a pan-Orthodox Vespers in the evening. This file describes the feast as it is actually observed, its place in the Lenten cycle, its hymnography and readings, and the popular life that has grown around it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Day and Its Place

The Sunday of Orthodoxy falls on the First Sunday of Great Lent, and its position is not accidental. Great Lent opens with Forgiveness Sunday and the Vespers of Forgiveness, moves through Clean Week and the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, and arrives at the First Sunday, where the Church proclaims what she believes. The remaining Sundays continue the pattern: St. Gregory Palamas on the Second, the Veneration of the Cross at the midpoint, St. John Climacus on the Fourth, St. Mary of Egypt on the Fifth (see Great Lent, which anchors the repository’s account of the Lenten Sundays).

The theological arrangement is worth naming. The fast begins with the mutual forgiveness of persons; the first Sunday states the faith in which the fast is kept; the second Sunday commemorates the theologian of the uncreated light, which is what the ascesis is for; the midpoint sets the Cross in the middle of the church. The Sunday of Orthodoxy is therefore not an interruption of Lent by a doctrinal exercise. It is the answer to the question in whose name are we fasting.

That the commemoration of St. Gregory Palamas immediately follows has long been read as a deliberate pairing — a “second Sunday of Orthodoxy,” in which the Church’s confession of the icon is completed by her confession of the uncreated energies (see The Councils, 1341–1351; The Palamite Chapters).

The Procession

The visible center of the day is the procession with icons. Clergy and faithful carry icons — of Christ, of the Theotokos, of the patron of the parish, and in many places the personal and family icons brought from home — in procession, in the older Byzantine usage around or out of the church to an appointed place, and in ordinary modern parish practice around the interior of the nave or around the building.

Descriptive accounts of the order differ, and the difference is real rather than an artifact of poor reporting: the procession is variously made after Orthros and before the Divine Liturgy, or at the end of the Liturgy, and the Synodikon is proclaimed when the procession reaches its station (older descriptions place the procession between Orthros and the Liturgy, with a canon attributed to St. Theodore the Studite sung during it; contemporary descriptions more often place it at the end of the Liturgy — see Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Feast of Orthodoxy” [1911], and OrthodoxWiki, s.v. “Sunday of Orthodoxy”; both used to locate the practice rather than as terminal authorities, per METHODOLOGY §2.3). This collection reports the variation and does not harmonize it.

The gesture is exactly the gesture of 843. What the Empress Theodora and the Patriarch Methodius did was to carry the icons back into the Great Church; what a parish does on this Sunday is to carry them around its own. The feast reenacts its origin rather than merely recalling it.

The Proclamation of the Synodikon

At the station, the Synodikon is chanted — by a deacon in the older usage, in modern practice often by the bishop or the senior priest, with the people answering “Eternal memory” and “Anathema,” each three times.

What is proclaimed is in nearly all places an abridgement, not the full received text (see What Is Actually Proclaimed Today, where the evidence and its limits are set out in detail). In some places the anathemas are omitted altogether and only the acclamations chanted. In the Russian tradition the service is known as the Chin Pravoslaviya, the Rite of Orthodoxy, and the repository’s hub article notes that in ROCOR it is given particular solemnity (see Great Lent).

Two elements from the text are almost always kept, whatever else is cut, and they are the two the whole document exists for: the great confession — “As the prophets have seen, as the apostles have taught, as the Church has received… thus do we believe, thus we speak, thus we preach Christ our true God and His saints” — and its acclamation, “This is the Faith of the apostles, this is the Faith of the fathers, this is the Faith of the Orthodox, this Faith hath established the whole world” (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, received Greek text of the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston).

The Hymnography and the Readings

The Triodion’s propers for the day are unmistakable. The kontakion sings that “the uncircumscribed Word of the Father became circumscribed, taking flesh from thee, O Theotokos, and He has restored the sullied image to its ancient glory, filling it with the divine beauty. This our salvation we confess in deed and word, and we depict it in the holy icons” (Triodion, Matins of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, Kontakion; English as in The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware [London: Faber and Faber, 1978], the standard English version of the Triodion propers). The doctrine of the day is stated in a stanza: the image is restored because the Uncircumscribed became circumscribable.

A Canon of the Synodikon is associated with the day, attributed in the tradition to St. Theodore the Studite (see St. Theodore the Studite; Repose and the Triumph of Orthodoxy). [Disputed: the attribution of the canon sung at the procession to St. Theodore the Studite is traditional; this collection has not verified it against a critical study of the Triodion’s authorship.]

The appointed readings are Hebrews 11:24–26, 32–40 and John 1:43–51. The choice repays attention. The Epistle is the roll of those who “obtained a good report through faith” and yet “received not the promise” — the Church reading, on the day she commemorates her own confessors, the ancient catalogue of those who suffered without seeing. The Gospel is the calling of Philip and Nathanael, ending with “Come and see” and with the promise “ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” On the feast of the image, the Church reads the Gospel of seeing (see OrthodoxWiki, s.v. “Sunday of Orthodoxy,” on the readings and their theme; the older stratum of the day’s commemoration, of the Old Testament prophets and their faith in unfulfilled promises, survives in the Epistle).

Around the liturgical core a considerable popular life has grown up, and it varies widely.

Icons brought from home. In many parishes the faithful bring their own icons to be carried in the procession — a practice whose logic is exact, since the restoration of 843 was the restoration of icons to churches and to households.

Children in the procession. In much of the diaspora the icons are carried by the children of the parish, which turns the day into a catechetical event of considerable force.

Pan-Orthodox Vespers. In cities where several Orthodox jurisdictions are present, a common Vespers is very widely celebrated on the evening of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, with clergy of the different jurisdictions concelebrating and a visiting preacher. This is a modern development, and an eloquent one: the feast of the Church’s unity in the faith is the day chosen for the visible expression of the jurisdictional unity that the diaspora otherwise lacks.

Preaching. The day’s sermon is traditionally on the icon, on the Incarnation, or on the confession of the faith — and, increasingly, on the meaning of the anathemas, since a congregation that has just heard them usually wants them explained.

What the Day Does

It is worth saying plainly what happens to a parish on this Sunday.

The people fast; they walk in procession holding pictures of Christ and His saints; they hear the Church state her faith and reject its contraries; they answer out loud; and then they receive Communion. The sequence binds together things that in most religious cultures come apart: doctrine and worship, memory and present act, the confession of the mind and the ascesis of the body, the individual’s icon from the corner of his own room and the Church’s conciliar judgment of eleven centuries.

That is the achievement of the feast, and it is why the Synodikon has survived in a liturgical book rather than in an archive. The Church’s dogma is not something the faithful are told about; on this day, once a year, it is something they say.

See Also

References

  • Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Received Greek text as printed in the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston. (The great confession and its acclamation.)
  • The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. (Propers for the First Sunday of Great Lent; the Kontakion quoted.)
  • Triodion, the Canon associated with the procession of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, attributed in the tradition to St. Theodore the Studite.
  • Scripture appointed for the day: Hebrews 11:24–26, 32–40; John 1:43–51.
  • Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Feast of Orthodoxy” (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911). (The older description of the order: procession between Orthros and the Liturgy, the canon sung during it, the deacon’s proclamation of the Synodikon at the station. Used to locate the practice, not as a terminal authority.)
  • OrthodoxWiki, s.v. “Sunday of Orthodoxy.” (The procession with patronal and personal icons; pan-Orthodox Vespers; the readings and the older prophetic theme. Used to locate the practice, not as a terminal authority, per METHODOLOGY §2.3.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The feast and its significance.)