Oration 45: Second Oration on Easter

Gregory of Nazianzus preached two Easter sermons that survive, and this is the second and far longer of them. The first, Oration 1, was a young priest's offering at Nazianzus in 362. Oration 45 comes from the other end of his life: after his brief, bruising tenure as bishop of Constantinople and his resignation from the Council of 381, he withdrew to Cappadocia, and it was there, in 383, that he delivered this address on the feast of the Resurrection. It opens with Habakkuk standing at his watch to see what the Lord will say, and then with the acclamation that the Byzantine liturgy later took up almost verbatim: Pascha, the Lord's Pascha, and again I say Pascha, in honor of the Trinity. The occasion is festal, but the preacher is a theologian in retirement, and the sermon is as much a summary of his whole teaching as a holiday address.

The argument moves in three stages. Gregory first lays down the doctrine of God, creation, the fall, and the Incarnation, reusing large stretches of his Theophany oration (Oration 38) so that the hearer understands Easter as the completion of Christmas: the same Word who assumed flesh now carries that flesh through death. He then turns to the Passover of Exodus 12 and reads it feature by feature, the lamb without blemish, the blood on the doorposts, the unleavened bread, the girded loins and staff, the command to eat in haste, as a figure of the Christian's deliverance and departure from the old life. Along the way he corrects a popular etymology, insisting that Pascha is a Hebrew word meaning passage, not the Greek word for suffering, even as he allows that providence has let the two meanings meet. The climax is a question Gregory refuses to leave unasked: to whom was the blood of Christ offered? Not to the devil, which would be an outrage, and not straightforwardly to the Father, who neither demanded it nor held us captive. The answer he gives is that the Father accepts the offering not from need but from the economy of salvation, because humanity needed to be sanctified by the humanity of God. His compressed formula is that we needed a God made flesh and put to death so that we might live. The sermon ends with a roll-call of Passion figures, Simon of Cyrene, the thief, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, the women at the tomb, each offered as a role the hearer can take up.

Oration 45 became one of the most heavily commented of Gregory's orations in Byzantium, and its phrases pass directly into the Paschal canon of John of Damascus that Orthodox churches still sing at Easter matins. Its treatment of the atonement is regularly cited as the sharpest patristic refusal of a ransom paid to Satan, and its typological reading of Exodus remains a model of how the early church read the Old Testament liturgically rather than merely historically.

Who should read this: anyone preparing to preach or pray through Holy Week who wants Easter joined to the full sweep of creation and incarnation, and readers working on the history of atonement theology who need the primary text behind the debates. It is not a devotional meditation for a quick Easter morning read; the doctrinal sections are dense and assume a hearer already catechized in Nicene faith.