Prepare the Way of the Lord: The Triodion
This post comes from an email in the "Walk Through the Church Year" series which goes out to folks who sign up to receive two emails per month about major feasts and selected commemorations in the liturgical calendar. To receive these emails in your inbox, sign up here.
The original email was sent out in February of 2025.
by Brendan
The lenten season begins then by a quest, a prayer for humility which is the beginning of true repentance. For repentance, above everything else, is a return to the genuine order of things, the restoration of the right vision. — Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1)
After these few months of journeying together through the Church calendar, we have already reached the outskirts of the preeminent season of our year. If one counts Holy Week and the Triodion’s three weeks of preparation, the Lenten season lasts for ten weeks. Ten weeks of preparation for Pascha, yes, but much more importantly, preparation for one’s eternity.
Holy Church gives us the Triodion, these three Sundays and accompanying weeks, to be ready for Lent. During this time, she gradually increases the level of fasting and abstinence from worldly and physical concerns. Moreover, she calls us through Scripture and Liturgy to a time of repentance, humility, and illumination. Like those in the catechumenate who are preparing for their baptism, we are called to participate in these three modes of living. As such, the three Sundays of the Triodion are not only signposts for the journey but in fact the primary ways of discipleship that we are given throughout the year.
Humility: Sunday of the Pharisee and the Publican
This theme of humility begins on the previous Sunday, Zaccheus Sunday, which this year was celebrated along with Christ’s Presentation in the Temple. The story of the short tax collector who climbs into the sycamore tree to see Jesus points to the necessity of humility. This truth is continued this Sunday in the account of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18:9-14).
As happens throughout the Gospels, Christ turns common expectations of reality upside down. Instead of praising the good works of the Pharisee, He lifts up the words and example of the anonymous tax collector as a model of prayer and life (“God, be merciful to me a sinner.”) This quality of humility is what Christs wants His disciples to see as essential to any repentance and subsequent illumination. He desires the same for us as well. In his classic text Great Lent, Fr. Alexander Schmemann addressed the essential nature of humility by asking,
How does one become humble? The answer, for a Christian, is simple: by contemplating Christ, the divine humility incarnate, the One in whom God has revealed once and for all His glory as humility and His humility as glory… Humility is learned by contemplating Christ who said: “Learn from Me for I am meek and humble in heart.” (2)
Return from Exile: Sunday of the Prodigal Son
Our next stop during the Triodion focuses squarely on the reason for repentance – not only have we been exiled from our true home, but we have lost even the knowledge or desire to return. There are so many truths and mysteries contained in this most renowned of Christ’s parables. At the center, though, is this call to remember, to repent, and to return. Again, Fr. Schmemann:
It is easy to confess that I have not fasted on prescribed days, or missed my prayers, or become angry. It is quite a different thing, however, to realize suddenly that I have defiled and lost my spiritual beauty, that I am far away from my real home, my real life, and that something precious and pure and beautiful has been hopelessly broken in the very texture of my existence. Yet this, and only this is repentance, and therefore it is also a deep desire to return, to go back, to recover that lost home. (3)
Even if we recognize the need to return home, fear can keep us away. At the heart of this parable, though, is the call to trust our Good and Loving Saviour’s love for the repentant sinner. He calls each prodigal son or daughter to have faith that His grace is sufficient, and that He is waiting with arms open wide.
As he does for every other feast in the Church Calendar, Fr. Lev Gillet of blessed memory states this truth in moving terms:
What Jesus asks of a penitent sinner (and so, of each one of us), is above all this abandon, this absolute trust in the tender mercy and the favour of God. (4)
He expounds more on this relational truth, reminding us on any stage of our journey that
God does not simply restore a repentant sinner to the grace he might have possessed before sinning: he bestows on him the greatest grace he could receive, a maximum of grace. (5)
This Sunday’s readings and liturgy all serve to remind us that we have a Good Father waiting to embrace us and to make us His own. All that we need to do is to turn back toward Him.
Learning to Love: Sunday of The Last Judgment
If one was liable to forget the consequences of sin and wait for repentance, this Sunday is a reminder that our time is short. The Gospel text (Matthew 25:31-46) makes clear that judgment is coming, and that God will be looking not only on how his children acted, but how they treated the people in their lives. This text emphasizes the centrality of relational love, a selfless giving and dying to one’s self for the sake of the other. All other relationships are blessed or condemned based on how they mirror God’s own love for each of us.
The key element of this love is caring for the individual in front of me, not simply an anonymous, abstract ‘good feeling’ toward others. Ultimately, our love is judged by God’s love. Fr. Schmemann explores this sobering truth, noting
When Christ comes to judge us, what will be the criterion of His judgment? The parable answers: love– not a mere humanitarian concern for abstract justice and the anonymous “poor,” but concrete and personal love for the human person, any human person, that God makes me encounter in my life… (6)
Fr. Gillet likewise seizes on this principal theme of this Sunday, recognizing that it is our choice in giving and receiving love that determines how we will be judged:
We pass judgment on ourselves when, voluntarily, we adhere to God or reject Him. It is our love or lack of love which will place us amongst the ‘blessed’ or amongst those who are dismissed… (7)
An excerpt from one of the Vesper hymns for this Sunday,
O my soul, the time is near at hand; make haste before it is too late, and cry aloud in faith: I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned against Thee, but I know Thy love for man and Thy compassion…
notes the terror of imminent judgment juxtaposed with God’s great mercy. It is a lingering reminder of our Good Father who knows each of us better than we know ourselves and stands ready to see the humble, forgive the repentant, and illuminate the prodigal with His energies of love and presence.
As we make our way through the Triodion, we are encouraged to contemplate Christ and to remember what He offers to every man and woman, every boy and girl: Himself. May we cling to Him, keep coming back to His presence, and humble ourselves so that we may see the fullness of His love radiating through each of us.
(1) Great Lent, Father Alexander Schmemann (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1969) 20.
(2) Ibid, 20.
(3) Ibid, 22
(4) The Year of Grace of the Lord, Father Lev Gillet (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1971) 112.
(5) Ibid, 114.
(6) Schmemann, 24.
(7) Gilet, 116.
All Scripture references taken from the Orthodox Study Bible (Thomas Nelson, 2008).