Office Of Readings | Tuesday Of Holy Week | A Reading From The Book Of Saint Basil On The Holy Spirit | One Death For The World, One Resurrection From The Dead
‘There is one death for the world, and one resurrection from the dead.’
In this reading, Saint Basil the Great—a towering theological mind of the early Church—guides us into the heart of the Paschal Mystery. His meditation on Christ’s passion and our participation in it through baptism offers profound insight into the transformative meaning of Holy Week. Basil’s message is simple but immense: by one death and resurrection—Christ’s—the world was saved. And we, through baptism, are drawn into that saving mystery.
Divine Plan For Restoration
Saint Basil begins by locating Christ’s passion within a divine plan of healing. Humanity, he writes, was estranged from God ‘by disobedience’, and the coming of Christ in the flesh was God’s response to this estrangement—a plan to lift us up, to restore us ‘to friendship with himself’.
This echoes the foundational theme of salvation history: that God’s response to sin is not abandonment, but mercy. Like the father of the prodigal son, God does not wait passively for our return but actively sends the Son to seek us, heal us, and raise us from our fall. The Incarnation, then, is not simply God joining our condition—it is the launching of a rescue mission.
As Saint Paul puts it, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5:8) Saint Basil draws out the depth of this love, highlighting that Christ not only came but ‘suffered, died on the cross, was buried, and rose from the dead’, all so that we could follow him—not only in life, but through death and into new life.
Imitating Christ’s Death | A Radical Call
Basil insists that it is not enough merely to admire Christ—we must imitate him. And not only in his gentleness or humility, but in his death.
This may strike us as paradoxical, even frightening. How can we imitate death? Basil, drawing from the Apostle Paul (Philippians 3:10–11), points to baptism as the way. In baptism, we are ‘buried with Christ’, and thus we begin to participate in the death that leads to resurrection.
This reflects the early Church’s theology of baptism as death and rebirth. Paul writes: ‘Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? … So we too might walk in newness of life.’ (Romans 6:3–4) For Basil, this is not metaphor but mystery: baptism is not merely symbolic, but a true spiritual dying to the old self.
Baptism As Burial |The Turning Point Of The Soul
Basil develops a compelling image from the racecourse: the runner must pause and turn to reverse direction. This ‘turning point’ is the soul’s death to sin—the end of one life, the beginning of another.
Here, Basil aligns with the ancient Greek idea of metanoia—a complete turning of the mind and heart. Baptism is not just a ceremony; it marks a decisive rupture with the past. The person who goes under the water dies to sin, dies to selfishness, and emerges a new creation. As Saint Cyril of Jerusalem taught his catechumens, ‘You were led by the hand to the holy pool of divine baptism… and each of you was asked if he believed… then you descended into the water and rose again: this was the symbol of Christ’s three days in the tomb.’
For Basil, baptism is not only personal but cosmic—it is our share in the one death and resurrection that saved the world.
Descent Into Hell | A Spiritual Journey
Basil speaks of our own ‘descent into hell’ as part of baptism. This draws on early Christian belief that Christ descended into the realm of the dead (cf. 1 Peter 3:19), breaking the bonds of death and raising up the righteous.
Our own descent is symbolic: a journey into the grave of self, into the silence where sin is stripped away. Through the waters of baptism, we go down into death so we may rise in purity and light. Basil references the Pauline idea of a new circumcision—not of the body, but ‘the complete stripping away of the unregenerate nature’ (cf. Colossians 2:11–12). This inner purification is radical and complete.
Basil echoes Psalm 51: ‘You will wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’ This is no moral surface-cleaning, but a re-creation of the soul, a re-forging of the human heart in the likeness of Christ.
A Once-For-All Mystery
Saint Basil ends by emphasizing that baptism happens only once—because Christ’s death and resurrection happened only once. There is only one Paschal Mystery. To be baptized is to be eternally linked to that singular moment in history when sin was defeated, death was conquered, and life broke through the grave.
This idea is liturgically embodied in the Church’s celebration of Easter. During the Easter Vigil, catechumens are baptized and clothed in white, recalling both the burial shroud and the garment of resurrection. As Saint Paul says, ‘If we have died with him, we believe that we shall also live with him.’ (Romans 6:8)
In this way, the Church teaches that baptism is not only the beginning of Christian life but the very pattern of Christian living: a daily dying and rising. As Saint Gregory of Nyssa wrote, ‘This is the goal of our life: to be conformed to the death of Christ, to be crucified with him, to be buried with him, and to rise again with him to new life.’
A Reading From The Book Of Saint Basil On The Holy Spirit
When mankind was estranged from him by disobedience, God our Saviour made a plan for raising us from our fall and restoring us to friendship with himself. According to this plan Christ came in the flesh, he showed us the gospel way of life, he suffered, died on the cross, was buried and rose from the dead. He did this so that we could be saved by imitation of him, and recover our original status as sons of God by adoption.
To attain holiness, then, we must not only pattern our lives on Christ’s by being gentle, humble and patient, we must also imitate him in his death. Taking Christ for his model, Paul said that he wanted to become like him in his death in the hope that he too would be raised from death to life.
We imitate Christ’s death by being buried with him in baptism. If we ask what this kind of burial means and what benefit we may hope to derive from it, it means first of all making a complete break with our former way of life, and our Lord himself said that this cannot be done unless a man is born again. In other words, we have to begin a new life, and we cannot do so until our previous life has been brought to an end. When runners reach the turning point on a racecourse, they have to pause briefly before they can go back in the opposite direction. So also when we wish to reverse the direction of our lives there must be a pause, or a death, to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another.
Our descent into hell takes place when we imitate the burial of Christ by our baptism. The bodies of the baptized are in a sense buried in the water as a symbol of their renunciation of the sins of their unregenerate nature. As the Apostle says: The circumcision you have undergone is not an operation performed by human hands, but the complete stripping away of your unregenerate nature. This is the circumcision that Christ gave us, and it is accomplished by our burial with him in baptism. Baptism cleanses the soul from the pollution of worldly thoughts and inclinations: You will wash me, says the psalmist, and I shall be whiter than snow. We receive this saving baptism only once because there was only one death and one resurrection for the salvation of the world, and baptism is its symbol.
In the parable of the prodigal son, the story Jesus tells is so homely and familiar to our lives, and to our most basic human and family instincts, that even without the deeper meanings as we interpret the parable, it would be powerfully moving to hear as a tale of estrangement and difficulty followed by forgiveness and reconciliation through love [ … read more … ]
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
Envy and the evil of material possession are closely related because envy is often directed at the material possessions of others. When we see someone else with something that we desire, such as a nice car, a big house, or a fancy watch, we can feel envy and a sense of dissatisfaction with what we have [ … ]
