As was mentioned earlier, the Church year is organized around Christ’s Resurrection. Simultaneously the liturgical day is structured around the realization of Christ’s victory over death and sin.
Christianity has maintained the old Jewish notion that the day begins with the setting sun. Why? Because we await the morning of Christ’s Resurrection. Thus the first service of the new day is Vespers; we move from the old day to the new day – the day of Resurrection!
Living Christ’s Resurrection is the basis of the Divine Liturgy and underpins the entire structure of the liturgical order of the Church. The Church calendar is built around two cycles: movable and immovable feasts.
The first, movable feasts, relates to the most profound moments of divine revelation: time which the Greeks called kairos. The second, fixed or immovable feasts, relates to specific days in history, for example, the Nativity of Christ or the Annunciation. It never changes and so it is straightforward to understand. This time/cycle was regarded as chronos by the Greeks – the root of the word chronological.
Every Divine Liturgy (Eucharistic liturgy) is a celebration of and participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. It is important to recall that the death of our Saviour is only the door through which we must go in order to come to the Resurrection: We bow to Your Cross, O Master, and we glorify Your Holy Resurrection!
Christ’s self-sacrifice allows us access to His Resurrection. At the opening of the Divine
Liturgy we stand on the verge of the Resurrection and the celebrant proclaims: Blessed is
the Kingdom of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We are God’s Eucharistic people. This is why the spirit of every Divine Liturgy is joyous and extols
God’s graciousness.
Christians are the ones whose lives witness that Christ is risen from the dead, through their attitude to the world, to material things and to one another. They also witness to the fact that goodness, life and God’s love are stronger than hate, evil and even death!
Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Transfiguration 