Today we stand before our tortured Lord, and, like a tragic overtone to everything taking place, the clock strikes the third, sixth, and ninth hours. Have you noticed how painfully the clock sometimes strikes when we are waiting for someone? Even when we are no longer waiting, but simply sitting in petrified stillness, as if not in this world, the clock can suddenly strike so ominously, frighteningly, and yet soberingly. And it is so remarkable that we have these prayers of the Hours. Let us turn to them now. And let us try to live through the third, sixth, and ninth once again...

But then it turns out that the third hour is about something else; it is about Pentecost, not about the nailing to the cross. "O Lord, who at the third hour sent down Your Most Holy Spirit upon Your apostles, do not take Him from us, O Good One, but renew us who pray to You." Why? Why this sudden disruption of the logic of the liturgical text's construction? But of course we remember: "...these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour..." (Acts 2:15) Someone will find this circumstance insignificant, a chance coincidence; someone else will see it as a conscious falsification for the sake of preaching "one's own" truth; someone will say that the evangelist Luke symbolically linked the event of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles to the moment when the execution began, as a symbol of the beginning of the preaching of the Word of God in the world. But perhaps we need neither the first, nor the second, nor the third line of reasoning. What we need is simply to stand before the events that are taking place and cry out: "Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me."

"O Christ God, who at the ninth hour tasted death in the flesh for our sake, put to death the reasoning of our flesh and save us." Put it to death, for "the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal. 6:14). These words are often interpreted in the traditional way: I have died to the world, and the world has died to me. But if the apostle Paul had wanted to say that, he would have said that; instead he said "crucified"...

When our Lord was crucified, the world changed so much that it is now impossible to live in a world where the Lord is not crucified. And although many still live that way, we live differently; therefore we too are crucified. With Him.

Today's reading may help us, to some degree, make sense of the sharpest question facing a person: how does almighty God allow the existence of suffering and evil, especially when it is always the purest and most innocent people who suffer? Today we are given a glimpse of how God relates to evil in the world. We read how the Lord Himself passes through the very thick of human suffering. He descends from heaven in order to share with humanity all the darkness, all the horror of its loneliness and pain. Jesus is abandoned by His disciples; He passes through the soldiers' mockery, the shameful procession to the place of execution, and the agonizing crucifixion on the cross. In order to drink to the end all the bitterness of human torment, He refuses to drink the wine with myrrh that would dull the pain.

The King of all the earth, the Son of God, is "numbered with the transgressors." He does not come down from the cross, so that He may pass through the most terrible thing: "My God! Why have You forsaken Me?" He passes through the darkness of God-forsakenness belonging to fallen humanity. After this He, like each of us, sinks into the cold of death. The veil in the temple, which separated God from people, was torn: the Son of God had walked the human path to the end. The few disciples who remained buried Him like any mortal man.

Such is God's answer to the existence of suffering on earth. He does not merely sympathize; He suffers with us completely, with us and for us.

Here is also our answer: Christians, each in his own measure, take part in the sufferings of Christ, suffer with the world, and in this way take part in Christ's redeeming sacrifice, and through this also in His Resurrection.

Sometimes people who have remained unnoticed for a long time suddenly find themselves at the center of events. Thus, all at once, Joseph of Arimathea, whom the evangelist mentions, appears on the scene. Almost nothing is known about him except that he was a man of very high standing. What was Jesus to him? What was his relationship with Him? A secret disciple, as the other evangelists also say about him, but what did it mean to be His secret disciple? To give support in a situation where none of the open disciples could do anything, to use one's position so that the impossible would become possible? Yes, of course, that too. But the main thing was readiness.

In a certain sense it is easier to be an open disciple. Jesus, of course, tells all the disciples and everyone willing to hear that one must always keep watch, that spiritual laxity and the path into the Kingdom are incompatible. Still, for those who are constantly beside Him, it is easier in a certain sense. They see the Teacher with their own eyes; for them He is absolutely real at every moment of their life. The secret disciples, no doubt, communicated with Him much less often. He appeared to them and disappeared, and one could never say exactly when He would appear next.

The apostles experienced something similar during the Last Supper, when they understood that Jesus was going to leave them for a time. They did not know where He was going; they did not truly understand the Teacher and could not imagine what they would have to live through very soon. But they understood that, at any rate, now they would be left alone for some period of time, and a completely undefined one at that. They would not see the Teacher, would not hear Him, would not know where He was or what He was doing, and would not know what He would require of them when He returned.

This situation very much resembles the situation of every Christian today. We live in the age of the coming Kingdom, but when it will be completed no one knows except the Father. We cannot calculate any time frames here, even approximately. We can only live with the awareness that on any day everything can come to an end and the Savior can return.

One cannot prepare for that day in the way we prepare for one event or another in our world. We can usually imagine the events of our world somehow; we can at least try to think through and calculate what we may need, though how successful and adequate that calculation will be is another question.

But as for the Kingdom and the return of the Messiah, here we can neither imagine nor calculate anything. What remains is readiness as an inner spiritual state, presupposing the very spiritual alertness whose necessity Jesus spoke of and which His secret disciples constantly had to maintain: waiting for the Teacher's unexpected appearance and inwardly ready to do what is completely impossible to imagine in advance.