This Holy Pascha Week, I will be sharing tidbits garnished from reliving the week with Christ through the service readings, Treasures of the Fathers and Jesus: A Dialogue with the Saviour, this year’s choice for the book club.

St. Augustine explains why the Orthodox church uses the term Pascha:

Pascha (Passover) is not, as some think, a Greek noun, but a Hebrew: and yet there occurs in this noun a very suitable kind of accordance in the two languages. For inasmuch as the Greek word paschein means to suffer, therefore pascha has been supposed to mean suffering, as if the the noun derived its name from His passion. But in its own language - that is, in Hebrew - pascha means Passover; because the Pascha was then celebrated for the first time by God’s people, when, in their flight from Egypt, they passed over the Red Sea. And now that prophetic emblem is fulfilled in truth, when Christ is led as a sheep to the slaughter, that by His blood sprinkled on our doorposts, that is, by the sign of His cross marked on our foreheads, we may be delivered from the perdition awaiting this world, as Israel from the bondage and destruction of the Egyptians; and a most useful journey we make when we pass over from the devil to Christ, and from this unstable world to His well-established Kingdom. And therefore surely do we pass over to the ever-abiding God, that we may not pass away with this passing world.


St. Augustine, The Gospel of John, Tractate 55, Ch. 13, NPNF, s.1, p. 600.
Taken from page 15 in the Treasures of the Fathers.