(i) The Sixth Week. During the services of this week, and to a still

greater extent during Holy W eek, the Triodion assumes the charac­ ter of a historical narrative. Day by day we accompany Christ: we are with Him as He draws near to Jerusalem, as He reaches Bethany to raise Lazarus, as He enters the Holy City on Palm Sunday, as He 73 See his vividly written account: / erimitis Photeini eis tin erimon tou lordanou (6th ed., Volos, 1 9 7 1 ) .

approaches His Passion. The daily offices are marked by a sense of advancing movement and dramatic realism. Each day we call to mind, as exactly as possible, the things that must have occurred on

the corresponding day during the last year of Christ’s earthly

ministry. All this is not to be seen merely as the bare commemoration of occurrences in the distant past. On the contrary, through the litur­ gical celebration we relive these events, participating in them as contemporaries. We are raised from the level of secular time, as measured by the clock or calendar, to the level of ‘ liturgical’ or ‘sacred’ tim e; we are transferred to the point where the vertical di­ mension of eternity breaks into linear time. This transposition of past into present, of remembrance into reality, is expressed in the liturgical texts above all through the word Today. So we sing on