The Holy Fire

Jerusalem’s Annual Miracle

For centuries, a miracle occurs every year during Holy Saturday at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. It is the great miracle of the Holy Fire, which occurs at the tomb of Jesus.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is under the general administration of the Jerusalem patriarchate of the Holy Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, currently His Beatitude Theofilos III, successor to the Apostle James (stepbrother of Jesus). On the Saturday of Holy Week, the Jerusalem Patriarch and the Archbishop of the Armenian Church enter the tomb of Christ, located inside an edicule within the church. The church complex contains both Golgatha, the hill on which Jesus Christ was crucified, as well as the tomb close to Golgatha that received Jesus’ dead body, and is same spot from which he rose from the dead. The ceremony surrounding “The Miracle of the Holy Fire” appears to be one of the oldest recurring Christian ceremonies in the world. It is considered by many to be the longest-attested annual miracle in the Christian world, though the event has only been documented consecutively since 1106. In many Orthodox countries around the world the event is televised live.

The tomb of Jesus is searched and sealed with beeswax, formerly by the Muslim Turks, but now by the Israeli police authority. The ceremony begins at noon when the the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem is searched for any incendiary device (traditionally to disavow a hoax). Wearing a simple white robe and carrying two bunches of 33 unlit candles each (representing Jesus’ age when He was crucified), he enters the tomb with the hierarch of the Armenian Church and prays the same century-old prayers while the crowd of people waiting outside the edicule chants “Lord have mercy.”

What is the Holy Fire?

The Holy Fire originates as a divine light which manifests on the marble slab covering the limestone bed upon which Jesus’ body was placed for burial, though there are various experiences by different people at various times in history. It then changes to a fire that that does not behave as normal fire, though it can be transferred from candle to candle, but for a time will not burn/damage what it touches. (In videos you can see people washing their faces, beards, and clothes with the flames from the Holy Fire in the first fifteen to thirty minutes after the initial appearance of the Fire.) The fire is also said to spontaneously light other lamps and candles around the church. The Holy Light is not only distributed by the Patriarch, but spreads by itself. It is emitted from the Holy Sepulchre with a hue completely different from natural light. The blue flame appears in different places in the Church. It flashes like lightning, and sometimes flies around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and lights the oil lamps in front of the tomb. It flies from one end of the church to the other. Sometimes it lights the lamps in the upper chapel of Calvary. There is one fascinating YouTube video (see below) in which a large ball of fire explodes from the tomb, darts through the crown and strikes a pillar which lights up and then the light is gone.

The Testimony of the Patriarch of Jerusalem

Here is the description of what happened to Patriarch Diodoros of Jerusalem, in his own words at Holy Pascha in 1998: “ After all the lights are extinguished, I bow down and enter the first chamber of the tomb. From here I find my way through the darkness to the inner room of the tomb where Christ was buried. Here, I kneel in holy fear and… I say certain prayers that have been handed down to us through the centuries and, having said them, I wait.

“Sometimes I may wait a few minutes, but normally the miracle happens immediately after I have said the prayers. From the core of the very stone on which Jesus had lain an indefinable light pours forth. It usually has a blue tint, but the color may change and assume many different hues. It cannot be described in human terms.

“The light rises out of the stone as mist rises out of a lake; it almost looks as if the stone is covered by a moist cloud, but it is light. This light each year behaves differently. Sometimes it covers just the stone, while other times it gives light to the whole sepulchre, so that people who stand outside the tomb and look into it will see it filled with light.

“The light does not burn; I have never had my beard burnt in all the sixteen years I have been patriarch in Jerusalem and have received the Holy Fire. The light is of a different consistency from normal fire that burns in an oil lamp. At a certain point the light rises and forms a column in which the fire is of a different nature, so that I am able to light my candles from it.

“When I thus have received the flame on my candles, I go out and give the fire first to the Armenian patriarch and then to the Coptic. Thereafter, I give the flame to all people present in the church… We experience many miracles in our churches, and miracles are nothing strange to us… But none of these miracles have such a penetrating and symbolic meaning for us as the miracle of the Holy Fire.

“The miracle is almost like a sacrament. It makes the resurrection of Christ as real to us as if it occurred just a few years ago… I have been in Jerusalem since 1939 when I came to the city at the age of fifteen. I have attended the ceremony of the Holy Fire for all these years, and have thus been a witness to the miracle sixty-one times. For me it is not a question of whether I believe in the miracle or not. I know it is true.”

The temperature of the Holy Fire is around forty degrees Celsius for several minutes after its descent, so believers can freely take it in their hands and “wash” their faces in it during this time because it does not burn, Archpriest Gennady Zaridze, Chairman of the Association of Orthodox Christian Scientists and rector of the Church of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God in the Voronezh region, said in his interview with RIA-Novosti.

“I used a pyrometer and it registered the temperature of the Holy Fire right after its descent: at once I ‘washed’ my face with this Fire (and it did not burn!) and measured its temperature. And it turned out that the average temperature of the Fire that I was holding and the Fire being held by my neighbors was forty-two degrees Celsius. Fifteen minutes later I measured the temperature again and it had reached 320° Celsius by that time,” the archpriest who has been researching miracles using natural-scientific methods for many years related.

Fr. Gennady Zaridze used a pyrometer, which by means of a non-contact infrared thermometer measures the temperature of an object’s surface, for measuring the temperature of the Holy Fire. A silver plate which was five millimeters wide and one millimeter thick was used as an object. As silver is one of the greatest heat conducting metals, when you place a plate in fire it will instantly obtain the temperature of the flame.

Fr. Gennady Zaridze visited the Holy Land in April 2016 for Pascha at the invitation of the St. Andrew Foundation and with the blessing of Metropolitan Sergy of Voronezh and Liski.

“I don’t have the slightest doubt that the Holy Fire is a work of the grace of God. It is a sort of divine mercy on the sinful world designed for preserving and strengthening faith,” the pastor noted in his interview with RIA-Novosti. He added that there were cases of healing miracles during the Holy Fire’s descents.

The archpriest stated that back in 2008 Andrei Volkov, a scientist from Russia’s National Research Center (Kurchatov Institute), had come to Jerusalem before the descent of the Holy Fire. He brought an instrument with him which registered various spectra of electromagnetic radiation. On that day he was the first person (even before the patriarch went out to the faithful with the Fire) to learn that the Holy Fire had descended because his instruments showed a very strong electrical discharge.

Although the Holy Fire event is commonly known throughout the Middle East, drawing large crowds, most non-Orthodox Christians in the West have never heard of it. We are blessed to witness the Lord’s testimony of His presence in His Church. “How great are His signs, and how mighty His wonders! His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and His dominion is from generation to generation.” (Daniel 4:3)