“In Orthodoxy, “evil” does not have the last word. On the contrary, belief in the Resurrection acts as a motivation to fight against it. Our faith thus acquires a “transformative power” and does not allow us to compromise or capitulate with “evil”, the Ecumenical Patriarch pointed out, among other things.
The Easter message of the Ecumenical Patriarch
“Venerable brothers, Bishops and beloved children in the Lord,
By the grace and grace of the pandora God, passing through the darkness of Holy and Great Lent and passing through the Week of the Lord’s Passion, behold, we rejoice in the celebration of His glorious Resurrection, by which we were redeemed from the tyranny of the Blood.
The glorious Resurrection of the Savior Christ is a co-resurrection of the universe of the gens of the dead and a foretaste of the end of everything and the fulfillment of the Divine Economy in the heavenly Kingdom. We participate in the immeasurable mystery of the Resurrection in the Church, being sanctified in its holy mysteries and experiencing Easter, “the gate of Paradise was opened to us”, not as a memory of a past event, but as a reminder of the stolen life, as the presence of Christ He is in our midst, closer to us than we ourselves are to ourselves. At Easter, the Orthodox believers discover their true self as it is in Christ, they join the movement of all things towards the End, “in joy unsung and earned” (1 Pet. 1, 8), as “sons of light… and sons of day” (1 Thess. 5, 5).
A central characteristic of Orthodox life is its unstoppable pulse. The philosopher mistakenly called Orthodox spirituality “gloomy” and “autumnal”. Westerners praise the developed sensibilities of the Orthodox for the meaning and experiential depth of the Paschal experience, without however forgetting this belief that the path to Resurrection passes through the Cross. Orthodox spirituality does not know the otopianism of the Resurrection without the Cross, nor the pessimism of the Cross without the Resurrection. For this reason, in the Orthodox experience, evil does not have the last word in history, while faith in the Resurrection acts as a motivation for the struggle against the presence in the world and its consequences, it acts as a powerful transforming force. In orthodox self-awareness there is no room for capitulation to evil, for indifference to the course of human affairs. On the contrary, the contribution to the transformation of history has a theological basis and an existential basis and unfolds without the risk of identifying the Church with the world. The Orthodox believer is aware of the contrast between worldly reality and eschatological perfection and it is not possible to remain inactive in the face of negativity. For this reason, the Orthodox Church has never seen the struggle for the transformation of the world as an insignificant matter. The Paschal faith saved the Church both from introversion and closedness, as well as from secularism.
In the Orthodox Easter, the whole mystery and the existential wealth of our piety is concentrated. The “dazzled” of the Myrophores, when, “entering the monument I saw a young man… clothed in a white garment” (Mark 2:5), characterizes the magnitude and essence of the experience of faith as an experience of existential shock. “Dazzled” indicates that man is in front of a mystery, which deepens as he approaches it, as it has been said, that our faith “is not a path from mystery to knowledge, but from knowledge to mystery”.
While the denial of the mystery actually shrinks man, respect opens the gate of heaven to him. Belief in the Resurrection is the deepest and clearest expression of our freedom, or rather its birth as an eternal acceptance of the supreme divine gift of deification by grace. The Orthodox Church, as “experienced Anastasis”, is the place of “true freedom”, which is the foundation, path and destination of the Christian life. The Resurrection of Christ is a gospel of freedom, a gift of freedom and a guarantee of “common freedom” in the “eternal life” of the Kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
With these sentiments, venerable brothers and beloved children, full of the joy of sharing in the “communion of all feasts”, receiving light from the eternal light and glorifying Christ who rose from the dead and gave life to all, remembering the feast on this “calling and holy day”, of all our brothers and sisters, let us pray to the Lord and God of peace, who “treads death with death”, as he pacifies the world, enlightening our steps towards every good work and pleasing to Him, calling upon the omnipotent but ” Christ is Risen”!
Fanarion, Holy Easter, west
† Of Constantinople
fire to Christ Anastas
greetings to all of you.”
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