Arabic original here.
“Christ is risen!” Beloved, before all else, I would like to
send my congratulations and my regards to everyone in Syria and in Lebanon,
wishing that in their days they will rejoice in the Lord, especially because we
in this region of the world take joy in the fact that the Lord came from among
us. I would like to turn my attention to those of us in Jerusalem and in
Palestine, where the Resurrection of the Lord occurred after His birth there
and after he spent the years of His life preaching the Good News here, and not
in any other region. It is good for me to mention that our Lord trod the soil
of Lebanon, as the Bible says that He went to Tyre and Sidon.
It is worth remembering that the Apostle Paul , here in
Damascus, was guided to the Christian faith. It was here that he heard the
heavenly voice: stop persecuting the gatherings here! Stop resisting Christ and
trying to prevent Him from entering the hearts of the people! Stop insulting
those who confess Christ as their Lord and God!
Before you were guided to the truth, you used to say, “The
God whom you confess is not my God because your God speaks in love and my God
says to me, ‘Go and kill and sacrifice all who do not believe in your faith.’”
The reversal and what followed it happened in Damascus, just as the divine
birth happened in Bethlehem and the crucifixion happened in Jerusalem or
nearby. Likewise, the tongue of the Apostle Paul was changed from being a
tongue that preached killing, that preached barbaric violence, that preached
incitement of people against other people on account of their beliefs. It was
here that that tongue changed into a tongue that spoke of love and said that it
is impermissible for any human to be a stranger to another.
As you heard in the hymn “Today is the Day of Resurrection,”
we must—as the hymn says—learn today to address others, however they may be, by
saying “my brother” and we must begin to think of the brotherhood of people and
not of their antagonisms. We have said on very important occasions that anyone
who uses religion to acquire honor from people or to benefit their families or
their children, anyone who does this in the name of religion does the greatest
harm to religion, whatever his religion may be.
We here have learned that our God is one and unique. Do not
think that we say anything other than that “No one has seen God.” You have
heard this statement in our Holy Gospel. God is one and unique and is not three
gods, as some think. When we talk about hypostases, we say that the substance
is one. The hypostases are undivided. When you separate one hypostases from
another, in doing so you divide God. Our God is not a collection of parts. He
is one. “I believe in one God.” “In the name of the Father and the Son and the
Holy Spirit, one God.” If we leave out any part of this phrase, we have divided
the truth in which we believe.
This, beloved, is what we say in order to arrive at the fact
that God is one, the one, unique Creator. This means that every person is a
creature of God and there is no person on the face of the earth, great or
small, learned or illiterate, who is not a creature of the one, unique God.
This is why you have one duty toward every person, without exception. One who
denies people their dignity denies the fact that God created a person for
dignity, and not so that they will not be honored. Why do we complain about
ourselves and our sins? Precisely because they are against human dignity and
because they are against love for humans. Why do we complain about what happens
in Palestine when we see a youth dying, a woman killed, a child martyred? It is
because we have a deeply rooted belief that that youth, that woman, that child,
were created for a life of dignity and not in order to die at the hands of
another human. We do not appoint one person to be a god over another, even if
one of them is weak and powerless, fated to fight and struggle while the other
possesses all the powers of the earth. We do not bow down to him and we do not
worship him.
Beloved, some people criticize us for always being with the
weak and the oppressed, the weak in struggles and not the weak in virtue. We
believe that the strong do not possess truth, do not possess justice, do not
have respect for others. The one who is
strong is weak, weak to the greatest possible degree. They say to us, “Why are
others strong in a way different from our own strength?” We say: has it become blameworthy
for a person to not want to be a predator, for a person to not want to
hatefully, forcefully, oppress others? We
believe that blame goes to one who is not willing to talk to another except in
the language of power, compulsion, revenge, killing, and mockery. When we turn
our attention during this feast to our brothers in Palestine, we think of this
and we ask our questions that we have heart to the world, that perhaps the
world may understand. On this morning, I also turn my attention to our brother
bishops who guide our people, and how dear is our people to our hearts—I turn my
attention to them because on this day they say to our people, “Christ is risen!”
and they repeat this wherever they are found. They are present here and at the
ends of the earth: in America, in Europe, in Australia, wherever your brothers
are found, today they say, “Christ is risen!”
I know that today we might forget those who have died as
martyrs. Beloved! All of us will die, but there are those who die for the sake
of something that is special to you. They know very well that they must pay the
price, without receiving any profit from their work. Many of them are among us.
Our religions in this region are based on people who died
for the sake of true faith. Likewise we say: They die for the sake of Christ
and they die indeed, as they say to us that they reject evil in any place and
in any form. Beloved! May God almighty have mercy on us in a world in which we
do not deserve more than what we do. May God help us to change our world into a
world worthy that humans live in it. May this be with one voice: “Christ is
risen!”
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