LATIN PATRIARCATE – JERUSALEM
Easter
Message 2004
Brothers
and Sisters
Christ
is risen. Indeed he is risen!
1. I address to you this message as Easter
comes to renew our minds and hearts with its spiritual gifts and to give us a
new strength so as to persevere in conducting our duties in our society and our
Church. It also inspires us to serve and love all our brothers and sisters to
whatever religion or nationality they belong. Christ’s commandment is indeed to
love and to see in every human being the face of God and to love him as God
himself loves him.
To all our
parishioners, I address my sincere wishes for renewal and perseverance in
service and love, which is the perfection of any human being as it is the
fullness of all laws. The glorious Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ is our
resurrection as well and it fills us with the joy and the strength of a new
life. It makes us the “new man” full of hope and love, as St Paul says: “A
hope which will not let us down, because the love of God has been poured in our
hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Ro 5:5).
2. As we celebrate the feast of the glorious Resurrection of
Our Lord, we turn our eyes to the Holy places and to the people who live around
them. We see with deep sadness a situation of death not of life, a situation in
which one does not know what to do as he goes searching for life in the
darkness of death, oppression, and bloodshed.
We live days in which
reason darkened; we are abandoned to “human madness” that sees solutions
only in bloodshed and in crushing the human being. Therefore towns and villages
are aggressed, occupied and reoccupied; many are killed while others are taken
prisoners. At the same time siege and oppression on towns and villages are
still going on.
The way out? The leaders should come
back to reason and consider that all human beings are equal, whether
Palestinian or Israeli. So when violence stops on one side it should stop on
the other as well. The leaders should consider the results of their policy during
these last three years since killing and demolition could not bring the so much
desired security. As thousands were killed the people keeps claiming for his
freedom. Within the frame of violence, the more are killed the more people will
keep asking for freedom. The way out is to listen to the voice of the oppressed
and to give them back what they are claiming for, freedom. It is simply a
lesson to be learned from all the past events.
It is high time for the
leaders to come back to reason and to reconsider what they have done in order
to avoid for themselves and for their people the sin of more bloodshed, and the
permanence of insecurity. Let them enter the true path of security which
consists in peaceful hearts and friendly relations. The hostile hearts of today
will become friendly with a secure protection when freedom and land will be
given back to them. The walls built today will fall only when the barriers in
the hearts will fall; then security will flourish without walls or any power of
destruction.
We ask God to open all
the hearts to the grace of Easter that will strengthen and enables all of us to
pass from death to life as we make the new history of this Holy Land.
3. To our faithful who live under siege and find themselves
behind the walls, we say: as you resist oppression accompany all these events
with prayers and patience, renew your hope through the joy and the power of the
Resurrection, do not submit to the logic of hatred but keep the freedom of your
spirit so that love may remain constant in you and become a source of
redemption for you and for everyone in this Holy Land. To those of our faithful
in the different parishes of the diocese who are not under siege we say:
accompany with prayer your brothers and sisters and all the inhabitants of this
land in this bloody conflict. May God have mercy on us and give this land and
its two peoples security, peace and a new life. The prophet said: “I shall
give them a single heart and I shall put a new spirit in them. I shall remove
the heart of stone from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh” (Ez
11:19; 36:26). We ask God and our Risen Lord to give us such a new heart, so
that Easter will be a resurrection for us also and a passage from death to
secure and peaceful life, and a journey with God. Amen.
Happy and Holy Easter.
+Michel
Sabbah, Patriarchch