Primate's Easter Message

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Primate's Easter Message

 

To Live Is Christ

 

For I know that through your prayers, and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I shall not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage, now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. (Philippians 1:19-21)

 

From prison the apostle Paul wrote those lines, as he awaited almost certain execution. Surely one senses his apprehension beneath the words. He is not a fanatic, who would seek death out as a worshipper pursuing an idol. To the contrary, like our Lord before him during His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, the apostle does not relish the prospect of death, because he knows that life is dear. But at the same time, the question of whether he will live or die is not uppermost in his thoughts. He can find the courage to write, "to die is gain," because he trusts that his killers will not have the final say. The power they hold over him may be real, and consequential. But it is not final.

 

But if to die is gain, then what shall he call "to live"? One can sense St. Paul grasping for the right word to convey life's splendor, its preciousness, its inherent quality of hope. If to die is gain, then to live? To live is...

 

"To live is Christ." That is the way a man facing death resolved to put it. Admittedly, it is a curious formulation--almost jarring to the ear. We should not pretend to fully understand his meaning. Yet we can observe that it is congruent with much else in Christianity: with our Lord's testimony, "I am the Resurrection and the Life;" with the epithet "Lord of Life" applied to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The entire Christian story, it would seem, is an affirmation of life.

 

And so it is a puzzle that this same God, this Lord of Life, chose to subject Himself to death. The paradox is concisely expressed in an Armenian hymn, Miadzin Vorti: "You, the unchangeable One, became man and you were crucified, O Christ our God: you trampled down Death by death."

 

The cause, of course, was a great one: the salvation of mankind. But let us not doubt that things could have been otherwise. God could have chosen to effect salvation through some means other than His own death. He chose not to. Armenian Christians should be clear on this point: Our church does not regard the shedding of His blood as a necessary condition of salvation, in the manner of other Christian denominations. We do not conceive of Christ as some kind of human sacrifice or scapegoat, whose humiliation and death "purchased" salvation for mankind. We stress the free choice of God: His willingness to enter into human history. To take on the infirmities of the human condition: its weakness and vulnerability; its mortality. To do this out of love for His creations, in a divine act of solidarity.

 

Singing Miadzin Vorti should remind us that God could have simply trampled death--period. But He chose instead to trample it with death--to subject Himself to the thing He sought to correct--thus not merely correcting the problem, but affirming the very human condition which had to endure such suffering in the first place. We might say that Christ's death was God's way of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with all the deaths that had gone before. And of anticipating all those that would come after.

 

It is an especially poignant thought for us this Easter--ninety years after the greatest conflagration of death our people have ever known. Knowingly or unknowingly, the Armenians of Ottoman Turkey in the days prior to April 24, 1915, were in the same position as St. Paul: captives awaiting death at the hands of unjust powers. Unlike Paul, most of them were denied the chance even to scrawl a final few words from a prison cell. So we cannot say that they all met their fates with the same consciousness as Paul, or even with the same faith. Our enemy made no discrimination between the believer and non-believer; all were killed, simply for being Armenian.

 

So we cannot say they were all martyrs, in the sacramental sense of that word. But then again, who are we to say whether they have not all been sanctified? To paraphrase the noble words uttered over a different spectacle of death: Their ordeal has sanctified them far beyond our own poor powers of recognition.

 

What we can recognize, as we experience Easter from the perspective of this solemn milestone, is this: That the scars we still bear today, the losses we have endured--whether inflicted ninety years ago, twenty-five years, ten, or even last night--Christ has borne before us. Borne them in anticipation of our own afflictions. Borne them out of His love for us, to show He abides with us, in triumph as well as tragedy.

 

Borne, above all, to assure us that affliction is not the End. There is a final act, not yet performed, but written nonetheless, awaiting its consummation at the true end of things--which itself will be only the beginning of something new. When that day arrives, we can be sure that something of our past affliction will still be with us, even as our Lord's wounds remained visible, tangible, after His return to life. But we will be made new: Not so much reborn, as made whole again. Whole in our bodies and spirits; whole--we are permitted to hope, and obliged to pray--in our relationships with others, too. Reunited with those we have lost along the way. Reunited with those we never knew, but to whom we owe our existence. Reunited with those who are, from our perspective now, still yet to be.

 

All of us, reunited in the bosom of our Lord. Even if such a reunion were only a dream, men would hardly be fools to long for it. But we have been promised, and shown, that it is not a dream, but rather a hope: the secret culmination of human existence. That is the hope which Easter eternally represents. We can enter upon it, if we so choose. And Jesus Christ is our doorway.

 

It was with his eye on that hope that St. Paul was able to face the prospect of imprisonment, injustice, even death. It is our hope, too: our hope for ourselves, to be sure; but more than that, our hope for those countless Armenian souls who perished ninety years ago. Let us carry that prayer in our hearts this Easter, as we affirm:

 

Krisdos haryav ee merelotz. Orhnyal eh harootiunun Krisdosee. Christ is risen from the dead. Blessed is the resurrection of Christ.

 

Archbishop Khajag Barsamian

 

Primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America