Paschal Epistle
AKAKIJE
By the Mercy of God,
True Orthodox Bishop of Resava and Shumadia
To all the faithful children of St. Sava’s Serbian
Church I send the most radiant and joyous ancient Christian salutation: Christ
is Risen!
Every year, the Light of the Resurrection of Christ
inspires us anewto persevere firmly and unwaveringly in the fight for our holy
Orthodox Faith, and, at the same time, for our much suffering Serbian
nation. The triumphant celebration of
the feast of the Holy Resurrection, which is preceded by the most terrible and
glorious week of the holy, saving sufferings of Christ, always reminds us that
without suffering and Golgotha there is no Resurrection. Every one is called to
follow the path of Golgotha. To take up one’s cross and follow Christ means to
have true repentance, to bring forth the fruits of repentance, so that for the
love of Christ, we have to bear every suffering which happens to us, looking to
Christ Himself who suffered for us sinners. The history of our much-suffering
people is Golgothic. The ideal of
suffering for the sake of loyalty to Christ has always deeply permeated our
people. While this blessed spirit was present in our people, we could hope for
the resurrection of the earthly Church and state. Today we lack that living faith
in the Cross and Resurrection which in every fateful moment gave our people
hope and raised them up.
On the one hand, the times in which we are living do
not differ in some ways from others through which our people has passed – times
of war, crisis, anddestitution. There
are still Serbs living who experienced the horrors of the disintegration of the
Yugoslavian Kingdom, the world and fraternal wars, regicide, the Communist
coup, andthe godless half-century of Communist governance.New generations, who
grew up when the Communist star had already begun to fade, experienced new
wars, and, in the place of godless Communism, godless western democracy.All the
generations of our ancestors inevitably tasted the bitterness of suffering to a
greater or lesser extent. That was allowed, or sent to us from God, because of
our sins, and can always be turned to the good, to serve for our salvation; for
it is a spiritual law that satisfaction and happiness tie man to this world,
while bitterness and suffering impel man to seek true joy and happiness, which
lie outside the bounds of this world. No one has ever drunk of a glass of
honey, as Bishop Negosh said, without first swallowing a cup of bile.
On the other hand, there now new poisons which our
forefathers never tasted, but which our generation partakes of. These are the
deadly poisons of the apostate Sergianist betrayal of the Church to the
god-haters, among the most fatal of which is the poison of the pan-heresy of
ecumenism. This suffering does not
affect the body: it is directed only at
the soul of the Serbian people. Fear not those who kill the body but cannot
kill the soul, says our Lord and Savior Christ; rather, fear those who can send
both soul and body to hell. Yes, these words are true, and today the intent of
the enemies of the human race is not only to separate the faithful from the way
of salvation on which the Orthodox Church leads, but also, as Fr. Seraphim Rose
pointed out, to create its own “Orthodox Church”; that is, to transform the
very Body of Christ into one earthly, ecumenist organization, in order to
prepare for the coming of its chosen Antichrist. The Belgrade Patriarchate has, owing to its
firmly ecumenist course from the time of Tito’s Patriarch German, become the
faithful image of this description. From
membership in the body of the World Council of Churches, a heretical assembly
which is made up of a few hundred various heresies, each one of which is
spiritual death, to communal ecumenist prayers, to identification of the
Mohammedan and Jewish god with the true Triune God, she has truly revealed her
true character through her actions.
One of the last True Orthodox bishops of Serbia, St.
Nicholas of Žiča,
confessed faith in God as the Creator of all people, but this same God is the
FATHER of only those people who believe in the Son of God and in His Divinity. “Whoever
denies the Son, has not the Father; but he who confesses the Son, has the
Father also” (First Epistle of St. John 2:23). All people are the creations of
God and potential sons of God. But the true sons of God are those who receive the
Son; it is to them that “…He gave power to become the sons of God,
even to them that believe in His name:
Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the
will of man, but of God” (John
1:12-13). This difference between Christians
and non-Christians, that is, between those who are spiritually reborn by the
will of God and those who are simply created by God, must especially be emphasized
in the midst of our time’s vulgar propaganda that all faiths are the same,
propaganda which levels mountains to plains, but cannot raise plains to the
height of mountains. If the teaching of
St. John the Theologian given above is the Orthodox confession of faith - and
it is - then how is it possible that Orthodox Christians pray with Moslems and
Jews to the same God?
The newly-chosen Belgrade Patriarch Irenaus took part in
prayers at the lighting of the Talmudic Menorah. By contrast, that luminary of the world, St. John Chrysostom, thunders, “None of the Jews worship God. Who
says so? The Son of God Himself: ‘You know neither Me nor My Father; for if you
knew Me, you would know My Father’ (Jn. 8:19).
What more reliable witness could one present?” Saint Chrysostom
continues: “A synagogue is the refuge of demons, or, it is more correct to say,
not just the synagogue, but the souls of the Jews. If one considers Judaism
true, why then burden the Church with oneself?”
Yes, truly, the pan-heresy of ecumenism is the greatest
evil that has ever happened to the Orthodox Christian Serbian people. The eyes
of the spiritual leaders of the people are darkened, and they are leading them
to eternal destruction. That is why it
is essential to tread the infallible and life-giving way of our holy father and
equal to the apostles Sava, the path of the patristic, true faith. “For the
devil has invented many heresies at different times and periods” – as St. Sava
warns us in his sermons on the true faith – “for many tares of falsehood have
been sown by his servants in the world to ruin and confuse the true faith,
which wecurse, and along with the falsehoods themselves we also curse those who
invent these evil dogmas, and we abhor every impure heresy.” We pluck out our
eye if it offends us, not bodily, but spiritually: if,namely, the Serbian
patriarch or bishops, who are the fathers of the Church, maintain such
destructive teachings and betray the faith to the scandal of the people, one should
separate from them. Let us remember, the
basis of Orthodox ecclesiology is the fact that believers cannot be saved
separately from their true-believing bishop, just as the body cannot live
separately from the head. The responsibility of a bishop and people for the
preservation of the Orthodox faith is from both sides: the bishop is obliged to
answer for the Orthodoxy of his flock, and the flock for the Orthodoxy of their
bishop. When a bishop becomes a heretic, he automatically ceases to be a bishop,
that is, the protector of the true faith. He apostatizes from the catholic
orthodox episcopacy and the unity of the Church. Furthermore, if the faithful
continue to consider him a bishop, that is, to attend his “services,”to receive
the “mysteries” from him, to take his“blessing,” etc, they apostatize from the
church with him.
This is the immense tragedy of these most unhappy times
in which we live. All of us, children of the Serbian Christian people of St
Sava, endure this tragedy with great sorrow. From the Second World War until
now defeat has followed defeat. Although
the number of those who remain truly faithful to the vows of our fathers, who
stand firmly on the line of defense with the motto “With faith in God, for the
King and Fatherland,” has dwindled nearly to nonexistence, in all the darkness
of this universal apostasy, in faith as well as nationality, in the darkness of
the disappearance of Christian piety, manliness, chivalry, and morals of each
Serbian individual, with a few exceptions, there still exists a small bud which
could, even before the end of time, blossom into a powerful, many-branched
tree. There exists one - and only one - shining ember whichcan be transformed into
a flaming brand, terrible to enemies, which could light the coals of zeal for
the glory of God, the same flame which God came to cast on the earth. That bud
and that ember are True Orthodoxy, the true faith of St. Sava, the true
anti-ecumenist Orthodoxy,the faith of our fathers.
We True Orthodox are few in number, very few. But our
ideal is that of the old Serbian Church of St. Sava, which was the people’s
church, which preserved and cultivated the people’s spirit, customs and
traditions, putting them under the eternal, divine, Christian Truth. The Church
of St. Sava always had before its eyes only its Divine vocation in the Serbian
people and peacefully but decisively fulfilled it, never paying attention to
whether the times for it were convenient or not, that is, to whether we would
be scorned by the world or even persecuted for adhering to the ideals of St.
Sava. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow she
will always defend her rights, the spirit of St. Sava’s people, St. Sava’s
national culture, and all the rest of his testament. That is indeed the way of
the Cross and Resurrection of our holy forefathers, which we dare not abandon
at any price.
The twentieth century was the decisive age of “sifting”
for all the Orthodox peoples along with ours. It divided people into two
groups: First, there are those who perceive what is happening now and who,
despite the inevitable problems of the narrow, thorny path of Golgotha, take
all precautions not to be carried away by the powerful waves of the current apostasy. Second, there are those who indifferently
close their eyes to all that is happening. These people close their eyes to the
truth of the terrible apostasy for the one reason that they do not wish to go
on the way of Cross andResurrection, of Golgotha. They have accepted the spirit
of secularization, which involves the renunciation of the spirit of Christ, the
spirit of St. Sava, and the acceptance of fusion with this world which lies in
evil. The so-called “world” or “ecumenist orthodox” church institutional
structures, which are deeply infused with the destructive heresy of ecumenism,
modernism and Sergianism, have separated from the Orthodox Church. Due to all of this,we must be aware that True
Orthodoxy today is the only way of the Cross
thatleads to the Resurrection, personal as well as national.
In his commentary on the Revelation of St. John the
Theologian, Archbishop Averky of Jordanville (+1976) writes the following
regarding the church of Philadelphia: “The Philadelphian church is the image of
the penultimate period of the life of Christ’s Church, of which epoch we are
the contemporaries, the epoch in which the Church has little strength among the
human race, the epoch in which will begin new persecutions and in which
long-suffering will be necessary.” In this context, we must also consider the
future of the Serbian people and the Serbian Church. We should not live in
illusions that the resurrection of Orthodoxy and Orthodox states will come,
with a Tsarist Russia at their head. These prophecies exist, but their
fulfillment lies in the domain of miracles and depends strictly on national
repentance. In opposition to the institutional, dazzling state church which is
having its full exterior bloom, the True Serbian Church of St. Sava lives and
will live in small, illegal (catacomb) communities, unrecognized by the state,
in the outskirts of towns, on mountains and in the forests, led by a small
number of bishops, priests and monks, completely hidden from public attention.
Today that Church which is scorned by the world
celebrates its most beloved feast of the holy and all-lauded Resurrection of
Christ, with the realization that without real faith there no Resurrection,
either personal or national. Whoever wishes to be saved, said St. Athanasius
the Great, must above all keep the catholic faith; if he does not keep it fully
in integrity, he will surely perish forever. With that very conviction, I
congratulate you on the feast of feasts, the radiant Resurrection of Christ. To those who have not yet gathered the
strength to leave the “official” church and join the True Church, I say, may
the Resurrected Christ give you fortitude for this holy act. To those who have accomplished this holy act,
either long ago or recently, I say, may the Resurrected
Lord strengthen you! Let us embrace one another, forgive those who hate us, and
joyously cry out, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by
death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!” Christ is Risen!
+Bishop Akakije
Pascha 2012
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