The Orthodox Church has never seen the struggle for the transformation of the world as a trivial matter, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew states, among other things, in his message on the Resurrection.

According to the Ecumenical Patriarch, 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 people.

“Belief in the Resurrection is the most profound and sharpened expression of our freedom, or rather its birth as a voluntary acceptance of the highest divine gift for the sake of deification” emphasizes the Ecumenical Patriarch.

The entire Easter message of the Primate of the First Throne Church is as follows:

“Venerable brothers Hierarchs and dear children in the Lord,

Eudocia and grace of the pandora God, passing through the dolihon of the Holy and Great Lent and passing in darkness the Week of the Lord’s Passions, behold, we rejoice in the festival of His glorious Resurrection, through which we were redeemed from the hell of tyranny.

The glorious Rising from the dead of the Savior Christ is the 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 eternal mystery of the Resurrection in the Church, being sanctified in its holy mysteries and experiencing Easter, “the gates of Paradise were opened”, not as a memory of a past event, but as the quintessence of church 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 selves as they are in Christ, they join the movement of all things towards the End, “with joy and joy” (1 Pet. 1, 8), as “sons of light… and sons of the day” (1 Thess. 5, 5).

A central feature of Orthodox life is its resurrection pulse. The philosopher mistakenly called orthodox spirituality “gloomy” and “autumnal”. The developed sensibility of the Orthodox is rightly praised by the Westerners for the meaning and experiential depth of the Easter experience, without this faith forgetting, however, that the path to the Resurrection passes through the Cross. Orthodox spirituality does not know the utopianism 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 opposition 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 Easter faith saved the Church both from introversion and closedness, as well as from secularization.

In the Orthodox Easter, the entire mystery and existential richness of our piety is condensed. The “astonishment” 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 denial of mystery shrinks man existentially, respect opens the gate of heaven to him.

Belief in the Resurrection is the deepest and sharpest expression of our freedom, or rather the birth of it as a voluntary acceptance of the highest divine gift for the sake of deification. The Orthodox Church, as an “experienced Resurrection”, is the place of “true freedom”, which in the Christian life is the foundation, the way and the destination. 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, filled with the fulfilled joy of sharing in the “communion of all feasts”, receiving light from the never-ending light and glorifying Christ, who rose from the dead and rose to life, and remembered during the feast on this “called and holy day”, of all the brothers in the situation, let us see the “trodden death” Lord and God of peace, as the peacemaker of the world, enlighten our steps towards every good and pleasing work, exclaiming the all-joyous hymn ” Christ is Risen”!