“Behold, I stand at the door …” By Metropolitan of Phanariou Agathanghelos 

“Behold, I stand at the door …”

By Metropolitan of Phanariou Agathanghelos 
General Director of the Apostolic Diaconia
of the Church of Greece 

​Dear fathers and brethren,
By the Grace of God, we have entered the Holy and Great Week, the Week of the Passion, in the midst of temptations, distress and affliction, bearing the Cross of the present time. We are again called upon to experience the mystery of the Cross and the hope of the Resurrection away from the liturgical life of the Church, as this is performed inside the church and as we have been taught from our childhood to this day; maybe even abstaining from the Sacrament of the Holy Communion, for reasons imposed by human need and sickness. This is not easy, particularly for each soul which finds its truth within faith, through love and humility, silence and discretion, fight and prayer, spiritual exercise and tears, an ethosthat lives up to the Crucifixion and a mood that is permeated with the Resurrection, by example and model.
The Bridegroom of the Church, our Lord and God, who we shall be praying to in procession in the middle of the night, will come this year to pay us a visit in our houses. He will not let us be alone. Besides, this is what He always did, with the poignancy and innocence that only love can cause. He stood at the door of our hearts and knocked so that we may open it to Him, no matter if we occasionally forgot about it, accustomed to self-evidence and to the complacency of an arrogant faith. The relationship with God is not knowledge. It is a communion, a mystery of the heart, an incandescent relationship of love performed in silence. God allowed for this testing experience to occur. Why? Let us ponder on it, yes! Let us not, however, hasten to provide a definitive answer. This piece of advice is addressed particularly to those who are used to amplifying their own opinion in a noisy, presumptuous, provocative, arrogant, patronizing manner, as if they could ever raise themselves higher than the love and the justice of God, in fact becoming nothing more than directors of cheerleaders. “Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you. […] if here He is merciful, we may believe that He will not change”, notes Saint Isaac the Syrian (Homily 60). Indeed, if God were not merciful, we would be doomed. As to the complaint addressed to God by just men, “Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? Arise, […]” (Psalm 44,23), Christ gives His own answer: “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still. And , behold, I come quickly” (Revel. 22,11-12, KJV).
Before the Resurrection, the Crucified Lord prepares us to live the new darkness over all the land from the sixth hour unto the ninth hour, in the time of this world. Yet, it is the light of the Resurrection which shines upon our course to the end of this age, our path to eternity. This is the light that grants us hope, expectation, love, goodness, peace, patience, self-sacrifice, sensibility, tenderness, humaneness. It is this light that keeps the world from decomposition and decay and illuminates the entire existence, life, sustenance, the worldly and the heavenly affairs. No one can take it away from us or be deprived of it. It is our Father’s gift, our rest and consolation, our joy and blessing! We believe in the Resurrection and eagerly expect it. We know that the death of Christ annihilated the power of death. This is how we can hold up! We live in patient hope and anticipation. God our Father allows us to suffer the test to the point where we can endure it; and when human vessels can no longer hold, then comes the miracle!
Churches may be closed. Holy Services may have been suspended. The solemn procession with the Epitaphios may not be held in the evening of Great Friday. We may be prevented from lighting our candle during the “Come, Receive the Light” hymn and from glorifying the Risen Christ in chorus during the mystery of the Synaxis. Still, no one may prevent us from singing along with the Church the Holy Services we shall attend on television, on the radio, on the Internet. No one may deprive us of the joy to chant the manly and hope-bearing hymns of the Holy Week, as we learned them and are still accustomed to chanting them softly. No one may deprive us of the possibility of praying in a loving disposition vis-à-vis all those blessed men and women of the medical science, who fight in the first line, with their anguish like drops of blood falling on their faces and their ailing patients; or of murmuring words of prayer for the departed.
This year we are faced with a challenge. Or, to put it better, with a pædagogical invitation, which, through testing, upends everything that we hold to be self-evident in the relationship with God and man: to live our responsibility anew as citizens and not colonizers of the world; to reassess our needs, priorities, choices and criteria, our truth, to discuss with ourselves earnestly; to render our homes private churches; to live as people of God the fact that our “sorrow shall be turned into joy”; once again to appreciate how precious a gift it is to partake of the Holy Communion and of the communion of our brethren we are now deprived of; how invaluable the gift of good health is; the beauty of the sensation of celebration, the value of coming together in love and peace, of greeting one another, shaking hands, embracing our people, being able to go to church. O how the sound of church bells poignantly reminds us of the spiritual and Eucharistic aspect of our lives, the quality of another life, and seems to invite us to the church so that we may live the beauty of our faith and tradition, to experience the mystery of God’s love. We stay at home and remain in the love of God! Only in this manner can we deal with the sorrow of these days, given that “Christ is Risen, and Life Reigns” and love chases fear away. If each one of us starts complaining, cursing his or her fate, levelling accusations, we should seriously think whether we can fully realize our responsibility as citizens and discover the essence of the test, the martyrdom and the witness, behind appearances, qua faithful. Besides, through the power of memory, the scars that this ordeal will leave behind will continue throwing not only our own authenticity and consciousness into question, but particularly those of the leaders of the world, who will be called upon to measure up to their responsibility and truthfulness, and to be meted with the measure and criterion of the Cross: namely, the cross of the ordeal of the peoples of the Earth. At this point judgment will be merciless, because the scales of justice in this case are the Cross of Christ.
Concluding these thoughts, we would like to note that what is happening these days is ALSO an ecclesiastical problem. And it concerns the Church equally, because disease also strikes the flock, the people of the Church, its pleroma indiscriminately, as it strikes every human person, who is a creature of God.
The measures that the state urges us to observe not only for our own health but alsofor that of beloved persons and of our fellow citizens, should encourage us to practise a form of daily exercise which is not outside the logic of the ascetic disposition of the Church. It is the Church that invites us to think that God always and today calls upon us, through unceasing prayer and humility, to overcome our one and only sin: our indifference to the Risen Christ. Let this also be our own Paschal appeal !

Lord, have mercy ! Glory be to God !

With my most sincere and heartfelt wishes for a Good Easter and good health to each one of you ! May God be with us !