Ressurection

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Angels and demons: Orthodox pain woven into this year's Pascha epistles in Ukraine

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Angels and demons: Orthodox pain woven into this year's Pascha epistles in Ukraine

With the barrage of horrors from Ukraine, it wasn't hard to distinguish between the messages released by the Eastern Orthodox leaders of Russia and Ukraine to mark Holy Pascha, the feast known as Easter in the West.

The epistle from Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill offered hope for this life and the next. But his text contained only one possible reference to the fighting in Ukraine, which the United Nations says has claimed the lives of 3,000 civilians, at the very least.

"In the light of Pascha everything is different," wrote the patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. "We are not afraid of any mundane sorrows, afflictions and worldly troubles, and even difficult circumstances of these troubled times do not seem so important in the perspective of eternity granted unto us."

But the first lines of the message released by Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine placed this Pascha in a radically different context -- a clash between good and evil, right now. It was released on April 25th, the day after Orthodox Christians celebrated Pascha according to the ancient Julian calendar.

This letter was especially symbolic since Metropolitan Onuphry leads Ukraine's oldest Orthodox body, one with strong ties to the giant Russian Orthodox Church.

"The Lord has visited us with a special trial and sorrow this year. The forces of evil have gathered over us," he wrote. "But we neither murmur nor despair" because Pascha is "a celebration of the triumph of good over evil, truth over falsehood, light over darkness. The Resurrection of Christ is the eternal Pascha, in which Christ our Savior and Lord translated us from death to life, from hell to Paradise."

The contrast between these messages underlined a complex reality in Orthodox life after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a land cruelly oppressed by the Soviet Union, but with strong Russian roots through the "Baptism of Rus" in 988. That was when, following the conversion of Prince Vladimir, there was a mass baptism of the people of Kiev -- celebrated for a millennium as the birth of Slavic Christianity.

Metropolitan Onuphry and other Orthodox hierarchs with historic ties to Moscow have openly opposed the Russian invasion, while trying to avoid attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church. The bottom line: Leaders of ancient Orthodox churches will ultimately, at the global level, need to address these conflicts.


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God, baseball and missionary work: Do people in Serbia really deny the Resurrection?

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Every now and then, journalists have rather technical arguments about the meaning of terms such as "truth" and "accuracy."

For example, what if a reporter quotes a person who is involved a complicated, even emotional, debate and people who reject this person's perspective later call the reporter's editor and insist that this information was untrue and should not have been included in the printed story?

Reporters often respond by saying something like this: "I was covering a very bitter debate. I could not prove that what this expert said is accurate, but my quotes were accurate. It is accurate to state that he said this and his claims are part of the story. Want to hear my recording of the interview?"

Arguments are like that. There are times when people with quite a bit of education, training, skill and personal experience disagree with one another about basic facts.

This brings me to a story that ran recently in The Claremore Daily Progress in Oklahoma -- one that talks about God, baseball and mission work. Here's how it starts:

Spreading the love of baseball and the love of Christianity seems like a perfect fit for Claremore High School Athletic Director Brent Payne.
The longtime baseball coach who hung up his cleats after the 2015 baseball season, is once again joining a local missionary group and heading to Serbia to teach the word of God, and also how to turn a double play. ...
Serbia, a country sandwiched between Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, has a population of just over 7 million.
Baseball, as would be expected, is not the country’s national pastime.

No problem, so far. However, an Orthodox reader out in the wilds of Oklahoma (such people do exist) had a spew-your-drink-of-choice moment when he hit this statement in the original version of the story that appeared in print, and on the newspaper's website.


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Did Jesus only become God at Easter?

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Did Jesus only become God at Easter?

Christians observe that the Son of God died to atone for human sins. But St. Paul says (Romans 1:4) that Jesus was “declared … to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead.” So apparently Jesus wasn’t divine when he died (or before). How then does atonement work? A timely inquiry as Christians reflect on Jesus’ death and resurrection, and also due to the clash between two new scholarly books, “How Jesus Became God” by skeptic Bart Ehrman, answered simultaneously (!!!) by an international team of conservatives in “How God Became Jesus.”

Arthur cites a sentence Paul wrote only a couple decades or so after Jesus’ crucifixion, and “form critics” think the apostle was quoting from a previous creed so these words date back to Christianity’s earliest days.

Thanks to www.biblegateway.com, The Guy compared 46 English translations and found “declared” is the typical wording. Other versions say that by the resurrection Jesus’ divine Sonshop was “openly designated,” “publicly identified,” “demonstrated,” “proved,” “marked out” and “shown,” while Bible commentaries add “displayed,” “proclaimed” and “manifested.”


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