THE ABOMINATION OF OUR FATHERS

Is our Orthodox Church in reality submitted to Christ as her head? St. Paul teaches: “Christ is the head of the church” (Ephesians 5:23f). Indeed, he adds: “He is the savior of the body.”

Did it ever occur to you that the church herself seeks a Savior? That the church needs to be saved?

The church appears to be very busy, but in things that are secular and that engage her time in activities of this world.

Remember the words of caution that were spoken by Christ: “Martha, Martha, you care and are troubled about many things, but there is need only for one thing” (Luke 10:41). That warning is directed to today’s church that keeps busy with activities that have no priority in the eyes of God. It’s easy and convenient to sanctify anything that brings revenue into the coffers of the church or provides parishioners with projects that make them feel they are “active members” of their church. One popular activity that keeps churches busy is the observing of anniversaries. They often involve anniversary banquets with religious or civic dignitaries highlighting the occasions with speeches. One or more of them might be honored and bestowed with special recognition and distinction.

One anniversary that comes to mind on March 25 is the annual celebration of Greek Independence Day. This event is exhaustively covered by the Greek press in this country with full page pictorial coverage of the festive parades that take place in many major American cities. The clergy are very conspicuous in the parades. Without exaggeration city parades fill entire pages of the Greek newspapers issue after issue.

In many Greek parishes special programs are set up in the church halls where Greek ethnic speeches are heard, extolling the heroic struggles of the Greeks at the time of the Revolution in 1821. Poems are recited and some scenes from that epoch are reenacted on the stage.

How can I forget the time that I used to participate as a teenager in such programs, at least reciting a poem in Greek in which I would honor the sacrifices of the Greek heroes who shed their blood for Greek emancipation from the brutal yoke of the Moslem Turks. I have to admit it was truly an emotional experience for me, as I would proudly wave the Greek flag with other young people on the stage.

What stirred me back in those early years was the fact of Greek survival after 400 years under Turkish Moslem tyranny. Accounts of Greek courage, bravery, and perseverance in the faith in Christ under constant pressure to convert to Islam remained deeply etched in my heart and memory.

Who could deny that it was nothing short of miraculous that the church survived when you consider how ruthless and barbaric the Turkish oppression was over several centuries. The events of this tragic and dark period are always dramatized in the annual Independence Day celebrations.

However, the excessive romanticizing and sanctifying Greek enslavement under Islam deprives the annual celebration of any positive and prophetic message. First of all, there is no consideration of such questions as:

• Why did the Greeks suffer a total defeat at the hands of the invading Ottoman Turks?

• What was the cause of the fall of Constantinople?

• Was God involved in the decline and fall of the Byzantine Empire?

As children of God and especially members of His historic Church, it would seem normal for us to ask such questions as:

• If God is sovereign and controls the entire universe He created, why did He permit His Orthodox people (including Serbians, Bulgarians, and Romanians) to endure centuries of inhumane treatment at the hands of bloodthirsty Islamic conquerors?

• Why did God permit the fall of Constantinople, the center of Christian civilization, to the invading Ottoman Turks?

• Could God not have obliterated the enemy of His people and Church with one move of His hand?

• Why did the Islamic domination extend to as many as four hundred, and not only to three hundred years, or less? As a matter of fact, the Orthodox Bulgarians and Serbs endured five hundred years of captivity. Why?

Where was God in all of this? Why did He not intervene to cut short the nightmare of Islamic brutality?

Anyone can answer those questions, if he professes that the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament are one and the same. The God of the old covenant who secured victories for His chosen people Israel in times of battle with invading enemies also is the God who withdraws His hand of protection and surrenders His people unto the hand of the enemy.

God reassured and comforted King Jehosaphat when his defending forces were outnumbered by an invading enemy army: “Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God’s.” “Ye shall not need to fight in this battle. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord with you, O Judah and Jerusalem. Fear not, nor be dismayed. Tomorrow go out against them, for the Lord will be with you” (2 Chronicles 20:15f).

The victory of Judah came as a result of the expression of repentance and trust in God’s divine intervention. If you read the account, you will see how miraculously they crushed their enemies “without firing a shot.”

But when King Manasseh “made Judah to sin doing that which was evil in the sight of the Lord,” the Lord exercised judgment on His people and surrendered them to their enemies. “I will forsake the remnant of mine inheritance, and deliver them into the hand of their enemies, and they shall become a prey to all their enemies” (2 Kings 21:14f).

God is a God of love before and after Christ. His love, however is not a pampering love. He is also a God of justice who is ready to chasten His people in their hour of disobedience and rebellion.

In the light of these eternal and immutable realities, it becomes obvious why Constantinople fell to the Turks and why the Byzantine Empire in 1452 came to a tragic end. God was definitely involved in this dramatic event. He was in it and behind it. It was the appointed hour sovereignly marked by his infinite wisdom and justice.

Enough is enough! The righteousness of God could no longer put up with the moral and spiritual decay infecting all areas of the Byzantine state. The wonder of it all is that God waited as long as He did before surrendering Constantinople, the bastion and wonder of Christian civilization to the Turks.

The disintegration of Byzantium was transpiring from within over an extended period of time. Dynastic family rivalries and court intrigue crippled the Empire. A succession of civil wars hastened its collapse. Corruption and lust for power were rampant. Separatist Greek forces resisted imperial efforts for unification.

Constantinople became a mere pawn in the politics of its neighbors. The incessant invasions from both the Serbian and Bulgarian empires were sapping Constantinople of its power, already weakened by the Franks in the Fourth Crusade. Orthodox were fighting Orthodox!

The Slav Orthodox were aspiring to be mighty conquerors of the spiritual Mother that brought them to the crucified and risen Savior. They often made alliances with the Ottoman Turks in achieving their military ambitions! The Slav benefactors of their Byzantine legacy, like predators, were bent on consuming their Benefactress!

Divine wrath was bound to be unleashed. Is it not revealing that the Turkish domination of Bulgaria and Serbia exceeded that of the Greeks by one hundred years?

A further moral blemish most conspicuous on the face of Byzantium was the periodic extermination of members of the church splinter group known as Paulicians or Bogomils. They were simple men and women that comprised this dissenting religious group, Orthodox in doctrine, but tried to restore and live the simplicity of apostolic times. One troubling aspect of this movement was their rejection of icon veneration.

Following the Seventh Ecumenical Council, for example, Emperor Michael Rangaves (811-813) conducted a systematic persecution of the Paulicians. Then under Empress Theodora (842-867), at the demand of the Abbot Theodore Studites, had one hundred thousand Paulicians executed in cold blood. Indeed, Pope Nicholas I of Rome congratulated her for her “zeal to cleanse the church of heretics”. She was canonized a saint by the church!

Serbian Emperor Stephan of Nemanya (1195) stands out for massacring tens of thousands of Bogomils. Another emperor of Serbia, Stephan Ducan ordered an extermination of them in the fourteenth century, just before the fall of Serbia to the Turks (1463).

Any activity that challenged religious uniformity and conformity in the Orthodox Empire was in the eyes of the ruling powers viewed as a threat to imperial control and absolutism.

So, following the example of the prophet Ezekiel, I am hearing the Lord our God calling upon me to cry out to the Orthodox of this generation to remember the sins of their fathers and forefathers: “Cause them to know the abominations of their fathers” (Ezekiel 20:4).

By calling to remembrance the sins of their ancestors, they are more likely to sober up and to perfect their obedience to the Lord and thus avoid falling under the same divine judgment and wrath. A very important part of celebrating Independence Day on March 25 should be the mention of why and how the Orthodox of the Byzantine era lost their freedom and suffered centuries of Moslem subjugation.

But now we must consider what impact such an extended period of Moslem domination had on the Orthodox subjects. Did they acknowledge that their enslavement was an act of divine punishment for their sins?

What has puzzled me for a long time is that hardly any prophetic figured emerged after the fall of Constantinople. I cannot thing of any truly prophetic voices that called the people to collective and national repentance during that dark period of captivity. But even in their state of desolation they showed no significant change of heart. I am reminded of the words of the prophet Ezekiel: “I caused them to go forth out of the land of Egypt and brought them into the wilderness, but the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness. They walked not in my statutes and they despised my judgments” (Ezekiel 20:10).

The one clear prophetic voice I can think of is that of St. Cosmas Aetolos. Leaving the comfort and security of his monastery in Mount Athos, he toured the Greek countryside, preaching the gospel of hope and redemption. He brought consolation and encouragement to the enslaved populace, restraining them from succumbing to the ever-present temptation of converting to Islam.

Why are we not reminded on Independence Day every year that Orthodox were apostatizing and becoming Moslem in order to ease their suffering and the degradation to which their Moslem masters subjected them? There were mass conversions. Even priests were turning Moslem.

But the ruling bishops at that time who served under the Sultan as civil magistrates over the Christian subjects were doing their utmost to keep God’s prophet away from their sheepfold. For example, the ruling Bishop of Ioannina banned St. Cosmas from preaching in his province in agreement with certain prominent Greek laymen and wealthy Jewish merchants who prevailed over the local Turkish authorities.

This man of God was banned from the cities of Perga, Arta, as well as from Zacynthos Island by the local bishop who indeed considered excommunicating him in 1777. He was kept out from Corfu Island and was banned by Bishop Dositheus from Argyrocastro. ”I was called by Jesus Christ Himself to preach the gospel and for His love I am destined to shed my blood” (Cosmas the Aetolian, P. Michalopoulos, p. 76). And, to be sure, he did shed his blood when he was hung on a tree by the Turks most likely at the behest of prominent Greeks, prompted by self-interest, faring prosperously under the Turkish status quo.

Why is it on Independence Day we whitewash the moral and spiritual depravity that permeated Greek society even during the period of captivity? Why aren’t our festive messages prophetic? Why don’t they have a prophetic thrust? Why don’t we acknowledge the sins of our ancestors so we will not repeat them?

I am simply hearing the Lord speak to me at this hour: (Ezekiel 20:4).

But we have learned to live with spiritual lukewarmness and mediocrity, contenting ourselves with religious formalism and religious routine. This situation has mesmerized us and too often we react with displeasure to any spiritual challenge. But the word of God comes to shake us out of our comfort zone: “Today if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness.” “When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work.”

“Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, it is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways.”

“Unto whom I swear in my wrath that they should not enter unto my rest” (Psalm 95:7).

Are we modern Greek Orthodox certain that we will enter into the Lord’s eternal rest?

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