Joint Letter on the occasion of Pascha from the Greek Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox Patriarchates of Antioch and All the East

Ninth Anniversary of the Abduction of the Metropolitans of Aleppo

Below you can find a joint Letter on the occasion of Pascha and the ninth anniversary of the abduction of the Metropolitans of Aleppo, issued by Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East headed by His Beatitude Patriarch John X, and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East headed by His Beatitude Patriarch Mor Ignatius Aphrem II.

Dear brethren and spiritual children,

“Christ is risen; He is risen indeed”.

We declare it as of today, and we intend it as a paschal letter. We declare it today on Great Friday, which coincides this year with the ninth anniversary of the abduction of the Archbishops of Aleppo Youhanna Ibrahim and Paul Yazigi. We declare it today, while Christ is in the depth of Golgotha of glory, hanging on the lofty cross, to excavate for us and for the tormented East, the path of Resurrection. We declare it today and the present moments reiterate, to confirm that Christians in this East were and are steadfast in Crucifixion, following the model of our Lord. Once again, we declare it today, to always substantiate that the cross of suffering is the initiator of the path of Resurrection.

Pursuing the model of the Lord, our brethren, the Archbishops, follow the path of Golgotha of the wounded East. His steps have led them to the path of pain, but through Him, they pass over to the glory of Pascha. Their path is identical to any man’s path living in this East; any man willing to pay his life as a ransom for the rumble of wars on his land. Nine years suffice to encapsulate a little of what the people of this country have gone through, including wars, hunger, displacement, terrorism, and uprooting from the motherland. Nine years also partly outline the Christians’ and others’ suffering from the scourge of wars, and the sugar-coated slogans about “protecting Christians”. Nonetheless, we have always insisted and affirmed that protecting Christians is only achieved whenever a decent living would be secured, to socially live in harmony with the other social components.

Nine years have passed, but the memory of the Metropolitans marks an indication of a file that everyone has failed at. Nine years have passed to overtly confirm that our survival in this land over two thousand years, depends first and foremost on the strength of our faith and our witness to Christ our Lord and God. As Antiochian Christians, we solely rely on the Lord Who enrooted us in this land, as He sowed our ancestors along with the cedars of Lebanon, the jasmine of Damascus, and other magnificent archaic living things. Nine years have passed allowing Eastern Christianity to write a vow of authentic testimony to Jesus of Nazareth, as well as to transliterate from the life of the author of the Acts of the Apostles: “The disciples were first called Christians at Antioch.”

On Good Friday, we renew our prayers to the Lord of Life and Death hanging on the Cross of Glory. We address the Lord at present with Mary’s tears and John's parrhesia. We pray to Him with the keenness of Peter and with the certainty of Thomas. With the lips of Magdalene, and with the joy of the disciples, we beg Him to bestow mercy upon the world and to send peace to the East, hence allowing us to see a joyful end to the file of our brethren, the Archbishops. The tears in our eyes and our hearts are waiting for you, O Lord of glory, to wipe them away with Your pure hands. We rely on You alone; O Lord, You are hanging on the cross of glory, on this glorious day, and You emit the first lights of resurrection through Your Resurrection.

The abduction imposes on us, as Christians, to contemplate the fact that our unification is stronger than our scattering. The kidnappers of the Archbishops did not regard the sect or religion. The Archbishops were kidnapped for they were the children of the Church of Antioch, the daughter of this land, the foothold of the Apostles, and the first intellectual cradle of Christianity. These characteristics of Antioch have always called us to an existential view of our history, our existence, and the inevitability of our cohesion in this wounded East. Antioch is a Church that witnesses to the Lord in the authenticity of faith of its children and their burning zeal, afar from dispute and all ethnic or factional extremism.

On Good Friday, our eyes are directed to the Cross of glory that will pierce the dawn of Resurrection. Our hearts join the Sufferer who has removed every pain to anoint Him with the light of Resurrection. Good Friday came this year, coinciding with the painful memory, to inform every Eastern Christian that your life is similar to the life of the Lord of Glory, Whose faith you have nursed from your ancestors. This life involves the cross and the path of pain, but its destination is the light of Resurrection. The coincidence proves that Eastern Christianity, over the course of two thousand years of history, was thrown with the Lord on a cross and pinned with Him to a tree, but remained and remains and will remain with Him regardless of the severity of the scourges and wars, and no matter how emigration, displacement, abduction of priests and metropolitans, and all the sufferings of this land’s children, exhaust and drain our Eastern Christianity.

We take advantage of this Great Day of Salvation and the Glorious Pascha, to address you, our children in the homeland and overseas. We pray for you to receive the apostolic blessings and call you to address, altogether, Christ with fervent prayer. Christ is our Lord Who has loved us and assembled us in one single-family, to show mercy to His world and terminate with the might of His silence, every war so that we could chant from the bottom of our heart and entire being:

“Christ rose from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tomb bestowing life.”

Damascus, April 22, 2022.

His Beatitude Patriarch John X

Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East

His Beatitude Patriarch Mor Ignatius Aphrem II

Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East and Supreme Head of the Syriac Orthodox Church in the world

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