PRESS OFFICE
Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (E.)
630 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Contact: Chris Zakian
Tel: (212) 686-0710; Fax: (212) 779-3558
E-mail: prl@armeniandiocese.org
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March 22, 2005
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THE EASTER MESSAGE OF ARCHBISHOP KHAJAG BARSAMIAN
Primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America

TO LIVE IS CHRIST

For I know that through your prayers, and the help of the Spirit
of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is
my eager expectation and hope that I shall not be at all ashamed,
but that with full courage, now as always, Christ will be honored in
my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ,
and to die is gain. (Philippians 1:19-21)

* * *

FROM PRISON THE APOSTLE PAUL wrote those lines, as he awaited almost
certain execution. Surely one senses his apprehension beneath the
words. He is not a fanatic, who would seek death out as a worshipper
pursuing an idol. To the contrary, like our Lord before him during
His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, the apostle does not relish the
prospect of death, because he knows that life is dear. But at the same
time, the question of whether he will live or die is not uppermost in
his thoughts. He can find the courage to write, “to die is gain,”
because he trusts that his killers will not have the final say.
The power they hold over him may be real, and consequential. But it
is not final.

But if to die is gain, then what shall he call “to live”? One can
sense St. Paul grasping for the right word to convey life’s splendor,
its preciousness, its inherent quality of hope. If to die is gain,
then to live? To live is…

“To live is Christ.” That is the way a man facing death resolved to
put it. Admittedly, it is a curious formulation–almost jarring to the
ear. We should not pretend to fully understand his meaning. Yet we
can observe that it is congruent with much else in Christianity: with
our Lord’s testimony, “I am the Resurrection and the Life”; with the
epithet “Lord of Life” applied to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The entire Christian story, it would seem, is an affirmation of life.

And so it is a puzzle that this same God, this Lord of Life, chose
to subject Himself to death. The paradox is concisely expressed in
an Armenian hymn, Miadzin Vorti: “You, the unchangeable One, became
man and you were crucified, O Christ our God: you trampled down Death
by death.”

The cause, of course, was a great one: the salvation of mankind.
But let us not doubt that things could have been otherwise.
God could have chosen to effect salvation through some means other
than His own death. He chose not to. Armenian Christians should
be clear on this point: Our church does not regard the shedding of
His blood as a necessary condition of salvation, in the manner of
other Christian denominations. We do not conceive of Christ as some
kind of human sacrifice or scapegoat, whose humiliation and death
“purchased” salvation for mankind. We stress the free choice of
God: His willingness to enter into human history. To take on the
infirmities of the human condition: its weakness and vulnerability;
its mortality. To do this out of love for His creations, in a divine
act of solidarity.

Singing Miadzin Vorti should remind us that God could have simply
trampled death–period. But He chose instead to trample it with
death–to subject Himself to the thing He sought to correct–thus not
merely correcting the problem, but affirming the very human condition
which had to endure such suffering in the first place. We might say
that Christ’s death was God’s way of standing shoulder-to-shoulder
with all the deaths that had gone before. And of anticipating all
those that would come after.

It is an especially poignant thought for us this Easter–ninety years
after the greatest conflagration of death our people have ever known.
Knowingly or unknowingly, the Armenians of Ottoman Turkey in the
days prior to April 24, 1915, were in the same position as St.
Paul: captives awaiting death at the hands of unjust powers.
Unlike Paul, most of them were denied the chance even to scrawl
a final few words from a prison cell. So we cannot say that they
all met their fates with the same con-scious-ness as Paul, or even
with the same faith. Our enemy made no discrim-ination between the
believer and non-believer; all were killed, simply for being Armenian.
So we cannot say they were all martyrs, in the sacramental sense of
that word. But then again, who are we to say whether they have not
all been sanc-tified? To paraphrase the noble words uttered over a
different spectacle of death: Their ordeal has sanctified them far
beyond our own poor powers of recognition.

What we can recognize, as we experience Easter from the perspective of
this solemn milestone, is this: That the scars we still bear today, the
losses we have endured–whether inflicted ninety years ago, twenty-five
years, ten, or even last night–Christ has borne before us. Borne them
in anticipation of our own afflictions. Borne them out of His love
for us, to show He abides with us, in triumph as well as tragedy.

Borne, above all, to assure us that affliction is not the End.
There is a final act, not yet performed, but written nonetheless,
awaiting its consummation at the true end of things–which itself
will be only the beginning of something new. When that day arrives,
we can be sure that something of our past affliction will still be
with us, even as our Lord’s wounds remained visible, tangible, after
His return to life. But we will be made new: Not so much reborn,
as made whole again. Whole in our bodies and spirits; whole–we
are permitted to hope, and obliged to pray–in our relationships
with others, too. Reunited with those we have lost along the way.
Reunited with those we never knew, but to whom we owe our existence.
Reunited with those who are, from our perspective now, still yet to be.

All of us, reunited in the bosom of our Lord. Even if such a reunion
were only a dream, men would hardly be fools to long for it. But we
have been promised, and shown, that it is not a dream, but rather a
hope: the secret culmination of human existence. That is the hope
which Easter eternally represents. We can enter upon it, if we
so choose. And Jesus Christ is our doorway.

It was with his eye on that hope that St. Paul was able to face the
prospect of imprisonment, injustice, even death. It is our hope,
too: our hope for ourselves, to be sure; but more than that, our hope
for those countless Armenian souls who perished ninety years ago.
Let us carry that prayer in our hearts this Easter, as we affirm:

Krisdos haryav ee merelotz. Orhnyal eh harootiunun Krisdosee.
Christ is risen from the dead. Blessed is the resurrection of Christ.

Easter 2005

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