Faith and Confession / 24.7.2005
In today’s epistle to the Romans: “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved”. Here Paul summarizes the faith to be the belief in the resurrection of the Lord. He said this because the resurrection is the peak since it means the complete trust in Jesus and in what he inspired for us in his Gospel and in what the church passed onto us in dogma and worship. Other than the movement of the heart there are all the truths of the inspiration: The Trinity, the incarnation, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the sacraments and “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”.
The church reveals these things through teaching and preaches you with them so that they enter your heart and mind together, and these two are not separated in orthodoxy. Apostle Paul and the fathers after him did not think that only the mind is illumined. The heart also flares with the love of Christ. Paul reduced all the content of the faith by saying “God raised Jesus from the dead”. The church is tightened to this; this is why it celebrates Resurrection every Sunday as it does in Pascha and after it until the Pentecost.
Faith produces Confession through the tongue. At least, you cannot in the presence of strangers to faith say its contrary. This is blasphemy. The faithful heart appears through the tongue, since you have to spread the message of Christ and preach it. Every Christian is a preacher because he is happy with his Lord and he bursts his tongue by speaking about his master and he wants every person to love Lord Jesus so that he is saved and the church grows.
This is the testimony of the Christian: “You shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth”. With what shall we testify? You do not testify simply by reading the Gospel to people and explaining it. The Gospel should be stabilized inside your soul or else it shouldn’t go out through your tongue. This is why it has been said: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning Word of life- the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us” (1John 1: 1 – 2).
It is obvious here that Apostle John in the beginning of his first ecumenical epistle has tasted Christ and that his word entered his entity and he felt it, therefore his tongue burst with this internal experience so he wrote. This is why the scripture said: “For in him we live and move and have our being”. Christianity is real in the internal entity and then it becomes words and work.
The peak of the testimony is that of the blood which the faithful sanctified through Jesus not only during the Roman persecutions but also in every time and place. It is when you insist that Christ is our savior and that he is “the way, the truth, and the life”. It is when you say that and show it even if this will result in your killing from oppressors (Blind nations or crowds). In our concept, your heart and tongue are always harmonious so that you are not separated from the master on any level of your entity. We are attached to Jesus in our life and death because “for if we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord”.
The contrary of our position is that which is expressed by the word “Pious”, where you believe in your heart and you disbelieve through your tongue being afraid from death. This is permissible in this religion or that but for us it is complete blasphemy. We are lovers of Jesus not only if we were in peace or bliss, but we stay lovers even if we had to pay blood to express that.
Because of the duty of confessing, we have next to the martyrs a group of confessors, which are saints that were tortured because of their faith but did not reach death. However, they witnessed Jesus in their sufferings and took part in his resurrection.
Translated by Mark Najjar
Original Text: “الإيمان والاعتراف” – 24.7.2005
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