THE P RTAL
January 2017 Page 6
The lands from where the Wise Men came
Fr Mark Woodruff
In his Nativity 2016 letter to the faithful , Gregorios III , the patriarch of Antioch , of the Melkite Greek
Catholic Church , surveys the prospects for the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East and says , “ We will stay in the lands of Christmas ”. He is based in Damascus and is the head of the Catholic churches in Syria . He often says , “ Bethlehem was Christ ’ s birthplace , but Syria remains Christianity ’ s cradle .” As well as now scattered across the world , members of the Melkite Church are also in Lebanon , Jordan , Egypt , Palestine and Israel . Melkite Catholics , part of the Byzantine tradition shared with the Eastern Orthodox , form the largest body of Catholics in the Middle East . But , in six years , Patriarch Gregorios ’ diocese has fallen from 150,000 in number to 3,000 , as people have fled to Lebanon , the United States and South America ( the East is now south and west ). Perhaps when peace and rebuilding take hold – hundreds of churches , monasteries , hospitals , care homes and schools have been wrecked – people will hopefully return . The challenge is enormous , but for the sake of all Christianity , it is vital that Eastern Christians still flourish in their homelands .
Alongside Gregorios as Patriarch of Antioch , and successor of St Peter in his first see , are the Orthodox Patriarch , the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch , Syriac Catholic patriarch and the Maronite Catholic Patriarch . They say they are not separate Churches but one patriarchate , with several different histories , yet united in solidarity as never before , in the face of Islamist persecution , the civil war in Syria and the dispersal of the Christian population that presents their greatest survival crisis . Also in the region are Christians of the Western Armenian tradition , who once populated the uplands from the Mediterranean coast across Turkey and Syria to the Caucasus , also largely Catholic , forming a bridge between the apostles ’ Jerusalem and the first state to adopt Christianity in AD301 . Here too are the Catholic Chaldeans , of the once vast Church of the East that extended across central Asia to China , and south through Iraq and Persia to the coasts of India , where its cousin , the Syro-Malabar Church of the St Thomas Christians flourishes to this day .
These traditions do not represent the human division of the Church , as you might think . Instead they piece together the mosaic of liturgical , linguistic and cultural traditions that make the Christian people who they are : one Church , but diverse in each age , each history and each society in which it has devised a distinctive way of living and speaking Christ ’ s gospel . The members of the Ordinariate for the Anglican tradition , therefore , ought to sense a special affinity with them , and a special care . Their diversity is so rich that the churches of now ruined Aleppo were chosen in 2003 to produce the materials for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity used throughout the world . For here are the Christians whose ravaged
monasteries , with libraries that preserved the writings of the Fathers who lived in them , date from the dawn of monasticism . Here are the Christians of Malloula who speak the Aramaic language of Christ Himself , a living key to understanding His meaning in the Gospel . Here are the descendants of the shepherds to whom angels sang “ Glory to God ” in their own tongue , and whose Liturgy to this day repeats the words as they were first heard . Here are the peoples from among whom the wise men came . Here is the evidence of Peter and the apostles taking the words and the worship of Christ our God , born in Bethlehem , raised in Galilee , and crucified and risen from the dead in Jerusalem , from the Aramaic speaking Jews , to Syriac-dialect speaking cousins in the north , to the Greek-speaking world of the Romans . Here is the evidence of how the Christian religion from Jerusalem next took hold with Armenians and Persians .
Here , too , is the living evidence of how , centuries later , Arabic was Christian before it was Islamic . If you go to the Melkite parish in Pimlico in central London , you will hear a Catholic Byzantine liturgy in Arabic , with English and Greek too . Alongside Kyrie eleison , you will hear sung to Christ in Arabic the ancient Trisagion chant : Kuduson-illah , meaning “ Holy Allah ”, “ Holy God ”. So when Patriarch Gregorios says , “ We will stay in the lands of Christmas ”, it is no mere nostalgic sentiment . It is for the sake of bearing witness to God incarnate amid those who do not recognise that “ God is with us ”. If Christ in His people no longer dwells in the Holy Lands of his birth and our salvation , there are no other new “ lands of Christmas ”, and our Christianity has its roots nowhere else , no other living cradle .