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23-04-2011 
EASTER MESSAGE
OF
ELISEY
ARCHBISHOP OF SOUROZH
TO THE PASTORS AND FAITHFUL CHILDREN
OF THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND
Dearly beloved in the Lord,
honourable pastors and God-loving laypeople,
dear brothers and sisters!
In these radiant days of the Pascha of the Lord, that ‘opens to us the gates of Paradise’, I send you my warm greetings, in the joy of the victory of that new life that has been revealed to us:
Christ is Risen!
By his Resurrection, Christ invites us into the new world, of which the Divine Revelation speaks: ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God’ (Rev. 21:3).
Observing the vernal awakening of nature, who does not begin to think that his personal life could also change in a miraculous way? The Risen Lord gives us the possibility to achieve the most important possible change, that is, to be freed from sin. In the light of the Resurrection of Christ, a person can and should change. For this reason, it is written: ‘Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light’ (Eph. 5:14).
The Pascha of Christ is for us an amazing and mystical revelation of a new taste for life, a life of which we were only dimly aware, a life with which we were not in harmony, in so far as we were prisoners of sinful passions. The mystery of the paschal awakening begins when we, dwelling in the gloom of our half-blind state, begin to see the world in a new light, when we begin to hear the call to a new life – the life of freedom from the darkness of sin. This call is none other than the Word, without whom ‘nothing was made, that was made’, it is ‘the true Light, that lighteth every man that cometh into the world’ (Jn 1:3, 9).
Pascha is a dramatic encounter with the living, risen God whom we betrayed by our sinful choice and considered as one dead, non-existent, in order that He might not hinder us from living our old life … My friends! Without God everything is empty and dark. Let us make for ourselves a new choice on the path of our earthly life: let us reject death and call out to Life.
Before Christ’s coming into the world, Pascha or Passover signified the miraculous escape from death of the people of God at the time of their Exodus from captivity in Egypt. The Christian Passover, however, has a far greater significance: Christ does not avoid death, but enters into it; he descends even into Hades, there to defeat its deathly power.
The meaning of life and its final significance can be different, if we become partakers of the Resurrection of Christ. We shall not depart from life, even if our body dies. If Pascha is present in out life, if Christ has taken upon himself the punishment for our sins, if he descends with us into Hades and death passes us by, then it means that we are indeed born again according to the word of the Saviour: ‘ye must be born again’ (Jn 3:7).
The meaning of Pascha is disclosed for us as we recognise with amazement and believe that there are indeed no hopeless situations, no irresolvable earthly problems, no dead-ends, no predestination by fate to evil and death. The keys of all doors are in the hands of the Risen Christ, who is ‘the first and the last: … He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, … alive for evermore, Amen’ (Rev. 1:17-18).
Filled with Paschal joy, I extend my warm greetings to all of you, to those who serve the Church of Christ and those who labour in the world, to those who bring their gift to God and those who receive grace from him, to those who rejoice and those who endure hardships. I congratulate all of you with the Feast of eternal rejoicing and of the heavenly triumph that renews our world!
Christ is Risen Indeed!
+Elisey
ARCHBISHOP OF SOUROZH
The Pascha of Christ, 2011
London