Father Lazarus Abboud
The whole of human life is an end and a meaning, and all human beings share in the fact that their ends are one despite their variety — peace, security, immortality, comfort, wealth, power, glory, and so on — and all institutions, states, and parties have the same aims. But the difference lies among human beings as individuals, and among states, institutions, and the Church as communities, in the paths and the means for attaining the ends.
And in the course toward these ends many questions arise: Do the highest ends justify the means? Does the path become good by the goodness of its ends? Are the paths equal for the same end (does the saying hold true: “all roads lead to the mill”)? If the paths and means are equal, then why values?
The answer becomes evident by posing these questions and many of their kind, but let us suffice with some of them:
1. Why did God expel the first man from Paradise, despite God’s end being the deification of man and man’s end being the deification of himself?
2. Why do many of the religious reject civil marriage and accept ecclesiastical marriage, although the aim is one — marriage?
3. Why do the Christian confessions and the religions differ among themselves? Is it by the difference of their ends (the end of the Christian confessions is Christ) or by the difference of their ways (Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant)? Christians see that Christ is the way to God, and Muslims see the Quran as a way to God.
4. Why is the metropolitan of the autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine considered illegitimate today? Because he did not come through a sound apostolic succession.
The single answer to all the questions: because of the difference of the ways, not the end.
After these questions, let us present two events from the Gospel. The first is in the parable of the king’s wedding feast (Mt 1:22-14): “And he said to him: Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then the king said to the servants: Bind him hand and foot” …Here it is completely clear that the essence for Jesus is the way, since He punished for the manner.
The second: with Paul the Apostle.”(Acts 16:16-18) ” A slave girl possessed by a spirit of divination met us…, saying: «These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.» …Paul was greatly annoyed … «I command you … to come out of her!».
Why did Paul silence her, so long as the end was achieved and she was proclaiming the name of Jesus, and the end was the evangelization about Jesus? Metropolitan Paul Yazigi says: the devil justifies the means by the end…she wished to draw near to the apostles so as to gain from their preaching afterward an end that was positive for her……Well then, the deeper question: what prevents achieving a positive end by means considered negative? Such as achieving peace through wars, and security through bullets? Metropolitan Paul also answers: our Lord did not ask for the achievement of man’s good, that is, His divine will, at the expense of man. God arranges matters through sound means…Yes, let the proclamation in the name of Jesus fall if it comes from the mouth of the devil…for the end is no longer noble when its price is cheap and evil (1).
Christ did not come to set for us ends and aims that were already clear in human thought; for the constitutive deification is man’s end, which he achieves through a cruciform path after he had rejected the path of the fruit and the Tower of Babel. He came to teach us how to attain our ends and how to achieve our aims, for the criterion of the purity of a man’s intention is revealed by his paths toward attaining it. Jesus says of Himself: “I am the way” (Jn 14:6), “and the door.” And the Christians were called at the beginning “people of the Way”: ” men of the Way” (Acts 9:2), ” and I persecuted this Way“ (Acts 4:22). If the people of the Way lose the values, then how shall the lost find their way?
Christ did not teach the “what” but the “how”; life is the end and the Gospel is the way. The greatness of Christ — and every value — lies in His preaching of the way that He took to accomplish salvation, and how He walked, and how He arranged and disposed matters. The greatness of Christ is that He is the God of ways, not the God of ends: “I am the way.” The greatness of Christ lies in the way He took to save man, though He was able to save him by a word from His mouth. The greatness of Christ lies in the path He carved with the sons of men, He who is the God able by a word to overturn the scales.
Christians are the people of the Way, of means and manner and values, and not people of ends. So if the people of the Way have their path crooked and their values corrupted, then with what do we evangelize? We want the Church to be a witness. The criterion of the greatness of an end is the greatness of its conduct. For is the physician who succeeds through effort equal to the one who succeeds through his wealth? Is the word “worthy” (mustahiqq) said of a deacon, a priest, or a metropolitan because he took office, or because his ways were made straight and so he took office? Metropolitan Georges Khodr says: “It is not enough for one to be dear in order to remain; he must embody values that justify his remaining” (2).
How can we today build a society in which we violate the values in order to achieve ends, even if the end were the good news about Christ? For the value lies in the origins and not in the arrival, and the soundness of the arrival lies in following the path where He walked. Whoever does not obey the way does not attain the ends. Patriarch Athenagoras says: “The leader draws his strength from his sense of responsibility; he quickens the communion of all. His authority is bound to his ability to live the evangelical overturning of values: “Whoever would be first among you, let him become last and a servant of all.”
The failure to remain steadfast in the ways is a confirmation of the rule of Niccolò Machiavelli (the Italian thinker, philosopher, and politician of the sixteenth century): the end justifies the means, whatever the means and its consequences may be. Every dictatorial politician and every regime that founds its values in its own sovereignty rests upon this rule, sets it before his eyes, and adopts it to justify for himself despotism, the practice of tyranny, and moral corruption.
Today we, ” the people of this Way“ (Acts 4:22), must make” His paths straight” (Mt 3:3), and place our ecclesiastical conduct under the microscope of the light of the Gospel, and examine our paths according to the Orthodox criterion. Orthodoxy means straightness of opinion (uprightness of doctrine), and opinion does not mean information (about), but rather the stance in life, that is, the values. Consequently, straightness is straightness of conduct: ” rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15).
And that we should know the truth in what we walk, not in what we attain. The Orthodox Christian is known for who he is by his values, by his straight and upright life. Mantzaridis says: “Moral and doctrinal teaching did not appear separate from one another, but were joined and united organically” (4). We must today understand ourselves as a Church and as Christians: what kind of human being do we want to build? The human being of ends? Or the human being of the people of the Way, according to “I am the way, the truth, and the life”?
The conclusion, with what Metropolitan Georges Khodr says: “When the Christians betrayed, the values of justice, freedom, and dignity were violated, for they were suffocated and fled from the soil in which they were planted to the nurseries of the barbarians, that they might tend them; and they tended them as best they could, without God.” Then: ”If the guardians of the values trample them underfoot, then who will believe the good news?”
References
1. 1. Metropolitan Paul Yazigi, Tower and Body, Part Two, the sermon “Does the End Justify the Means?”, p. 142, Publications of the Monastery of the Annunciation, Aleppo, 2006.
2. Metropolitan Georges Khodr, Sunday Discourse, Lebanon and the World, Part Four, An-Nour Publications, p. 21.
3. Dialogue with Patriarch Athenagoras, Olivier Clément, Contemporary Orthodox Faces 5, Arabic translation by Dimitri Koutia, An-Nour Orthodox Publishing and Distribution Cooperative, 226.
4. The Sociology of Christianity, Georgios I. Mantzaridis, translated by Father John Musa Bdour, Publications of the Saint John of Damascus Institute, Balamand, p. 161.
5. Georges Tawfiq Ghandour, Antioch and the Law: An Introduction to the Antiochian Canons and Their Application in the Twentieth Century, An-Nour Orthodox Cooperative, Al-Yanbou’ Press, 2009.
6. The Prince by Machiavelli, translated by Akram Momen, Ibn Sina Bookstore, Heliopolis, Cairo, 2004.