Father Lazarus Abboud
The epidemic spread in “all the world” and reached a state of rapid outbreak, so visions (attributed) to the Virgin on Mount Athos came on the tongue of one of the monks, saying: mark your houses with the sign of the cross in holy oil. The simple believer, in his faith, realizes through the understanding of the peaceable petition “for all the world” that the Church asks peace for the whole world, that is, “believers and non-believers.” But these fabricated visions are nothing more than a consecration of the idea of the special group that its own special god saves — the idea of the tribe that worships a god who defends it and wards off calamity from it, that is, the idea of “the saved remnant.” Thus God, the Creator of the world, becomes its god alone, and consequently the god of the tribe alone, sitting as its servant whom it summons and he answers it, whom it calls upon and he saves it. As for the rest, they are left on earth to calamity and in heaven to annihilation.
This thinking is nothing but a revival of the Jewish mentality — the special people of God in the Old Testament, a chosen nation rising above all nations. We have inherited this tribal mentality, and God has become the savior of our group. “No, even more: the great catastrophe arrived when salvation became tied to the total submission to the beliefs of some,” as the blessed George Massouh puts it. This salvation that God gave to every man coming into the world has become confined to one group in the world, which distributes salvation and distributes the indulgences to its followers, and to whoever renders the duty of obedience to its teachings — that is, it has monopolized salvation for itself, so it is no longer free, but became tied to the conditions of the “tribe.”
So we are a tribe that portrays God in its own image and likeness, forgetting that God is not only a “savior” but “the Savior,” who wills that all be saved, who came for the sinners, the crooked of opinion, and not for the upright of opinion.
This image exactly imitates the Old Testament with the last plague upon Pharaoh: ” I am the Lord, and the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are; I will see the blood and pass over you” Exodus 12:14.
And here likewise: mark the doors of the houses with oil, and the epidemic will pass over you.
Here I have no room to explain and interpret the events of the Old Testament. What I want to say is the following: the problem of religious thought today is summed up in the fanaticism that brings thought and the group into a narrow shell and closes in upon itself, and puts God in the cell of the tribe — “the great-grandfather” — and forgets that God is no longer “the God of Abraham,” that is, “the great-grandfather,” but has become the God of every man coming into the world.
And the evil is not only in the idea that salvation is confined within this group, but in the ideas that are spread, especially by the distortion of the image of God and the distortion of the image of truth. They belittle the image of the saving God and make Him selective and exclusionary, and consequently an evil god who accepts one person and rejects another. This is what makes deliverance impossible, not only by eternal salvation but consequently the deliverance from Corona.
And on the level of the relationship with the other, there is no longer any possibility either of meeting the other or of dialogue with him.
But today Corona is “there is no longer any possibility either of meeting the other or of dialogue with him
Corona today is the “scourge of God” to purify religious thought from every distortion that befell it and befell our understanding that God belongs to us and not the reverse. We take salvation from its Giver, and we need it as do the rest of people, so our tribe does not intercede for us. We take grace by God’s favor, and we have no merit, for God is able to raise up from the stones “upright” children. Corona is the “scourge of God” so that we may return and pray “for peace for all the world.”
Note: “the scourge of God” is an expression, and I do not mean by it at all that God sent the epidemic — neither as mercy nor as wrath.