The idea of Constantinople and the glories of Byzantium still lingers in the minds of some Christians, and today they see, in the attempt to convert the Church of Hagia Sophia into a mosque and to hold prayers in it, an offense to Christianity and to its civilization, as though the face of Christianity were the glory of the emperor and not the face of Jesus. There are prophecies attributed to this one and that one about the return of the Church, and a hope for the return of the great glory of Byzantium and one of the prophecies, whose authenticity I personally doubt, says: “Turkey will vanish, and a Christian army will liberate Constantinople, and a third of the Turks will be killed.” This talk shows completely that every structure of earthly glory is built only upon the shedding of another’s blood. But when Christ willed to build His Kingdom and His reign, He shed His blood on the cross so that every person who comes into the world might live.
All this hope today is nothing but a repetition of the first Jewish trial. God, since Abraham, called him to “a land that I will show you,” and said to Moses, “bring My people out to a good and fertile land.” But afterwards the people wanted, in the era of Samuel the prophet, a king over them, and thus the building of an earthly kingdom; and God said to Samuel, “for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me”… And God wanted to be their King, but they said: “we will be like all the nations, and our king will judge us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam 20:8). Then they had a kingdom and a king, but a stronger state occupied them and took them captive; and through the captivity they began to long to return to the city and to build its glory and to build the temple. So Judaism is bound to the temple and to the sacrifices in it, and if the temple is not built the fundamentals of the religion are not fulfilled. And the Jews did not understand their existence except bound to a state and a king; therefore when Jesus came to them they crucified Him, because He was not a king with an army and a prison.
Today Christians repeat the same problem: “they long for the city that fell, they long to return to the geography of the emperor, and to the Church of the emperor” and they lament it, as Jeremiah lamented Jerusalem: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!” (Lamentations 1:1) and the paradox is twofold.
The first is that the empire was pagan; it was not born Christian, but rather it became Christian when the emperor became Christian. The kingdom follows the religion of its king. Thus Christianity did not arise as a political power; this matter was not within the realm of the thinking of early Christianity, and it is not of the essence of Christianity, which was sent — “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Mt 19:28) — as a teacher of the nations.
The second matter is that the Christian state at that time took many places of worship of others by force and turned them into Christian temples.
If we seek an earthly place, why do we seek the Church of the emperor and the traces of his achievements, when the traces of the places of the Lord — where He became incarnate, was buried, and suffered — exist? And here is the Church of the Sepulcher of the Lord of Christianity! Is not the desire to return to that city a desire that we be a nation like all the nations, with a king who goes before us and fights our battles? And is not forgetting where Jesus was crucified a sign that we have forgotten our gospel — that we are the Church of the Crucified and a Church not of this world? And we have forgotten that we are the Church of the incarnation of the Son, and not the Church of the emperor’s throne.
Should we forget Hagia Sophia and Constantinople? No; rather we must learn from history that Christianity was not born to be a power in the world possessing glory, and “here we have no continuing city” (Heb 14:13). We must gaze at it whenever the thought of power and earthly glory assails us, so that we may understand that every human power is transient, and every glory built on political power is the glory of emptiness and stone. And let us not forget that the empire that ruled in the name of Christ — we still suffer to this day from the consequences of the vengeance of those it killed in the name of Christ. Will it return? The more important question is: why do we ask that it return? Is not the whole world a field of evangelism and work for the Church? Why do we lose the glory of God for the sake of the world? Why does she lose her mission of Pentecostalizing the world in order to rule over the world with the power of the people of the world? Or so that an emperor may rule over her instead of God?
The end of Hagia Sophia being the church of the imperial capital is a lesson that brings us back to the first letter of the Gospel, to the word of Jesus, to the fact that the Church was created to be in the wilderness, in the wilderness of the world — “the wilderness where she has a place prepared by God” (Rev 6:12) — and that she was created for the sake of the world, and to bear the sins of the world.
Every trace and hope of the return of earthly glory must vanish, so that Christianity may return to the love of Jesus, the crucified Bridegroom, and preach His name, to return to the first wilderness — a Christianity whose sole concern is building the ship of salvation, not building a kingdom that imposes God’s law. Christianity must be freed from the tyranny of worldly glory — from the crown and the scepter, from the king’s robe and the king’s throne — and return to the wilderness, beseeching the glory of God, not beseeching the glory of the emperor.