His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel: “The Orthodox Faith is the Witness of the Divinity of Christ”
Romanian Orthodox Church
On the 7th Sunday after Easter, of the Holy Fathers from the Ecumenical Synod I, His Beatitude Daniel, Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the chapel of “Saint Gregory the Enlightener” of the Patriarchal Residence.
The Holy Church established for this Sunday the remembrance service of the Holy Fathers who participated in the Ecumenical Synod I from Nicene, at the call of Saint Emperor Constantine the Great. The Patriarch of Romania said in his sermon: “This Sunday, the 7th after the Holy Easter, is a preparatory Sunday in order to better understand the Coming down of the Holy Spirit, as the day when the Church of Jesus Christ, our Lord, was constituted. It is a preparatory day due to the fact that it reminds us of the essential truth of our faith, namely that to be Orthodox means first of all to confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. The confession of the divinity of Christ is the Orthodox faith. Jesus Christ, cannot unite us with God, unless He is God. He cannot give us the eternal life unless He is eternal God, made Man for the salvation of the humans. In today’s Gospel, the Saviour shows us that He has the power to give eternal life to those the Father gave to Him. So, Christ has come to give eternal life to those who believe in Him, to those who believe that God-the-Father sent Him to save the world. In other words, the righteous faith confessed in the Ecumenical Synods I and II reformulates the Creed that we call Nicene-Constantinople. The righteous faith is not only beautiful teaching, or religious philosophy, but also the righteous relation with God. When we confess that Jesus Christ is the eternal God, Who was made man for our salvation, although seen as a man, we do not confess what we see, but what is revelatory or revealed to us, namely that Jesus is the Son of God who was made man; He is not a deified or spiritualized man. Nobody can be saved unless he confesses that Jesus Christ is the Son of God – informs “Lumina” newspaper.
The Patriarch of Romania also said that the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the Ecumenical Synod I from Nicene teaches us that we have the duty to teach the people the righteous faith and to pray so that they should keep the righteous faith, to be able to remain in brotherly love and not to be cheated by the devil with false teachings that come from the heretics, from the sectarians, from dividers, and, at the same time “to keep the brotherly love that unites the minds and hearts in the love of the Holy Trinity”.
