ecumenism" "
“Everything starts out from Christ, everything flows from him. Jesus who denounces the temptation to have enemies to project onto them one’s own anxiety (…) and who throws into history, like a wound and like a ferment, the revelation of the full humanity of each person, sits down at the table of sinners, goes to the heart and the secret of everyone”. In a reflection on Easter, which opens the April number of the French ecumenical monthly Oi ( Oecumenisme informations), the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément emphasizes the paradox of a man (Jesus) who, although he defined himself as “the resurrection and the life, voluntarily died a death that recapitulates that of all men, all their rebellions and their despair”. “Taken upon himself by Christ – observes Clément the abyss opened up between God and mankind is filled with love; it becomes the place of the life-giving breath. It is the resurrection, the Pentecost. And the resurrection is not the reanimation of a corpse, but the germ and secret fulfilment of the transfiguration of the world, in which we too are associated”. In this perspective “Easter turned man into a ‘created creator’, a knight of the resurrection”. Recalling that Malraux, shortly before he died, said: “I await the prophet who will dare to cry out to the world: ‘Nothing does not exist!'”, Clément concludes that “each of us, all together, within the Church, with all our Christian brothers, must cry out: ‘Nothing does not exist, because Christ has risen! Nothing is the lack of meaning, and Christ is the meaning'”.
