Build Thou The Walls of Jerusalem:
Kosovo and the New Sanballat
The handing over of a part of Christian Europe, Kosovo and Metochia, to Muslims does not signify the victory of Islam in Europe. Rather it signifies the complete absence of faith in ex-Christian Western Europe. Western Europe has indeed taken a suicidal path. The contempt for Jerusalem on the part of Texas and its servile EU minions, operating against international law in Kosovo, has opened up a Pandora’s Box. Indeed, the irresponsibility of the USA and the EU can already be seen in the present Turkish invasion of Iraq. But there is much more inside Pandora’s Box than this.
The seizure of part of the territory of the sovereign state of Serbia by Muslims was welcomed by Scottish Nationalists. Naturally, because logically it means that Scotland can now become independent, followed by Wales and Northern Ireland, meaning the end of the nearly ninety years of existence of the United Kingdom. This will also mean long-awaited independence for England, though only if its sovereignty can be protected from EU tyranny. Next, Spain’s Basques and Catalans can also now take their independence, as can France’s Basques, Bretons and Germans (called Alsaciens), Italy’s Austrians, Belgium’s Germans and perhaps also its Flemish millions who yearn for freedom from the Brussels dictatorship.
Slovakia’s Hungarians may follow and Cyprus’ native Greeks will also want to retrieve their territory from the Turkish invader. As a purely artificial country, Bosnia-Herzegovina must also come to an end, as its native Serbs rejoin Serbia and its Croats return to Croatia. Also the absurd Ukraine, invented a hundred years ago in the chancelleries of Austria-Hungary and lately fostered by Warsaw, Brussels and Washington, will also cease its short existence (except perhaps in the small heavily Polonised western tip around Lvov). And finally ‘Transcarpathia’ will become independent at last, joining Carpatho-Russians elsewhere in Slovakia and Poland. The map of Europe could be redrawn.
All the above could hopefully take place peacefully and positively. Unfortunately, the picture would be much less positive outside Europe, where there are Turkey’s much-oppressed Kurds, Armenians and Greeks, and Iran’s Azeris and Armenians. Then there is all Iraq, which must yet break up completely into its component parts, now that the CIA-installed strongman, Saddam Hussein, has been silenced by the son of a former head of the CIA. In Africa many borders would also have to be redrawn, in Kenya, the Sudan and Nigeria for example. And as for Asia and Latin America, the possibilities are endless. But that is the nature of the Pandora’s Box that Washington and its EU front men have unsealed. No, do not expect the free world, that is the true free world, to take the violation of Serbia’s sovereign territory lying down. The arrogance of a lone Superpower is now coming to an end and the injustices committed over the last generations must be put right.
The hatred for Serbia and uncompromised Orthodoxy, and therefore for Russia, as expressed in the right-wing gutter press in the UK and elsewhere, has not understood the realities of the world that freed itself from the shackles of Western Communism nearly twenty years ago. Those who write their anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox nonsense in The Daily Telegraph and other such rightist rags, unsurprisingly, have not read the Bible, in particular the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. If they did, perhaps they would understand a lot more.
Thus, they do not recall how the people of God were once taken captive to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar and ‘there they sat down and wept by the rivers, as they remembered Zion’, for three generations (Ps. 136, 1, Septuagint). However, eventually some were given freedom to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. So the Prophet Ezra, whose name means ‘helper’, returned and preached God, as is related in his Book. Then came Nehemiah, whose name means ‘consolation of the Lord’, with the mission to ‘rebuild the walls of Jerusalem’ (Ps. 50, 20, Septuagint).
Everyone in Jerusalem began to help him. However, the people of God in their New Jerusalem faced an enemy, a foreign governor. He was called Sanballat, whose name means ‘bush’ or ‘secret enemy’. He was an idol-worshipper, who did not want God’s people to be strong again. At first Sanballat sneered. And Nehemiah answered: ‘The God of heaven, He will prosper us; and therefore we His servants will arise and build; but ye have no portion, nor right, nor memorial, in Jerusalem’ (Nehemiah 2, 20). Then Sanballat began to fear and his sneers turned into threats (Nehemiah 4, 8). So Nehemiah decided he would guard the walls with sentries. Half the workmen built, the other half stood on watch. Even those who worked had to carry weapons and Nehemiah posted a trumpeter beside him to sound the alarm in case Sanballat attacked.
Everyone worked ‘from the rising of the morning till the stars appeared’ (Nehemiah 4, 21). Nehemiah governed all the country around Jerusalem and cared for the people. Every day 150 poor people sat at his table and ate and drank. Once, the poor complained that they did not even have enough money to buy bread and had to borrow and when they could not pay it back, the rich oligarchs came and stole their land and goods and enslaved their children. Nehemiah reprimanded the rich and they were forced to free the slaves and restore all that they had stolen. (Nehemiah 5) Nehemiah’s enemies kept trying to make him leave Jerusalem, but he refused. And so the walls were rebuilt and it was said: ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain’ (Ps. 126, 1, Septuagint), for as Nehemiah told the people, ‘this work was wrought by our God’ (Nehemiah 6, 16).
When all was completed, Ezra was called on to preach God’s law to the people. He did so, reminding them of all that God had done for them and how they had to refuse to worship idols and adopt the ways of other nations. The people listened and cried in repentance, saying: ‘We have not kept God’s law properly’ (Nehemiah 8). And so the people began to keep the old festivals, which had meant so much to their forefathers in the past. The people went on and lived in this way, remembering their past, writing down the stories and how God had cared for them. But above all they remembered that God was to send them a great King, whose Kingdom would have no end and this was the One Whom they awaited.
Today the atheist West has not reckoned with these eternal truths of the Holy Scriptures. For after the Babylonian Captivity of Russia and the martyrdoms of three generations there between 1918 to 1993, there have come an Ezra and a Nehemiah. The Temple of the Saviour has been rebuilt in the centre of Moscow. The poor are being protected from the rich oligarchs, though this process is not yet complete, for many rich have been given shelter by the unscrupulous in such cities as London. Now the walls of the New Jerusalem, the Orthodox Commonwealth, still have to be rebuilt, guards posted on the walls, the new Sanballat and his Babylon defied again, and the New Ezra has to preach to all, for many still have to repent.
All of this signifies the rebuilding of the Jerusalem of the Orthodox Commonwealth, as Russia rediscovers its sacred mission - which the West and its feeble-minded converts ignore - but not for much longer. The time is coming when all of this will be revealed and Kosovo and Metochia, and much more, will be freed once more and then the King, Whose Kingdom shall have no end, will come.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
Priest Andrew Phillips,
East Anglia
12/25 February 2008
St Alexis, Metropolitan of Moscow, Wonderworker
