If I Perish, I Perish!

Follow us on the web

Subscribe to the Diocese's Email List

Join to receive messages from His Grace and event reminders or update your information.

home › resources › literature › If I Perish, I Perish!

Keraza Magazine issue 29-30 July 18, 2014

When Mordecai sent to Esther, asking her to go in to the king to make supplication to him and plead before him for the Jews, she progressed through two stages. The first stage was dominated by reasonable mind that placed before her all the logical evidences that support the necessity of refraining from the service and being excused from fulfilling the mission. Why not when all the evidences of the mind and its proofs are true realistic arguments that prove the inevitability of perishing in case of going ahead in taking charge of this great responsibility?

In the second stage Esther took a decision of faith, not one of logic and said: "I will go to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish" (Esther 4:16). She bypassed all and proceeded to all that is out of faith. In fact, this bypass is a stage of labor pains and delivery that every passenger on the Lord's paths must go through.

The first rational stage is very essential as it gives birth to the stage of faith. All proofs of the inevitability of perishing that the mind gathers become themselves the very evidence of the inevitability of faith and motives to it. We find in the story of Esther that the primary spur springing her to this juncture was the words of Mordecai, "For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish" (Esther 4:14). What Mordecai did is that he made her facing a spiritual indisputable law that everyone who refrains from service overlooks it with the motive of avoiding pain. This law states that when one decides to acquiesce to logical evidence with the intent of self?preservation, he will no doubt fall prey to this very same avoided perishability, "Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it" (Luke 17:33). Behold the rich young man who refrained and withdrew under the pretense of logical reason; his logic became to him a source of perishing instead of being a source of salvation.

Faith, in its essence, is accepting the risk and adventure that the logic places, through its calculations, before the man. It is the acceptance of the probability of perishing, "If I perish, I perish". Perhaps this phrase resonated inside Abraham when he decided, by faith, to take risk and "went not knowing where he was going" and also when he decided to take risk and offer Isaac. May be this phrase was in the mind of Peter when he decided, by faith, to take risk and come down out of the boat to walk on the water and in the mind of St. Anthony when he decided, by faith, to take risk and follow Jesus in the wilderness and desert. All of them, among others, judged Him faithful who had promised; therefore it applies to them the sentence saying, "But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul" (Hebrews 10:39). How necessary for every servant, rather every Christian who walks on the Lord's paths to repeat frequently, "If I perish, I perish" such that this phrase turns within his internal man into a deep?seated existential attitude of accepting the risk of faith even up to death because, "Without faith it is impossible to please Him" (Hebrews 11:6).

Bishop Youssef
Bishop, Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States