From the Rogation of the Ninevites (Bāʿuṯā dNinwayē):
"[Jonah] saw the old men weeping, While the aged of his people were living in luxury; He saw Nineveh was mourning, While Zion waxed wanton. He looked on Atour* and greatly despised Jerusalem, inflated with arrogance. Behold! The impure women had become chaste*, But the daughters of his people were defiled. He saw the devil possessed in Nineveh were changed, and had learned the truth; He saw the prophets in Zion were deceivers and full of falsehood. He saw the idols in public places were broken, among the heathen; He looked into and saw the secret chambers of his people were full of idolatry. He thus, being a Hebrew, received a proof in respect of the heathen; And laid aside the wonder that had held him. That the priest had entertained Moses, Or the widow woman, Elias, Or that David, when Saul persecuted him, Was honored among the heathen. He feared lest should now be falsified The preaching with which he was commissioned; For he knew that his
proclamation, Might become of no effect by repentance. He saw that the daughters of the heathen, Had renounced* the idols of their fathers; But he mourned that the daughters of his people, Were weeping for Tammuz. He saw that the soothsayers and diviners, Were abolished in Nineveh; But that enchanters and star-gazers, in Judea roamed at large. He saw the priests with their own hands Root up the altars of Ashur; But he saw every man in Zion Build his altar near his door. When Jonah looked on Nineveh, She gathered her sons together as a Church. Nineveh purified her womb and in her was honored the fast, But the Holy Temple of Zion, They had made a den of robbers. He looked on Nineveh, and the King Paid adoration unto God; He Looked on Jeroboam, And he was worshipping the calves. The sins of the Ninevites made them tremble, With loud crying before God; The Hebrews sacrificed their sons, And offered up their daughters to devils. In their fasting, the Ninevites Poured out their tears to God; But the Hebrews to their graven images Poured out their wines. From the Ninevites there was perceived The fair savor of mourning; But in the midst of Zion there breathed The perfume and incense of idols.[1][2]"
Never has
the locus of Assyrian identity been better placed and described than in these
words of St Ephrem. Every year, twenty days before Great Lent, Assyrians
reenter Nineveh and greet the Hebrew prophet as they put on the fast of
Nineveh, Bāʿuṯā. Ephrem wrote these words in the 300s yet the first
direct evidence of an annual liturgical commemoration of Bāʿuṯā is
from the 500s. The book length poem from which I excerpted the above attests to
the personal and powerful hold the Repentance of Nineveh had on Ephrem and,
through him as the father of Assyrian prayer, on all Assyrians. Likely, a
regular commemoration of the Repentance of Nineveh was popularly observed even in Ephrem's day, and the historical
mention of the fast being instituted was not that of a new liturgical
commemoration but of a popular devotion being revived or made mandatory on all believers. Aside from the
universal Christian days of Wednesday, Friday, and Great Lent as mandatory days
of fasting, only Bāʿuṯā is canonically binding. In the Assyrian
Church, we have many Christian feasts and yet there is an intimacy, a raw naked
reality to the nature of Bāʿuṯā. It is ours, rather, we belong to the
sacred space of Bāʿuṯā.
Bāʿuṯā
takes us to the place where we become ourselves. We stop eating and
drinking on a Monday morning and prepare for long services. Literally, we empty
ourselves so we can be refilled. We do so as we approach lent as if to first be
purified as Nineveh before entering the suffering, death, and
resurrection of Our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ. We wash in Bāʿuṯā before entering the sacred space of
Lent. Bāʿuṯā is our repentance but it is also our revival of
identity, who we are in sacred history, which is the defining essence of who we
ever were meant to be or who we may ever become. In Bāʿuṯā, the
Assyrian finds himself back at the turning point of history as his eyes behold
it.
Before the
Repentance of Nineveh was the story that leads to Nineveh’s Repentance with
Jonah, and after it is the story that stems from the Repentance of Nineveh. It
is sacred space writ large. We re-enter Nineveh in sackcloth and fasting and
from that holy ground we enter the biblical narrative not only as a powerful,
dominant, but idolatrous and lascivious people, but as a people of whom it can
be said that though the flesh dominated them in their ignorance, in their
repentance they vanquished the flesh.
Bāʿuṯā
is three intense days in which our expression of repentance to the God whom the
reluctant Hebrew prophet preached reinvigorates our identity. From the locus of
Nineveh’s repentance, we look back and see that Abraham is our father,
perhaps more than anyone else’s. We call him, in the Lišanā Swadaya of
everyday speech, Baban Awraham, ‘Our Father Abraham,’ and we have this
connection to his arch-parental role in our family history so ingrained that
most of us know his name as simply Babawraham, slurred so that his
paternal role and his name become one compound word. To Sinai we go back,
through the Repentance of Nineveh, and we stand with Israel receiving the law. In prayer, Assyrians identify with Israel to such an extent that I often get asked by parishioners why we constantly ask God to bless Israel, or we pray to him as the God of Israel. Of course, all who are baptized into Christ are members of Israel through the promised messiah, but for Assyrians it is deeper. We were the first fruits of the Messianic promise, a foretaste of God's blessings poured out upon all nations. Centuries before the incarnation, the birth of the Messiah, we were messianic heralds and this reality bears deep marks upon our Church ritual, interpretive tradition, as well as daily Assyrian life.
Assyrians
struggle to identify with the modern western concept of church. We are as much
members of a people as adherents of a faith in the western sense. It makes no
sense to us to think of our faith as separate from our identity as our
literature, calendar, law, diet, dress, family life, language, and
philosophical outlook are all elements of our Holy Tradition of living out the
principles of our faith. The most distinctive aspect of the Assyrian Church and
the Assyrian people is that they emerge from an intensive experience with the
God who adopted them in Nineveh, with Jonah as reluctant sponsor, and whose
Messiah they expected. Generally, Assyrian liturgy does not speak of the
nations as including themselves. We address God as Israel for God chose to
send us Jonah and our fathers chose to receive his prophet and turn to the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel.
This post
opens up many issues, and they are all issues that deserve very careful and
inquisitive study, and I hope to restart this blog with offering some
reflection upon the fullness of our Assyrian heritage. The Assyrian Church that
I am exploring is not only the human reality of people today, trying to workout
their salvation in a confusing world, during a time in our history when most of
our institutions have been ground to a nub, requiring much prayer and effort to
reemerge. The Assyrian Church I seek is the one that emerges out of the books
left us by our fathers, of commentary, poetry, canon law, liturgy, scripture,
icons, architecture, and common life serving the God whom our fathers
recognized as their true God. I cannot have pre-Jonah Assyria as an ancestor if
I do not have the over two millennia chain of fathers as my more immediate
parents.
Before
Jonah was one Assyria, and after Jonah was another. The two are the same
people, the same matter, but they became baptized in repentance and, later in Christ. Our purpose was made
heavenly rather than earthly. As an Assyrian, whatever my take on the biblical account, I cannot
dismiss that it owns me. After two thousand years of knowing my fathers to have
accepted the God of Abraham at the Repentance of Nineveh, the story is not
longer merely factual but truth in the most enduring sense. From before the Gospel was
announced in Mesopotamia, the Assyrians were following the God who called Abraham
out of Mesopotamia, and who with us shared his will with our fathers at Sinai. Our lifestyle is
replete with hallmarks of that journey. What Assyrian cannot recall how his
grandparents kept the Sabbath, on Sunday, but with injunctions not to touch a
scissors or needle? Or to mind themselves that they not desecrate their bodies
by drinking water or bathing before the eucharist? These aspects of our
experience become lost when we try to divorce our identity from our experience.
We have two millennia and more of experience as Repentant Nineveh. One cannot
find his grandfather without first knowing his father.
[1]Henry
Burgess. The Repentance of Nineveh: A Metrical Homily on the Mission of
Jonah by Ephraem Syrus. (Berlin: Blackader, 1853), 73-74. [I heavily
amended Burgess’ translation according to the Syriac of
Edmund Beck. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers
Sermones II, (Louvin: Peeters, 1970), 21-22. [Lines 1101-1141]
[2] This text is chanted in the Assyrian Church of the East on the Tuesday of Bāʿuṯā dNinwāyē as the first Qeryānā of the second Mawtwā. See: Hudra, Vol. 1. (Trichur: Mar Narsai Press, 1962), ܫܥܙ - ܫܥܚ. [I modified Burgess' translation above according to the critical edition of Beck, which matches that of the Ḥudrā in this section]
