Information Service of
the Serbian Orthodox Church
March 15, 2003

HOMILY OF HIS EMINENCE METROPOLITAN AMFILOHIJE OF MONTENEGRO AND THE LITTORAL AT THE FUNERAL OF DR. ZORAN DJINDJIC, GIVEN IN THE CHURCH OF SAINT SAVA IN BELGRADE

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit!

“This world is tyranny even to a tyrant, let alone to a noble soul!” These are the words, bereaved brethren gathered here, of the Poet Njegos, which come to mind before the bier of one such noble soul, Zoran Djindjic, the slain Prime Minister of Serbia. These words come to mind all the more forcefully because we find ourselves in the church which grew out of the burned relics and martyred dust of the greatest enlightener of the Serbian people — Saint Sava.

In this place, in this house of worship, before Zoran, reposed only he who left this message to his people and all the peoples of the earth: “The earthly kingdom is but for a while; God’s kingdom is for everlasting time.” This was the beheaded Great Martyr Lazarus of Kosovo. Here today we bid farewell to Zoran Djindjic, near the once encampment and now monument of the Leader Karageorge, whose head fell, as Zoran himself has fallen, at his God brother’s and blood brother’s hands some two hundred years ago, and stuffed with straw was sent to Istanbul to wither away impaled on a stake.

According to a folk adage: “every wound strikes close to the heart”, but Zoran was struck in his heart of hearts as were his mother Mila, his wife Ruzica, and his children Luka and Jovana, and the entire Serbian people. It is not, however, the only grievous wound which we have sustained in these recent times of tribulation. It is impossible to say which of them is the deepest cut of all. Is it Zoran’s wound, inflicted by a fratricidal hand? Or the wound inflicted upon all of us by the death of that little girl, Milica Rajic, who was killed during the bombing of 1999? Or the wound inflicted by the rape and butchery of Marica Miric, from Belo Polje, near Pec, who was buried behind the altar at the Patriarchate of Pec on the eve of Vidovdan in that same year? Or any one of those countless, still fresh wounds inflicted in these regions during the mindless period of the recent civil war and bombing. And more horrible yet is the fact that all these wounds are kept alive before our eyes by the light and the heat of flames, which have consumed hundreds of churches and shrines of Kosovo and Metohija.

Zoran Djindjic will be remembered by future generations because of this wound, but also because of so much more. He will be remembered above all because, at the moment of his people’s most abject humiliation, in the manner reminiscent of the House of Obrenovic, he extended the hand of fraternal peace and reconciliation to Europe and the world. At a time when hundreds of thousands of his people were still exiled from their centuries-old hearths, living in homes they could never call their own, without a country, without a fatherland; at a time when above the heads of his people the sword of Pilate’s justice was still suspended, Zoran Djindjic breathed new life into his people, reanimated his country’s civil and social life, re-established unity within the state of Serbia and Montenegro, and reconnected his country to the world. But he was slain, alas, by fratricidal hatred, which is shortsighted, which is blind, and which speaks of that eternal truth that: “Whosoever lives by the sword shall perish by the sword.”

If the murder of an individual is so great an evil, then how much greater an evil is the destruction and suffering of so many people in the recent wars in our country and throughout the world. And of that evil there seems to be no end. At this very moment, new bloodshed is being prepared for the people of Iraq. The war is imminent. Let the wound of Zoran Djindjic, the innocent tears of his children Luka and Jovana, and of all innocent victims of recent wars here and throughout the world be a warning and a reminder to all persons and peoples who are still in possession of understanding and reason, and most of all to Zoran’s people that there has been enough hatred among brothers, enough fratricide, enough war. Every murder is fratricide, from that first, committed by Cain, to Zoran’s. Evil and hatred do not profit anyone. War is brother to none.

Another reason for which our people will remember Zoran Djindjic is, without a doubt, his care and concern for the completion of this Memorial Church where we have come to send him on his journey to the shoreless eternity of the Divine mysteries, where there is neither sorrow nor sighing, but life everlasting. Zoran Djindjic understood that without a place of worship as a divino-human measure of human dignity there is not, nor can there ever be, either real future or all-embracing renewal of life, be it the life of this nation, or any nation or any individual on this earth. And that is why, lying here before us, through the very funeral service sung for him in this Church of Saint Sava, Zoran has woven himself and his grievous wound — the most precious aspect of his being and his most precious possession — into the structure of this church itself.

Let us pray, therefore, to Christ our God, the Lord of life and death, by His all-healing wound of Golgotha and eternal love to heal Zoran’s wound, to comfort his mother, wife and children, to encourage and comfort the faith and hope and fraternal love of his people. I have heard that, on the occasion of his visit to the Holy City of Jerusalem, Zoran waited for hours so that he could touch and venerate Christ’s Tomb and through that touch feel precisely that self-sacrificial of Christ’s Golgotha! Let us pray, once again, to the All Merciful Lord to save this people from horrific fraternal hatred, so that this people, as well as all the peoples of the earth will be encompassed by His eternal peace, truth and love. Amen! May God forgive his soul!