Ah, Pascha. The holiest day on the Greek calendar. Families gather, the spit turns, the arnaki glistens under the spring sun, and everyone pretends they’ve just emerged from 40 days of fasting purer than a newborn. Red eggs clink, tsoureki is sliced, and somewhere in the background a priest murmurs about the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Beautiful. Poetic. Utterly sacred.
Unless, of course, you’re one of those diaspora Greeks (or worse, homegrown ones) who spent the entire Great Lent tweeting “Death to the West, Long Live the Islamic Republic” and posting selfies with Iranian flags. In that case, put the fork down. That lamb is not for you. You don’t deserve it. You’re not even allowed to smell it. And yes, you absolute clowns, you are the textbook definition of hypocrites.
Let’s do a little theology for the regime-stans in the back. The entire Pascha feast is built around the Passover lamb—an innocent creature sacrificed so that the people could be set free. Christians took that image and ran with it: Jesus is the ultimate Lamb, slaughtered so humanity could escape the real Egypt of sin and death. Freedom. Redemption. Standing up to tyrants. That’s the whole vibe. The spit-roasted lamb isn’t just dinner; it’s a victory lap for liberation from oppression.
Now look at the Iranian regime you’re simping for online. A theocratic police state that throws Christians in jail for converting, stones women for showing hair, hangs gays from cranes, and funds every terrorist proxy it can find so it can keep exporting its medieval fever dream. Freedom? They don’t even let their own people celebrate their version of spring without morality police showing up. But sure, go ahead and tell us how “resistance” means cheering for the guys who would ban your grandmother’s Easter service faster than you can say “Allahu Akbar.”
You fasted from meat, dairy, and oil for seven weeks like a good little Orthodox soldier. You lit candles, you kissed icons, you cried during the Epitaphios. Then on Easter Sunday you’ll carve into that lamb while your Twitter feed is still full of praise for the very people who would turn every church in Tehran into a parking lot. The cognitive dissonance is so thick you could spread it on tsoureki.
Newsflash: the Lamb of God doesn’t do selective sacrifice. You don’t get to celebrate the ultimate act of defiance against earthly tyrants while carrying water for one of the biggest tyrants on the planet. You don’t get to stuff your face with symbolic freedom while defending a regime that specializes in crushing it. That’s not “nuance.” That’s not “geopolitics.” That’s just being a performative, larping hypocrite with olive oil on your chin.
So here’s my modest proposal for this Pascha: if you spent the last year defending the mullahs, posting “From the river to the sea” memes, or calling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard “freedom fighters,” do us all a favor. Skip the lamb. Eat a sad bowl of fassolada. Or better yet, order takeout from the local Persian spot and reflect on why the religion of love, forgiveness, and resurrection feels so hollow when your politics are straight out of the Dark Ages.
The rest of us will be over here, roasting our arnaki, clinking our red eggs, and actually meaning it when we say Christ is Risen. You? You can stay in your ideological Egypt. The angel of Pascha is passing over your hypocrisy this year.
Καλή Ανάσταση… to everyone who actually deserves it.