His Holiness Serbian Patriarch kyr Porfirije conducted a Divine service on 16 November 2025, the Feast of the Dedication of the Church of the Holy Great-Martyr George – Đurđic, in the church dedicated to this great servant of God in Stara Bežanija.
 
The Primate of the Serbian Orthodox Church – with the concelebration of guests from the Georgian Orthodox Church: His Eminence Metropolitan of Mestia and Upper Svaneti kyr Ilarion and His Eminence Archbishop of Bolnisi kyr Efrem – offered an interpretation on the spiritual message of the Gospel reading from Luke (Lk 8:26–39), which recounts a real historical event:
 
 – That message, like every detail concerning the Gospel of Christ and everything that historically occurred when the Lord walked among us in the flesh, is first and foremost present in the Church, and as it held true in the past, it holds true today, and it will hold true until the end of the world and time. In this story, we see a deeply moving image of a man possessed by a multitude of demonic forces. From the example of this Gadarene, we see that he is not free. Whoever gives space to demonic forces, who allows the devil to take possession, is no longer free and does what the unclean spirit wills. Moreover, it often happens that a person acts in such a way that he has the impression he is fulfilling his own will, that he is exercising freedom. However, since through sin a person submits himself to the evil one – through a passion he willingly accepts – he hands over his freedom to demonic powers, and they then govern him. Every sin, every passion, is a demon that takes a part of our freedom. The more passions there are, the more small stones there are that form the mosaic of our bondage, of our lack of freedom.
 
– Possessed by demons, he fully renounced Christ, the will of God, His love, and His commandments. He delivered himself to demonic forces. But the Lord, who is love and who loves everyone and everything, draws near to him and heals him, to the joy of this man. He then recognizes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He is the Lord, and desires to follow Him. Yet many others who heard of this healing – hearing that the Lord cast out the demons by sending them into a herd of swine that subsequently plunged into the lake and drowned – were displeased. They asked: Why have You come? for they saw that the Lord, by His word and commandments, was calling them to renounce their established way of life. The word of Christ disturbed their calculations and their order. They were concerned with material gain, and the Lord came and disrupted their order, disrupted their business. They looked at God through an economic and social lens. Is it not often the case today that we, too, view Christ and His Gospel, the faith and the Church, in a merely social or political context? We want the Lord and His Church to solve problems, achieve goals, and fulfill interests that do not belong to the nature of the Church. The Lord did not come for that! He is neither a revolutionary nor a social reformer. He came to conquer death; He came to defeat the devil, as He did in the story we heard moments ago from the Gospel.
 
At the end of the Holy Liturgy, celebrated in one of Belgrade’s oldest churches, built in 1826, His Holiness the Patriarch greeted the hierarchs and dear guests from Georgia, emphasizing:
 
– We believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. The Church is one because her Head is one; therefore the body is one, though its many members are scattered throughout the world. In Georgia, in the land of Christian faith, the seed of the Gospel was sown in the earliest centuries – first by the Apostle Andrew and later by Saint Nina, the Enlightener of Georgia. Regardless of which nation one belongs to, what the color of one’s skin is, or the geographic place where one prays to Christ, one is part of His community and His Body. We are all one body and one Church because we all partake of the Body and Blood of Christ. Today, as we celebrated the Holy Liturgy, although we speak different languages, we spoke the fundamental, common, and unique language – the language of salvation for all people, the language of Christ.
 
His Holiness Patriarch Porfirije then offered prayers for the health of His Holiness Patriarch of Tbilisi and All Georgia kyr Ilia and asked Hierarchs kyr Ilarion and kyr Efrem to convey his message of love and best prayerful wishes to their episcopate and the faithful people of Georgia, and to remember always in their holy prayers the Serbian Church and the Serbian people, especially those who suffer on Kosovo and Metohija.
 
Words of gratitude followed from Metropolitan kyr Ilarion, who conveyed to Patriarch Porfirije the greetings of the Primate of the Georgian Orthodox Church, His Holiness Patriarch Ilia.