We remember today the re-discovery of the cross of Christ in Jerusalem, whereby the Empress, St. Helena, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, discovered with God’s help the cross of Christ, the nails that pierced His precious hands and feet, and pieces of the crown of thorns, which she then brought back to Rome and which can still be seen to this day at the Church of Sancta Cruce.
That finding brings us back to the moving words of today’s Gospel for the Great Feast of the Elevation which recall all that Christ God suffered for us so that He could triumph over sin and death and make for us a way of redemption and new life in Him.
Christ God, the Giver of life, the Logos (Word)-made-flesh through Whom all creation came into being, destroys death by His death being Eternal Life. Today, then, we focus both on His suffering on the cross as well as that victory wrought through the cross (for every Divine Liturgy, and especially Sunday, is the “day of resurrection”).
So, we’re reminded today that the truth of the cross is a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles (II Cor. 1:23). St. Paul calls out in today’s Epistle, “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? Because the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (I Cor. 1:20, 18).
In the readings for the Sunday before the Cross, the example is put before us of Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness—a reference to the poisonous snakes God sent to humble the Israelites as they began to forget His saving power. Moses prayed for God’s mercy and so God instructed him to make from copper the image of a serpent and lift it high on a pole so that anyone bit by the poisonous snakes could look upon the snake and be healed.
What a great mystery’s here: As God would have it, the image of the cause of their death became the remedy for that death—and, as with all the great signs of the Old Testament, this one points to something greater to be fulfilled with the coming of the Messiah, the God-Man, Jesus Christ. He became incarnate to defeat sin and death on the cross by His death. And so, that great instrument of Roman death—the cross—is transformed, like the snake, into the greatest instrument of healing of all time, the remedy for death.
For this reason, we speak of Christ’s death on the cross as Victory—the greatest victory ever.
Christ entered death as man and defeated it as God, being the Giver and Author of Life. For us as Orthodox, the cross is never understood apart from the larger picture of our salvation, of Christ God’s redemption of fallen mankind.
Often, in Western forms of Christianity—and this includes many Orthodox living in the West—Christ’s salvific work is only focused on the cross. This limits the believer to simple ascent, head-knowledge, of what is really an ‘ontological’ or fundamental change that God affects over the human race. And this salvific change begins with Christ’s incarnation, God’s entrance into the human nature to renew that nature that He Himself created. And so, as Orthodox we trace our salvation from the Incarnation to the Cross and the Resurrection and subsequent glorious Ascension—all of which are integral to the ‘economy’ of our salvation in Christ and God’s calling on us that we too should partake of Christ’s victory over sin and death as well.
Without this fuller understanding, we fail to have even the slightest possibility of grasping the depth of God’s great love and mercy for us or His calling on us. Without such context, we easily become ‘victims’ of a great number of erroneous ‘theories,’ or rather ‘heresies’, concerning Christ’s salvatific work on the cross: One such theory, “the Ransom theory,” for instance, understands the cross in terms of God being forced to pay a ransom to the devil of His Son’s blood in order to free mankind—as if God is somehow beholden to the devil, imagine!
St. Gregory the Theologian refuted the same sort of impious theories in his own day, asking: “On what principle did the blood of His Only begotten Son delight the Father, Who would not even receive Isaac, when he was being offered by his father, but changed the sacrifice, putting a ram in the place of the human victim?” Heirotheos of Nafpaktos concludes that it is “blasphemous for us to maintain that God the Father would be pleased to have the blood of His only begotten Son.” Instead, the Fathers of the Church affirm what has believed from the beginning: Christ offered Himself freely, willingly, in order to cure man and sanctify him, that is, to make possible his deification—our participation in the life of the Holy Trinity through the healing of our souls.
Christ God offers Himself on the cross not as an appeasement of God’s divine justice or wrath, not as a ransom to the devil, but as the Life of the World, the One who has the power over death, being the Creator of all Life and Eternal Life. As St. Athanasius puts it, “That which Christ assumes, is healed.” So, having assumed human nature, He heals it of it’s sin-sickness and resulting death (separation from life with God). Having entered death as man, He destroys it as God, and makes possible through new birth, baptism, the healing of our individual souls as well.
The incarnation, Christ’s death on the cross and three-day resurrection, are, then, the supreme example of God’s love for us. Christ God defeats death on our behalf so that He can truly heal us on sin-sickness and enable our participation in His divine life—what we call deification or theosis in the Church. St. Peter refers to this participation in his Epistle as becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4). St. Paul speaks of us becoming sons by adoption, co-heirs with Christ through our participation in His life (Ephesians 1), in the human nature He redeemed by His incarnation. And this redeemed human nature, this salvific participation in the life of the Holy Trinity is made possible by baptism and the subsequent fervent living out of that baptism.
Jesus Christ Himself unpacks how His salvific work is appropriated by us when He says emphatically to Nicodemus, “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit” (Baptism and Chrismation), he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5). And elsewhere, “He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.”
Of this participation in Christ’s saving work, St. Paul also speaks, saying, “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27). Through baptism, and the living out of our baptism, participating in the sacramental life, receiving Christ’s precious and holy Body and Blood, praying, worshiping, and communing with Him, we appropriate the true meaning of the cross to our lives. St. Paul reminds us in today’s Epistle, that God has sealed us and given us the Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee of our salvation through Christ’s humble, loving offering of Himself for the life of the world.
The cross, then, is the supreme expression of God’s love for us: the Maker of all, the Giver of all life, was willing to become one of His own creation, be tortured, and lifted up on the cross, the most ignoble of deaths—and one of the most painful—to defeat sin and death on our behalf, to conquer death, so that, in this way, you and I who have been baptized and sealed in Him by the Holy Spirit and continue to persevere in Him may, likewise, become fellow conquerors over sin and death. For this reason, we life high the cross, we wear the cross, and on this day, the day of the cross, we venerate the icon of the Exaltation, glorifying God.
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Sunday, 14 September 2014
Epistle: 2 Corinthians 1:21-2:4; II Cor. 1: 18-24 (Cross)
Gospel: Matthew 22:1-14; John 19:6-11, 13-20, 25-28, 30-35 (Cross)
