Brothers and sisters, we’re confronted today with the paradox of our salvation: the instrument of Christ’s death has become the means of His victory over sin and death. The cross is, in the theology of the Church, “the trophy invincible, the weapon of peace.” The instrument of Roman torture, laid upon Christ, has become the all-powerful symbol and witness of sin and death’s downfall. But what does the cross mean for us personally, living in the world today 2,000 years since Christ won that victory? Sadly, for many in today’s secular world, its meaning is lost.
The secular world thinks in temporal terms. It goes something like this: all that I experience in the here and now is the extent of my existence so “eat, drink, for tomorrow, we die” (I Cor. 15:32). The world urges focus on self, ego, “me first.”
While the world urges us to focus on ourselves, “me first,” the cross is always a reminder of Christ’ s gift of Himself, His self-sacrifice on our behalf, and His urging that we become more like Him, that we come outside ourselves, growing in communion with Him by doing the same.
For this reason, Christ speaks to us today, that “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.”
St. Paul reminds us: the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, even as it is the power of God to those who are being saved (I Cor. 1:18). To the world, self-denial, even true love itself, is alien because the world seeks to understand love apart from God, the Author of love, He who teaches us love. Without Him we can’t truly know love: “We love Him because He first loved us” (I Jn. 1:9). And this Love directs us right to the cross, the ultimate sign of God’s love for us, manifested in the Incarnation and in Christ’s saving Passion. Love is both sacrificial and holy; it becomes life-giving because it further unites us with God and with each other as we learn to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Christ. When He’s at the center of our lives, He’s at the center of our love too because always, there stands the cross!
In the Matins of Monday we sing: “the Cross is the preserver of the whole universe, the Cross is the beauty of the Church, the Cross is the might of kings, the Cross is the confirmation of the faithful, the Cross is the glory of angels and the scourge of demons” (Monday Matins).
The cross is the power of God first because we see in it Christ’s victory over sin and death on our behalf. Christ God entered human nature as man and redeemed it, renewed it, as God, becoming the new Adam. Through baptism “We put on Christ,” that is, we’re reborn into the new race of Adam. What Christ has assumed, He’s healed, proclaims St. Athanasius. Christ has put on death, but being Life itself, its Creator and sustainer, He’s won the victory and has risen again. He’s freed all those held captive by death in Hades who awaited His coming.
All that Christ accomplished for us is foreshadowed: In the Gospel reading 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 that God sent to humble the Israelites as they grumbled against Him. Moses prayed for God’s mercy on the people and so God instructed Moses to make from copper the image of a serpent and lift it high on a pole so that anyone who was bit by the poisonous snakes and looked upon the snake that Moses lifted, would be healed.
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, they point to something greater fulfilled in the New, when the Messiah, God incarnate, defeats sin and death on the cross for our sake.
Whereas the copper snake miraculously saved the people of Israel from a temporal death by snakes, they still eventually died a mortal death. Greater is the death caused by sin, if left unhealed and undefeated: a snake can kill the body, but sin can kill the soul if unrepented.
Unlike the bronze serpent, which saved for a time, the cross continues in perpetuity as the “weapon of peace, the trophy invincible,” as the Kontakion for the Feast proclaims. St. John Maximovic writes these meaningful words: “The Cross was sanctified by the Body of Christ which was nailed to it when He gave Himself over to torments and death for the salvation of the world, and it itself was then filled with life-giving power… The demonic hosts tremble when they see the Cross, for by the Cross the kingdom of hell was destroyed.
By the power of the sign of the cross the holy Gifts of bread and wine, become the precious and holy Body and Blood of Christ we feed on in the Eucharist; by the sign of the cross, the waters are sanctified at baptism and the Jordan is made present by the sign of the life-giving cross; demons are put to flight by the making of the sing of the cross.
The cross is then, second, the power of God, because signing ourselves with the cross, we come to ‘own’ Christ’s victory for ourselves: we proclaim Christ’s victory inwardly and outwardly, we guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus from the demons and their vices, we witness to the truth that His victory is for all mankind because all are loved by God and called to holiness and new life through communion with Him.
As St. John says, “The Cross then will save from eternal perdition all who conquered temptations by the Cross, who crucified their flesh with its passions and lusts, and took up their cross and followed their Christ.”
Hence the paradox: in order to gain the victory, we humble ourselves and become like Christ; in order to gain the victory, we die to ego and to the world, in order to allow God to give us new life, a new identity—not a vainglorious one, but an identity filled with the knowledge of the truth of who we are in Christ, as a “new creation,” equipped to strive and to struggle with the cross before us for the healing we all need from our sin-sickness and victory over our passions that would otherwise “drag us down to hell alive” (Pre-Communion Prayer of St. John Chrysostom).
This world and everything in it is passing away, but those who have denied themselves, taken up their cross and followed Christ will gain the victory as fellow heirs of Christ’s Kingdom. This is our Lord’s great promise of love to us this day. Our verbal “Amen” is echoed by our physical signing of the cross as we say with St. Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
We proclaim this love, this hope, to a world that no longer knows how to love. We deny ourselves, we struggle with our sins and passions, which is what it means to take up our own symbolic cross. And in this way, only in this way, we live for Christ, we proclaim the reality of His life and victory over sin and death to the world around us. We who are struggling with our sins and persevere in the end with that struggle, always returning to Christ and bearing the fruit of repentance, bear witness of the victory of the cross right here in this church. We loudly and undeniably proclaim to the world the Truth and Reality that He is, that His life alone is.
We follow Christ, we live in Him. We live for Him. In dying to self, we become the men and women of God we’re called to be, so that Christ is glorified in us and through us. We prioritize the life that He alone is over all the temporal and passing things of this world, remembering that the world doesn’t understand the cross except by the power of our witness: By the cross, Christ is healing us. By the cross, Christ is saving us. Christ is in our midst!
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Sunday After the Elevation of the Cross
September 15, 2013
Epistle: I Cor. 15:1-11; Galatians 2:16-20
Gospel: Matt. 19: 16-26; Mark 8:34-9:1
