We hear in today’s Gospel for the Sunday before the Elevation of the Cross—the Major Feast this Friday– the Good News that God loves us to such a tremendous extent that He sent Himself, His Logos—the Word through Whom all creation and life was spoken into being, into the world to redeem the fallen race of Adam. We hear today this oft-quoted verse that everyone used to learn in Sunday School, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3;16)
This verse is heard so often that it’s almost become a cliché for some. Most often it’s used in the context of certain neo-Protestant groups where belief is reduced to ‘ascent’, an acknowledging of Christ—‘believe’ and you’re assured of salvation. That’s it. But as we see clearly throughout the Gospel of John, belief involves much more than mere ascent or acknowledgement.
Belief is always accompanied by action: following through with a life that becomes grafted into the Life that God the Holy Trinity is as a perpetual relationship and movement of love. It’s not enough to simply say, “I believe in God. There, I’ve said it, I have salvation,” for we know that the “demons believe and shudder” (James 2:19). Because of the demands of this ongoing struggle and pilgrimage, Orthodox Christians reject the “once saved, always saved” belief of some Protestant circles. In fact, Christ says bluntly in Matt. 8:34, “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” Belief involves a daily struggle, the cross, self-denial, if one is to attain to Christ.
As many of you know, every summer as part of my chaplain duties at the USNA, I minister to the incoming class of midshipmen called plebes. These young men and women are dressed down, berated, push physically toward the breaking point, humbled. The idea here is that in breaking them down of their independent and individualistic self-focus and building them back up in the image of an officer-in-the-making, that they will be able to learn what they need to become leaders who will be able to inspire and command others.
Similarly, in our own lives, without the cross, without dying to ourselves and the “old man” we cannot grow in humility and grow in our identity in Christ even as we are built up into a new man or woman in Christ. This is also what it really means to believe, without which we cannot attain to Christ and be found ready to participate in the joy of His Kingdom.
In today’s Gospel for 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.
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 Covenant, it points to something greater to be fulfilled in the New Covenant with the coming of the Messiah, God incarnate, and His defeat of sin and death on the cross.
Whereas the copper snake miraculously saved the people of Israel from a temporal death by snakes, they still eventually died a mortal death. But Christ’s death on the cross is no temporal victory. Here too, the instrument of healing is itself an instrument of death—just like the snakes that killed the Israelites. Greater is the death caused by sin, if left unhealed and undefeated: a snake can kill the temporal body, but sin can ‘kill’ the immortal soul, so how much greater is Christ’s victory, the fulfillment of all that God promised His people Israel and, indeed, the world.
Christ entered death as man and defeated it as God. The very Word of God who made all life and sustains all life, entered death and conquered it. When we speak of belief and God’s
love, we speak of something deeper than the intellectual or even spiritual ‘acknowledgement’ of God. Rather, we speak of participation in His divine life—what we call deification or theosis in the Church, or, as St. Peter puts is, becoming “partakers of the divine nature.” (II Peter 1:4).
Jesus Christ Himself unpacks for us His understanding of belief when He says emphatically to Nicodemus in the same chapter of St. John’s Gospel, “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit” (Baptism and Chrismation), he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5). And elsewhere in relation to belief, “He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.” And He says this just before proclaiming, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:54).
In other words, ‘belief is intricately connected with communion with God through the Sacramental life He Himself provides through His Church and through which we’re united with Him. Of this participation in Christ’s saving work, St. Paul also says, “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27) and Christ affirms, “he who believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mk. 16:16). Through baptism, and then the ‘living out’ of our baptism throughout our lives, participating in the Sacraments, praying and communing with Him, submitting ourselves to Christ and His holy Body, the Church, we practice true belief; we know what true belief is—that same fullness of the life in Christ He entrusted to His disciples, the Apostles, who have, in turn, passed it down to us (paradosis).
For this reason, the cross is so important for us. It is a call to remembrance and action, to remember and practice all that ‘belief’ entails—not just for one day, but throughout our lives until we attain to the Kingdom of God. We wear the cross, we sign ourselves with the cross, we put the cross up in our houses and dorms, on Fridays we fast to remember Christ’s saving Passion on the cross and our own struggle to defeat the passions.
In the language of the Church, the cross is referred to as the “trophy invincible.” If we boast in anything, we boast in the cross. Because we ‘believe’ in Christ, we follow Him, we live in Him, we submit ourselves to Him and His holy Church, His Body. We prioritize the life that He alone is over all the temporal and passing things of this world. We say, “Amen!” to the words of St. Paul, who proclaims, “God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14).
Examine your life—in what or in whom do you believe? Does your belief go beyond assent and recognition? Are you ready to take up your cross to follow Christ, denying yourself, and growing in your communion with Him who is the life of all? “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ!
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Sunday, 9 September 2018
Epistle: Galatians 6:11-16 (Cross); 2 Corinthians 4:6-15
Gospel: John 3:13-17 (Cross); Matthew 22:35-46
