“We Bow to Your Cross…”

I think it is rather moving that the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross falls on a Friday this year.  We fast every Friday throughout the year since every Friday is a memorial of Good Friday, just as every Sunday is a memorial of Easter Sunday. So it is that we honor and exalt the cross of our Lord on “the day” of His crucifixion.  This should make us all the more aware of what took place on that cross and praise our Lord for opening the door to salvation for us.  “Joy to you, life-bearing Cross of the Lord, invincible triumph of the true faith.  You are the gate to Paradise, the strength of the faithful, and the stronghold of the Church. Because of you, corruption no longer has meaning nor power. By you we have been lifted up from earth to heaven. You are an invincible weapon against evil, a glory indeed for saints and martyrs, and a haven for salvation.  You are the source of mercy to the world.” (Vespers, Aposticha for the Feast)

Our services for this feast bring home the fact that, although we are celebrating the discovery of the True Cross by St. Helena, we are really celebrating the salvation that comes through that cross. “O most venerable Cross of the Lord, the angels surround you with joy at your elevation today.  You raise up those who had fallen and had been delivered from death for having eaten of the forbidden tree.  Therefore, we praise you with our lips, begging for sanctification, saying: Exalt Christ our gracious God, O you nations, and adore His divine footsteps forever.” (Vespers, “At Psalm 140”).  We are also presented with the Cross as the Tree of Life in juxtaposition of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  In Genesis 2:9 it is written: “Also, in the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of learning the knowledge of good and evil.” Verse 17 relates that God says to Adam, “…but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you may not eat; for in whatever day you eat from it, you shall die by death.”  Instead of eating of the Tree of Life, Adam and Eve sinned by preferring the knowledge of good and evil over life itself.  In verses 22 and 23, God says: “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil.  Now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever—” “therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of pleasure….”  In contrast then, we see that the Tree of the Cross, through which we receive forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life, is the same as the tree of life in the garden. And it is through the voluntary death of Christ on the Cross that He conquers sin, corruption and death, and gives to those who believe that everlasting life that was denied us in the garden.  It brings sharper focus the words recorded for us between the one criminal and Jesus as they hung on their crosses: “Then he said to Jesus, ‘Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.’  And Jesus said to him, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.’” (Luke 23:42-43).  Through his act of repentance and prayer to our Lord, the Cross of Christ became his gate to salvation!  And so it is with us who believe.  If we ask for forgiveness and repent, the Cross becomes our gate to Paradise.

With all this, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross should take on a deeper meaning.  At our liturgies for the feast, the priest, in imitation of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, elevates the cross and blesses the four corners of the earth, consecrating the whole world to God.  When we see this elevation take place, it should strike such awe in our hearts that we rededicate ourselves to following Christ, receive the blessing given to us by the cross, and allow Him to strip off the gown of sinfulness and garb us with the gown of righteousness.  “We bow to Your Cross, O Lord, and we glorify Your holy resurrection.”  “Save Your people, O Lord, and bless Your inheritance; grant victory to Your Church over her enemies and protect Your people by Your Cross.”

 

On the Sign of the Cross

One of the books I am currently reading is “The Sign of the Cross: The Gesture, The Mystery, The History,” by Andreas Andreopoulos (Paraclete Press). I find it a very exciting book – OK, it’s not Stephen King, but I am a priest, remember! There is a lot of good teaching in the book, but two things in particular struck me as I was reading tonight:
“Vast literature has been devoted to the inspiration of the cross, commenting on the cross’ ability to sustain in times of difficulty, or noting the pain that Jesus endured on the cross. Still, pain, endurance, and suffering are not the main focus of the way of the cross. Jesus makes this evident by connecting the cross to the denial of the self in the passage from Matthew’s Gospel. Rather than death, the way of the cross is submission of the self to the will of God. St. Paul also points to this when he writes to the Galatians, ‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.’ [Galatians 2:20]
“Inward spirituality is a difficult chapter in the history of corporate worship. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as private prayer in the tradition of the church. Individuals in the church are part of a larger body: No focus is meant to be made in prayer for one’s private salvation; no claim is meant to be made to having attained a higher level of “spirituality” than anyone else. The spiritual ascent ‘of the one to the One’ was a pagan ideal, to which Christianity was firmly opposed. In that sense, inward spirituality, or the contemplative withdrawal into the self, is meaningful only if it is still connected to collective prayer, and if the person who prays privately does so while in a connection of love and community with the rest of the church.
“In the same way, the sign of the cross starts from the self, but it describes an inward journey that is shared by the entire church and leads back to the church. The way of the cross is not a pursuit for a personal, individual spiritual merit, but an offering of the self to God. The deeper the journey into the self, the more complete is the offering of the self to God. This spiritual analytical journey into the self is practiced to varying degrees by all Christians, though the monks of the desert have lived in the practice of this journey. It is no surprise then, that monasticism is often thought of as the way of the cross.” (pp. 74-75)
What excites me about this section is where Dr. Andreopoulos teaches us that taking up our cross and following Christ is not so much concerned with the burden of the cross (as in that ever-popular saying that such-and-such is “my cross to bear”) or a concentration on all those things that we have to deny to ourselves (both of these have such negative connotations to the average person), but rather the submission of our lives to the will of God, a much more positive view of our life in Christ. Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion, we must remember, was first and foremost submission to the will of the Father (“Not my will but Thine be done” were His words in Gethsemane). So, like Christ, our way of the cross is also submission to the will of God.
The second thing that I found exciting in this passage is our constant connection with the rest of the church in our individual walk with the Lord. Christians cannot live apart from the rest of the Body. Especially in our culture, there is that history of “rugged individualism,” of the individual being totally self-reliant, that we can do it on our own. This is completely opposed to what all of Scripture teaches us. It can be said that, when Israel was taught that the sin of an individual affects the rest of the community, that they were being taught that they were part of a group and that whatever they did affected every member of the group, that they were not alone. This is why it is taught that the excuse for sin that “it doesn’t hurt anyone” is totally wrong and a lie of the devil. Thus, it is important for us to be connected to the rest of the body, to have a church family, for lack of a better way of saying it. Just as when a part of our body is severed, it withers and dies, so too if we are not connected to the rest of the Body of Christ, we too will wither and die. The popular view of monks and nuns is that they have separated themselves from the world, that they selfishly are concentrating on their own salvation. This is patently incorrect. Every good religious is aware that they are still connected to the rest of the Body. I have read that even hermits go to churches to receive Communion. Even if they do not go that far, they still are visited by a priest to receive the Sacraments. Their prayers are for the entire church, their own attainment of salvation is in concert with that of the entire Body; it is not an individual pursuit.