Sunday of the Veneration of the Holy Cross
“He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, ‘If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’ And he said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power’” (The Gospel According to St. Mark 8:34-9:1).
TL;DR Get over yourself and carry your cross.
This week marks the mid-point of Lent, and the veneration of the Holy Cross, is meant to instill in us the strength to continue on venturing into the desert with Christ. For it is at this point that we are most assured of our own weaknesses, our own cowardice, and our own blemishes. Yet, we have no reason to fear, no reason to despair, we are reminded on this day and this week and every time we celebrate Eucharist that Christ, indeed, has defeated death. That we need not despair over our sins but repent. This is what the Holy Cross symbolizes for us, it represents victory over death, victory over despair, redemption.
No matter how far from God we are or become, there is nowhere He would not go to reconcile us to Himself. God literally goes to Hell to free us from death and to return us to His Presence in the kingdom. This is why we take comfort in the Life-Giving Cross of the Godman, and why we seek its healing for it has become a Tree of Life.
We know redemption is found in its terrible profundity and why we must pick up our own cross and carry it. This is way to eternal well-being.
This is the central message of this Sunday’s gospel message and Lent itself: to follow Christ to eternal life by embracing the Cross. There is no other way to Paradise:
St. Anthony of Optina said, “Of course, it would be easier to get to paradise with a full stomach, all snuggled up in a soft feather-bed, but what is required is to carry one’s cross along the way, for the kingdom of God is not attained by enduring one or two troubles, but many!”
I believe that Lent is a journey that forces us to confront the myriad ways in which we hide from God and refuse to bring our pains forward, the ways in which we refuse to carry our cross, because we would rather sit and grow resentful toward God and neighbor that we have such sufferings that plague us, by our own design, though.
We are trapped in the prisons of sin and temptation, falling over and over again into the same patterns, routines, and habits that bring about suffering in our lives because we want to be trapped. We yearn to be enslaved to our sins, imprisoned in our illness.
We want to be resentful.
Remaining in suffering is a form of pride.
What this attitude does crystallizes us in our own passive ignorance. Pride is stagnation, it is a nonactionable orientation. This is why Christians cannot afford, for a moment to slip into judgement because judgement produces pride and is a product of pride.
It becomes a sort of bio-spiritual feedback loop of inaction. We become the proverbial morning star: a constellation of self-relation, everything around us becomes either something to be consumed, where we enter into a normalized licentiousness and everything that we witness is judged according to our standards.
It is Satanic.
So, operative action is thus to refrain from speaking so much, shed grumbling, lose judgement, and pick up our cross and follow Jesus our Lord.
The mid-point of Lent offers… or the second mid-point… offers us the opportunity to truly see what the object of our affections must be: the aim of our entire lives, which in the Christian life is theosis, and how much distracts us from it.
Additionally, when we begin taking our spiritual lives and the state of our souls seriously, we are confronted with how little we can accomplish without God; how much we must rely on Him to help carry us forward to His Resurrection. And our own resurrection if we can let go of our desires, our wants, and our thinking that we can do anything on our own.
We are invited to venerate His Holy Cross on this day and are, in turn, invited to invite Jesus into our struggles, our ills, our suffering. There, we can ask Him to heal us, because we must carry our cross to achieve Paradise, in this life and the next, but we cannot do so if we refuse to let go of our grumbling, our judgements, and our resentments. We must crucify them on today’s cross that we might carry tomorrow’s cross renewed.
This is the transformative power of living by The Way of the Cross, following in the footsteps of Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection. We live each day dying to ourselves and reborn, conforming our likeness to Christ with each cross we carry and the troubles that we put to death on them. The Christian life is paradoxically living death, embracing the victory of the Cross and crucifying the self to be truly realized.
This is the power of the Life-Giving Cross. To be stripped bare of what we cling to in this life so that the potential of eternity awakens within us. The Cross is the enemy of untruth and to bear witness to it and carry it is to plant our feet squarely in reality. Carrying the cross is a humility that does not engender cowardice; carrying the cross is a strength that does not fuel domination; carrying the cross is being yoked to Jesus’ peace.
We can brave the world with our cross, for it will reveal the truth in and around us; it’s our victory against death. It is where we receive nourishment for our spiritual journeys. It is hope, a beacon of hope that knows no evening for it bears the Light of the World.
The Apostle writes,
“Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Every high priest chosen from among mortals is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness, and because of this he must offer sacrifice for his own sins as well as for those of the people. And one does not presume to take this honor but takes it only when called by God, just as Aaron was.
So also Christ did not glorify himself in becoming a high priest but was appointed by the one who said to him,
‘You are my Son;
today I have begotten you’;
as he says also in another place,
‘You are a priest forever,
according to the order of Melchizedek’” (Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:1-6).
God does not stand outside time, space, and our suffering, but the very Godman condescended to walk with us through our trials, struggles, and temptations. For God so loved the world that He entered into the human condition to deify that very flesh so we might all be reconciled to Him. If we really reflect on the meaning of this—that God became man so that man could become God, then how much more seriously would we embrace discipleship?
Not only did He condescend to take mortal flesh, but He descended into Hades to call His children back into Paradise. He calls each of us back to the kingdom and to seek the kingdom is to seek God Himself. And to seek God is to die to the self.
To follow Jesus Christ is to condescend, humbling ourselves and serving others; to complain less of our troubles and sit with our neighbors in their sufferings, and to carry our cross.
The life of a Christian is movement, refusing to become crystallized in the places that we fall, the potholes and ditches along the spiritual path, but to remain focused on our goal. Ever wary and present on our path, acknowledging our limitations, our passions, temptations, and our need for a Savior.
This is the Way. Selah.
The blessed Seraphim Rose writes, “Only struggle a little more. Carry your cross without complaining. Don’t think you are anything special. Don’t justify your sins and weaknesses but see yourself as you really are. And, especially, love one another.”
We venerate the Holy Cross because it is the Tree of Life that restored humanity to its eternal state by the death of God the Word. We venerate the Holy Cross because we are taking it into ourselves and thereby able to walk the rest of the Way with Christ to His death and our own. The kingdom of heaven is not found in the feather-bed, a full stomach, and the objects of our lusts, but the kingdom of God is found through the cross. Today’s cross and tomorrow’s cross: that is where the kingdom lies, because there awaits our resurrection in Him.
Si comprehendis, non est Deus
Witness, NM 