Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

            The cross is not a metaphor. The cross is not a metaphor. The cross of Jesus Christ is death. The cross of Jesus Christ is an instrument of torture, a source of pain, a heavy burden, leading unto death. The cross of Jesus Christ is a symbol of complete and absolute self-denial, a self-emptying, a kenosis, from the Greek ekénōsen, used by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Philippians, “But [Jesus] heautòn ekénōsen, ‘emptied himself / made himself nothing’” (Phil 2:7). The cross is pain. The cross is self-denial. The cross is death. The cross is not a metaphor.

            At least, it is not the sterilized and popularized metaphor that our contemporary culture has fashioned it to be. Crosses adorn t-shirts; crosses can be pieces of high-end jewelry. Crosses are bumper-stickers, earrings, tattoos. Crosses are still everywhere, despite the waning acceptance and endorsement of Christianity in modern America. Crosses are everywhere because they are treated as metaphor—sterile metaphor; consumable, palpable, safe metaphor. “Bear your cross… a ‘strained relationship’ [or] ‘emotional baggage’ [or] ‘low self-esteem’ with confidence in Jesus.” Crosses are everywhere because we have forgotten: the cross is real pain. The cross is real self-denial. The cross… is real death. When we treat the cross as anything less than this, we reduce it to “self-help mantra”: “The Cross and You: 10 Simple Steps to Crucify the Old Man,” now on sale at your local Barnes & Noble, with free workbook, and 10%-off discount for the audiobook edition, only through the end of the month. … But the Gospels say:

‘When [Jesus] had called the people to Himself, with His disciples also, He said to them, ‘Whoever desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it’” (Mark 8:34-35).

“Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor's headquarters, …and they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him and led him away to crucify him” (Matt 27:27-31).

“… and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of the Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him” (John 19:17-18a; italics mine).

Given what follows later in the Gospels—what we have just read—we can only interpret the words of St. Mark thus: Jesus is speaking of a cross; a real cross, real pain, real self-denial, real death. “Whoever desires to come after me (i.e., ‘to be my disciple’, ‘to bear the name “Christian”’), let him deny himself, and [die], and follow me [in death]” (Mark 8:34, sic.).

            In the life and the spirituality of the Orthodox Church, the cross has never lost its most material meaning. Yes, in Orthodoxy the cross also adorns many of our buildings. It adorns our altars, our vestments, candlesticks, trim work. It adorns baptismal robes, and the covers for our holy books. We put it on signs, pens, religious tracts. Orthodoxy too uses the cross aesthetically. And yet, this is because we love the cross and we embrace the most literal aspect of the cross: death. In the Orthodox Church, the cross is also a decoration; the cross is also a symbol. But never is the cross mere metaphor. We have too many saints who have been crucified with Christ, quite literally; St. Peter, St. Andrew, St. Simeon of Jerusalem, St. Eulalia of Barcelona; too, too many to name here. We have too many saints who have been crucified with Christ to forget that the cross is more than decoration, more than “significant”.

             I will repeat myself: Orthodoxy embraces the most literal aspect of the cross—death. “Whoever desires to come after me… .” “Where to, Lord?” “To the heavenly Kingdom. … Let him deny himself, and die.” From her most nascent years the Church has built her altars on the tombs of the martyrs. The Church has venerated and kissed and enshrined the relics of her saints, not as memorials of death, but of life after death, for “[God] is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matt 22:32b). The Church has bowed down before the implement of our Lord’s saving death, the cross. And in all of this, the Church communicates a singular truth. It is the same truth which our Lord speaks in today’s Reading,

“For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”

In life: death. In death: life. You cannot get to heaven in a pickup truck; you cannot get to heaven in an aeroplane. And you cannot get to heaven alive, that is, alive to the world. You (and me) sinful, wayward, unrepentant man must die, so that Christ can live in you (and in me).

            The Apostle Paul says in his Epistle to the Galatians,

“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 loves me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).

This sounds as though the Apostle is contradicting my whole argument today: the cross is not a metaphor. But here, is he not speaking metaphorically? “I have been crucified with Christ… .” St. Paul is clearly alive and well, as he is writing to the Galatian Church. No, he does not speak metaphorically. He is speaking spiritually. That is to say, in baptism, by the anointing of the Holy Spirit of God, in becoming “the Apostle to the Gentiles,” through pain and sacrifice, shipwreck, hunger, persecution, mocking, scourging, imprisonment; through all these things, the Apostle has presently incarnated a future reality. St. Paul will die. He will be beheaded in Rome for confessing Jesus Christ as Lord. He will die for Christ; so now, he is dying for Christ. St. Paul understood, as have all the saints, what has been said before: you cannot enter the heavenly Kingdom alive. The present sinful man cannot enter heaven alive. He must die. She must die. You must die. I must die. We must die to sin “for the wages of sin is death,” so that we might live in Christ, “[for] for the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 6:23).

            Our father among the saints, Nikolai Velimirovich, commenting on today’s Gospel, says,

“What does it mean to take up your cross? It means the willing acceptance, at the hand of Providence, of every means of healing, bitter though it may be, that is offered. Do great catastrophes fall on you?  Be obedient to God’s will, as Noah was.  Is sacrifice demanded of you? Give yourself into God’s hands with the same faith as Abram had when he went to sacrifice his son. Is your property ruined?  Do your children die suddenly? Suffer it all with patience, cleaving to God in your heart, as Job did. Do your friends forsake you, and you find yourself surrounded by enemies?  Bear it all without grumbling, and with faith that God’s help is at hand, as the apostles did” (Homilies, vol. 1).

“Do great catastrophes fall on you? … Is sacrifice demanded of you? … Do your children die suddenly? … Bear it all without grumbling, and with faith that God’s help is at hand… .” The death of the body is inevitable, brethren. The death of the soul is ours to command. How we accept death in the flesh will dictate the forfeiture or triumph of our souls. The cross is not a metaphor. The cross is our weapon of peace, but it is also our earthly end, if we are united to Christ. It is the “cup that [Christ] drank… the baptism [with which he] was baptized” (cf. Matt 20:22-23). If we are in Christ, then the cross—scary and painful thought it may be—is our cup, our common baptism, and our ascent to heaven.

Through Thy Precious and Life-Giving Cross, O Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.  

Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!