Believe it or not, we have reached the mid-point of Great Lent! No doubt, as I have spoken to many of you this past week, we are all feeling the “Lenten lull”. The days of fasting and added prayer seem to become more difficult. The worldly temptations ramp up considerably, and we begin to wonder when the light at the end of the tunnel will come.
In the middle of the fast, The Church, in her wisdom, puts in front of us the wood of the cross. Just as Moses once threw wood into the bitter waters of Marah to sweeten them for the Israelites…we also now venerate the wood of the cross so that it might sweeten our own bitter Lenten struggle against the passions.
For many of you, especially if this is your first Great Lent and you have not been to many of the weekday services, there might be a feeling of awkwardness when first bowing down to the cross. There are many Christian communities that are gathering this morning in congregations that refuse to have the symbol of the cross anywhere in their worship space…much less bow down low to the instrument used for our Lord’s Death.
When I was in seminary, I heard the story of a woman who used to challenge pious Christians about their faith on the campus of a university. She once saw an Orthodox priest walking through campus in his cassock, wearing a large pectoral cross around his neck. Expecting to challenge the priest, she ran over to him and made an observation that she was sure would stump him:
“Someone I loved very dearly was shot and murdered in their home. I would think it very stupid for me to immortalize them, by wearing a piece of jewelry shaped like the gun that they were killed with! Why do you Christians insist on wearing the very instrument of which Jesus was killed?”
The priest’s response was a simple: “In the cross, we don’t see an instrument of death…but rather we see what true Love looks like.”
What does the cross mean for us as Orthodox Christians? To the Romans and the Jews at the time, it was an instrument of humiliation. To kill Jesus in secret wasn’t good enough. They needed to humiliate him, to beat him, to have him stripped naked and put on display for all who might oppose the corrupt Jewish authority.
Even in our own day, there is a sad understanding of what the cross is. There are some that see the cross is just an instrument of death that was required by an angry God as a payoff of the penalty for our sins. This idea wasn’t really popularized until the Middle Ages in the west, and in no way was the focus of the early Church. This is perhaps one of the very reasons why we have so many people that reject Christianity today. Why would they want to follow such an angry God?
The Cross goes well beyond these limited understandings, because 2000 years ago, Christ turned a simple piece of wood from a Roman instrument of humiliation, into a symbol of victory. It is this victory that we wear on our chests. It is this victory that we put high above our Churches. It is this victory that we literally BOW DOWN to, because we see it as a symbol of hope from God, who willingly endured all of this for us.
St. Athanasius says that before the Cross, “God saw us destroying ourselves…and pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure the death should have mastery, and all of the work of the Father turn into dust, He took Himself a body, even as our own. He surrendered His body to death instead of all…This He did this out of sheer love for us.” (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation)
When someone asks what Love is, the answer is simple, and it doesn’t require words. All we need to show them is the Cross. Just as its base was buried deep beneath the earth to support the weight of our Lord, so also do we need to bury the Love of the Cross deep beneath the recesses of our hearts, so that we can better understand and come into communion with God, who so richly pours out that Love on His Creation.