Were someone to ask me, beloved in the Lord, for a single reason to become an Orthodox Christian, I would say, while the experience of the Royal Hours on Great and Holy Friday every year—that would be sufficient! [Laughter]—is high concentration, in this joint service, of four canonical hours, why does this hit me so hard? First of all, it’s a very high concentration of the depths of the Christian understanding. And, second, it’s the only opportunity I have, during the entire course of the year, to preach a four-point sermon. [Laughter]

I want to start this morning— Not all my comments will be equally long, just this. I’d like to start with the text that Joseph read to you not many minutes ago, from the third chapter of Ephesians. I’ll use this as my guiding text for the morning.

I bend my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whom all paternity (all family) in heaven, on earth, is named, that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory (doxa, as in ortho-doxy, doxa)— according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man (o eso anthropos, the man within, o eso anthropos). That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted (the word there is riza, at least the word is more riza, which means root)— that you may be rooted and grounded (the etymological root there would be [themelion], grounded: foundation)— rooted and grounded in love, that you may be able to comprehend with all the saints (it’s the Church’s experience)— with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Paul is describing here a noetic experience that he wants all the hearers of this epistle to have: the knowledge of the incomprehensible love of Christ. And he describes this within a context but without further qualification as having four directions. I take these to be the four directions of the cross: the width—he begins with width, platos. You get the word “plateau” from that. The width and length and depth and height.

We begun this morning with the First Hour. The way I was raised, that was always called Prime, Hora Prima, Prime. Let’s begin with the width of the Christian experience. Now, there’s an irony here because the way in is narrow; the gate is narrow. One enters only by the obedience of faith. The place into which we enter, however, is wide. It is broad! It reaches out to horizons, and it grows more expansive as we enter more deeply into it. In fact, Paul lists depth as one of his dimensions.

How wide, how expansive is this? You see, on Palm Sunday we enter the narrow gate. Salvation is found only this way, on Palm Sunday. It’s our introduction to the cross. It’s our entrance into Holy Week, the week we ponder the narrow way of the cross. But what is the epistle that’s read on Palm Sunday? It’s not narrow! It’s broad! It’s as expansive as the universe and then more. This is the epistle reading from Palm Sunday.

Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are well-expressed—if there is any excellence (arete)—

The only time the word arete appears, by the way, in the New Testament. The great word summarizes all of Greek culture: arete, excellence.

—if there is any excellence, if there’s anything praise-worthy, discourse on these things (logizesthe).

He’s not talking about talking about it necessarily. The discourse can take place inside the soul, and should.

The things which you have learned and received and saw in me, these do, and the God of peace will be with you.

Paul lays here, in this text, the basis of all Christian culture. All our architecture, our rituals and ceremonies, our iconography, our music, our literature are all given warrant and guidance from this text. Once we enter into the love of Christ poured out on the cross, we receive this dimension of breadth. We become fully humanized, totally at one with everything that God has made, because of the riches that poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit unto the building up of what he calls the pleroma, the fullness, of Christ in the inner man. Amen.

In this third hour, beloved, this Hora Tertia, or Tierce in the English language, I want to talk about the second component, the second dimension that Paul gives of the experience—Christian noetic experience.

The full width of the Christian experience is, I argue, revealed only in its length. The length is part of the whole. If I were to ask most Christians now how long has the Christian Church been around, they would say what? 2,000 years? If I put the same question to St. Justin Martyr, he would have said 2,000 years. [Laughter] One thing about the early Christians: they never thought of themselves as early Christians! They thought of themselves as old Jews. They were convinced that the Church, when Jesus hung on the cross, had already had a long and cultured history. They were the heirs of a vast history and an enormous body of literature.

See, the cross does not stand in isolation from a whole bunch of things. This is why during Lent serious attention was given to all three parts of the Old Testament. During Lent, we were reading Genesis. You didn’t get very much of it, because we only read it on Wednesday nights, but if you were someplace where they have more services than we do, like Mount Athos, you’d have had the whole of Genesis read. We’re reading a little bit of Exodus during Holy Week. If we were to do it the way they did it at Jerusalem in the fourth century, the whole book of Exodus was read in church during Holy Week—but: Genesis and Exodus.

We read the wisdom books. During Lent it was mainly Proverbs; during Holy Week it’s Job: two of the wisdom books. But, again, if we were on Mt. Athos— And, by the way, Mt. Athos is not originally monastic. Originally, this was done in the parishes, at least at the big cathedral parishes where they had better clergy and more of them. You’d get all these Scriptures! And during this whole season, the book of Isaiah.

That’s the length of the Christian experience: the accumulation of significant works, any one of which would have been the major gift of God to us if none of the others had existed. If we— Just from Genesis; if we just had Genesis or just had Exodus or just had the psalms or just had Job or just had Isaiah or just had Sirach, we would have had so much. The great wealth—the [length] of the Christian experience—is conveyed to us through an ongoing history which is embodied in our literature. Amen.

I begin our reflections on the sixth hour, Hora Sexta, beloved, with a little bit of narrative. It’s the recent tragic destruction of the cathedral of Notre Dame; it’s sort of dominated our minds, at least my mind during this Lent. I don’t think I’ll have very many Lents left, but I’ll always think of Lent now in connection with that event. The fire had barely started when plans began to rebuild it, and I was very happy about that until I found out that UNESCO was going to be taking charge of that. Now I know what to expect.

But I remember commenting to Denise when they first started talking about rebuilding it, and I said, “I’m not going to take that rebuilding seriously unless it takes at least 500 years.” And Denise looked at me as though I were a freak—which is pretty often the way she looks at me. “They’re not going to take 500 years.” I said, “Of course they’re not going to take 500 years. Of course not. I know that.” [Laughter] What is missing—what will be missing—in the construction of this new cathedral? What it’s missing actually in the modern construction of almost any church— Modern churches are built for this congregation, people who worship here now. That’s one of the reasons why it’s risky even to consecrate churches any more because once they’re consecrated they can’t be unconsecrated, which means if everybody moves to another neighborhood, which is the case, for example, in Rome—we’ve got all these hundreds of churches which have no congregations—they have to be kept up because they’re consecrated churches.

What’s missing? What’s missing is this third component, this third dimension of the cross, which is the height. We started going with the breadth and the length; it’s the height. The width and the length of Christian experience depend entirely on height, this reaching beyond the stars, this sense that we have here no permanent city. Ironically, that’s how you build the best churches. They’re churches that your children will worship in; your grandchildren will worship in those churches, but you won’t—because you have here no lasting city; you’re looking above. It is precisely because we are already citizens of heaven that we experience the width and the length of the love of Christ. We are already in heaven; as the epistle to the Ephesians says, we have already sat, taken our seats, in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus.

The Orthodox Christians, above all, should know this and must know this, that heaven is not someplace else. It’s the height of where we are now; that we are already at the heavenly throne. Heaven is not someplace else. Listen to an early Christian testimony on this point. What does it mean to worship as Christians? He writes, “But you have to come to Mount Zion.” “You have come”: not “you’ll get there.”

You have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God. Your politia, your citizenship, is in heaven. You have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an enumerable company of angels, to the assembly and the Church (ekklesia), the Church of the firstborn, who are registered in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect.

We have some of their icons around; those just men made perfect: we’ve come to them. This is called the communion of the saints.

—to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better than that of Abel.

Now this dimension of the life in Christ is the one that gives shape to everything else. It makes us already in the high places with the Lord. So that when we pass from this earth, it is no more than the tearing of a very thin piece of translucent paper. It’s no more than that. You see, what divides us from heaven is no more than transparency, but there’s always translucency, that the light of heaven shines already into our lives. And we know this especially in our worship. Amen.

We arrive now, beloved, at the ninth hour, Hora Nona. Among the things I have never been asked to do which I would rather enjoy doing, but among those things, I’ve never been asked to draw up a seminary curriculum. If I were asked to draw up a seminary curriculum, I think I would have in the first year, first semester, an intense study of Dostoevsky—but I’ve never been asked to do that. [Laughter]

One semester, however, when I was teaching seminary, I was asked to teach a course on apologetics. They only asked me one time. [Laughter] And then the apologetics professor came back from his sabbatical. But the first text I had them read for this semester of apologetics, the first text was Crime and Punishment. I thought that was— I still think that’s an ideal introduction of the Gospel to modern man. It’s through the mind of Dostoevsky, particularly a work that directly reflects his conversion experience. He went on to write larger and arguably more significant works, but that’s the one that conveys his conversion experience. You see, because he really is Raskolnikov. When he’s converted, he’s converted from reading the story of Lazarus, or having it read to him by Sonya. Remember that? Sonya reads him this story of the raising of Lazarus. When she preaches, she preaches the Orthodox Holy Week, is essentially what we’re talking about. And she requires him to go to the crossroads, a place where the earth is marked by the cross, and to kneel down and kiss the earth, at that place. Kiss the earth at the place marked by the cross.

I use this as the story to introduce the fourth dimension of the cross, which Paul calls bathos, the depth, bathos, the depth. I believe the biggest affliction facing us in the world right now, as it is right now, is almost total absence of depth. There is no bathos. I mean, you can’t even go and buy groceries without a systematic attempt to distract you. One endures it. I was not able to get to the store this week until Wednesday because I’ve been sick most of the week, but I was able to go Wednesday. And that was my lenten penance. I think if you have to shop for groceries and listen to that music, you’re probably exempt from fasting. [Laughter] That’s already sufficient suffering. That’s enough podvig for anybody! [Laughter] The total lack of bathos—you can’t leave me with my thoughts! You have to pour some stupid noise in my mind, that young people pay good money for.

You see, the thing about the Gospel, my beloved people, is the Gospel is for keeps. It’s for keeps. It’s addressed to the depths of the human soul. It’s addressed to the memory of the human race. The cross stands in opposition to every form of human reduction. The sad thing about this world is that there is no paganism. Paganism is gone! And the whole approach of the Church for centuries was to address the questions of paganism, and the Church got really good at addressing the questions of paganism, but now paganism is gone! There is no paganism. There’s a brand-new demonic thing called the secular, which is not pagan.

My great fear for the cathedral of Notre Dame: it’s just going to be a question of whether that building belongs to the secularists or the Muslims. There’s nobody else in contention for it! In France, there’s nobody else in contention for the human soul except the secularists and the Muslims. You see, because France exemplifies at least the culture I know, which is Western culture, in which there’s constant reduction of what it means to be a human being: we’re reduced to biochemical responses; we’re just a bunch of cells; there is no purpose in life; reason itself, they’ve reasoned, is an illusion; we’re not made in the image and likeness of God, we’re descended from apes.

What does the cross affirm? What’s affirmed here? What is the message screaming out from this figure? “Hey, people, I take you seriously! Hey, people, you’re important! I love you! I take you so seriously that I’m going to give everything I have for your sake. Those souls of yours, they’re so important, I am going to redeem them. I’m going to dedicate my entire existence to telling you you have souls and how to save them.” Amen.