On the third Sunday of Great Lent, the cross of Christ is solemnly carried from the sanctuary into the middle of the church, and it’s placed on a stand in the midst of the church, surrounded by candles. Usually the cross itself is surrounded with flowers or with basil leaves. Usually this cross that is brought out is a crucifixion: it has the body of the Lord Jesus hanging on the cross. Hopefully, usually, it is made out of wood rather than metal or ceramic or some other material, because in the services the cross as wood, the wood of the cross and the tree of the cross, is constantly mentioned, and therefore the wooden cross with the body of Jesus carved onto it is normally the type of cross that is placed in the middle of the church for veneration and contemplation.

This cross is placed in the middle of the church, and it remains there the whole week. It remains the whole middle week of Lent, for the faithful people, when they come to the church, in order to meditate and to contemplate the cross of Christ. And it’s interesting that this particular meditation and contemplation and veneration in the act of worship is of the cross itself. During Passion Week, of course, the crucifixion of Christ, then, the meaning of the cross particularly as the instrument of the death of Christ and the saving Passion of Christ, the crucifixion of Christ, the death of Christ is what is celebrated and contemplated and worshiped, venerated, during the Passion Week.

But in the midst of Lent, as, for example, on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on September 14, the emphasis and the what-is-being-contemplated is the cross itself, the cross itself as the means of our salvation. What is contemplated is the cross as the instrument by which we are saved, or, as the service would say, as the weapon of God, the invincible weapon of God, the powerful, life-creating weapon of God by which all of God’s enemies are defeated and destroyed. We remember that the Gospel, the term “Gospel,” is a proclamation of a victory in battle. It is the good news and the glad tidings that our King is victorious.

And so it’s interesting that the psalm line that is used on these occasions of the contemplation and veneration of the cross is the psalm line, “God is our King before the ages; he has worked salvation in the midst of the earth. God is our King before the ages; he has worked salvation in the midst of the earth.” The other psalm line that is used is: “Bow down before the Lord and worship at his holy footstool, for it is holy.” And this means that the Lord is enthroned as a King, and we bow down before his feet. But we see that his throne is the cross, and the footstool is the holy cross, and he is holy and the cross is holy. Indeed, in that line, it is not clear grammatically what is proclaimed as being holy is the Lord: “Bow down before the Lord and worship at his footstool, for he is holy,” or whether it means the footstool, the cross itself: “Bow down before the Lord and worship at his footstool, for it is holy.”

But certainly the Lord is holy. He is the holy, holy, holy God, Jesus Christ is the Holy One of God, and the cross is the holy cross. The cross is become holy. This instrument of public execution and death has become the holiest sign for Christians on earth. It is the cross that the Christians wear around their neck on their body. It is the cross with which they are inscribed when they’re baptized and sealed with the Spirit. It is the sign of the cross that is put on our bodies when we worship God and pray to God. And the cross is the very center of the Christian faith. We preach Christ crucified, folly to Gentiles, scandal to Jews—and Muslims—but to us who believe it’s the wisdom and the power of God.

I like to say that for Eastern Orthodox Christians, all theology is ultimately stavrology. Theologia, the word about God, is stavrologia, the logos tou stavrou, the word of the cross. And so in the midst of Lent, like in the midst of our life, every single day, Christians are called to venerate the cross, to contemplate the cross, to meditate on the cross. And they are exhorted to take up the cross, to take up the cross. And indeed, on this particular Sunday and week during Great Lent, the gospel reading is exactly that aspect of the cross. When Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, the Messiah, in Mark and in Matthew and in Luke, Jesus says, once he is confessed as the Christ, that he must be crucified. And it says in Mark’s gospel that only when he is confessed as being the Christ that he commands the disciples not to tell anyone yet about him, and then he begins to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days, rise again. And he says this very plainly for the first time.

Peter responds negatively. He says, “The Messiah is to bring God’s kingdom. The Messiah is to endure and live forever. The Messiah’s kingdom has no end. How can you speak about being rejected and even beaten and scourged and killed? That’s impossible!” And then the Lord Jesus calls him Satan; he says, “Get behind me, Satan, for you are not on the side of God but of men. You look at things not from God’s perspective but from the perspective of fallen man.” It’s interesting to note, as Archbishop Demetrios, the present archbishop and primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in America, he wrote a book about St. Mark’s gospel when he was a professor of the New Testament at Holy Cross Theological School and at Harvard. He wrote this book and he pointed out in that book that the only person that the Lord ever called “Satan” was the chief apostle, Peter. And he called him Satan right after Peter confessed him as the Christ, because Peter, after confessing him as the Christ, said that he should never suffer; that he should not suffer. And the Lord says that he must suffer; he has to suffer.

But what we are contemplating now is the fact that we have to suffer with him. So the gospel on this particular Sunday has to do with us, not with Christ but with us. And so the gospel is taken from St. Mark, and it begins with the 34th verse of the eighth chapter. Jesus calls to him the multitude with his disciples, and he said to them:

If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it. For what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and to forfeit his life, or soul.

The word there is psyche. In King James it says “soul”; in RSV it says “life,” nephesh in Hebrew, his life.

And what can a man give in return for his life? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with his holy angels.

So we are told, in no uncertain terms, that if we are to be the disciples of Christ, we are to deny ourselves and to take up our cross and to deny our self and lose our life for the sake of the Gospel. And this is very important. We are not simply told to deny our self or to lose our life in general, just, you know— if we were just going to go around denying our self and losing our life, we would be ill! We would be mentally ill; we’d belong in some kind of institute where we’d need mental help. The denial of the self and the taking up of the cross is very clear: for Christ’s sake. “He who loses his life for my sake,” the Lord says, “and for the sake of the Gospel,” for the sake of the good news that God has destroyed his enemies, the last enemy of which is death, on the cross. And this is the way that we also destroy death; this is also the way that we overcome our enemies by denying our self for the sake of Christ, not just denying our self for its own sake, but denying our self for the sake of Christ and for the sake of God’s Gospel in Christ, the Gospel of Christ, the good news of Christ.

Now, when we hear these words, we can’t help but think of a wonderful early Christian hymn that is found in the writings of the New Testament. It’s actually found in the letter to Timothy. The letter to Timothy, the second letter of Timothy, in the second chapter, we hear these wonderful words. It says, “The saying is sure,” and the Apostle says this after he says, “I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they may also obtain salvation, the Gospel for which I am suffering and wearing fetters like a criminal.” So it’s salvation in Christ Jesus with its eternal glory that St. Paul is suffering and enduring for. And then he says, “The saying is sure,” and here most scholars think this was a hymn; it was an early Christian song, a kind of poetic song that was committed to memory and to singing in the context of worship, and it goes like this:

If we have died with him, we shall also live with him.
If we patiently endure with him (or suffer with him), we shall also reign with him.
If we deny him, he also will deny us.
If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.

So we are told in this early Christian hymn that the only way to live with Christ is to die with him, for his sake, for the sake of the Gospel. The only way to reign with him in his kingdom is to patiently endure, to suffer patiently, together with him all things. And we are told also that we may not deny our self: we may end up denying him! And basically that’s the choice; that’s the either-or. We either deny him for our own sake, for the sake of our self, or we deny our self for the sake of him, and you can’t have it both ways.

So it says that if we deny him, he also will deny us, but then it also says these wonderful words: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful.” He remains faithful to us no matter if we’re not faithful to him. Why? Because he cannot deny himself. He is the great Lover. He is the beloved Son of God who comes into the world to destroy all of God’s enemies for our sake, for us human beings and for our salvation he came. Not for himself, but totally for us.

And this is even what we find in the epistle reading for this particular Sunday. The reading is again from the letter to the Hebrews, as all the readings are during Great Lent, and it’s confessed again that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God. And so we have to hold fast to our confession of faith. We have to hold fast to him. And then it says, “For we have not a High Priest who is unable to suffer with us in our weaknesses, but One who in every respect has been tempted and tried exactly like we are, yet without sinning.” He did not sin; as the new and final Adam, he does not sin.

“Therefore,” it says, “let us with boldness draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy from him and find grace and help in time of our need.” We can add: when we are patiently enduring, when we are suffering together with him, because he himself has come to us. And the great high priests are appointed by God, like Aaron was, but the priests of the Old Testament had to offer the sacrifices for their own weaknesses, for their own sins; but Christ, who is the High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek, who is God’s only-begotten Son, he did not exalt himself to be made High Priest, but God appointed him. And so in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up the prayers and supplications and loud cries in order to save us from our sins and to suffer together with us. So he is suffering together with us, and we have to deny ourselves and to suffer together with him.

Now, the cross tells us all of this. The word of the cross, the cross before our eyes, the cross that we gaze upon, that we look on, it tells us all these things. The cross is lifted up on this day, just like Christ was lifted up upon the cross. And even it is a teaching of our Holy Fathers that Jesus had to die upon the cross. It had to be the wood; it had to be the tree, because it was through the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that sin came into the world, and the cross is the tree of life. As we ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which means that we sinned and brought death, so we have to eat and drink of the tree of life, which is the body and blood of Christ hanging upon the cross, so that we would have life.

It’s so beautiful in the Church services that that relationship, that comparison between the trees in the garden are related to the cross, the tree of the cross. And even there’s a wonderful part of the service where we sing, “Let all the trees of the forest rejoice. Let all the trees rejoice, because on this day the Son of God is hanging on the tree of the cross.” We’re contemplating him hanging on the tree of the cross, the wood of the cross, by which we are saved. And it’s amazing that it is the execution symbol, the symbol of public execution, and execution for the lowest class of society. Only the dregs of society by the Romans were killed by crucifixion. If you were a high-class Roman, like a citizen of Rome, if you had to be executed, you were beheaded very neatly. That is why, according to the Tradition, St. Paul, who was a Roman citizen, was martyred and put to death by beheading, whereas the Apostles Peter and Andrew, according to the Tradition, were put to death by being crucified, Peter even upside-down according to Tradition, because he said he was unworthy to be crucified as his Lord, and Andrew on an X-shaped cross.

But the cross is there in front of us, most amazingly, as the symbol of the greatest defiling death and degrading and shameful and humiliating death possible, but then it is now the great sign of victory, of God’s Gospel, of God’s love. It’s called the weapon of victory, the trophy of victory. And it is even the means by which the Messiah is put to death, according to the Holy Fathers, because of how it’s shaped, because it is the height and the depth and the breadth and the width; it goes up and down, it goes eastern, western, sideways. And on it the Lord is hanging with his arm extended, embracing the whole of creation. It is high in the air. And as Athanasius and other of the Holy Fathers said, it is on the cross that the demons of the air, the aerial phantoms, the powers of darkness, are put to shame and destroyed so that the whole cosmos is cleansed, it is purified, when the Son of God is lifted up upon the cross.

And in St. John’s gospel it says that the Son of Man must be lifted up; like Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, the Son of Man must be lifted up upon the cross. And even in St. John’s gospel, it’s one of those places where the divine name is used by Jesus. He says, “And when I am lifted up, you will know that I am.” That I am: that’s the divine name, and usually it says, “I am he,” but when he is lifted up, we know that he is Yahweh; we know that he is the I am, that he is the Lord, because that act is the fulfillment of the mystery of God from all ages, the ultimate saving act of God, the final, mighty act of God in human history.

And so you have this shape of the cross. Very often the Fathers would refer to the texts of Paul in the letter to the Ephesians where, speaking about Christ and the Holy Spirit, and our being rooted and grounded in love, the Apostle says that we may have the power to comprehend with all of the saints what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth, and to know the love of God, the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fullness of God. To know the breadth and the length and the height and the depth, and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, which is beyond knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. And this breadth and length and height and depth: it’s seen in the cross.

And actually the four-pointedness of the cross, or in the Slavic tradition, the eight-pointedness of the cross, that four and eight, that’s a cosmic symbol, too, because there are the four directions—north, south, east, west. There are the four winds; there are the four corners of the universe in the biblical symbolism as we find in the Apocalypse. So, looking upon the cross, looking upon him who has been pierced, God is our King before the ages, working salvation in the midst of the earth, lifted up upon the cross, with that titulum upon the cross which says, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” That’s St. John’s gospel. In Mark it simply says, “The King of the Jews.” In Matthew and Luke, it says— One says, “This is the King of the Jews. Houtos estin ho Vasilevs ton Iudaeon.” And the other one says, “This is Jesus. This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”

It’s interesting that the only thing written about Jesus when he was alive on earth was the titululm on the cross, the sign on the cross that publicly proclaimed the reason for his execution, because by Roman law when a criminal was executed, his crime had to be publicly displayed on the cross. And Jesus’ crime was to be the King of the Jews, but Jesus himself, when he was on trial, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he is killed for quoting the Scripture to the high priest when he says, “You will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds with all his angels. He is the Lord who said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make all the enemies a stool for your feet.’ ” So the psalm says, “Bow down before the Lord and worship at his footstool, for it is holy and he is holy.”

So we have that cross in front of us at this point during Great Lent, and we’re called to contemplate it, to venerate it, to worship God and his saving act and his Gospel through it. But what does it mean to take it up? What does it mean when Jesus said, “If any person would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”? What does it mean to deny one’s self and to lose oneself for the sake of the Gospel? What does it mean not to be ashamed of Christ in this adulterous and sinful generation? This question is asked again and again. What does it mean to take up the cross? What does it mean to die with Christ, or to co-die? It’s so interesting that in the letters of St. Paul you have this prefix “co-” all the time. In Greek, it’s “syn-.” In English we would say, syn-, co-crucify, co-die, co-suffer, be co-buried. Especially in the letter to the Romans, you have this kind of language being used all the time: co-crucify, co-suffer, co-die, be co-buried—then be co-raised, then be co-glorified, then to be co-inheritors, and then to co-reign, to reign together with: die together with, suffer together with, be buried together with, be raised together with, to be enthroned together with, to be glorified together with, to inherit everything in all creation together with. That’s the language of the New Testament.

But what does it mean? How does it work? What are we talking about? The simplest way of answer it would simply be: It means that we are completely and totally given to obedience to God the Father as his Son Jesus Christ was on this earth. What it really means is that being totally entrusting our self to God, having no words but the Word of God, no will but the will of God, no work but the work of God, like Christ himself, that, believing in him, we do the very same work that he does. In St. John’s gospel, this is one of the most amazing sentences in Scripture, where it says, “The person who believes in me”—it’s in singular; it’s a present participle. “The person who believes in me will do the works that I have done, and greater works than these will he do,” Christ boldly says, “because I go to the Father.” And that means, because Christ is crucified and glorified and enthroned at the right hand of the Father, his disciples, humanly speaking, can do the works that he does, and even in some sense greater, because they’re being done by creatures, by faith and by grace in the life in the fallen world.

So to deny oneself and take up one’s cross basically means to be totally surrendered to God, no matter what. No matter what people are doing to you: if they hate you, they revile you, they beat you, they scourge you, they ridicule you, they crown you with thorns, they put you to death in the most vile death, you say, “Father, forgive them,” and you love them. And when all that is going on and you have to go through that because of the will of God—because this is God’s will for us; it was the will for Jesus so that we could be saved and Jesus could save us and that we could be deified and glorified together with him—then we have to say to God the Father, as we scream in our heart, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me”—because we are abandoned into the hands of the evil-doers and the evil of this world—we still at the same time say, “Father, Abba, into your hands we give our life. Into your hands we give our soul, our spirit.” We are totally faithful to God when he abandons us into the hands of the evil of this world and into the hands of evil-doers.

Another way of putting it is that, simply, to use a four-letter word, it’s love. It’s love. To deny our self and to take up our cross is to love, no matter what. To love God with all our mind, soul, heart, and strength, no matter what is happening to us. Even if we feel totally abandoned and forsaken by God, we still love him. And it also means to love our neighbor, including our enemy; no matter what, no matter what they’re doing to us, no matter how evilly, badly, wickedly they’re treating us, we still love them; we still forgive them. That’s what it means to take up the cross. It means total love of God, total love for neighbor, in total obedience to God, in total imitation of Christ, and we see all of this in the figure of the cross, in the sign of the cross.

St. Innocent of Alaska, he wrote a little book for the Native Americans. He was a missionary there, and he wrote in this little book, which is entitled, An Indication into the Way of the Kingdom of Heaven, the way to get to go to heaven, to be saved, he wrote this little book—he commented on denying our self and taking up our cross in this way. He said there are, first of all, for us fallen creatures, what he called “interior crosses.” This means what we bear in our flesh, what we bear in our mind, in our brain, in our body, in our heart, just by being born into the sinful world. For example, we may bear diseases, illnesses, predispositions to sin, passions.

In fact, that term, “predisposition,” it’s a technical term in Eastern Orthodox Church Fathers. It’s called in Greek prolepsis. It means that we are prone to certain evils just by being conceived in iniquities and brought forth in this fallen world. All of the sins of the generations before us—our parents, their parents—it’s all in our bodies. It’s in our brain; it’s in our DNA. So that if our parents had certain illnesses, we will have to bear them. If our parents had certain—I don’t know—mental type of illnesses, schizophrenias or hysterias or some predisposition to certain addictions like for drugs or alcohol—we will have those things to struggle with within our self. And we’ll have what are called evil memories. And the memories will not only be our own, they’ll be the memories of our forebears. It’ll be that presence of those who produced us.

As it says in Genesis that Seth was born of Adam and Eve, in Adam’s image and likeness, not just the image and likeness of God, which can never be erased, but that image and likeness of God is obscured and darkened and twisted and diseased by our parents. So we are in the image and likeness of our forebears, of our ancestors, and that’s a cross that we have to bear. For example, sexual stuff, like sexual orientation, for example. Let’s take even specifically same-sex attraction, homosexual orientation. I believe that it’s very clear, according to Scripture and our Holy Fathers that some of us human beings are born with that particular affliction—and it is an affliction; it’s not a gift, it’s not a grace. By the providence of God, that’s a cross to be borne by certain people, just like others are born with, I don’t know, lustful, lecherous feelings towards, I don’t know, women’s bodies and things like that. That’s already in us, and according to St. Innocent those are crosses to bear; those are crosses to take up. God doesn’t take them away from us; God gives us the grace and the power to be victorious over them by the power of the cross of Christ.

And then St. Innocent says there are exterior crosses, exterior crosses that don’t come from within us but outside us, like, for example, even diseases, illnesses that can come upon us in this world. In general, we could say that the crosses of the exterior nature are the three main tragedies of a righteous person in the old covenant. If you read the Old Testament Scriptures, there’s three terrible things that can happen to a servant of God. One is that he would be stricken by disease, he would be stricken in young age by disease and have to suffer diseases. Another is that he would be stricken by evil people, by the enemies, that the enemy would strike him down and kill him or destroy him or maim him. And the other, another is that he would be struck by what we would call nowadays natural calamities, cosmic calamities, like earthquakes and floods and fire and sword and tsunamis. So you have the enemies, and you have the natural enemies of the fallen world.

And by the way, these so-called natural enemies, what insurance companies call “acts of God,” are providential acts of God, to be sure. However, it is the Christian teaching that if Adam was with God, if we were with God, if we were not sinful, we would have control over nature. We would have control over the winds and the waters and the fires and the earth and its movements. And in the coming kingdom of God, together with the risen Christ, we will.

But these exterior crosses are diseases, illnesses; wicked people, criminals. We could be mugged on the street and put to death or raped by crazy people, or attacked by enemies. And then there can be all these forces of nature that we can’t control. Those are all crosses to bear also. And the teaching is that, as Christians, we have to bear these crosses. We have to learn how to transfigure them into victories through the cross of Christ. We have to learn by the cross of Christ how to take the evils of this world and to use them for our salvation and the salvation of our brothers and sisters, our fellow human beings, and even our worst enemies. That’s what it means to deny our self, not to surrender to the evils of this world or to the evils that we find working in our own earthly members, our brains and our bodies, the evils that are around us, the evils that come to us in the fallen world; but that, by the power of the cross, by the virtue of the cross, as the song in the Church says, we can be entering into the salvation of Christ who saves us by the power of the cross.

So on this particular Sunday, the main hymn is: “O Lord, save your people, bless your inheritance, grant victories to the Orthodox Christians, to the Christians, over their enemies, the enemies of God, and by the power of the cross preserve your kleronomia, your people.” And then the veneration hymn is: “Before your cross we bow down in worship”—in veneration, actually, technically. “Before thy cross we bow down in veneration, O Master, and your holy resurrection we praise and we glorify.”

So we lift up the cross; we hold it on high. It is the sign of our victory, the sign of the Gospel. And we pray to God in meditation and contemplation and veneration of the holy cross, to not only know and to believe that it is by this cross that we are saved, but to know and to believe that we cannot be saved unless we take it up. It’s not enough to decorate the cross, carry the cross in procession, lift it up high, bless ourselves and each other with it, incense it with sweet-smelling incense, bow down in front of it, kiss it. Those are all wonderful things, but they exist only for one purpose: that we know that we are saved by it, by God, and that we would take it up; we would consciously, actively, take up our crosses so that the salvation of God could work within us, because, as the song says in the holy Scripture:

If we have died with him, we shall also live with him.
If we have patiently suffered and endured with him, we will reign with him and be glorified with him.
If we deny him, he will deny us on the day of judgment.
And if we are faithless, he remains still faithful to us, because he, being the Lord and God, cannot deny himself.