Fr. Constantine (Simon) is an American hieromonk of Visoko-Petrovsky Monastery in Moscow who converted to holy Orthodoxy in 2014 after 34 years of priestly ministry in the Catholic church. The following homily was delivered on September 28, 2019, the day after the feast of the Exaltation of the Precious and Lifegiving Cross, following an English-language Liturgy celebrated at the monastery.
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Photo: plainbibleteaching.com
Yesterday, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we celebrated the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. And we might ask ourselves: “What does the holy Cross mean for us in our lives?”
First of all, we must make a little distinction. First of all, there is the Cross of Christ. What is the Cross of Christ? The Cross of the Christ is His holy Passion, by means of which He redeemed the world of sin.
What is the Cross of Christ? The Cross of Christ is the mockery, the insults, the offenses which He received at the hands of the Jews on that night before the Crucifixion.
What is the Cross of Christ? The Cross of Christ is the crown of thorns, the scourging, the carrying of the Cross to Golgotha, the Crucifixion on Golgotha, and finally, His descent into hell—His descent into the realm of the spirits to whom, as St. Peter says in his epistle, Christ preached.
So while after the Crucifixion His Body was in the tomb, at the same time He was with the Father on the throne, and at the same time He was preaching to those spirits, or those souls, who were in hell, or what we might call that transitory place where the spirits of those righteous men and women of the Old Testament awaited the Savior.
And He took them with Him into Heaven. That is the Cross of Christ.
And what is our cross?
Christ tells each of us that if we are not ready to lose our lives, we will lose them. And if we are ready to lose our lives, we will gain them. How do we gain them, or how do we gain our souls? We gain our souls by carrying the cross that is given to each of us, since the Cross is not only given to Christ, but also to each of us.
In many cases that cross will not be as terrible, not as heavy as the Cross which Christ carried to hell. It might be a somewhat lighter cross. It might be the cross of everyday life, which we live in our families and in which we must give witness to the Cross of Christ by loving each other in the family.
A Serbian priest once said to me that when he was in religion class, before the war, before the communists closed religion in Serbia, a priest told them that before Confession, they had to ask forgiveness of each other in the family. And that, he told me, was the most difficult part of going to Confession.
Because it’s not so difficult to ask forgiveness of the sins that we have committed from who a priest who does not know us, or from a priest who slightly knows us. It is much more difficult to ask forgiveness of those with whom we live day after day, before our Holy Communion.
That is the most difficult and that is a great cross. Perhaps it is not as great as that Cross which Christ carried to His death, but it is a little cross, and a difficult one, which each of us must bear in our own lives, so that all of us share in the carrying of the Cross. The cross is not only for Christ; the cross is for each of us.
And that is why we celebrate the Cross, three times every year. We commemorate the Cross in August, and we commemorate the Cross during Lent, but we especially commemorate the Cross on the feast of its universal Exaltation.
And that Cross may be a heavy one for some, who even today in this world go to their deaths for the Cross and for Christ. Or it might be a much lighter one for many of us, but still it is a cross, and a cross means work; a cross means pain, but a cross also brings joy; for as you know, at the very beginning of Christianity, the Christians did not identify themselves by the Cross. They identified themselves with the fish, because the letters in Greek for fish make up a Christian acronym.
Because at that time the Cross was still being used as a form of execution and it was the most terrible, hideous form of execution, and that is why we also read in the Scriptures that Christ Himself became a curse unto the Law, and thereby abolished, at least in part, the cultic prescriptions of the Law.
Let us remember that the early Christians did not use the Cross as the symbol of their faith.[1] That came only later, and it came first not as the symbol of death, not as the symbol of execution, but as the symbol of joy, and of redemption, for by His Cross, Christ redeemed the world and redeemed each of us; and we share in that redemption every day of our Christian lives.
[1] Although there is mention in historical sources of Christians marking the cross on their foreheads in as early as the second century.—Ed.
