In reverent awe before the live-creating Cross and calling us to fall down before it, the Church calls out in this fourth week of Great Lent, saying, "This holy and light-bearing week offers to the world the honorable Cross: come, fall down with fear and love.
Archbishop Dmitri (Royster)
Rating: 10|Votes: 2
The Cross is our badge and emblem as Christians. Remove the Cross from our lives and we have nothing. Without the Cross, both in Christ’s life and in ours, there is no genuine Christianity and consequently, no reason to observe Lent or any other sacred season. This fact may seem self-evident. Yet ours is a time in which words like sin, repentance, sacrifice, the Cross and crucifixion, are misunderstood, being viewed even by some Christians with suspicion, as "negative" terms, at least when applied to our own lives.
George Strickland
Rating: 6,5|Votes: 6
We are just outside of Eden, but on this side of Pascha. Bishop Kallistos observes, “Lent is a time when we weep with Adam and Eve before the closed gates of Eden, repenting with them for the sins that have deprived us our free communion with God. But Lent is also a time when we are preparing to celebrate the saving event of Christ’s death and rising, which has reopened Paradise to us once more (Luke 23:43).”
Hieromartyr John of Riga
Rating: 6,3|Votes: 3
It could be that a soul has left this world for the spiritual world without having drawn close to the holy inhabitants of that world through prayer; he may have appeared in that higher sphere as one entering a strange and unfamiliar land and may not find any spiritual 'relative' in this upper Sion. Take in the stranger; give rest to the beggar; give him a place to rest his head, and the Lord will grant the soul, for whom you do this, one of the bright dwellings in His Father's mansion.
Archimandrite John (Krestiankin)
We know that it was Divine will. But our heart—the human heart—remains as if unsatisfied: could there really not have been a single person with the resolve to say a kind word for the Lord before His judges, or testify in His defense?.. We are shocked by this spectacle of the ingratitude, blindness, madness, and cruelty of Christ’s contemporaries.