Father Vassilios Argyriadis
Today is called Holy Cross Sunday. In the i. Liturgy we circle the Cross inside the church and the faithful worship it. What's the point of this? Why is it? We can perhaps get some answers from today's passage in the Gospel of Mark. We heard there a monologue of Christ to His hearers. A teaching addressed to all His disciples throughout the ages. Its first sentence summarizes a lot: "Whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself, and worship his cross, and follow me."
"Whoever wants...". Self-evident, one might say. Free will is a prerequisite for the Christian life. But how many of us pay attention to its meaning? We Greek Orthodox (and not only) are baptized as infants. Until our mature age, when man can take control of himself into his own hands, faith has either become a habit or has been left unexamined in the unclaimed of our past. But once upon a time Christians took seriously the necessity of free will for man's entry into the Christian life. The believer who would choose the Church, had to possess adult maturity, before being baptized. His decision had to have the full weight of responsible free choice. It is worth keeping this in mind for us infant baptists. It is possible that our entry into the path of Christ took place early (this is what the Church defines today and it has valid reasons for this), but alas if this turns the truth into a habit. Let there come a time in our lives when we seriously ask ourselves the dilemma: either we continue to drag with us a worn-out Christian habit (a mere seasoning of our lives with traditional religious practices and ideologies) or we make the Christian life mature decision and choice, with all that entails.
"... they are following me." Faith is a sequence, a dynamic course, which means that its orientation must be constantly tested. It is perhaps no coincidence that immediately before today's Gospel passage, the evangelist Mark quotes the moment when Christ disapproves of Peter: "Get behind me, Satan..."! It was then that Peter was asking for things different from the divine will for the Lord. With roughly the same words—"look behind me"—the Lord called Peter to become a disciple. These two show us that following Christ does not automatically make you a Christian. Your "Christianity" may at any time be distorted, "see behind me" become "be behind me." Risk is a condition of our course. Vigilance, our concern.
"...deny yourself." We talked about mature choice with all that it entails. What being a Christian entails is self-denial. Not the annihilation of the self in a Buddhist-style annihilation into the impersonal universe. The Christian's task is to make the commandments of God and the needs of his brother the center of his existence. In this way he turns his back on his self-love and gives real value to his face. Because our real value is the reorientation of ourselves in the direction of the needs of our neighbor and the worship of God.
"...and glorify his cross." We consider ourselves familiar today with the concept of the cross. We bear in mind the sufferings and trials of life and count this more or less as our share in the cross. But when Christ was speaking to His disciples about the cross, He was speaking to them about the necessity of being ready to give their lives literally ("eneken of Christ and of the gospel") in the most horrible, painful and dishonorable way. Later, in fact, He showed them that such a cross was also His - the one we still worship in the temples today. What kind of cross is this? It is dying for your brother. To die shouldering the responsibilities of others. This is what Christ did. He assumed human nature, and this human nature bore upon it the traces of sin (and the consequences of sin: all evil, to its ultimate point, death). Sin was not Christ's responsibility—he was sinless. But by taking on sin-burdened human nature, He took responsibility for people. And for their sake he suffered the consequence: he died. But, because He was both God, and sinless as a man, His death became life. And he rose again. He took upon His shoulders the responsibility of sin, without committing it. And so the ultimate consequence of sin, death, was turned into life through the resurrection—"die death by treading on your feet." In one word: the Cross of Christ asks each of us to take responsibility for our brother, the responsibility of everyone, the responsibility for everything; and to die for it.
In today's Gospel passage, Christ's monologue ends with a phrase that cannot be interpreted: "I tell you, there are some of you who remain here, who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God opened in power" - there are some among you, that before they taste death, they will see the glory of the Kingdom of God. Interpreters tell us that the phrase foreshadows Christ's transfiguration on Tabor—it is the incident which, in Mark's gospel, immediately follows today's passage. The three disciples saw the Lord transfigured, enveloped in the light of the Kingdom of God. What does this mean for us today? It means that the disciples saw—and we are called to see—what is behind and beyond the cross. Behind and beyond our free decision to deny ourselves and take up our cross, that is, to take up the responsibility of our brothers, the light of the Kingdom of God, the resurrected Christ, awaits us.
Let us now return to our original question. Why do we worship the cross today? For two reasons. First, to remember the struggle we undertook at the beginning of Lent: we chose to deny something of ourselves, to fast, to intensify prayer; we chose to take up our cross, to exercise by taking on ourselves some of the burdens and responsibilities of the neighbor (with alms to begin with). And secondly, we worship the Cross, so that in the midst of our struggle we may be comforted by what lies behind the cross, the Kingdom of God and its light. It is the same never-evening light that beckons us from the approaching Easter.
The struggle of this period is, in miniature, a picture of the struggle of our lives. We chose to be Christians long ago — it is the yesterday of our lives. We bear the responsibility of the Cross, the responsibility of the brother — it is the eternity today of our life. And the Kingdom of God awaits us — it is the ends of our existence, it comes upon us from the everything of true life.
Today we worship the Cross. Yesterday, today and everything of our life rests on this worship...
