The Balance of the Holy Cross – Sermon Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross 2020
Beloved in Christ,
This is the First Sunday Liturgy we are streaming, and it is odd, because is Church is not and online event and and more so Church is it is not virtual. It is real and it needs people to participate in it.
But every Liturgy is never local, it does not involve only the people that attend St John in Euless, but includes all people that are commemorated at the oblation service, living or fallen asleep, includes the saints, the angels, the Theotokos and first and foremost God Himself, the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
So when we serve the Liturgy here you all are in it. When the priest prays (I learned this from a priestmonk at Simonopetra, on Mt Athos) he prays not just for himself, but for all the people that are one with Him: his family, his parish, his spiritual children, his friends, all of them.
So today we celebrate the Holy Cross of the Lord, in the middle of Lent, acting as a balance between the first two dogmatic weeks (Sunday of Orthodoxy and St. Gregory Palmas) and the last two ascetic weeks (St. John Climacus and St. Mary of Egypt). This is to show that we need to know our faith but we also have to act on our faith, keeping our spiritual life well balanced.
The cross is also another type of balance. The so called Russian cross has an other horizontal bar at the bottom, which is slanted a little bit, the right side being higher than the left. Why? Remember the two robbers who were crucified alongside Christ? Well one of them kept mocking Christ while the other one said: Remember me o Lord when you come into your Kingdom. The one on the right is the robber saint, Saint Dismas, who was the first to enter paradise with Christ. So the right side of the horizontal bar is higher to show the direction (up) for St Dismas and down, for the thief on the left.
There is another way in which the cross Is a balance. The Cross is a balance between good and evil. The cross is a powerful weapon against the adversary, the devil, that tries to trick us all the time into abandoning God and hope and giving into fear and panic until we are in his power completely. The simple gesture of making the sign of the cross over ourselves is protective against evil.
See the story with drunk man in abandoned house from elder Cleopa.
The cross is also a balance between life and death. Christ was killed on the cross, a torture instrument, made out of wood which, according to tradition, was wood from Noah’s ark that ensured the survival of the human race through the flood. But through the sacrifice that happened on it, the Cros has become life giving. Saint Hellen found the cross alongside with the other two of the robbers, and recognized the true cross after it raised a woman from the dead.
In Constantinople, whenever there was an epidemic, there was a procession with the Holy Cross and the blessing of Holy Water and the people were delivered. On August 1st, the Church still commemorates the custom that prevailed in Constantinople, where in the summer months were many diseases, to carry the precious Wood of the Cross in procession throughout the city for its sanctification and its deliverance from illnesses. It was brought forth from the imperial treasury on the last day of July and placed upon the Holy Table of the Great Church of the Holy Wisdom; and, until the Dormition of the Theotokos, it was carried in procession throughout the city and was set forth for veneration before the people.
So we will do the same today, as we do every year, at the end of Liturgy, we’ll take the Cross in procession and venerate it and ask that through the power of the Cross we will be delivered from this disease that is upon us and that soon our Churches would be filled even with more people.
May the Lord our God, through the intercessions of the most holy Theotokos and the power of the Holy and life giving Cross, keep you healthy, safe, peaceful, patient, enduring the tribulations of the flesh with the great hope that our Lord will deliver is as good and men loving God that He is!!
Amen.