Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Lent: the Holy and Life-Giving Cross

 

by Brother Christopher

 

Today is the 3rd Sunday of Lent, its mid-point and the very heart of the season. Perhaps strangely to some, the Church celebrates the mystery of the Cross, the central mystery of our faith. We honor it by solemnly placing it at the entrance of the church, in front of the Golgotha, so that it is the first thing that we reverence upon entering Holy Wisdom. Throughout this week we will sing hymns that honor its power and mystery, bringing to our hearts and minds all that Jesus revealed through his sacrifice on the cross: the unconditional nature of his love. One of the stichera we’ll sing this week speaks to this:

     The cross is raised on high this day, sending forth its power to all the earth. To all four corners of creation, its arms extend salvation’s awesome grace. In this cross, all believers find unending courage! In this cross, those who fight that unseen warfare find saving strength! How awesome, how great this love! Come let us all rejoice this day! Let us extol the Lord! On that cross he died for us, for great indeed is his love, for humankind!

     How does the cross save? How does a ghastly instrument of torture and death be a means of life for all? Certainly not in some juridical sense—Jesus paying the price for human sin to placate an angry God. That sort of medieval theology is bankrupt. Rather, its saving power is in Jesus being able to absolutely identify with all manner of human suffering through what he experienced on the cross. God knows our suffering from the inside, and the cross reveals the extent God will go to make us understand God’s love for humanity.

            If we accept this, it provokes the question: “What does it mean to be a disciple of Christ?” As Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness asking himself what it meant to be Jesus, so now we have forty days to ponder what it means to be his disciple, to be a Christian. And as we heard in this morning’s Gospel, it means each of us taking up our own cross and following him. It will cost us, but if we move forward with the mind of Christ, the phronima he embodied, we will be willing to lay down our lives for the world, each in our own way. In some small way we shall be in continuity with Jesus’ act of unconditional love.

            It seems that we’re living through a time when there is so much wrong in the world. We see the horror of the war in Ukraine and the instability it has fostered in the world, the political polarization of our society, the escalation of nuclear arms tension and the rise of authoritarianism world-wide, the suppression of women’s human rights in Afghanistan and Iran, and the persecution of Christians in many third-world countries. And that’s just scraping the surface. Now more than ever it is so important for the Church to manifest the authenticity of its witness to Christ, to be Christ for the world. And that will inevitably involve the cross. But let’s be honest: true discipleship, fidelity to Christ in this country, is seldom a life-and-death matter. We don’t live in areas of the world where being a Christian means you face death daily. At the same time, laying down our life for the sake of Christ and for the sake of the world isn’t absent from our experience, either. It is done in all those little acts of love that God challenges us with and which often go unnoticed by others. Perhaps being faithful to Christ in those humble acts may prepare us for the time when a bigger sacrifice will be required, and we shall draw strength and courage from the power of the cross.