Hebrews 4:14-5:6
Troparion, Kontakion, etc.
Mark 8:34-9:1
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"If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself
and take up his Cross and follow Me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for My sake and the Gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?" In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. |
Always we face a crossroads. At every moment in our lives, two ways beckon to us: the path to darkness and the path to light.
The dark path leads to a prison-house made from all of our No's to God and the neglect of spiritual life. We know the signs of darkness: the alarms of conscience dim to a whisper ... even to deadly silence. The soul no longer is offended by words, thoughts, and images that offend Heaven. A thick callous forms over the heart, once alive with compassion and hope. Darkness: we yearn for the fleshly at cost to our souls.
But the path to light splits open the callous on our hearts until it drops away. This happens through love, through a heart that expands-unto-bursting with godly love — love of God and love in our holy relationships. Foul language and images again become instantly offensive. Compassion for others is reawakened, and the alarms of conscience once again are keen and sensitive. That is, the path to light is a path back to our own former selves, to the sensibilities and thoughts of our childhood. It is a pilgrimage to our own innocence, to Eden.
This is the purpose of life. This is the reason for the Advent of Christ, for God sent His Son into the world to lead us back to the true state of our Creation and being, which is our own personal Edens. This is our deification, or theosis: to reclaim our true image and family resemblance, which is God's. This is why we were made, who we are, and where we are bound. Do you not believe this? Then recall the quality of life of your childhood before you chose to discard it: a tender heart, a soul easily offended by wrong and evil, a distaste for darkness, an easy and natural compassion, and a disposition to seek the natural world in its aspect of beauty, which is God's world, not the cities of man.
Today, the Third Sunday in Great and Holy Lent, when we Adore the Holy Cross, we gaze upon the Great Compass of the World. Upon the Cross we see the Son of God, the New Adam. He has redeemed, and supplanted, the Old Adam. This is the Compass that leads to our only True North, which is our destination, Eden.
How do we known this as a fact? The name ADAM in Greek spells out the four cardinal directions. From 2 Enoch:
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And I appointed him a name, from the four component parts, from east,
from west, from south, from north, and I appointed for him four special stars, and I called his name ADAM, and showed him the two ways, the light and the darkness. (2 Enoch 30:13) |
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"The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God." (Luke 3:4-6) |
The Compass also points away from Eden. It points to the anti-Eden: down the path of darkness to the prison-house of souls enslaved by worldly desire. It is a fact that the Discovery of the Holy Cross, which we celebrate today, took place at this great crossroads.
On March 6 in the year 326 when the Precious Nails and Most Holy Cross of our Savior was uncovered, they were found just outside the first-century walls of Jerusalem. They emerged from beneath the temple of Venus. On the one side, Divine Love, the self-giving and saving sacrifice of God's Son. On the other, the selfish and self-destructive obsession of human lust, worldly love.
The temple of Venus commemorated the promiscuous goddess. In her marital portrait, we see her trapped in a bed of lust with her lover Mars entangled in a humiliating net set by her husband. Venus was the mother of many children by many fathers, including the god of debauchery, Bacchus. She is the mother of Phobos, meaning fear, and his twin Deimos, meaning terror. She is the mother of Priapus whose grotesque being is nearly all his sexual part. She also took mortal lovers, including Anchises, producing a son, Aeneas — by legend the founder of Rome and celebrated as such in Roman literature's greatest epic. The identity between ancient Romans and Venus, therefore, is complete. You see, they descend from Venus (according to the ancient myths). Against this backdrop, perhaps we can decipher a contest described in Pliny the Elder's Natural History wherein the wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius competed with a Roman prostitute to see who could accommodate the greatest number of men. A similar story is told of Julia, the daughter of Augustus Caesar.
Three centuries later, the Emperor Constantine, shut down temples to Venus as part of his campaign to end temple prostitution in the Empire. Our modern word venereal means "of or having to do with Venus."
From this stained ground of eros emerges the Most Holy Nails and Cross of our Savior. Here is the everlasting symbol of the love we call, not eros, but agape. Not selfish, but self-denying and life-giving. Not impure, but rather the purest love imaginable flowing from the Heart of God. Not riddled with shameful disease, but rather Life-Giving, even Life-Creating.
The Discovery of the Holy Cross was carried out under the direction of Helen, mother of the Emperor Constantine, Equal-to-the-Apostles. The Emperor and his mother decided to rebuild Jerusalem. They wished to purify and consecrate the holy places where our Lord had suffered and given his life. They sought the Life-Creating Cross sifting through rubble, scraping back encrustations of pagan worship and filth. Finally, beneath this rubble they discovered three crosses. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, Macarius, saw a man on a bier being carried to his burial and ordered that the corpse be laid on each cross in turn. When the man was laid upon the Most Holy Cross of our Savior, he came back to life.
We give thanks for the Life-Creating Cross. As the Fathers have written: the Life-Giving Cross in the midst of our God-seeking journey through scorched desert becomes a tree providing cool and shade; the Life-Giving Cross, which transforms a world of death into life as Moses' tree turned the bitter water of Marah into sweet water (Exodus 15:23-25); the Life-Giving Cross, which quenches the death-dealing heat of flaming swords at the Gates of Eden; the Live-Giving Cross, which has shattered the hinges of the Doors of Hell. Metaphorically, we say that the Cross was made of wood from the Forbidden Tree in Eden, that the Tree of God's own suffering and grief should be the Tree on which His Son was hung. It is this Cross, which has reopened Eden. It is this Cross, which is the Compass of the World.
Does the crossroads between eros and agape speak to us in the year 2020? 40 million Americans regularly use pornography ... one-third, women. Sexual sin is the leading cause of divorce and shattered families stealing from our children their precious innocence. Sexual sin drags more souls off to Hell than all others combined wrote Erasmus of Rotterdam in the sixteenth century. It did in the first century, in the sixteenth century, and in the twenty-first century. It is the story of shame and loss on one side and redemption and grace on the other. One one side, the temple of Venus leading down the path of darkness; on the other, the Holy Cross guiding us toward the light, guiding us upward and upward toward the light.
Two loves.
Which do you choose?
The insane mind
with its many explanations, narratives, and rationalizations
strives to claim both.
But such insanity in essence is a venereal disease.
The baptism of the Forerunner was to wash off the sins of worldly desire
and
to point us to the instincts of Eden:
pure and self-sacrificing love,
eternally rooted in Heaven,
the ultimate triumph of our souls over the world.
A brilliant burst of light has been set before us in the year 326. It is a revelation for the ages: God's Son, our Brother, our Savior, the Lord of Life rejected by the world and hung upon a Cross, which points to Eden. Set beside it is another image, haunting and menacing — depravity, human degradation, insolence against God.
Which do we choose? Shall we fix our stare upon this culture of venereal filth-turning-to-rubble? Or do we cast all of our hearts, souls, and minds upon the Life-Giving Cross? As we live through this season of pandemic plague, let us remember the only goal that matters. Is it a coincidence that this Coronavirus limits our intake of breath, our spiritus, in an age of spiritual poverty? Could this be coincidental?
Look out upon the great canvas depicting all human life.
Our God,
the Artist Nonpareil,
unfailingly forges salvation from the rusting iron of sin.
Look upon His deep, deep art,
and
see the valley of darkness below
with Bacchus, Priapus, and the demons they have spawned.
Then, look up and behold the triumphant light
of the Life-Giving Cross high upon a hill.
It beckons to all,
for it calls us back to ourselves,
to the True North of our own beginnings
and
of our love for God.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.