"Be Not Afraid"

Do you know the sublime? It is a mysterious phrase. It describes the magnificence which inspires awe. The sheer power of the tornado, or the hurricane at its zenith, is sublime, overwhelming us, moving us to the edges of human experience. I stood a half-mile from a tornado. Every hair on my body stood up, and waves of awe swept over me. The distinguished scholar Frances Ferguson wrote, "Wolves are sublime.   Dogs are not."

What do we say of the image which was at once the most hated symbol in the Jewish imagination and the Throne of God on Earth? Four years before the birth of Christ and three miles from Nazareth, 2,000 Jews were crucified in a single day with their families butchered at the foot of each of their crosses. Yet, the only time the Son of God formally presided as King before the people was upon a Cross:

The people said,

What is this most hated and most adored symbol? What is its undoubted power in our own lives? Does it not summon feelings of revulsion and adoration even today? During His own earthly life, Jesus offered this most hated symbol as a gesture of His love:

It is hated .... and refused. Yet, the Son of God attests that its value to be above all price.

Can we not say , today, that the meaning of the Cross continues to be controversial and disputed at the highest levels of Christian authority .... even within the Catholic Church? In the West, the Cross is contemplated in terms of "the Lamb who was slain" (Rev 13:8), wrote St. John the Divine. "Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us" (1 Cor 5:7), wrote St. Paul. His Blood poured down from the Cross re-enacting the sacrificed lamb whose blood was painted on the door lintels of Egypt, that the plague of death might not come near, but "pass over" us. Catholic religion in the West centers upon Jesus' passion and human death. Did you know that the Stations of the Cross are practiced as a spiritual discipline exclusively in the West, notably in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Methodist Churches? This spiritual discipline was developed in Italy during the eleventh century and then imported into Jerusalem with the advent of the Franciscan friars in the thirteenth century. But it never caught on in the East.

Protestants today assert that Jesus "nailed the bond of our sins" to His Cross annulling our debt. For them, the Christian religion centers on Jesus' death expiating sins. This is salvation. This is the way to Heaven.

As with the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, such religion is "animal sacrifice religion." It poses an equation:

But is this the sum and total of Christianity? That is, is Christianity a cult of death, or is it a Way of Life, .... or better said, The Way to Life? This is no small question. Indeed, it goes to the heart of our entire Judeo-Christian tradition.

But let us begin at the beginning. To quote the Ukrainian scholar, Yehezkel Kaufmann, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a most respected scholar,

Before the Babylonian Captivity, the Hebrew people practiced a religion modeled on the purposes of Eden, which was to attain complete unity with God. God created man and woman in His Image including the faculties of contemplation and free will. He conversed with them and taught them. God expected them to mature unto the fullness of their Image, which was Himself. This was their telos, their blueprint, set within them from the beginning. It follows that this should also be the human blueprint forever after, for we were created human. Indeed, Solomon's Temple was laid out to focus the mind and spirit upon this very process and spiritual journey. The outer courtyard represented the world. The interior was paneled in cedar with images carved into it depicting the Garden of Eden (1 Kings 6:29) recalling unity with God. Beyond lay the Holy of Holies, where the High Priest reached the summit of human experience: to embody in human dimension the fullness of God. Orthodox Christians today recognize this process as theosis, which is the purpose of life on Earth.

I might say as an aside that the Old Testamant scholar Margaret Barker, specializing in ancient Hebrew culture, was present in an Orthodox temple witnessing an Orthodox liturgy. It was her first time. She said later that it was new to her, yet it was familiar. For what she witnessed was precisely the spirituality she saw in Solomon's Temple through the lens of her scholarship.

Yes, this journey will be a way of thorns leading to a Cross, for these are among the Promises of Christ: "In the world you will have tribulation" (Jn 16:33), but know this: ".... [the world] hated Me before it hated you." (Jn 15:18).

With the Siege of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Captivity (605-539 B.C.), Solomon's Temple was razed to the ground, and the political and cultural leaders of the Hebrew civilization were taken to Babylon. For two generations they were acculturated to a new language (Aramaic), learned new customs, and were inured to a new religion. The primary focus of ritual within Babylonian temples was animal sacrifice. "Since I have been king," said Nebuchanezzar II, "Markduk (the Bablylonian idol) has never eaten so well!" Animal sacrifice religion was practiced throughout the Middle East during the Iron Age, except in Jerusalem. As Prof. Kaufmann has written, but the Hebrew lifeworld died there, and Judaism, a blend of the old and the new, was born.

But how could the slaughter of an animal become a central religious activity (which I became familiar with in Haiti in the form of Voudou)? The idea is that the animal is manifestly filled with an abundant "life force." Whether it be the strutting chicken or the bull beating the earth with its hoofs, the animal exhibits a veritable power plant of energy inspiring humans with its living, breathing life which they could never aspire to create, but only marvel at. In the act of sacrifice, then, an attempt is made at opening this force on to the surrounding world. The arteries of the bull are severed at the neck releasing a burst of palpable life-energy with the warm outpouring of its blood. This is then collected and sprinkled, imparting life force wherever it is directed.

The effect of such religion, of course, is to de-personalize and to de-humanize. Gone is the ancient Hebrew religion of relationship with the Divine, of friendship with God. Here is quid pro quo religion whereby an idol, whether it be Marduk, Moloch, or Baal, is offered this in exchange for that .... perhaps expiation for sin or fertility or rain for crop fields. This for that.

This is not the religion we find proceeding from the lips of the Son of God, who said,

And

Not once does Jesus direct the minds and souls of His Disciples to quid pro quo sacrifice. Indeed, the most violent chapter in the Jesus story depicts His rage (there is no other word for it), the rage of the Son of God that animal sacrifice should be practiced in the Temple. And the long memory of God's Son easily recalls a time a thousand years earlier when theosis had been the Temple's primary focus.

He said,

Prophesying to His disciples concerning the Temple and all the rest of Jerusalem, He declared,

And in 70 A.D., by the will of God, the Temple was razed to the ground.

As Hebrew religion veered in the direction of animal sacrifice becoming transformed into Judaism, so Christianity in the West, much later, became absorbed with this precedent, whose high point during the early Middle Ages was the Sacrifice of the Mass executed upon a High Altar for all to see — a concept, we hasten to add, which the East did not embrace.

Around the time of the Great Schism, with the Western Patriarchate of Rome breaking off from the Church to inaugurate its own, independent Church, an Italian monk named Anselmo developed a new theological innovation: the Crucifixion of the Lord Jesus should be seen as ritual sacrifice expiating sins to appease a wrathful Father.

As Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev has pointed out in his landmark work, Orthodox Theology,

We might pause here to consider this cult of death in the Catholic West, whose central focus is the Sacrifice of the Mass, crucifying Jesus over and over, so more and more of His Blood might be procured for the general benefit. The Roman Catholic Church invented a "treasury of merit" to capture this benefit, so later withdrawals could be made on the account.

My brothers and sisters, our salvation lies, not in death, but in our participation in Divine Life, which is fed and nourished at every communion, where we really and truly break Bread with the Lord of Life. And He taught us another kind of unity, which is no less important: to take up our own crosses — our cross of self-sacrifice, the cross on which our worldly desires will be sacrificed for the sake of all goodness, the cross on which we will offer our highest selves, laying down our life for our friends, our family, our children, and our God. He created each of us to be royal kings and queens. The crosses we take up must be understood to be our thrones, differentiating us from the world, through which we master the chaos of our own lives, rejecting the empty riches of this world, and seeking our treasure only in Heaven.

Then what are we to say about the death of our Lord and Savior? Is it His death that redeems us? No, His human death makes manifest what has been true all along: Jesus is the Eternal Word, our Creator, the Lord of Life. And He brings us to Heaven with His life: His love, His living example, and His all-important acceptance of our birthright to be His family: "Here are My mother and My brothers!" He declared in Mk 3:34, pointing to us.

As "the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the Cross," (Heb 12:2) Jesus used His death to end the quid-pro-quo faith life (if you can call it that) of blood-for-salvation:

How shall we understand the "Cross event," then. It is the ransom offered for many. It is the Suffering Servant (Isa 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-7, 52:13-53:12), who stood in the breach for his friends suffering the fate that rightly was theirs. It is that most important symbol of friendship for Antiquity, the story of Damon and Pythias — each offering his life for the other — so treasured in a world where amicitia represented the highest form of love. Among the finest works of the Roman Senator Cicero (d. 43 B.C.), and widely read for many generations, was his De Amicitia.

As Met. Hilarion comments,

Who can gauge the cosmic significance of God offering friendship to mankind and then standing in the breach for His friends? Jesus said explicitly: "I call you My friends":

Jesus left no bodily remains, for His life was such that neither disease nor death nor anything could contain Him. Neither Heaven nor Earth could hold Him. But He did leave us the Cross. Relics are precious to us because proximity is a property of holiness. The Early Church celebrated the Eucharist directly on the graves of the saints. We do the same today (in the form of holy relics secreted in the Altar) because holiness inheres in these most intimate remains of a person. How do we know this? Experience teaches. And the incorrupt remains of the saints leave little room for doubt.

When the Emperor Constantine determined to unearth the Holy Cross, he sent his aged mother, St. Helena, to Jerusalem to find Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre. Following the direction of an old man, these eventually would be discovered in 326 A.D. They had been buried beneath a colossal public works project, a Temple of Venus, which had been built in order to hide these most holy sites .... as mankind commonly seeks to hide its most grievous sins, burying them beneath the debris of life. Do you know our adjective associated with Venus? It is venereal.

They dug for weeks under the direction of St. Helena and St. Makarios, the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Then, finally the workers found an enormous cross and then two more crosses. "Could one of these be the True Cross the Precious, Life-giving Cross?!," asked Makarios. A funeral procession happened to be passing, so he laid the corpse upon each one. When the man who had died was laid upon the most Sacred Wood of the Life-giving Cross, behold, he awakened back to life. A dying woman was revived to full health with even the shadow of its holy form falling upon her.

The Orthodox Church countenances the Cross as being Precious and Life-giving. The Church does not countenance it as an instrument of criminal execution. She does not single out a moment of death to become forever after a cultus. She sees no bond being nailed to it. The Cross does not signify an invitation to disfigure Jesus again and again, laying His dead, limp body upon a High Altar to appease a wrathful Father. No, these things are alien to the Orthodox mind and sensibility.

The Cross is God's Throne on Earth. He poured out His incommensurable glory in order to enter the straits of our narrow humanity, κένοσις (kénosis).   This was His horrible sacrifice, which He lived every day He was among us. From this awful confinement, it was but a tiny step, in the perspective of Eternity, to ascend a Cross .... which by that fact became incommensurably Holy and Life-giving, forever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Yes, the world has become a daunting place. Undeniably, we live during a dark age in human history. Yet, sacred Mysteries also surround us. Reports of the sublime reach our ears. And we ourselves may behold dark forms in the night walking towards us. But be of good cheer, for His life-giving tones are heard:

Yes, the world will hate us as it hated Him. Yes, all whom He called were destined for suffering or martyrdom. All. Yes, we cannot mature into royal heirs to whom He has promised His Kingdom unless we take up our crosses, suffering condemnation .... even from those we love and our neighbors. But be of good cheer. He says,

And

Dominus vobiscum. May the Lord be with you always!

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.