Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

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

At the risk of being thought longwinded (no comments from the peanut gallery, please!), allow me to offer you several extended thoughts by our Fathers as commentary on today’s Holy Gospel, one from St. Innocent of Alaska and two from St. Isaac the Syrian. All three fall under the category of “Suffering” in a compendium of sayings from the Fathers (Wisdom of the Divine Philosophers I).

First, from St. Innocent:

A Christian’s . . . duty is to ‘take up his cross.’ The word ‘cross’ means sufferings, sorrows, and adversities. To take up one’s cross means to bear without grumblings everything unpleasant, painful, sad, difficult and with love, with joy and with courageous strength.

And now the two from St. Isaac:

If you would be victorious, taste the suffering of Christ in your person, that you may be chosen to taste His glory. For if we suffer with Him, we shall also be glorified with Him. Blessed are you if you suffer for righteousness’ sake. Behold, for years and generations the way of God has been made smooth through the Cross and by death. The way of God is a daily Cross. The Cross is the gate of mysteries.

The Cross is the door to mysteries. Through this door the intellect makes entrance into the knowledge of heavenly mysteries. The knowledge of the Cross is concealed in the sufferings of the Cross. And the more our participation in its sufferings, the greater the perception we gain through the Cross. For, as the Apostle says, ‘As the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.’

As I said to you on the eve of the Feast of the Holy Cross, this whole subject is not easily broached in our culture enslaved to safety and security, prosperity and happiness founded upon a very deformed and insufficient image of God. Not only do our saints associate our human sufferings with the Cross of Christ God, that is, these sufferings experienced by us to one degree or another, provide us the grace-ladened opportunities to be transformed by our Lord into His image and transfigured with His glory (2 Cr. 3:18). St. Paul bears witness to this divine power. “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels,” he proclaims,

that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. . . . For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh (2 Cr. 4:6-15).

But, it is, more pointedly, our suffering for the sake of our Lord and His Gospel: “’Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven’” (Beatitudes; 1 Pe. 3:13-17; 4:12-19). “’[W]hosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospel’s,’” says our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, “’the same shall save it.’” However, “’[W]hosoever . . . shall be ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him shall the Son of Man be ashamed when He cometh in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.’”

The long and the short of it is this: whoever wishes to be saved, let that soul take up his cross daily, deny self, and follow Jesus Christ unto the ages of ages. “The way of God is a daily cross,” St. Isaac tells us. “The Cross is the gate of mysteries.” This Gospel of the Cross as central and critical to our salvation has been lost in our health and success saturated culture, aided and abetted no less than by the hawkers and purveyors of the gospel of prosperity. Listen to most any of the popular media evangelists today and you will be hard pressed to find the Cross, let alone the Gospel of our Lord presented here today to us by St. Mark (2 Tm. 3:1-9; 4:3-4). Can we imagine any of these darling preachers, boldly and with absolute clarity of conviction, preach to their congregants, “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come, and die” (The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer)? I highly doubt it.

And yet, this is Jesus’ message of foolishness and a stumbling block (1 Cr. 1:18-24). It is the heart of St. Paul’s Epistles and that of the preaching of St. Peter and all the other holy, glorious, and all-laudable Apostles! It is the Apostolic Truth that is non-negotiable if we wish to be saved, “’Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.’” We who have been baptized are etched with the sign of the Cross upon our bodies, its image engraved upon our hearts and our souls, so that we are every day being formed by it and conformed to it, as we surrender to the Cross our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our aspirations – our very life – just as our Lord Who was stretched out upon the hard wood of the Tree (Rm. 8:29). With St. Paul, we, too, glory in the Cross of our Lord because we have found it to be the very power of God unto our salvation (2 Cr. 11:23-26; Ga. 6:14). The Cross is the very center of our salvation around which – if we take Jesus very seriously here – our lives revolve. Hear that, again, my beloved: we order and structure our lives according to the Cross and around the crucified Son of God. We are determined, like St. Paul and all the other saints, martyrs, and confessors of the Church, “not to know anything . . . except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cr. 2:2). The Cross is our joy, our hope, our power, and the wisdom of God (1 Cr. 1:18-31).

Let us note here, beloved, that the salvation offered to us by Jesus Christ necessarily involves discipleship – there is no salvation without discipleship. We must follow Him. It involves the laying down of ourselves as a sacrificial offering unto Him and a picking up of His Cross each and every day (Lk. 9:23; Rm. 12:1-2). We lay down our very self at the feet of the crucified Lord of Glory Who, then, takes us up upon His Cross so that with the Apostle, we, too, can say,

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me (Ga. 2:20).

Beloved, when we empty ourselves of self, just as our Lord emptied Himself (Pp. 2:5-11), He comes to fill the void with Himself in the power of the Holy Spirit, not like some demon-possessed soul deprived of self-knowledge or like some puppet in the hands of a ventriloquist. But, rather, He comes to fill us full with Himself, to heal the fragmentation of our lives caused by sin and death, so that Christ God Himself is formed in us for the express purpose of our acquiring His image and likeness, “in righteousness and true holiness” (Ga. 4:19; Ep. 4:24; Co. 3:10). This self-denial or self-emptying is necessary if we yearn to be one with our Lord in His Sufferings so that we may share in the glory and power of His Resurrection (Pp. 2:5-11; Co. 3:7-11). Because we have encountered the Crucified and Risen Jesus, we abandon the attachments of this world – “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer; 1 Jn. 2:15-17).

If, however, we still try to hold onto our fallen life, we will invariably lose our souls, Jesus says. “’For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’” If we try to take up that Cross and hang onto self, that is to say, if we try to preserve our sinful, death-riddled self, we will only find ourselves crying out with the demons, “’What have we to do with Thee, Thou Jesus of Nazareth? Hast Thou come to destroy us?’” (Mk. 1:24). Why, yes, He has. The Cross crucifies us. The Cross puts us to death so that we may be united to Life Himself, so that He may be fully alive in us and through us as His disciples.

Beloved, is whatever it is you’re clinging to that keeps you from following Jesus to the Cross for the sake of His Gospel, is it really worth the losing of your soul? Is the fear of losing our cravings greater than denying self and taking up the Cross of Christ crucified and risen? Is our love for the things of this fallen and passing away world greater than our love for the Lord Jesus? Do we treasure our self-indulged passions more than we treasure our Lord? Is that why we don’t strive against them? Wherever our treasure is, Jesus tells us, there we will find our heart – our true home, what we truly value, what we take to heart (Mt. 6:21, 33; Lk. 12:31-34). But, beloved, if we hand over our fallen life to the Lord, He’ll take it, redeem it, and sanctify it, and then He’ll hand it back to us renewed and re-invigorated with Life – His Life, divine Life, Life Eternal. The Cross is always, always, always for our salvation.

“’Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.’”

Through the prayers of our holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

PROPERS:

Ga. 2:16-20

Mk. 8:34-9:1