In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
On this Sunday, during the Great Lent, we worship the Holy Cross of our Savior and we encounter the great mystery of our Salvation. Our Lord Jesus Christ became Incarnate for us and chose to suffer for us in order to save us. When I think of these things I cannot help but think of that amazing Appalachian Christmas Carol, “I wander as I wonder out under the sky, how Jesus our Savior did come for to die, for poor ordinary people like you and like I.”
As we know from Holy Scripture, our first parents foolishly and recklessly hearkened to the counsel of the evil one and stretched out their hands in disobedience, and by this they were infected with sin and, so that sin would not become immortal, they became subject to death. Yet, even from that time, our Savior, in His love for man, devised a plan for our salvation. He accomplished that plan when He stretched out His arms on the wood of the Cross in an act of self-sacrificing love to heal us from sin and gather us all unto Himself.
The wood healed the wood, the wood of the tree of disobedience was healed by the wood of the Cross, because of our Savior’s obedience and self denial.
There are times when a symbol carries with it a meaning that is beyond words. The Cross is the Symbol and Sign of the Son of Man. The Cross is the Symbol of self-sacrificing, co-suffering love. Our Savior said “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) –and He laid down His life for us. When we partake of the cup of the Eucharist, in a mystery we partake of the Blood of the God-Man’s self-sacrificing love. At the time of the Mystical Supper, our Savior said, “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples: if ye have love one for another.” (John 13:35) And that love of which our Savior speaks is a self-sacrificing love.
The Cross is also the Symbol of Immortality and the victory over death that the Christ of God accomplished during His earthly sojourn. Thus when we encounter the Cross we encounter our Savior’s love for us and the promise of immortality. And so, the Holy Cross fills our hearts with awe and overwhelms the mind and we are left speechless and cling to those grace filled words of the hymns of our blessed Church and say,
“O wonder! How did the Life of all taste of death? were it not that He willed to enlighten the world that doth cry out and say: Thou that art risen from the dead, Lord, glory be to Thee.” (Sunday Vespers First Tone Aposticha)
Brothers and sisters in Christ, it is through the Cross, that the thief inhabited paradise. And it is only through the Cross that Christians of every generation have found salvation. Without the Cross, there is no resurrection.
In Today’s Gospel our Savior said, “Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” (Mark 8:34) And, so our Savior requires us all to take up our cross.
And our Savior explained further that, “…whosoever will save his life shall lose it.” That is, he who lives a self-centered life, he who lives a life according to the flesh, he who lives according to the carnal mind of man will lose his life. And then He added, “…but whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it.” (Mark 8:35) And so, the heavenly remedy that will heal us of sin, grant us victory over death and find salvation is to lose our life by taking up a life of self-sacrificing love for our Lord’s sake.
And our Savior continued, “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? (Mark 8:36-37) The words of our Savior make it clear that, in the face of eternity, material things will do us no good, even if we were to gain the whole world. Thus, to carry one’s cross is an essential therapy to heal the soul and unite it to God and vivify both soul and body unto eternity.
Yet, there is another aspect of the Cross related to confessing our Savior, for in the same Gospel passage our Savior said, “Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of His Father with the holy Angels.” (Mark 8:38)
Thus, we follow our Savior when we carry our own personal cross in the struggle to show self-sacrificing love and to remain faithful to Him and unashamedly to confess Him.
I ask you to turn your attention to the painting depicting the Appearance of the Cross over Mount Hymettus, just outside of Athens on the feast of the Exaltation in 1925. The priest depicted in the painting is Fr. John Floros. His holy remains are buried in the courtyard within the women’s monastery of Saint Irene Chyrsovalantou.
The calendar change took place 90 years ago today on the Sunday of the Worship of the Holy Cross during Great Lent on March 10/23, 1924. This date was chosen so that the feast of the Annunciation of that year would be held using the Liturgical (Gregorian) Calendar of the Protestants and Papists and not the Liturgical (Julian) Calendar of the Orthodox Church established at the First Ecumenical Council.
To help you understand these events, I will give a brief historical background. The new Revolutionary government in Greece led by Colonel Nicholas Plastiras, arbitrarily and uncanonically removed Archbishop Theokletos and replaced him with Archimandrite Chrysostom Papadopoulos on February 25, 1923. Then for purely political reasons, the new Archbishop Chrysostomos Papadopoulos changed the calendar in March of 1924.
This tragic event was part of an overall plan by a politically motivated faction that had usurped control of the Church. Four years prior to the Calendar change, in 1920, the Patriarchate of Constantinople composed the infamous “Encyclical to the Churches of Christ Wheresoever They Might Be.” This encyclical addressed the denominations of Western Europe, i.e., those outside the Holy Orthodox Church, as “fellow heirs and partakers of the same promise of God in Jesus Christ.” Quote:
After the essential re-establishment of sincerity and confidence among the churches, we think, then, that above all, love should be rekindled and strengthened among the churches, so that they should no more consider one another as strangers and foreigners, but as kinsmen, and as being a part of the household of Christ and “fellow heirs, and formed of the same body and partakers of the same promise of God in Jesus Christ” (Eph. 3:6).
For if the different churches are inspired by love, and place it before everything else in their deliberations and relations among themselves, instead of increasing and widening the existing dissensions, they should be enabled to reduce and diminish them. By stirring up a right brotherly interest in the condition, the well-being and stability of the other churches; by readiness to take an interest in what is happening in those churches and to obtain a better knowledge of them; and by willingness to offer mutual aid and help, many good things will be achieved for the glory and the benefit both of themselves and of the entire Christian body. In our opinion, such a friendship and kindly disposition towards each other can be shown and demonstrated particularly in the following ways:
a) through the adoption by all the Churches of one single calendar so that the great Christian feasts may be everywhere celebrated simultaneously;
Thus in 1924 these churchmen abandoned the sacred liturgical calendar of the Orthodox Church as a first step in their efforts to unite with the heretical western Churches. It is clear from all of the above that the Calendar issue is not about 13 days, it is about men making political merchandise of the things of the Church, it is about the Church being infiltrated by men who desired to subject the Church to their political ambitions and purposes. It is about the betrayal of the Faith and Holy Traditions of the Orthodox Church.
I wish to draw your attention to God’s providence for us. These vain and blindly politically minded men chose to change the calendar on the Sunday of the Cross in 1924, and, in His ineffable mercy and love for man, our Savior gave us a sign on the other great feast of the Cross, that is the Exaltation of the Cross in 1925, approximately one and a half years later. This sign was “A Divine Confirmation” regarding the Orthodox liturgical Calendar and the Traditions of our Church. I quote from an eye-witness account:
At 11:30 P.M., there began to appear in the heavens above the church, in the direction of the northeast, a bright, radiant Cross of light. The light not only illuminated the church and the faithful but, in its rays, the stars of the clear, cloudless sky became dim and the church-yard was filled with an almost tangible light. The form of the Cross itself was an especially dense light and it could be clearly seen as a Byzantine cross with a crossbar toward the bottom. This heavenly miracle lasted for half an hour, until midnight, and then the Cross began slowly to rise up vertically, as the cross in the hands of the priest does in the ceremony of the Elevation of the Cross in church. Having come straight up, the Cross began gradually to fade away.
[From the Greek text, "I Too Was There" Eyewitness Accounts of the Appearance of the Cross over the Church of St. John the Theologian at Mt. Hymettus, September 14, 1925.]
The civil authority sent police to this service to break it up, but the police were greatly outnumbered and simply remained to observe. When the Cross appeared in the heavens the police were on their knees weeping and asking God for mercy. These men were converted and were among those who proclaimed the miracle. Alas, even this sign did not cause those who had control over the State Church of Greece to change their ways and thus there occurred a division that grieves us even unto this day. Ninety years have passed and the leadership in the state jurisdictions of “world orthodoxy” have sold their birthright in the things of God for a mess of lentils, as Esau once did, and betrayed the faith for political purposes, subjecting their local churches to the pan-heresy of ecumenism. But there are many among the laity who are being swept along by this heresy through the pernicious counsel of false elders and teachers. We all must continue to pray for them and hope that they become aware of this history and are moved by this evident sign of God.
The reason why I purchased this painting was so that you would retell this story to your children and this would be a symbol and vision for us all concerning the “Divine Confirmation” of Holy Tradition and how we can live in a secular world and still preserve that which is sacred and not deny the things of God and not be ashamed of the things of God.
And I say this because one characteristic of the present day leaders of the Ecumenist pseudo-Orthodox is that they are ashamed to proclaim the, “One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism,” of the singular Church of Christ which was preached by the Holy Apostles.
We have been given a sign, the sign of the Cross, the sign of the Son of Man. We have been given “A Divine Confirmation.” At the Second Coming of our Savior and His Last Judgment, this sign will divide all the people of the world, as it is written:
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. (Matt 24:30)
Our Savior promised that He would return and judge the world. We must ask ourselves, will we be counted as faithful members of the Tribe and Household of God and rejoice at His return, or will we be counted as members of “the tribes of the earth” who will mourn at the appearance of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, at the Second Coming?
Let us embrace the Mystery of the Cross. May the Mystery of the Cross overshadow your hearts and overshadow your families, and this parish community. And let us love nothing of this earth more than our Savior, so that when we encounter Him at the Second Coming we may be counted worthy of Him. Amen.
Courtesy of Father Panagiotes Carras' Yahoo Group