As we head toward the end of the first month of our new Church Year, we have just passed the Apodosis of the Exaltation of the Cross. Now our mission parish looks toward our patronal “second feast,” of the uncovering of the relics of our patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, this Friday and Saturday (services Oct. 11 and 12, 7 pm and 10 a.m. respectively). Here are words of St. John on the Cross, with a slight addendum, which were given as the Homily for the Exaltation of the Cross at our parish this year.

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Our patron, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, said this of today’s Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross:

“Before The Time of Christ, the cross was an instrument of punishment; it evoked fear and aversion. But after Christ’s death on the Cross it became the instrument and sign of our salvation. Through the Cross, Christ destroyed the devil; from the Cross He descended into hades and, having liberated those languishing there, led them into the Kingdom of Heaven. The sign of the Cross is terrifying to demons and, as the sign of Christ, it is honored by Christians. The Lord manifested it in the sky to the Emperor Constantine as he was going to Rome to fight the tyrant who had seized power, and the Emperor, having fashioned a standard in the form of a cross, won a total victory. Having been aided by the Cross of the Lord, the Emperor Constantine asked his mother, the Empress Helen, to find the actual Life-giving Cross, and the devout Helen went to Jerusalem where, after much searching, she found it.

Many healings and other miracles were wrought and continue to be wrought by the Life-giving Cross and also by its depiction. Through it the Lord preserves His people from all enemies visible and invisible. The Orthodox Church solemnly celebrates the finding of the Cross of the Lord, recalling at the same time the appearance of the Cross in the sky to the Emperor Constantine. On that and other days dedicated to the Holy Cross, we beseech God that He grant His mercies not only to individual people, but to all Christendom, to the whole Church. This is well expressed by the Troparion to the Cross of the Lord, composed in the eighth century, when Saint Cosmas, Bishop of Maiuma, a friend of St. John Damascene, wrote the service to the Exaltation of the Cross of the Lord.

“’Save, O Lord, Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance, granting victory to (right-believing) kings over adversaries, and by Thy Cross preserving Thy community.’

“The beginning of this prayer is taken from the twenty-seventh Psalm. In the Old Testament the word ‘people’ designated only those who confessed the true faith, people faithful to God. ‘Inheritance’ referred to everything which properly belonged to God, God’s property, which in the New Testament is the Church of Christ. In praying for the salvation of God’s people (the Christians), both from eternal torments and from earthly calamities, we beseech the Lord to bless, to send down grace, His good gifts upon the whole Church as well, and inwardly strengthen her.

“The petition for granting ‘victory to kings,’ i.e., to the bearers of supreme authority, has its basis in Psalm 143, verse 10, and recalls the victories King David achieved by God’s power, and likewise the victories granted Emperor Constantine through the Cross of the Lord. This appearance of the Cross made emperors who had formerly persecuted Christians into defenders of the Church from her external enemies, into ‘external bishops,’ to use the expression of the holy Emperor Constantine.

“The Church, inwardly strong by God’s grace and protected outwardly, is, for Orthodox Christians, ‘the city of God,’ God’s community, His commonwealth, where the path to the Heavenly Jerusalem has its beginning. Various calamities have shaken the world, entire peoples have disappeared, cities and states have perished, but the Church, in spite of persecutions and even internal conflicts, stands invincible; for the gates of hell shall not prevail against her (Matt. 16:18). Today, when world leaders try in vain to establish order on earth, the only dependable instrument of peace is that about which the Church sings:

“The Cross is the guardian of the whole world;

the Cross is the beauty of the Church,

the Cross is the might of kings;

the Cross is the confirmation of the faithful,

the Cross is the glory of angels and the wounding of demons.”

(Exapostilarion of the Exaltation of the Cross)

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There is nothing to add to those words of St. John’s, who bore the Cross in his life from China and to Western Europe and to North America in bringing Orthodoxy to the world out from the sufferings of the twentieth century, a standard of victory in Jesus Christ.

On the form of the Cross, though, here are a few more words to consider today on the Church Year’s second major feast, from our holy Tradition. The Holy Cross with its vertical and horizontal lines reminds us of how we both look to the heavens to God our Father and also acknowledge how the Holy Spirit, Who is everywhere present and fillest all things, embraces us together here in the Church, and of course the Holy Trinity is all together in all actions. For in the central focus of the Cross is the God-man, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Here is the entire Holy Trinity emblazoned.

The Slavic Byzantine Cross adds to this the additional diagonal Cross-bar or footrest, as well as the headrest. The footrest balances up on the right side of Jesus Christ symbolizing the Wise Thief, St. Rakh or Dismas, who asked Jesus to remember Him in His kingdom, and thus stole Paradise. Likewise we hope to follow that Wise Thief unworthily, rather than the Foolish Thief, represented by the downward side of the bar, who did not so find salvation in our Lord’s memory. The footrest pointing up represents deification imparted by the Holy Spirit. The head rest reminds us of the Father. The Son again is in the middle focus. All are one in essence, and so there are multiple dimensions of the mystery of the Trinity in the Holy Cross, which we kiss at the end of Liturgy and mark on our bodies every time we cross ourselves.

Unworthily, as a reminder of Jesus’ death for us, the Cross as explicated by our patron St. John remains a lesson I a sinner need continually to learn, for the Cross also brings us face to face with Jesus’ New Commandment, to love our neighbor more than ourselves. On the way to the Cross He suffered in the Garden, sweating blood, confessing “Not my will but Thine be done.” I remember my first encounter with this fuller Orthodox sense of the Cross before I had converted, in life experiences, and then also reading the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood.” There Jesus leaps onto the Cross like a hero, onto his emblem of suffering, whic is also a standard of victory. This is the Cross which we exalt today with the memory of its rediscovery by St. Helena and the Holy Hierarch Macarius of Jerusalem, appropriately a leading opponent of Arianism.

With the Cross also comes the tradition that it was made from Old Testament times of three woods of cypress, pine, and cedar, in fulfillment of ancient biblical verses, the woods entwined together also to typify the three-in-one Trinity. As the Old Testament readings at Vespers noted, divine Wisdom, which we identify with Jesus Christ, is a tree of life. And here it is before us, the power or virtue of the precious and life-giving Cross, as the Tree of Life, so unfathomably deeply rooted and so wonderfully and infinitely high and broad.

May the Lord through the power of His precious and life-giving Cross be gracious to us, bless us, make His face to shine upon us, and have mercy on us. Amen