Homily for the Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross, 7534/2026, from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Christian Mission Church, by Priest Dr. Paul Siewers.

We are halfway through Lent, and can see the pattern of meaning laid out for us in the tradition of our Lord’s Church. It is a path of forgiveness and repentance that leads to the Resurrection.

First we had the Sunday of Orthodoxy, commemorating how we venerate and humble ourselves before the icons of our holy saints and ultimately of the Mother of God and our Lord Jesus Christ. The icons are otherworldly windows giving us strength in our journey of Lent. Then came the Sunday of St. Gregory of Palamas, reminding us of his brilliant defense of the Orthodox teaching that God’s grace is uncreated yet engages us physically.

Today the Sunday of the Cross reminds us of the Cross we need to bear, and how it also is our ladder to Pascha, and our life preserver. “Lent” is an old word for springtime, and we must during Lent like a seed die in the wintry ground at first in order to come really to life in the spring of Pascha. The Cross is the Tree of Life that springs from the deep soil of Lent. It lifts us up in joyful sorrow, closer to God and to one another in the branches, while we suffer to put off our sins.

The goal of Lent is the achievement of the Cross, to empty ourselves in Jesus Christ, not to assert ourselves. As the classic Orthodox book Unseen Warfare, whose final editor was St. Theophan the Recluse, tells us of the Way of the Cross:

“A man who is moved toward doing one thing or another purely by the consciousness of God’s will and the desire to please Him never prefers one activity to another, even if one is great and lofty and another petty and insignificant, but he has his will equally disposed toward either, so long as they are pleasing to God… for he has but one intention and one aim to the exclusion of all else—to please God always and in all he does, whether in life or in death, as the Apostle says: Wherefore we labor, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted by Him. Therefore, beloved, be ever watchful over yourself, be collected within, and strive by all means in your power to direct all your activities toward this single aim… to please God by obeying His will, since it is in God’s wish that you should go ot heaven rather than be cast into hell.

“None can fully conceive how great are the strength and power in our spiritual life of this motive and aim,” Unseen Warfare tells us, “to please God. For even if some activity is in itself quite simple and unimportant, if it is done for the sole purpose of pleasing God and to His glory, it becomes in the eyes of God infinitely more valuable than many other great and glorious deeds performed without this aim….

“This inner task, which you must practice in anything you do—the task of directing your thoughts, feelings, and actions only toward pleasing God—will seem difficult at first, but will later become easy and light, if, firstly you constantly exercise yourself in this spiritual effort and, secondly, if you constantly keep warm your yearning for God, sighing for Him with a live longing of the heart….  The more often this search for limitless good in God is practiced in our consciousness and the deeper it penetrates into the feeling of the heart, the more frequent and warm will be the actions of our will I have described, and the more quickly and easily shall we form the habit of doing everything solely through love of the Lord, impelled only by desire to please Him, since He is the most worthy of all love.” (Robert Edwards’ translation)

This warming of our hearts that the manual Unseen Warfare describes, brothers and sisters, touches in on the compassion of our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane where he sweat as if blood for our suffering human nature. This is the Way of the Cross we commemorate today.

Metropolitan Antony, the first primate of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, wrote that our Lord “was oppressed with the greatest sorrow on the night when the greatest crime in human history occurred, when God’s ministers—with the complicity of Christ’s own disciple, the former through envy, the latter through greed—decided to put the Son of God to death…. One must suppose that during that night in Gethsemane, the thought and feeling of the God-man embraced all of fallen humanity—numbering many millions—and wept with loving grief over each one individually, as only the all-knowing Divine heart could….having suffered in His loving soul over our imperfection and our corrupt will, the Lord poured into our nature a wellspring of new, vital strength, available to everyone who has ever or will ever desire it, beginning with the wise thief.”

This is the way set forth to us fully and finally on the Cross. Yet the Cross offers in reality but a ladder to the Resurrection. Brothers and Sisters, let us clamber up the Cross this middle of Lent, as we look forward to next week’s Sunday of the Ladder. By our death to self on the Cross with God’s help we are healed, and we find our salvation and redemption in the Lord Who in his suffering poured forth compassion upon us, died for us, and lived again to save us, and showed us the Cross as the way home. The Cross is our life preserver, and our way home.

Amen

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark,

§37 8:34-9:1]

The Lord said: ‘Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospel’s, the same shall save it. 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? 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.’ And He said unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, that there are some of them that stand here who shall not taste of death till they have seen the Kingdom of God come with power.’