John 12:28-36 (Matins)
1 Corinthians 1:18-24
John 19:6-35

At the Crossroads

Today we observe the Universal Exaltation of the Precious and Life-giving Cross. In this, we continue a kind of national holiday of the Eastern Roman Empire, called Byzantium. Before the exertions of the Emperor Constantine and of his mother, the Empress Helena, the Church was slow to adopt the Cross enthusiastically as its symbol. As St. Paul had commented centuries earlier, a stumbling block to faith for Jews and just plain foolishness to intellectuals (1Cor 1:18-25) as we just read in our Epistle lesson.

But the Emperor adopted the Cross as his personal device ordering that it be clearly displayed upon the armor of his legions and publishing the Cross as his motto:

which he had heard from on high and saw a Cross emblazoned across the sky on the eve of a decisive military battle: "By this Sign you shall conquer," expressed in Latin, the official language of the Roman Court. He was determined that the Cross no longer be seen in its aspect of of public humiliation, but rather as a banner of bold conquest.

We can understand how the sensibilities of a world-conquering general might differ from those of a Church whose central message was inner transformation. Not smoking battlefields and the cries of attack, but the quiet of inner contemplation achieving serenity. Military victories can be settled in an afternoon. But the reshaping of the human heart and soul very often requires years or even lifetimes. And if anything stands out to Westerners as they stream into the Orthodox Church by the thousands these days, it is this: conversion does not happen in an instant as frontier preachers had promised (for them it had to, for their revival tent would be folded up that same night). And the Crucifixion of Jesus did not instantly clear a debt demanded by a Father with blood on His hands. No. Conversion is a journey among friends. It is journey to the most important Friend. Jesus said, "I call you my friends" (Jn 15:15) It is a process whereby a Kingdom is created from "living stones" (1Peter 2:5), who by-and-by resemble God's Son. For this is the goal: that we be adopted as the children we were born to be, that we come to the fullness of the original Image placed upon us at birth, the Image of God. Did not the Apostles call their movement The Way? You see, it's a journey.

At the beginning of the journey is heard "a voice crying the wilderness." The Forerunner exhorts us to change everything: our thoughts, our desires, our habits, our plans, our whole direction in life. Metanoeite! he cries. Be changed!

A little later our quotidian lives stop. We encounter the Living God ..... or He encounters us. From His lips are heard that same word: Metanoeite!, now not spoken as an exhortation, but issued as a Divine command. "Burn down your whole former life!" He says. It is not possible to serve Mammon, living in the "world system" (as Christians say these days), and also claim that you are following God.

We stand at a Crossroads (another meaning of the Holy Cross), and we remember the Baptist's admonition:

We must choose which we shall be: chaff or wheat, tares or grain (Mt 13:24-30), goats or sheep (Mt 25:32-33). This is the constant message of the Christ. We must choose. It must be ourselves who pronounce the Final Judgment. And the journey between now and the last days (or the end of our lives) is the only important thing: for ourselves, for the children we are rearing, for our family and loved ones. The journey to God .... This is the most important thing. Jesus says, the only necessary thing (Lu 10:41-42).

Now, the Synoptic Gospels may differ in detail, but they all tell the same story: the exhortation to change, the encounter with God, the acceptance or refusal of the call, the Cross.

Should we accept God's call, the road ahead will lead to His good Kingdom. Instantly and dramatically, we enter a fellowship of angels and saints and others like ourselves who together are called The Way. Together, we begin a transformation after the example of the Master, who points to the Cross as our salvation.

For the journey and the Cross turn out to be one and the same. The Cross is the instrument on which our former lives are crucified (Gal 2:20). We die to our former world and become a new creation in Christ (2Cor 5:17). And, bearing our Cross, we find that we renew ourselves in this life everyday — refusing the world, stripping away its filth, becoming more and more like Him.

Like the Gospels, our individual lives might vary widely in detail, but no one might evade this call from God nor elude this Cross. We all hear His Divine command from within: Be changed!

Do we not see the restlessness of the world which has refused God? C. S. Lewis wrote that "Human history is the long, terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy." And certainly, change is the subject of countless books and blogs and YouTube streams, whether it be diet, exercise regimen, or new "life philosophies." And it is perennially the main theme in every election season: change!

But this juggernaut, too, inescapably must lead to God's Crossroads. For this crisis, this crucial moment, is built into our lives. We cannot change the subject. When we are young, we are consumed with the question, "What is the purpose of my life?" And, it returns, if we have not addressed it, in our twilight years. We ask, "What did it all mean?"

We must choose. Either we choose for Him, or we choose against Him. There is no neutral position, no half-way.

The call to change declared by John the Baptist was heard by all those in the Levant during the first century AD:

They all went. That's 600,000 people according to the reliable census ordered by the Romans. (And the population of the the wider region, coterminous with the Roman Province of Syria, was six million.) By any measure John's ministry was earth-shaking. And those who came repented, seeking new life — symbolically washing away their shames and regrets in ritual drowning, so they could be reborn into a new journey to God attired in the white tunic which awaited them after their baptism..

Seeking the pristine and the pure, these people followed John in a kind of "back to the garden" movement, for He Himself bespoke the freshness of Eden. And they followed Jesus, for He was the Lord of Eden. Was there any doubt about this? Did not Satan (Mt 4:3) and the demons of Hell (Mt 8:29) and those who survived a near shipwreck (Mt 14:33) all say, "You are the Son of God"?

But the Cross is a very different proposition. After all, a journey back to the garden or encountering the Lord of Life in approachable, human form is a pleasant thing, "A green thought in a green shade" (Andrew Marvell). But the Cross, erected on a stony hill, is not. Far from the cool of the evening where one converses with God among groves, the Cross signifies being stripped bare before all eyes, being beaten, almost flayed alive, and then nailed, hands and feet, to a cruel instrument of execution. This is no ritual drowning, but a brutal and protracted assault ending in a slow death.

Alice Von Hildebrand in her forward to Transformation in Christ wrote, there is a very great difference between being in love with the idea of conversion and conversion itself. You know "falling in love with conversion." You buy little icons for house. You get the popular books. You attend discussions where "the essence of Orthodoxy" is discussed. But this is not conversion itself in which you burn down your whole world.

In this insight, we see God's call afresh. You cannot answer God with insubstantial changes to your comfortable life. No. You must discard that former life. It will mean parting with friends. Perhaps it will mean parting with family members.

I will share that when I arrived to the point of real conversion, ready to turn away from "living in the world," those around me said to each other, "He's become a religious fanatic." Interesting that real life should be demonized. Isn't this precisely backwards? Where the path to dark kingdom is held up to be the healthy norm, And Kingdom of God is labeled as "Hell."

Now at an old age I can say with the confidence of experience that the "old life" collapses anyway. No one has to burn it down; it collapses from its inner rot.

Ask any worldling who has encountered God. God will surely have His Way. He will have His shake-up. We might call it a crisis, a catastrophe, the "day my whole world ended." For no reply to God, is a reply, is a choice. And it is the choice most people make: eternal death. Ask the parents of adult children who have been lost to the ghastly culture of degradation and death. Offspring covered with tatoos and body piercings who are addicted to drugs and riddled with sexually-transmitted diseases. For where God is not there can be no life. And life is beautiful.

All roads lead to the Cross. It is the Great Compass of the world and looms over every journey as well as wanderings by the way. It is on every horizon, in every season, and eternally changeless. For its cardinal points in Greek, spell "ADAM," who is the beginning of all our journeys, and point ahead to the end of all journeys, which is the "New ADAM" — our God Who hung upon a Cross, the One we refused, the One the people chose to be crucified. Hear Him, for He speaks. But these are not words of anger. These are not words of condemnation. Even with His last breath, He reassures us. He tells us that on the other side of this all-consuming ordeal lies Divine Life.

Let us return to original question. What is the Church's message: the Cross or transformation through a journey called Theosis? I did not understand this riddle until I saw the puzzle pieces clearly. For I had pictured the Western Cross used for execution of the condemned. But that is not what the Emperor Constantine saw. He saw a great Chi-Rho (in English, an enormous "X" with a "P" drawn through it). These are the Greek letters that begin the word Christ, called the Christogram. What the Emperor saw is that Christ is the Cross, nor can they ever be separated. He is eternally one-and-the-same with His Self-sacrificing love, which is the Life's Blood of the world, Precious and Life-giving. And this is the Life, this is the sacrifice He asks us to make our own.

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What does this life look like? People come to visit our enclosed community. They have come to see something. Usually they focus on outward, material aspects of our lives. One volunteer from an Orthodox parish — pointing to our monastic compound, orchards, and planting fields — demanded to know, "Who paid for all this?"

Our reply is simple and direct: "God has done this."

If I am pressed for details — our large buildings, the certified organic farm, thousands of feet of buried water line and valve boxes, hundreds of feet of road, thousands of feet of fencing installed in a jungle — I reply, "Two elderly nuns and their hapless chaplain have built all. For God chooses the weak, the foolish, and the lowly (1Cor 1:27), that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to Whom belong the glory and the dominion forever and ever" (1Peter 4:11). There can be no doubt what has happened here .... unless you believe that nuns now in the eighties and their feeble chaplain did all without the mighty power of God.

"And you receive no pay?

"That is true. We are adopted children of the Most High (Rom 8:15). Shall a laborer extort his mother and father?"

"And the Church gives you no support?"

"That is true. The Church does not give to monasteries and parishes; we give to the Church" (Heb 7:8).

"And the farm has run in the red for ten years?"

"That is true, by the grace of God, for 'in Him we live and move and have our being' (Acts 17:28)."

"I just don't understand this," they say and walk away.

But the world is out-of-focus. What most people call "life on the margins" conforms to the Divine Will to "live simply that others might simply live." Simplicity is the acceptable life in God's perspective.

As of 2023, 735 individuals held more wealth in the U.S. than 50% of the population. The stark truth is that capitalism is a zero-sum game. What is that? Imagine ten jelly beans: if a few hoarders should take eight (and the top 20% do), that leaves two jelly beans for all the rest of us, which have to be shared. During the COVID epidemic, wealth held by billionaires increased 70%. And so, to accommodate their upward adjustment in wealth, more families were forced out on to the streets. Perhaps this is difficult for most people to understand, but this is what a zero-sum game is.

It is absurd to blame poverty on the poor, for it is the rich who make poverty necessary. It is not possible for everyone to be rich. We cannot have a constant influx of more jelly beans. There is a finite number: that's all there is. This is beyond debate. It is an immutable, structural feature of our economic system. As I say, a zero-sum game.

Nonetheless, we must all labor in the Vineyard. In that Vineyard a Watchtower has been set. It is the Cross, the universal Compass for all mankind. We might call this a moral compass. And from that Cross, God watches. He watches us. And His gaze is perfect, missing nothing. And the sun is setting. Glory to God! Glory to Him Who watches in our twilight!

And how do you love God? He has said it: "Take up your cross, and follow Me."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.