Embracing the Cross: Finding Strength in Christ’s Sacrifice

On this Third Sunday of Lent, Sub Dn. Timothy Grace reflects on the story of St. Peter and his encounter with Christ on the road from Rome—where Peter sought to flee, but Jesus walked toward sacrifice. How do we respond to our own crosses? Do we flee suffering, or do we embrace it as Christ did? Join Sub Dn. Tim as he explores the beauty and mystery of the Cross, learning to see our struggles not as burdens, but as opportunities for transformation and grace.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There's a story told of St. Peter in the Latin tradition, who, when the persecutions were intensifying in Rome, he attempted to flee that city. As he was leaving, he sees Christ walking up the same road but going in the opposite direction, going to Rome. St. Peter asks him, "Where are you going, Lord?" In the Latin, "Quo vadis?"—"Where are you going?" And Christ says, "I'm going to Rome to be crucified again." He's basically telling St. Peter, "Since you are fleeing your cross, I will go to be crucified in your place." At hearing this, St. Peter gains courage, turns back around, and goes into Rome to face his own martyrdom.

The story shows us two things: how Christ acts towards his cross, which is that he embraces it, and how we tend to act with our crosses, our suffering—we try and flee from them. So today, I'd like to focus on these two things, really about what we can learn from how Christ has gone about taking up his cross on this third Sunday of Lent, where we reflect on the significance of the cross in our lives and our own crosses.

We start with the reality that we do tend to flee from pain and suffering. We try to flee from our crosses. You know what? St. Peter, he was crucified upside down, and there's a sense in which our own crosses will feel upside down to us too. They feel totally wrong, and that's how we try and flee them. Now, if you're wearing a cross, think of how it looks to you from your perspective, looking down at the cross on your chest. It looks upside down, doesn't it? And so it is for us. We expect the crosses that Christ gives us to be a certain way, to look a certain way, to be within the bounds of what we would prefer, to fit our expectations, to fit in with our lives, to be manageable, to be predictable and controllable, to be the right way up, for everything to just be as it should.

You know what? It reminds me of this scene in a novel, "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway, where a British nurse, Catherine Barkley, loses her fiancé in the Battle of the Somme in World War I. She recounts that she expected him to be wounded with a saber wound or shot through the shoulder with a bandage around his head, but instead, he was blown to pieces by an artillery shell. I think it's the same for us. We expect our crosses to be something like a spiritual saber wound, to have a certain nobility about them, a certain maybe tragic romanticism, right? But our true cross will be something painful because Christ tells St. Peter right at the end of the Gospel of John, he says, "Truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and go wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you, and they will carry you where you do not want to go." The parenthesis tells us this he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God. There's a sense in which the crosses that Christ gives us will take us places where we would rather not go, right? So it's no wonder that we run. A true cross will, moreover, be to a degree something shameful. It was shameful for Christ to be crucified and to die in this ignoble way, reserved for criminals and without clothing, right? Totally degraded. I mean, do we think that the Romans would go to the bother of crucifying someone only to say, "Well, let's let him retain his dignity"? No, it's all taken away. But as we read in the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 12, he scorned the shame, he disregarded it, thought it to be nothing for the joy set before him. That joy was the beauty of our salvation and the healing of humanity.

It's this beauty that the Church teaches us how we should view the cross. I mean, let's look at how we present the cross today with beautiful flowers, and we present it with ornate carvings and with colorful icons. Let's look at how we interact with it. When we have the procession of the Holy Cross, we'll make the sign of the cross before it, we'll bow down before it, we will kiss it reverentially, and we display crosses with pride in our homes. Actually, St. Ephraim the Syrian presents a beautiful connection between the cross and the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden, adding to the beauty of the cross. In his hymn on virginity, number 16, he says, "Greatly saddened was the Tree of Life when it beheld Adam stolen away from it. It sank down into the virgin ground and was hidden to burst forth and reappear on Golgotha. Humanity, like birds that are chased, took refuge in it so that it might return them to their proper home. The chaser, that is, the devil, was chased away, while the doves that had been chased now hop with joy in Paradise."

So we find the cross beautiful because it really is the Tree of Life. It is the wood upon which life is given to us, the very means by which Christ gives us his life, and we eat of this tree when we partake of the body and blood of Christ himself. There's an extremely close connection for us between the person of Christ and his work on the cross for us and for our salvation. Kissing the cross is a form of kissing Christ, of veneration to Christ himself.

Let's consider our own crosses. Rather than running away from them and seeing them as something ugly, something painful and undesirable, can we also, with prayer, with pain of heart, also identify closely with our crosses, just like Christ, so that they might be the site of our greatest victory? This place where we might think is actually our greatest problem, our greatest struggle, our greatest issue—can it actually be the site of our greatest victory and the greatest work that God wants to accomplish in our lives?

Let's speak about what it might mean then to deny ourselves and take up these crosses if so much is at stake, if so much is on offer for us. I'd like to share the thoughts of Mother Siluana Vlad, a Romanian nun who only recently passed away, who writes in her book "God, Where Is the Wound?" three ways that people might typically approach these struggles, right? Two of them being not so great, and the final one being perhaps what we want to aim for. She gives us a practical example, like when someone insults you and you bear the cross of this insult that someone gives you. She says, "Let's say someone tells me I'm stupid. When I receive this message, I can have three types of reactions. Number one, I can react according to my emotional patterns, and I can either get angry or scared. This way, I go into fight or flight mode, and I truly become stupid, even more stupid, and I pray to God to punish that person, to show him that I'm right, to rid me of him, etc., right? Number two, I can detach from the anger I feel with the help of prayer, but I focus on thoughts such as, 'Well, what can I expect from him? Poor man, his mind is not right. He's had a difficult life. Maybe his parents were alcoholics. God forgive him. I pity him because I am Mother Siluana, and everyone knows I'm not stupid.' But she says detachment is negation and is not healing. Number three, she says this: the third stage, acceptance and prayer. 'What did you call me? Stupid? You know, I haven't thought about this. Good thing you told me. Here I was thinking I'm smart.' Then I start to think seriously about the person's arguments and about what I can do and how I can become smarter. I accept that now I actually can be stupid, and the truth is that I am, maybe not in the area where I think of myself as smart, but in another area. So I accept it, and I can pray, 'Lord, allow me to see clearly what you are teaching me through this. Lord, reward him because he has given me a great gift. Without him, I wouldn't have seen this side of me.' These could be the ways I can receive the message and three kinds of prayer. We separate ourselves from the need to answer immediately with help from God's grace, and we believe that God works through that person so that he can tell us something extremely important. We need to pray to be able to decipher the Lord's message in anything that people might say to us. If 99% of what someone tells me is not true, but 1% is true, I need to choose to receive that part, the truth. I need to choose to be on the side of truth instead of attaching myself to untruths and trigger the fight or flight mechanisms I am capable of. If I am on the side of the truth, the forgiveness of the lie or the deceit will only be the price I have to pay for the truth."

In this scenario, we can see how we can deny ourselves, deny our desire for retaliation, self-justification, deny even our right to pity the other person because, I mean, let's face it, sometimes our pity is just a veiled disdain. Instead, we can take up the cross of criticism to find what can be resurrected on it, in this case, that kernel of truth that is so valuable, that little piece of piercing insight that we wouldn't have been able to see ourselves. You know, when we read the writings of the Church Fathers, something like the "Ladder of Divine Ascent," which we'll commemorate next Sunday, we see how willingly all our holy forbears took on criticism, abuse, ill treatment, insults. I think we have a clue here because they really knew that behind all these difficulties lay immense spiritual benefits if only they accepted them with humility, with gratitude, with patience, and with an open ear to hearing what God was trying to say. The shame that could have been part of all that treatment they scorned, they disregarded it because of the joy that would come through advancing a little bit more on the path of salvation.

I'd like to share another story with you that I think really embodies what it means to really take up our cross, and those who've done the foundations course have heard this, but it comes from Metropolitan Nikolaos, who wrote a book called "When God Is Not There." He tells a number of stories as he's worked all his life as a hospital chaplain, right? He tells a story of this woman, and her husband had a daughter with a severe mental handicap, and they had great struggles. The father wanted to have the girl institutionalized and hospitalized, and the woman said, "No, we'll look after her ourselves." The husband ends up leaving her alone with this child, and she happened to also work in a children's hospital. In addition to her own child, she took on another child with a different mental handicap, right? She adopted this child, and she said to Metropolitan Nikolaos, "I didn't have the faith to understand why God would let this happen to me, so I decided to make up for my lack of faith with a superabundance of love." She found that when she made that choice, though she was feeling like she had no faith at all in God, still making the choice to take on this other child, she felt her life transformed, and the grace of God flowed into her and filled her with abundant peace and joy. She denied her lack of faith, didn't curse God, didn't run away, but embraced the cross of the situation, didn't just accept it through gritted teeth, but even took on more. I think that shows something of the attitude that we must have.

My final point today is to say that in the mystery of the cross, what we really see is Christ co-suffering with our own pain, the joining of his suffering with ours and our suffering with his. You know, it's interesting to read stories of where the wood of the cross came from. Where did the actual wood that Christ was nailed on come from? There are actually a number of stories in our tradition, and there's one that speaks about all the way back to Adam, where Adam, he's on his deathbed, he's sick, and he sends his son Seth to go grab some oil from the Tree of Life. Seth goes to the boundaries of Paradise, and of course, the Archangel Michael is there; no one can go past. The Archangel refuses, but instead, what he does give Seth are three seeds from the tree, right? When Adam died, they placed these three seeds under his tongue, right? They buried him with these seeds, and from these seeds, the tree of the cross grew—a miraculous tree from three different types of wood: cedar, cypress, and pine, united in the one trunk. You might have seen an icon of the crucifixion of Christ, and you see a little skull down the bottom. Well, this is a reference to this story, right? From the skull of Adam, the cross of Christ grew. What we're seeing here is not only from the skull of Adam but really from the very place where he sinned—his tongue, right? His tongue is what he used when he didn't fast according to the commandment. His tongue is what he used when he blamed God and his wife. So from this very wound, from the very place where sin entered his life and sin really kind of entered all of humanity, from this wound, the cross grew, right, according to the tradition of this story. It shows us that in our very wounds, even in our very sinfulness and sins, the work of the Trinity is mysteriously present, right, to bear his wondrous fruit in due time.

As we venerate the cross of Christ today, let's first be thankful for what Jesus has achieved on it, seeing today a foreshadowing of Great and Holy Friday in a few weeks' time. But let's also reflect on our own crosses with thankfulness and patience, understanding that from the bleakness, from the pain, from the despair and the anguish, God wishes to truly make something beautiful. Before your cross, we bow down and worship, O Master, and your holy resurrection we glorify. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.