The Meaning of the Mystery of the Cross

A Sermon for Great Friday

Now hangs upon the tree He who hung the earth upon the waters (Antiphon 15, service for Great Friday, Matins)

Here on the cross hangs the One who hung the earth upon the waters—that is, the Lord Almighty, who created heaven and earth by His all-powerful word and upholds the whole boundless creation, visible and invisible, by His almighty hand.

On the one hand—what humiliation, dishonor, weakness, suffering, mortal anguish, and death! On the other—what awesome, incomparable majesty, omnipotence, and splendor; what boundless goodness, what infinite holiness and justice—a justice that demands righteousness and truth from every rational creature, and that through His divine-human Passion redeems and utterly consumes all the unrighteousness of men in return for faith and repentance!

Let us fathom the meaning of the Mystery of the Cross.

Out of His boundless goodness the Lord created man with immensely great advantages over all the earthly creatures, in His Own image and likeness, endowing him with a rational, free, and immortal soul, and entering into a covenant with him of faith and of the keeping of God’s commandments. For keeping them, everlasting blessedness in heaven was promised to man. Before the first human beings there stood a trial—the keeping of the easy commandment given them; the gradual fulfilling of it was to strengthen all the powers of man—the mind, the heart, and the will—in obedience to the Creator, and to convince Adam and Eve of the necessity of obeying the Creator for the good of themselves and their posterity, and to preserve them from the abysses and misfortunes of self-will and disobedience.

The covenant was defiantly and ungratefully broken by the first couple, and the terrible corruption of sin and decay infected Adam and Eve; and—since they bore in their loins the whole human race that had come from them—this infection passed into all mankind, as we see to this day in ourselves and in all people. Through the breaking of the covenant the human race cast itself off from God, the Source of life; it enslaved itself to the enemy of God, the enemy of all righteousness and truth; it allied itself with and became fused with the all-malicious and all-cunning nature of the devil; it fell under the curse of God and under temporal and eternal death.

But since the fall of the first human beings was not devised by themselves, but by a fallen, bodiless, and rational being, strong in malice and cunning—the devil—and took place through his beguiling of the inexperienced primeval couple, it was therefore not so deep as the fall of the Morning Star; and so the justice and mercy of God allowed for the restoration and redemption of fallen man and his being raised up again to his first goodness and possession. And in the eternal Counsel of God it was determined to redeem the fallen human race through the Incarnation of the Son of God and His accomplishing of all the righteousness of God, through His redemptive and voluntary sufferings on the cross, through His free death on behalf of the guilty; and—out of His boundless goodness and His compassion for the fallen—He took upon Himself the heavy burden of redemption and said to His Father: See, I come… to do Your will, O God[1].

Here is the greatest and saving Mystery of the Cross! Here is the explanation of why there hangs before our eyes the One Who hung the earth upon the waters, Who holds heaven and earth in the palm of His hand, Who created all the lights of the heavens and gave firm laws to all the stars.

For the boundless sins of mankind a boundlessly great Sacrifice was offered, and for those who had sold themselves to the enemy—the devil—an infinitely great ransom: the voluntary sufferings in the flesh of the very Giver of Life and the death of the Sinless One. Ask: how could the sinless and passionless God-Man suffer and die—He who had no part in a single sin? For suffering is proper to sinful man, and death cannot have power over the sinless, since death is the consequence of sin and the punishment for sin — the wages of sin is death[2], says Holy Scripture. But Christ suffered not in His divine nature, which cannot undergo suffering, but in His human nature—He died in body, not in His Divinity; and He took on suffering and death voluntarily, for our redemption and for victory over the universal death of mankind; otherwise suffering and death could not have touched His divine-human soul and body.

O the depth of the wisdom and knowledge of God in the redemption of fallen man! O the boundless love of God for a sinful world! Now is the very time to bring forth the God-inspired words of the evangelist John the Theologian: God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but have eternal life… For he who believes in the Son is not judged, but he who does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God[3].

Now we all who believe in Him are healed by His wounds, according to the word of the prophet Isaiah, from the cruel, malignant, deadly sore of sin; and just as the Jews wandering in the wilderness of Arabia, wounded by serpents for their murmuring against God, were healed whenever they looked with faith upon the brazen serpent hung upon a tree—so we, too, are healed every time that, wounded by some sin, we flee with faith and repentance to the One crucified on the Cross, who abides with us invisibly until the end of the age, and tangibly in the Holy Mysteries—in His Flesh broken for us and in His Blood poured out for us on the Cross: for this mystical Flesh and Blood are one and the same with the flesh and blood of Christ that were visible on the Cross. — What can we render to You, O Christ our God, who suffered for us and redeemed us by Your Cross and Your death? — What thanksgiving shall we offer? Everything we have is Your gift, except sin.

But let us see how present-day humanity relates to Christ and to the Cross, or—let us take a smaller sphere: how Russian people, or—the so-called—intelligentsia, relate to Christ and to His Church, which He loved with an everlasting love and gave Himself up for, and in which He laid down all the treasures and all the pledges of His love, all the saving treasures of the grace of the Holy Spirit, the treasures of truth, righteousness, redemption, sanctification, renewal, power, deification and immortality? — The majority—with utter contempt; to a lesser degree—with indifference; and many even arm themselves with hatred and blasphemy against the Holy Church and her ministers; while pictorial art, at the prompting and instigation of the well-known apostate from God and blasphemer Leo Tolstoy, dared to depict Christ in a painting full-length not as the God-Man, but as a mere man, and exhibited it as a spectacle before everyone, just as on Golgotha the Jews hung Christ nailed to a cross. — What, then, is the modern Russian intelligentsia, which has renounced Christ together with its false teacher? Is not this a new Golgotha mockery of our own day, and in view of the Sacrifice of Golgotha can one refrain from publicly denouncing the present-day blasphemers and renegades from Christ and from the Church, who scheme to overturn the royal thrones and the Churches of God, and to murder the faithful servants of the tsar, the devoted sons of the Church and of the fatherland? And we boldly denounce this unbelief and madness—this present frenzy of the unruly and violent youth who are called educated, but are not at all brought up in the rules of the faith and of Christian piety and of civil honor and valor. The Lord sees all that is taking place in our fatherland, as throughout the whole earth, and He will soon pronounce His righteous judgment upon the insolent and treacherous, who breathe malice and murder against all the honest servants of the Church, of the tsar, and of the fatherland.

O Lord! Let Your Blood cry out against all the seditionists, and let it repay them with righteous retribution! But if they are still capable of being brought to reason, bring them to reason: — for they do not know what they are doing. Amen.