The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is a very ancient feast. The history of the feast, like the history of the finding of the true Cross, is obscured by various legends. It is not easy to separate historical fact from pious legend.
Historians of the Eastern Church generally agree that two particular events gave rise to this feast: the finding of the holy Cross by St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century and its recovery or return from Persian captivity in the seventh century.
Tradition has transmitted several different legends about the finding of the Cross which is believed to have taken place in 326. The finding is celebrated by the Greek Church on the 6th of March. The Western Church originally celebrated this event on the 3rd of May until 1960 when the feast was excluded from the Church’s calendar.
The feast owes its origin to the consecration of the Church of the Resurrection of the Lord, which was erected on Golgotha. This consecration, during the time of Marcarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, was celebrated on the 13th of September in 335. On the day following the consecration, the Cross was solemnly elevated for all to venerate. During the elevation, the people sang repeatedly, Lord, have mercy. Since that time, the Eastern Church celebrates the feast of the Exaltation on the 14th of September.
The second event which rendered the feast universal in the East was the return of the Cross from Persian captivity. In 614 the Persian King Chosroes captured Jerusalem and carried off the Cross. Fourteen years later, Emperor Heraclius recovered the Cross and had it brought back to Jerusalem where, on the 14th of September, a second celebration of the feast took place. Since that time on, the feast the name: The Universal Exaltation of the Venerable and Life-giving Cross.
Since the feast calls to mind the crucifixion and death of Christ, it is become a custom to observe a strict fact on this day. It is one of the twelve major feasts of the Eastern Church.
The Eastern Church has several other feasts that remember the Cross of Christ and the meaning it has for salvation history. On May 7th the Apparition of the Sign of the Cross in the sky in Jerusalem is celebrated. On August 1st the Procession of the Cross is celebrated. This feast recalls that the Cross was carried from the royal palace in Constantinople to the Church of Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) every day for two weeks because of the various sicknesses that seemed to occur during the month of August.
The feast was already mention in the 13th century in the land of Rus-Ukraine. It has been universally celebrated in our Church since 1276.
It is my hope that my readers are wrestling with the ideas I am trying to present in this article. I truly believe that it is essential that we wrestle with and think about the call given to us by God through the Person of Jesus Christ, His saints and, finally, His Church. The call to holiness is the call to personal wholeness, that is to being the person God intended when He infused our parents with the power to create us.
As you know, it is our belief that God calls each of us personally into existence even though our existence depends on an act of our parents. Out of the millions of possible combinations of genes and chromosomes and other elements that comprise us as human beings, the resultant combination is, our faith tell us, the will of God. We are not accidents of nature but, rather, the unique persons that God intends to call into existence out of love.
I know that many scoff at this idea that God intends, in particular, each, individual person that is born. I truly believe that Salvation History bears witness to God’s true intentions with humankind. Jesus, Mary and all the other persons involved in Salvation History were called into existence because of God’s loving will. This idea is further proven true by our very idea of God Himself. Nothing can come into existence unless He has an eternal idea of it. We have been called into existence from all eternity in the mind of God. He knows each person by name and, as the Scripture says, He even knows the number of hairs on our heads (of course that is before some of us go bald). Remember, while all things are not possible with men, they are with God.
I do believe that when we begin to envision ourselves in this manner, that as unique creations of a loving God, we begin to have a better feeling about ourselves. Then, when we project this same vision on all other humans, we begin to realize how absolutely critical it is that we treat others with deep respect. It is this idea of humans being the unique creations of God that allows Paul to say: Do you not realize that you are the Temples of God’s own Spirit.
I find that often the first thing that a person must do if he wishes to respond to God’s call to holiness is develop a spiritual idea of who s/he is and then to love that person. We know that we cannot love others if we don’t love ourselves. Our love of self must be realistic and not aggrandized. I find that often people depreciate their value and worth or truly overestimate it. Our value comes from the fact that God has made us the temples of His own Spirit. Our value and worth comes from God and not ourselves!
Saint Euphemia
EUPHEMIA born to a noble family in Chalcedon, she lived during the reign of Diocletian. She was known among Christians and non-Christians alike for her charity. She, with other Christians, were asked to offer sacrifices to the Roman gods. She refused and was tortured. Because she endured her torture without a sound, two of the men who tortured her asked for her blessing. Priscus, the local magistrate, on seeing this, ordered her and the two men thrown to the lions. She died shortly after. Surprisingly enough, after killing her the lions left her body intact even though they devoured the two men. She has two feast days, September 16th and July 11th. St Euphemia pray for us.
The Son of Man [had to] be lifted up,
that all who believe may have eternal life in him.
Yes, God so loved the world that He gave His only Son,
that whoever believes in Him may not die but may have eternal life
As we prepare to celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September14th), we are called to remember all that was revealed to us through this most generous and loving act of our God. We need to recall the words of John, the disciple, who wrote: God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him may not die but may have eternal life. Perhaps the key words that need to be stressed are: whoever believes in Him.
Christ’s death on a cross makes no sense to a person without faith. Only faith can make sense out of this act of hatred. By faith we embrace the thought that Jesus voluntarily accepted His death on the cross in order to stress the truth of that which He taught. He lived and died in a manner that reflected His deepest teaching, namely: love of neighbor as self which is expressed through one’s actions of not judging others, forgiving others and treating others in the same way that you want to be treated. Jesus showed us, in a very poignant way, how to incorporate the four life-rules into everyday life. He lived, as I said, what He truly believed and taught! We, of course, are called to live the very same way. We must make every effort to live what we say we believe and hold to be true.
This coming feast of the Exaltation of the Cross truly challenges us to assess how we are living and answer the question: Do I truly live what I believe?
We will find, if we do an honest examination of our life, that living in accord with the four life-rules that Jesus taught truly challenges us to change, especially, the way we think.
As I experience life I find, especially living in this time in history, that society can easily lead me to judge others. Living in a very diverse society and with all the pressures of modern-day life, it is easy to judge those who don’t think like me or live like me. When you add the fear of terrorist attacks, which is fanned by the media, it is quite easy to give in to judging others, especially those who are culturally different from you and who don’t believe the same things that you do.
By saying this I don’t mean in any way to lessen the real seriousness of the threats that are directed against us as Americans. The possibility of attacks is real. Jesus, however, knew that crucifixion was a real possibility. He refused, however, to hate even those who had the ability to kill Him.
I have, in this article, been sharing information about the New Testament (NT) and presenting the books which comprise it in chronological order. The first books to be included in the NT were seven of Paul’s Letters. After that, the Gospel of Mark was written, even though there was probably a text of the Sayings of Jesus (Manuscript “Q”) that was extant. As I shared in the last article, Mark’s Gospel is essentially separated into three parts.
Part One: Galilee
Part two: Journey to Jerusalem
In this issue I would share information about the third part of Mark’s Gospel.
Part Three: Jerusalem
Part three of Mark’s Gospel makes up almost 40 percent of his Gospel and includes chapters 11 – 16. These chapters present Jesus’ final week in Jerusalem. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a colt at the beginning of the week, on Sunday. By this act He provocatively acted out an Old Testament text that speaks of a king of peace coming to Jerusalem on a donkey. By His act, he signified he would banish the weapons of war from the land and speak peace to the nations. On the following day, Monday, it is recorded that He performed another public prophetic protest by indicting the temple – the center of native collaboration with imperial power – as a den of violent robbers.
Tuesday, representatives of the Temple authorities challenge Him with a series of questions in the presence of crowds of pilgrims. They plan to arrest Him, but want first to discredit Him with the crowd, who like what He is teaching. The authorities fail to accomplish this task. Wednesday, He is betrayed by a follower named Judas. Thursday, after He and His followers share a final meal, they go to the Garden of Gethsemane, where the authorities arrest Him. Then on Friday He is condemned to death and crucified.
On Saturday it was the Sabbath, and nothing, in accord with Jewish custom, happened. The Church’s understanding that Christ descended into Hades on Saturday only came into Christian history later.
Mark’s gospel concludes with what is known as Easter Sunday. His story is very brief, only eight verses long (16:1-8), and it all fits into an hour or so of early Eastern morning shortly after dawn. The other gospels have significantly longer Easter stories and continue them into the next days and perhaps weeks. Compared to Mark’s eight verses, Matthew has twenty-eight, Luke fifty-three, and John fifty-six.
It is believed that Mark felt there was sufficient information shared in the various Christian communities about the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus that he didn’t need to include a great deal of information. Each of the other Gospels had a different focus and intent and therefore include more information.
The Greek patristic understanding of man never denies the unity of mankind or replaces it with a radical individualism. The Pauline doctrine of the two Adams (“As in Adam all men die, so also in Christ shall all be brought to life”), as well as the Platonic concept of the ideal man, leads Gregory of Nyssa to understand Genesis 1:27 – “God created man in His own image” – to refer to the creation of mankind as a whole. It is obvious that the sin of Adam must also be related to all men, just as salvation brought by Christ is salvation for all mankind; but neither original sin nor salvation can be realized in an individual’s life without involving his personal and free responsibility.
The scriptural text which played a decisive role in the polemics between Augustine (the person who formulated the idea of Original Sin) and the Pelagians is found in Romans 5:12, where Paul, speaking of Adam, writes: “As sin came into the world through one man, and through sin, death, so death spread to all men because all men have sinned”. In this passage there is a major issue of translation. The last four Greek words were translated in Latin with a different meaning than the original Greek, and this translation was used in the West to justify the doctrine of guilt inherited from Adam and spread to his descendants. But such a meaning cannot be drawn from the original Greek – the text read, of course, by the Byzantines. Such a translation renders Paul’s thought to mean that death, which was “the wages of sin” for Adam, is also the punishment applied to those who, like him, sin. It presupposes a cosmic significance of the sin of Adam, but does not say that his descendants are guilty as he was, unless they also sin as he sinned.
I am sure that most Eastern Catholics, steeped in Western Catholicism, probably think that the way Augustine thought about Adam is the way that one is supposed to think about mankind. I am sure that when someone suggests that there is a different understanding of our faith and that Augustine’s idea about humankind is not the only right, acceptable and authentic understanding of mankind, that they are being non-Catholic and, probably, non-Christian.
The Christian East has maintained a different understanding. Think about the concept of Theosis. It suggests an entirely different understanding of mankind and its relationship with God. The sin of Adam did not destroy the fact that humans are made in God’s image and likeness. The purpose of life is to cooperate with God in coming to a deeper understanding of God’s image and likeness within us.
When our Eastern Church came into union with the Western Church, she did not give up her theology and her way of worship.
Think about this!
It has been my sincerest hope that these articles on Eastern Spirituality are helping my readers see that Eastern Christianity presents a different and equally authentic approach to spirituality. One of the problems, I believe, that we have as Eastern Catholic Christians is that too often people have an impression that there is a distinctly Catholic spirituality which is different from Orthodox spirituality. This is, in my humble estimation, truly unfortunate since one of the true sources of all true spirituality is the way that a person worships God. Our Eastern spirituality flows from our Divine Liturgy. It is that which forms and animates our spirituality. Therefore, since we use the same Liturgy as our Orthodox brothers and sisters, we would hopefully have a similar approach to spirituality.
Our Divine Liturgy, for example, very clearly suggests, through all the adjectives it uses in reference to God, that He is truly beyond our understanding and that all of His actions are beyond our knowledge. In fact, we do not dare to suggest we know when the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ. This is a very Eastern approach. All we know is that the gifts are changed when we truly prayer to the Father, remember the words of the Son, and invoke the power of the Holy Spirit to change the gifts. Further, we don’t even care to know when this exactly happens. We truly JUST BELIEVE it happens.
Further, our sense of sin is quite different. We ask, during the Liturgy, God to forgive our not only our voluntary but also our involuntary offenses. This again is an Eastern way of thinking about life.
There are many more examples in our Liturgy which clearly tell us that our Eastern spirituality, which is formed by our worship, is different from that which is found in Western Christianity.
As we become more immersed in our understanding of the Liturgy, our thoughts also change about our relationship with God. He is not a Supreme Power that commands us to keep rules! Rather, He is a God Who loves mankind and only calls us to experience His love and then live as His loving children.
The advent among men of the redeeming Word of God (i.e., Jesus Christ) required the development of a new liturgy – a new form of God-worship – a liturgy no longer intended solely to recall and maintain the natural relations of the cosmos and its Creator, but to express man’s faith in the divine economy and perpetuate the living effects of the Incarnation. The sacred play of beings and things before God and with him is no longer founded upon some myth expressive of the primitive past or an intimate awareness of the created harmony of the world, but on a sacred history, wholly oriented towards Christ and His Cross.
Liturgies (i.e., ritualistic ways of offering sacrifice and worship to a greater power in order to secure consideration from that greater power), however, have seldom been constructed out of nothing. They have all tended to build on previous ways of worship. Christian liturgy, as can be guessed, built on the fundamental framework found and used by Judaism. The extensive use of the Psalms and various scriptural passages in the Byzantine liturgy give evidence to this.
To understand the Liturgy, the act of the people, we must begin with the idea that it is the ritual act in which an organized community expresses itself, in the strongest possible sense of that word, setting free in its inmost depths those supreme values on which its being is founded. To comprehend this we must first know what the Church is in reality. Now, to the believer, the Church is part of the economy of salvation, of God’s plan for the world; it belongs to the order of mystery, of the divine secret, of its nature inaccessible to our understanding.
We believe too that God has willed to communicate this secret and to bring it within our reach. He has translated it into images, into parables, each of which is in itself fundamentally inadequate, but which, taken all together, encompass the mysterious reality and shed convergent beams of light upon it. We must follow the themes which find their ultimate and complete fulfillment in the Church of Christ throughout the whole of biblical revelation, both in the history of the people of Israel as interpreted by the authors of the sacred book and in the prophets and the reflections of the wise men of Israel. We must learn to recognize these themes in utterances at first hesitant or fragmentary, adapted to differing situations, but which gradually arrange themselves into a coherent whole.
In order to make the Liturgy truly our own expression of worship, we must understand how it was formulated, what it includes and truly embrace its expressions as our own personal way of expressing our Thanksgiving and also our Remembrance of God’s saving acts.
As I indicated in the last issue of the Eastern Herald, the Church’s New Year is marked by the celebration of two major feasts: the Nativity of the Mother of God (September 8th) and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September 14th). Of the two feasts, of course, the feast of the Exaltation is given greater emphasis by celebrating the event both prior and subsequent to the feast itself. The Saturdays and Sundays before and after the feast are dedicated to remembering the Exaltation of the Cross.
This liturgical emphasis tells us that the Church would have us understand that Christ’s voluntary death on the Cross should have intense meaning for us. It not only expresses God’s absolute love for us but also conveys an important lesson that we are meant to learn from His life.
How does the Cross convey God’s love? It tells us that God was willing to do everything possible to tell us that Jesus, God Himself Incarnate, came to teach us not only how to live but also how to die. One has to admit that Jesus, although His death was filled with pain and anguish, died with grace and nobility. He did not allow the hatred of others to quell His love for others. He also did not regret the life He led. He saw death as a part of life and embraced the death that life presented to Him. The love He is said to have expressed to others even during His suffering reveals how greatly God loves us, His children.
What is the important lesson that the Cross is meant to teach us? That lesson is multi-dimensional. First, if we truly believe, we do not have to fear death. Jesus showed us by His belief in the love of the Father, that death does not have to be feared. It is only one part of this earthly existence and is the means to allow us to progress to the next stage of life. Death has a meaning! It signals the end of one sequence of learning and opens the door to the next stage of spiritual development. That is why it always comes unannounced to each of us and in a manner that is least expected.
Second, that if we tap into God’s Spirit within us, we will have the power to endure all things. There is nothing that can destroy the life-force within us.
Third, God is with us in all the events of life, even death. We are never, ever separated from Him. It is all a matter of us recognizing that He is a part of our life.
Last, one of the important lessons of this earthly life is to understand the meaning of death. Death challenges us to think about what we really believe! Do we truly believe in life-after-death? Is life immortal? It is truly immortal if we believe that human life is a sharing in God’s own life.
What do you really believe?
Next week on Sunday the 14th of September we celebrate one of the major feasts of our Church, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Although it falls on a Sunday, it is a feast where the Church calls us to fast since it recalls the crucifixion of Christ. If for some legitimate reason you cannot fast on that day, you are truly encouraged to find another day during the week on which you fast. Many see this feast as a mini-Great and Good Friday since the entire focus is on the crucifixion. Again, do not think about it as being an obligation but, rather, and opportunity to truly profess your faith.