By Fr Thomas Hopko  |  March 2008

Emeritus Dean, St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary

 

On the Third Sunday of Great Lent, something striking happens in Orthodox Christian worship: the cross of Christ is solemnly carried from the sanctuary into the middle of the church and placed on a stand, surrounded by candles and adorned with flowers or basil leaves. It remains there throughout the entire middle week of Lent, an invitation to every believer who enters the church to stop, to look, and to contemplate.

This is not merely ceremony. It is a summons.

The Cross as the Center of Everything

During Holy Week, the focus of worship is the Passion of Christ — his suffering, crucifixion, and death as the saving act of God in history. But the Veneration of the Cross in mid-Lent is something subtly different. Here, the emphasis falls not only on what Christ endured but also on the cross itself as the instrument, the weapon, and the very symbol of God’s victory.

The psalm verses sung during veneration capture this beautifully: “God is our King before the ages; he has worked salvation in the midst of the earth. And again: “Bow down before the Lord and worship at his holy footstool, for it is holy.” The footstool is the cross. The throne is the cross. The King is Christ crucified.

What was once the Roman Empire’s most degrading method of execution — reserved for the lowest classes of society, for criminals and slaves — has become the holiest symbol in human history. Christians wear it around their necks. They trace it on their bodies in prayer. They inscribe it on the foreheads of the newly baptised. As Fr Thomas Hopko observed, “For Eastern Orthodox Christians, all theology is ultimately stavrology” — the word of the cross.

The Gospel Reading: What It Costs to Follow Christ

The Gospel appointed for this Sunday comes from Mark 8:34–38, and it is directed not at Christ but at us. Jesus calls together the crowd and his disciples and says plainly:

If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it. For what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and to forfeit his life?

These words come directly after Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ – and Peter’s immediate, indignant rejection of the idea that the Messiah must suffer. “Get behind me, Satan,” the Lord says to the chief apostle. Peter was looking at salvation from a human point of view: a Messiah who triumphs without suffering, a kingdom without a cross. But God’s way is different.

The cross is not a detour around glory. It is the road to it.

An Early Christian Hymn: Dying and Reigning Together

In 2 Timothy 2, St. Paul quotes what scholars widely regard as an early Christian hymn — a song committed to memory and sung in worship:

If we have died with him, we shall also live with him. If we patiently endure with him, we shall also reign with him. If we deny him, he also will deny us. If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.

The New Testament is saturated with this co-language. St Paul speaks of co-crucifying, co-dying, co-suffering, co-burial, co-resurrection, co-glorification, and co-inheriting. This is not poetic flourish. It is the structure of Christian life itself. We share in Christ’s death so that we can share in his life. There is no other way.

And yet the hymn ends with a breathtaking assurance: even when we are faithless, he remains faithful. He cannot deny himself. He is, as Hopko put it, “the great “Lover”—the one who came not for himself, but entirely for us.

What Does It Actually Mean to Take Up the Cross?

This is the question that every reflection on this Sunday must eventually confront. Venerating the cross is not taking it up. Kissing it, incensing it, carrying it in procession — these are beautiful and meaningful acts, but they point toward something more demanding.

St. Innocent of Alaska, the great missionary to the indigenous peoples of North America, addressed this directly in his catechetical work An Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven. He identified two categories of cross-bearing.

The first he called interior crosses: those burdens we carry simply by being born into a fallen world. These include inherited predispositions – physical illnesses, mental struggles, emotional wounds, and what the Church Fathers called ‘prolepsis’, the tendencies toward sin that are embedded in our bodies and minds through generations of fallen human living. Destructive passions, addictions, disordered desires of every kind — these are crosses, not gifts. God does not necessarily remove them, but by the power of the cross of Christ, he gives grace to bear them with dignity and even with victory.

The second category is exterior crosses: the sufferings that come to us from outside — illness, persecution by wicked people, natural disasters, and the violence and injustice of the world. These too are crosses to be borne, transfigured by faith into instruments of salvation.

But at the heart of all cross-bearing, Fr Hopko identified something simple and terrifying: love. “To deny our self and to take up our cross is to love, no matter what.” Love God with everything we have, even when God seems silent or absent. Love of neighbour – including enemy – even when they are actively doing us harm. Total surrender to the will of God, no matter the cost. This is what Christ showed on the cross: “Father, forgive them.” “Into your hands I give my spirit.”

The Shape of the Cross Is the Shape of Love

The Church Fathers saw cosmic significance in the shape of the cross — its four directions corresponding to the four corners of creation, its arms extended as if to embrace the whole world. St Athanasius and others taught that on the cross, the powers of darkness were publicly defeated and the cosmos itself cleansed as the Son of God was lifted up in the sight of all creation.

St Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3 echoes this: that we might have power to comprehend “what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge.” The cross is the shape of that love made visible.

In St John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “When I am lifted up, you will know that I am” — using the divine name, the I AM of Exodus. The crucifixion is not defeat disguised as victory. It is the final, decisive act of God in history, the fulfilment of every promise, and the destruction of every enemy, including the last enemy: death itself.

 

A Closing Reflection

The cross stands in the middle of the church this week for the same reason it stands in the middle of Christian faith: because there is no way around it. The Gospel is not a promise of comfort insulated from suffering. It is the good news that suffering, borne in love and in union with Christ, leads to life.

The prayer of the Church on this Sunday says it plainly: “O Lord, save your people, bless your inheritance, grant victories to the Orthodox Christians over their enemies, and by the power of the cross preserve your people.” And the veneration hymn answers, “Before thy cross we bow down in worship, O Master, and thy holy resurrection we praise and we glorify.”

We bow before it. We praise him through it. And then—if we take seriously what we have heard—we pick it up and follow.

 

This blog post is adapted from a podcast homily delivered by Fr Thomas Hopko (1939–2015), Emeritus Dean of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, recorded in March 2008. Fr Hopko’s podcast series “Speaking the Truth in Love” is archived at Ancient Faith Radio.