Christ Crucified
“…the Lord’s death on the Cross was no impersonal payment, no supernatural transaction to balance the scales of divine justice…The Cross…was not an offering to appease an angry God. It was a sacrifice of deliverance…It was a voluntary and personal act of self-sacrifice. Our reading teaches that Christ fully identified with humankind which was captive to the powers of sin and death…Humankind needs salvation, not merely instruction. And that salvation is found in the Cross of Christ.” (Fr. Basil)
“Those who passed by defamed him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who can destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are God’s Son, come down from the cross!” (Matthew 27:39-40)…There is rich irony in the statements of those who were passing by, “save yourself!” and “come down from the cross!”…they wanted Jesus to come down from the cross and save his physical life, but it was indeed his staying on the cross and giving his physical life that led to the fact that they could experience a resurrection from death to life.” (NET Bible, Matthew 27:40)
“I think that times of turmoil, such as we endure at present, have their own form of imperial temptation. We long for order, for normalcy, for stability. That longing can make us easy prey for the various solutions offered by the world. There is an interesting phrase in the Liturgy of St. Basil. The priest prays for God to “make the evil be good by Thy goodness.” The temptation within our hearts would likely rephrase that prayer – simply saying, “Make the evil be good.” God has never offered us any solution other than the Cross. St. Paul readily admitted that the Cross appears to be “weakness” and “foolishness.” The Cross is a clown in a world of scholars. He nevertheless declares it to be the “wisdom and power of God… The Cross cannot be loved from a distance or theologized at arms-length. It is revealed to us only in union…Salvation is the full union of our lives with the life of Christ. The shame and self-emptying of the Cross are the content of the commandment, “take up the cross, and follow Me” (Mark 10: 21).” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“…for there can be no love for God without labors, without self-sacrifice, without sufferings for the sake of Christ…The Savior Himself demands such sacrificial love for God from us when He says: Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me (Mk. 8:34). If any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple (Lk. 14:26).It’s not because He needs it that the Lord demands of us to love Him with complete selflessness. He demands such love from us because we are in need of it…” (St. Seraphim Sobolev)
“In a sense, the Resurrection comes before the Crucifixion. That is, there would be no Church and no gospel, no apostles or heralds of the gospel, had Christ not resurrected from the dead. Therefore, we today actually “see” the Resurrection first. If Christ had not risen, no one would be preaching his cross….Once we have accepted the fact that Christ has risen from the dead, only then are we ready to see the Cross and to understand that the Cross is our destiny as well. Because only in the light of the Resurrection can we see the Cross as life-giving, as a dimension of our future resurrection in transfigured form. To give a mundane example: if my friend pays me a surprise visit, the first thing I will see is his arrival at my door. Only then do I know that he has left his home. Even though his arrival came second in time to his departure, in my experience it actually comes first.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)
“We do not know the mind of God, but we do know His heart. We know it most of all in the suffering of the Crucified Christ for us. God is wholly unknowable in His essence, but His heart is revealed in the revelation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Whatever may come, we have faith in Christ, who has shown us that “God is love” (1 John 4:7). That is our hope, our comfort, and our peace in the struggles of this age.” (Fr. Basil)
“I was nurtured on stories as a child that contrasted Christ’s “non-judging” (“Jesus, meek and mild”) with Christ the coming Judge (at His dread Second Coming). I was told that His second coming would be very unlike His first. There was a sense that Jesus, meek and mild, was something of a pretender, revealing His true and eternal character only later as the avenging Judge. This, of course, is both distortion and heresy. The judgment of God is revealed in Holy Week. The crucified Christ is the fullness of the revelation of God. There is no further revelation to be made known, no unveiling of a wrath to come. The crucified Christ is what the wrath of God looks like.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“It happens when our eyes are open, at a moment of purity of heart; because it is not only God Himself Whom the pure in heart will see; it is also the divine image, the light shining in the darkness of a human soul, of the human life that we can see at moments when our heart becomes still, becomes transparent, becomes pure. But there are also other moments when we can see a person whom we thought we have always known, in a light that is a revelation. It happens when someone is aglow with joy, with love, with a sense of worship and adoration. It happens also when a person is at the deepest point, the crucifying point of suffering, but when the suffering remains pure, when no hatred, no resentment, no bitterness, no evil is mixed to it, when pure suffering shines out, as it shone invisibly to many from the crucified Christ.” (Metropolitan Anthony Bloom)
“The Church extols the example of the penitent thief, emphasizing the fact that we are all crucified thieves, hanging either to the right or to the left of the Crucified Christ. Of course, this fact alone cannot save us. Whether we enter Paradise or the Kingdom of Heaven or not does not depend on whether our behavior is good or bad in ethical terms but hinges, as we have already noted, on how repentant or unrepentant we are. Our return from a life of exile in this barren world to a paradisiacal existence in the future Kingdom is Christ’s reward to us for showing a humble faith, a faith which chooses the way of repentance through a sense of the wrongs we have committed and also complete faith in God.” (Fr. Michael Kardamakis)
“God calls us to the life of the resurrection, not of death, but our fatal condition is reflected in his death. He made us for ‘the abundance of life’, as Saint John the Evangelist says [10, 10], but we restrict ourselves to paucity, to barely surviving. The fall of humankind and our departure from God has made us sick in soul and spirit, which is why we find ourselves in this position. In the times in which we live, terrible events are happening: pandemics, wars, suicides, homicides, isolation, fears, stress, depression and so on. In this dark reality, there seems to be no light. Perhaps we might try to see more clearly into the center of this image and we’ll see that that is precisely where Christ crucified is to be found. That day sums up the whole of human history. Let’s choose to write our own, different history and not leave Christ alone on the cross. Rather, let’s find the courage of Nicodemus, the secret but true disciple.” (Sister Parakliti)
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