Sunday of the Veneration of the Holy Cross – Father Gabriel Galev
~+~
Today is the third Sunday of Great Lent, dedicated to the honourable and life-giving cross of the Lord.
The cross is our reality and the cross is the centre of our life. In fact, everything in our life is cross-centric, or, more precisely cross-resurrection-centric. Through the cross we reach resurrection.
As things stand in our everyday life, we notice that there is a duality. A contradiction between the earthly and the heavenly, between the temporal and the eternal, between good and bad (evil), and all of this is because of sin. But in the beginning it was not like that. God created His world to be good, and all was good. Because of sin, division arose, which resulted in our struggle, and now we are exposed between two extremes. That is, whether we want to serve God or mammon, or more precisely, God or the devil. Do we want to save our soul, to gain the Kingdom of Heaven and eternal joy, or do we want to lose our soul and go to the place which is not prepared for us but for the fallen demons of the underworld, for satan and the demons, in eternal suffering.
The choice is ours. God does not curtail our freedom, even though we are sinners, and that is why He says: “Whoever takes up his cross and follows me,” and taking up one’s cross is acceptance that everything that God gives us in our daily lives as our reality.
And, if we are ashamed to live a Christian life, if we are ashamed to call ourselves Christians, if we are ashamed to fast, if we are ashamed to confess and go to church, to have our own Spiritual Father, then we ourselves choose to be on the wrong side. Therefore, at the last judgment, He will be ashamed of us, or rather, we will be ashamed of Him, because we have acted in this way.
This is why the cross is our reality, and this means we are to bear all our sufferings, all our temptations, all our struggles in this life in order to gain the Kingdom of Heaven, to gain eternal joy.
On that road, on that life-giving path, we will encounter a variety of situations, sometimes unpleasant ones. When we travel, the road is not always flat, the nature surrounding us is not always beautiful, we also encounter uneven roads, we encounter unpleasant weather conditions, but we do not stop on our journey. We go to our destination because it is our goal to reach it. So it is in our life. This is where our duality manifests itself, whether in this spiritual life we want to reach our final destination, whether we always want to be Christians at all times and in every opportunity, even if we are threatened with many inconveniences and even death, as has happened in the past with the martyrs, or we will give up, we will be offended, we will stop fasting, and at some point we will accept something from this world and start living in a non-christian manner.
And that is why it is worth fighting. That is why the holy fathers this week place the cross in the middle of the churches, in the middle of lent as a support for us Christians to endure the struggle of the Lenten fast.
What does it mean to lose our soul or to save it, to preserve our soul, that is, he who loses it will save it? Due to our fallen nature, we have acquired passions in our lives and our hearts have become captured by these passions, and these passions of ours have become our second nature.
Especially pride, vanity and a high opinion of ourselves – these are the most terrible things and from here all other passions and sins spring forth. We are able to give up everything, we will fast, we will do “trimir” (three days of absolute fasting) and we will not eat, however, when someone says a single word to us that is not in accordance with our expectations, or does not suit us, it will hurt our vanity, we immediately react violently. That is not carrying the cross, that is rejecting the cross.
Yet again, now is the time of fasting, when we have found ourselves in a situation whether to fast or not, we hesitate and find some excuse (which is not an excuse) and we break the fast and sin in the time of fasting. And again, that is not carrying the cross.
Or someone will say an insulting word to us, and we do not say one, but a hundred of our own words for their one word. And if we are provided with the opportunity we will beat him, we will repay him with evil, and again, that is not carrying the cross.
However, if we endure, if we are silent, if we do not repay evil with evil, – this is the renouncing of ourself. This is the carrying of the cross, and this is the loss of our soul for Christ and the Gospel (Mark 8:35). That is, when we renounce our vanity, our pride, and our high opinion of ourselves, when we accept everything in our life with gratitude, and especially when we accept the rebukes and the lessons from our Spiritual Father, we can now say that this is carrying the cross. That is a proper carrying of the cross and so, just as all sins come from pride, through humility comes all virtues, all good deeds. That is the opening of the door to the grace of the Holy Spirit and the creation of good deeds.
Therefore, let us not be ashamed if someone offends us, let us return with good. We should remain silent, we should endure, we should accept everything with gratitude, and this will be salvific for our soul.
Let us not return with the same measure, nor be angry or worse still. But let us return with humility and love. That is the carrying of our cross and thus we acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit, which we spoke about last week when Saint Gregory Palamas stood alone before everyone, he fought and proved that the life of grace is possible in communion with God and that only God is our reality.
And no matter what might be, be it wealth, be it fame, be it money – everything will fail, only God remains, because again at the end of the day, that is, at the end of our lives, we will face that unsolvable puzzle, that unsolvable problem, and that, is death, which only Christ has solved, only Christ has conquered. Christ is the first to conquer death, therefore we voluntarily, consciously, lovingly and freely choose to be Christians so that we may live forever with Christ and with God. Amen.
Father Gabriel Galev
Abbot of the Monastery “St. Clement of Ohrid”,
Kinglake, Melbourne, Australia
23 / 03 / 2025
