www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Sunday of the Holy and Life-giving Cross

(from The Communion of Love, Matthew the Poor Man, St. Vladimir�s Seminary Press, 1984, pp. 138-139)

Suffering is our path to glory

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the crucified, for they shall be transfigured.
Blessed are those who are totally crushed, for they shall rule.
Blessed are the hungry, for they shall be filled.

All their sufferings will be forgotten and their tears will be wiped away. In their place a light will point to the horrors they underwent and the mystery of the glory that was the result. The greatness of human fortitude will be revealed along with the power of the merciful acts of God. Suffering will be seen to be almost ludicrously light in comparison with the glory that results from it. Everyone will see that suffering was a sacred trap prepared by God to catch us and bring us to glory. The bearing of suffering is more powerful than worship.

One of the saints says that he saw in a vision a group of martyrs more dazzling in glory than the angels who appeared with them. Around the necks of those who had been beheaded he saw garlands of red flowers in the place where the sword had struck, and these shone and sparkled more brilliantly than any other light in the vision.

For Christ, the mystery of the cross is the mystery of His glory. The overwhelming suffering the Lord underwent, His psychological torment at the injustice and crookedness of his trial, the desertion of His disciples, the treachery of Judas, and the knowledge that the high priests had agreed with one of His disciples to put a value of just thirty pieces of silver on His life�all this was a path for Him to leave the world of passing trivialities and enter into the glory of the Father. We in every time and place must tread the same path. The cross with its enormous suffering cannot be compared with the glory it brought forth. The cross did not come by chance into the life of the Lord; He was born for it. �For this purpose I have come to this hour� (John 12:27). Man is born for suffering, and suffering was born for man. But at the same time the cross was not an irrevocable imposition on the Lord. We feel this from His words and are sure of it in view of His holiness and divinity. He made it irrevocable for Himself��Shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given Me?� (John 18:11)�in order to share with us the inevitability of suffering. God manifested Himself in the person of Christ His Son as one compelled to suffer, in order to make suffering under compulsion equal to suffering by choice, so no one would be deprived of the mercy of God and the cross would be extended to include all who suffer unjustly.

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We are made for suffering. That is, we are born to be "plunged into Christ" (Greek, baptizein) and participate in His suffering by accepting our own in this world in order to participate in His glory and have Him give us a glory of our own at the same time. We are also called by this baptism into His suffering to "leave this passing world" by becoming detached from "stuff" and "habits" and anything else that can come between us and our God. Suffering is a purification, a way that we can come to realize that our true home is not here; that we are on pilgrimage here; that our best made plans are not necessarily those of the One Who wants to give us "every good gift and every perfect gift" from above.

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Suffering is often associated with some physical limitation that reminds us as it progresses that we will never be an olympic athlete, that we will never be the most handsome man that attracts all the women, that we will never be the great ones of the earth. But the fact that Jesus, during His lifetime, was none of these ought to remind us that we are not called to be the great ones of the earth. We are called to be like Him: to do the work that the Father gives us to do in the place He has put us and with the gifts He has given us. Most of us will never leave a great impact on the world: much like the man who tries to write his name on the surface of a bucket of water, most of us will pass and be forgotten by the world. But we attach our suffering to the One Who came here to suffer for us--to bridge the gap left by sin. Christ obtained again His glory when He returned to the Kingdom and made it possible that we, by our own suffering, might also have glory in the Kingdom with Him by being in communion (that intimate relationship established in and through the Church in the Mysteries) with Him now. By Christ's coming, returning to the Father but still remaining with us in the Mysteries, He has enabled those of us chosen to be part of Him to share what He has had before the foundation of the world--so that everything He allows us to have has an eternal value, especially, as Father Matta says, our suffering.

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The Lord Himself tells us that God chastises the son(s) He loves. What does that mean? It seems to me to mean that He ALLOWS us to have the suffering of this age as a gift, the same gift He gave His Only-Begotten Son and the same gift the Son accepted as the Father's Will. Now, Jesus did not accept this with a sullen attitude. I believe that He accepted everything that the Father gave Him with love, joy, peace, and faith that each thing, including His Suffering, was for a benefit not only to Himself but to all who would be part of Him.

We are part of Him. We benefit by His suffering. We also have our own suffering made part of His Suffering so that it has an eternal value, both for us and for others. And this latter is an important part, often missed. Our suffering is not in a vacuum. It is part of Christ because we are part of Him. So when we suffer, our suffering--like the suffering of Christ--has value for others. I once made this point to my spiritual father and asked him to consider what he would feel like if he walked into Heaven and someone completely unknown to him ran up and revealed that through his suffering this person had his entry into Heaven--that the Lord had used his suffering for the benefit of another.

I believe that this stems from how God is: other-directed. The Trinity is a model of other-directedness in the relationships of the Divine Persons to each other and to all created beings. So our participation in Christ makes us part of that other-directedness (or should).


The Deep Meaning of Fasting

(from The Communion of Love, Matthew the Poor Man, St. Vladimir�s Seminary Press, 1984, pp. 109-111)

Fasting and the imitation of Christ

�Fasting and the Imitation of Christ� originally appeared in Arabic in the St. Mark Review, March 1977, and was translated into English in the Monastery of St. Macarius (Feb 1981).

The Church imitates Christ. All that Christ has done the Church does; He becomes its life. Christ�s call to Matthew (�Follow me.�) was intended by Him to mean �Take my life for you.� The Church has adopted this call as a scheme of its own.

Fasting, in the life and works of Christ, ranks as the first response to the act of unction and of being filled with the Holy Spirit. It represents the first battle in which Christ did away with His adversary, the prince of this world. In His forty days� experience of absolute fasting, Christ laid down for us the basis of our dealings with our enemy�along with all his allurements and vain illusions. �This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting� (Mk 9:29). For when a person enters into prayerful fasting, Satan departs from the flesh.

As the Son of God, Christ did not need fasting, nor did He need an open confrontation with Satan or baptism or filling with the Holy Spirit. Yet He fulfilled everything for our sake so His life and deeds would become ours. If we know that Christ was baptized to �be revealed to Israel� (Jn 1:31), it follows that being filled with the Holy Sprit meant �being tempted by the devil.� This was so He could be revealed before the spirits of darkness, and openly enter into combat with the devil on behalf of our race. Fasting was to elevate the flesh to the level of war with the spirits of evil, those powers that hold sway over our weaker part, the flesh.

. . . baptism, being filled with the Holy Spirit, and fasting form a fundamental and inseparable series of acts in Christ�s life that culminated in perfect victory over Satan in preparation for his total annihilation by the cross.

It is . . . extremely important to accept and to feel the power of each of these three acts in our depths and draw from Christ their action in us as they worked in Him, so that His same life may identify with ours. The ultimate aim of baptism, of being filled with the Holy Spirit, and of fasting is that Christ Himself may dwell in us: �It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me� (Gal 2:20).

In Baptism the connection with our old Adam is cut off for us to receive the sonship to God in Christ. In being filled with the Holy Spirit, our connection with the devil and with the life of sin is cut off for us to receive the Spirit of life in Christ. And in fasting, the connection between instinct and Satan is cut off to give the flesh victory in it life according to the Spirit, in Christ.

We can never sever these three acts from each other; baptism grants spiritual fullness, and spiritual fullness grants (by fasting) victory for the flesh to walk in the Spirit. By the three together we live in Christ, and Christ lives in us.

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The point to understand is that fasting is a divine act of life, which we receive form Christ complementary to baptism and fullness (being full of the Holy Spirit). Since its beginning the Church has been occupied with infusing into its own body the acts of Christ�s life so they would become life-giving acts to all its members.

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It is impossible for us to carry our cross well and get through the temptation of the devil, the ordeal of the world, and the oppression of evil without fasting . . .