Taking Up the Cross and Following Christ

On the Sunday after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the Church reads at the Divine Liturgy the words with which Christ called people to come after Him: “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34).

The Lord spoke these words as He was passing with His disciples through the villages around Caesarea Philippi. A little earlier, Peter had confessed Him as the Christ. Then the Lord began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, be killed, and after three days rise again. Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, and the Lord, looking at His disciples, rebuked Peter. After this He called the multitude to Himself together with the disciples and spoke to them about the cross.

Interpreting the same words as the Gospel according to Matthew records them, Saint John Chrysostom shows that they are the Lord’s answer to Peter’s wish to keep Him from His Passion. Christ reveals to His disciple that He is not the only one who must pass through death. Peter himself cannot be saved unless he stands continually ready to die.

Saint John also observes that, although it seems a single exhortation, this saying contains three commandments: to deny oneself, to take up one’s cross, and to follow Him.

“Whosoever will”

The Lord does not say that people must take up the cross whether they will or no. He says: “whosoever will”. Saint John Chrysostom places this meaning in the Saviour’s mouth: I leave each one master of his own choice, for I call people to good things, which draw them by their very nature. The one who compels, says Saint John, often drives people away, while the one who leaves them free to choose draws them all the more.

The call, he adds, is for anyone: man or woman, ruler or subject. Taking up the cross therefore begins with a free response. Christ sets the cross before a man and waits for him to take it up himself.

“Let him deny himself”

To show what it means to deny oneself, Saint John Chrysostom starts from something everyone understands: what it means to deny another. A man who has denied a brother or a servant can see him beaten, bound or led away to death without being troubled for him, because he has become estranged from him once and for all.

This is how Christ asks us to treat ourselves as well. Saint John says that when men scourge us, banish us or burn us, we must not spare our body. The one who has denied himself has nothing more to do with himself: he gives himself up to every danger and struggle, and receives them as though someone else were suffering them.

Few of us will ever stand before the scourge or the fire, but self-denial is asked of us in everyday life as well. Saint Maximus the Confessor teaches that all the passions spring from self-love, which the Fathers call by a Greek word, philautia. He describes it as an irrational love for the body. The passions that begin in self-love end, he says, in pride. Whoever has cut off self-love has cut off with it all the passions that are born of it.

On the same Sunday the Church reads from the Epistle to the Galatians the witness of the holy Apostle Paul: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20). Paul adds that the life he now lives in the flesh he lives by faith in the Son of God. Self-denial, then, does not mean hatred of one’s own person or contempt for the body. A man renounces the dominion of the passions and refuses to keep his life at the price of denying Christ. The place the passions held in his life is taken by Christ.

“And take up his cross”

Saint John Chrysostom says that, in speaking of the cross, the Lord did not want us to think that self-denial stops at harsh words, insults and reproaches. The cross was then a shameful death, appointed for evildoers. By it Christ shows that self-denial goes as far as death, and a death of reproach at that.

Saint John adds that this death is not accepted once or twice, but throughout the whole of life. Christ asks us to bear this death about with us continually and to stand ready each day for sacrifice.

Father Arsenie Papacioc (1914–2011), a spiritual father who himself passed through Romania’s communist prisons, used to tell those who listened to him that “no Christian is exempt, in any way whatsoever, from his cross”. Suffering, he would add, is a gift from God and is not necessarily a punishment. It is a gift because God permits it for man’s salvation and works through it.

The great mistake people make, Father Arsenie said, is that they will not consent to bear suffering. Yet he did not urge people to seek it: “We do not say that you should seek it; but if it has fallen upon you, overcome it!” To bear one’s cross does not mean refusing help or healing. It means remaining with Christ in the trial through which one is passing.

Saint Isaac the Syrian, who lived as an ascetic in the desert in the seventh century, shows that the work of the cross has two sides, just as human nature has two parts, body and soul. The first side is the patient endurance of bodily afflictions, which the Fathers call practice (praxis). The second is the subtle work of the mind, that is, unceasing meditation on divine things and perseverance in prayer. The Fathers call it vision (theoria), because through it the purified mind comes to behold the mysteries of God.

Saint Isaac warns that the wrath of God comes upon the one who passes on to the second work before he has been trained in the first, whether out of longing for its sweetness or out of sloth. Such a man has imagined the glory of the cross without first bearing its shame. Saint Isaac likens him to the man in the Gospel who shamelessly entered the wedding feast clothed in unclean garments.

This does not mean that the beginner should abandon prayer. In the same homily, Saint Isaac shows that the darkening of the mind begins with sloth towards the services of the Church and towards prayer. He holds back only the one who seeks lofty visions without having passed through the labours of the cross. For the one who walks the straight path, labours and the guarding of the mind purify the thoughts. In the purified mind the light of understanding dawns, and from there grace guides it further.

Father Arsenie recalled that in the 1950s he lived with Saint Cleopa of Sihăstria in the wilderness of the mountains. They talked a great deal, above all about one difference between them. Saint Cleopa inclined more towards an ascetic struggle of deep fasts, prayers and tears, while Father Arsenie inclined more towards watchfulness, that is, attentiveness at every moment, through which a man keeps God continually before him. Both ways, he said, lead to the same unceasing watchfulness and to love, and each person walks the way that suits him best.

“And follow me”

The last commandment might seem self-evident. Yet Saint John Chrysostom explains that a man can suffer much without following Christ, when he does not suffer for His sake. Robbers, says Saint John, often endure grievous torments, and so do violators of tombs and sorcerers. Suffering alone does not make a man a disciple of Christ. To follow Him means to endure all things for His sake and to have, besides courage in afflictions, the other virtues as well: temperance, moderation and self-restraint.

On Golgotha this difference could be seen with one’s own eyes. Two malefactors were crucified with Christ, one on the right hand and the other on the left, and they were in the same condemnation. One of them railed on Him and demanded that He save Himself and them. The other rebuked him and confessed his guilt: “And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss” (Luke 23:41). Then he said to Jesus: “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom” (Luke 23:42). And the Lord answered him: “Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

The two bore the same cross. Only one made of it a way of following Christ, through repentance and through confessing Him as Lord, and paradise was opened to him that very day.

The Price of the Soul

The Lord continues: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it” (Mark 8:35). Then He asks: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mark 8:36–37).

Saint John Chrysostom interprets these words starting from the things we lose in everyday life. Whoever loses money can give other money in exchange, and whoever loses a house can give another. But for a lost soul a man has no other soul to give. Even if he ruled the whole earth and gave all of it away, he could not redeem his soul.

On 20 September, in the days following the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the Church commemorates a man who weighed the world against his soul and chose his soul: the holy Great Martyr Eustathius.

The Lives of the Saints relate that before his Baptism he was called Placidas and was a general of the Roman armies in the time of the emperor Trajan. Although he worshipped idols, he lived like Cornelius the centurion in the Acts of the Apostles: he fed the hungry, clothed the naked and set many free from prison. One day, while hunting, he pursued a stag far into the wilderness. The stag stopped on a high rock, and Placidas saw between its antlers the Cross, shining brightly, and upon it the image of Christ crucified. A voice asked him, as it once asked Saul on the road to Damascus, why he was persecuting Him. It was Christ, whom Placidas had been honouring through his almsgiving without knowing Him. Thus God hunted the hunter.

Placidas was baptized together with his whole household and received the name Eustathius. His wife received the name Theopista, and their two sons the names Agapius and Theopistus. The priest who baptized them also gave them Holy Communion. The next day the Lord revealed to him that he would pass through many afflictions, like another Job, but that His grace would keep him. Then He asked him whether he wished to receive the afflictions now or at the end of his life. Eustathius asked to receive them at once, so long as he was not left without His help. He took up his cross willingly.

Sickness and death took his servants and his cattle, and thieves stole his wealth. Reduced to poverty, he departed from Rome in secret with his wife and children, to live in a foreign land. The master of the ship on which they travelled took his wife in place of the fare. While they were crossing a river, a lion carried off one son and a wolf the other. Eustathius lived for fifteen years as a watchman of fields in a strange village. At times he gave thanks to God, at other times he wept over his losses before Him, but he did not murmur against Him.

God had not forsaken him. His wife had been kept pure, and his children had been rescued from the jaws of the beasts by shepherds and ploughmen. When the barbarians invaded the Roman lands, the emperor sent soldiers to seek out his former general, and they brought him back to Rome. The emperor restored his honour and his wealth, and Eustathius defeated the barbarians. On the way back, the army halted at a village where his wife was living. There it came to light that two young soldiers of his army, to whom he had grown attached without knowing who they were, were his sons. God brought them all together again.

Meanwhile Trajan had died, and the new emperor, Hadrian, wished to offer sacrifice to the idols for the victory. Eustathius remained outside the temple of the idols and confessed that the victory, his wife and his children had been given to him by Christ. The emperor condemned him and his whole family to be thrown to the beasts, but the beasts bowed down before them and turned back. The next day he had them shut inside a bronze ox heated in the fire, that is, a hollow figure of an ox made of bronze. There they prayed and gave up their souls into the hands of God. On the third day their bodies were found whole, and the fire had not burned so much as a single hair.

Saint Eustathius went to his death together with his family without being ashamed of the reproach of his condemnation. In the same Gospel the Lord says: “Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed” (Mark 8:38). Eustathius lost everything that could be lost, received back all that he had lost, and gave it all again for Christ. His path began with the Cross seen between the antlers of a stag and ended in the fire, where he bore the cross together with his whole household.

Those who today bear losses, separations or afflictions in their families have in Saint Eustathius an intercessor close at hand. He passed through all these things with tears, yet without losing his faith. God gathered his household together first on earth, for a little while, and then for ever in His Kingdom. This is the reunion that every Christian hopes for, even when in this present life the separation remains.

“The kingdom of God come with power”

The Gospel reading ends with a promise: “Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1).

Immediately after these words, the Evangelist Mark relates that after six days the Lord took with Him Peter, James and John, led them up into a high mountain and was transfigured before them. “His raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow” (Mark 9:3).

In the fourteenth century Saint Gregory Palamas defended the prayer of the mind, that is, the Jesus Prayer said with the mind gathered into the heart. In his homily on the Transfiguration he shows that the light on the mountain is the glory of the Father and the Kingdom of which the Lord had spoken. Saint Gregory calls it uncreated light, that is, the eternal light of Christ’s divinity, and not a made light like that of the sun. The King of all is everywhere, he says, and so is His Kingdom. Its coming does not mean that it arrives from somewhere else. It is revealed by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that is why the Lord said it would come “with power”.

This power, Saint Gregory adds, is not given to just anyone. It is given to those who stand with the Lord, that is, to those made firm in faith in Him, like Peter, James and John. That is why God shows Himself on the mountain: He comes down from His height and raises us up from the lowliness of our nature.

The Evangelist Luke says that the Lord was transfigured as He prayed. Saint Gregory shows that Christ had no need of prayer in order to shine, since this light was His own. He prayed to show the saints whence the light comes down upon them and how they may behold it. It is given to all who, through unceasing struggle in the virtues and in prayer, direct their mind towards God. What Christ has as God, the saints receive by grace.

Here the two sides of the cross of which Saint Isaac spoke meet: the ascetic struggle that purifies the mind, and prayer. Yet the light remains a gift of God, and man does not earn it as a payment for his labours.

At the feast of the Transfiguration the Church sings that the disciples beheld the Lord’s glory as far as they were able, so that when they saw Him crucified they would understand that His suffering was voluntary. The light on the mountain was given to them before Golgotha, to strengthen them for the cross that was to come.

The words “some of them that stand here” are fulfilled in those who remain beside Christ. The Gospel of this Sunday begins with the call to the cross and ends with the promise of the Kingdom. Christ strengthens with His grace those who follow Him, even while they labour. The cross borne together with Him leads to the Resurrection and to the light of His Kingdom.