How Can We Help Realize God’s New Creation?
Homily for the Sunday before the Holy Cross
Galatians 6:11-18.......John 3:13-17
The Holy Cross has such an important part in God’s plan for our salvation that we dedicate two Sundays to it in addition to a special feast day. We celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14, so today we observe the Sunday before the Holy Cross, tomorrow is the feast itself, and in a week we’ll have the Sunday after the Holy Cross. On all of these days, our readings from Scripture teach us about the importance of the Cross in our lives.
The readings today emphasize the way in which God uses the Cross to transform the world. In the Gospel, St John writes that Jesus said to Nicodemos that “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved. For God so loved the world that He gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Because of the sinfulness of people, which comes from the Original Sin of our First Parents, people commonly think that God will judge and condemn the world. But God wants to save the world, because God loves the world. To remind ourselves of this truth, we repeat Jesus’s words in the Anaphora every time we celebrate the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.
To save the world from perishing, God willed that his only Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, should die on the Cross, and Jesus willingly accepted this death. St Paul says, “May I never boast of anything but the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” He means that Jesus’ death on the Cross was also the death of our sins and the death of sin in the world, so that all believers and the whole world could rise to new life with Jesus. This makes the Cross a sign of a new creation—a world filled again, as it was in the beginning, with the love and goodness of God.
So salvation through Jesus Christ and the Holy Cross is not just about life after death. The new creation also takes place in this world, in this life. Remember what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” God wants us to work with Him in actualizing—in making real—his new creation. Jesus’ death on the Cross makes the new creation possible, but the whole world, especially those of us who believe in Christ, must cooperate with God to make it happen.
We wonder, of course, how we can help God’s work. We are so small, so weak—so sinful, so imperfect. St Paul tells us how: we crucify ourselves to the world and crucify the world to ourselves. We nail to the Cross our sinful attachment to the evil in the world: our pride and greed and anger and lust, our gossip and fighting, our failure to love and unwillingness to forgive, our refusal to share the gifts God has generously bestowed on us to welcome strangers and to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked, our disregard for and avaricious exploitation of the wonders of creation in the natural world and in our brothers and sisters, our abandonment of justice and embrace of profit.
When those evils die, we can embrace the goodness created by God in people and in the world—faith, trust, mercy, joy, generosity, compassion, justice, and peace. This starts with each one of us, at home, in the family, and then it spreads outward to the neighborhood, the school, the parish, the workplace; the parking lot, the highway, the bank, Costco, even politics. When we treat each other with respect and kindness, we teach our children and demonstrate to others what it means to be truly Christian and we participate more and more fully in the realization of God’s New Creation, which comes to save the world through the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and to ages of ages. Amen.
