Take Up the Weapon of Peace

Homily for the Sunday after the Holy Cross

Galatians 2:16-20.....................Mark 8:34-9:1

Twenty-five years ago, the Sunday after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross came only five days after the previously unimaginable attacks of what we now call simply “Nine-Eleven,” when terrorists hijacked four American airplanes full of passengers and flew two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, DC.  They planned to smash the fourth into the Capitol in Washington, but plunged it into a field in rural Pennsylvania when heroic passengers broke into the cockpit and took on the terrorists.

More than two-thousand people perished in the attacks and immediate rescue efforts.  Facing such a massive loss of life and such terrible destruction, the nation was grieving for the dead and the injured and all those who suffered in so many ways.  At the same time, the country’s leaders were planning how to respond to these attacks on America’s security and stability. 

And everyone was wondering what they could do.

Twenty-five years later, a different set of challenges to our nation’s security and stability confronts us.  At all points on the political spectrum, people have lost faith in the government and the political process.  We don’t trust traditional news media and increasingly get our information from blatantly partisan online sources that hardly even pretend to care about objective, factual reporting.

Some people believe that criminal immigrants, pampered minority groups, doctors and scientists, various “woke” and unnecessarily compassionate busybodies, fanatical environmentalists, Socialists, and Communists threaten to destroy our White, Protestant, Christian nation.

Other people see that incompetent, corrupt, and criminal politicians and government officials have joined forces with money-grubbing billionaires to wipe out a century of social progress, degrade the environment, deny climate change, deploy armed forces against civilians, exploit workers, prevent citizens from voting, deface national monuments, erase historical facts, alienate our allies around the world, persecute opponents, and personally profit from what has always been known as public service.

And again, we wonder what we can do.

The answer to our questions is the Holy Cross of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ.  Not erected as public, in-your-face monuments.  Not brandished in demonstrations or flaunted in parades.  Not exalted in words but ignored in works.  But honored and trusted for its true meaning, as God teaches us to understand.

In the troparion of the Holy Cross, we pray, “O Lord, save your people and bless your inheritance.  Grant victory to our country over its enemies, and preserve your community by the power of your Cross.”

In the kontakion of the Holy Cross, we ask Christ our God to grant mercy to the Christian people, to strengthen our public authorities in good works, and to make the Holy Cross a “weapon of peace and a standard of victory.”

In today’s reading from the Holy Gospel according to St Mark, Jesus says that those who wish to follow him must put aside their own desires and take up their crosses, then follow him.

In the Letter to the Galatians, St Paul tells us that we are saved not by following the Law of the Old Testament, but by faith in Jesus Christ.

Faith in Jesus Christ is faith in the God who sacrificed himself for his people.  Jesus willingly died on the Cross to take away our sins, not to bring glory to himself.  God does not ask us to make any sacrifice greater than the one He made for us.  In St John’s Gospel, Jesus tells us to “Love one another as I have loved you.”  For Christ and his followers, sacrifices are acts of love that lead to new life.

Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross turned the wood of torture into the Tree of Life.  It turned a sign of defeat into a banner of victory:  life over death, love over sin, humility over power, the common good over individual advantage.  It turned an instrument of oppression into a weapon of peace.

When we put aside what we want—which twenty-five years ago was revenge, punishment, and destruction directed at the terrorists and their backers, and now is much the same, directed at political “enemies”—and take up the Holy Cross and follow Christ, we also will take up the greatest weapon of peace.  It will preserve God’s people and bring them the greatest victory, the victory over sin and death already won by Jesus Christ.

The Holy Cross is not a sword; it is greater than any sword.  Christ’s victory is not worldly domination; it is eternal salvation.  Christian faith is not a human invention; it is a gift from God.  Christians are not meant to be ordinary people; we are called to be like our Lord and God Jesus Christ, living in love, not hate, working for peace, not violence, seeking life, not death.

The world is the Lord’s inheritance, bequeathed to him by the Father, to bless and cherish and protect.  Armed with the power of his Holy and Lifegiving Cross, we embody that inheritance and we give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and to ages of ages.  Amen.