Поучение в 3-ю неделю Великого поста. О крестоношении

“If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and come after Me,” the Lord said to His disciples, calling them before Him, as we heard today in the Gospel (Mark 8:34). Beloved brothers! And we are disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ, because we are Christians. And we are called before the face of the Lord into this holy church to hear His teaching. We stand before the Lord; His eyes are fixed on us. Our souls are naked before Him; our secret thoughts and innermost sensations are obvious to Him. He sees all our intentions; He sees the truths and sins we have committed from our youth; sees our whole life, both past and future; what we have not yet done is already written in His book 59 . He sees the hour of our transition into immeasurable eternity and proclaims to us for our salvation His all-holy commandment: “Whoever wants to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and come after Me.” By the power of living faith, let us raise our mental eye to the Lord - and we will see Him, we will see Him, the Omnipresent One, present here with us! Let us open our hearts, rolling away the heavy stone of bitterness from the entrance to it; Let us hear, consider, accept, and assimilate the teaching of our Lord. What does it mean to “deny oneself”? To “deny oneself” means to leave a sinful life. Sin, through which our fall took place, so consumed our entire nature that it became as if natural for us: renunciation of sin became renunciation of nature; renunciation of nature is renunciation of oneself. Eternal death, which struck our soul, turned into life for us. She demands her food - sin, her pleasure - sin; through such food and such pleasure, eternal death maintains and maintains its dominion over man. But fallen man recognizes the maintenance and development in himself of the dominion of death as the development and prosperity of life. Thus, someone infected with a fatal illness is overcome by the violent demands of the illness and seeks dishes that intensify the illness, seeks them as the most necessary food, as a necessary, most pleasant pleasure. Against this eternal death, which seems like life to humanity suffering from a terrible fall, the Lord pronounces His sentence: “Whoever wants to save his soul by developing in it a life of fall or eternal death, he will destroy it: and whoever will destroy his soul for the sake of me and the Gospel, killing sinful desires in himself and denying himself from sinful pleasure, he will save you” (Mark 8:35). Pointing to the whole world that stands before our eyes, with all its beauties and charms, the Lord says: “What is it good for a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” (Mark 8:36) What benefit would there be for a person, what gain would it be if he were to gain control not over something unimportant, but even over the entire visible world? This visible world is only a short-term hotel for man! There is no object on earth, there is not a single advantage on earth that we could recognize as our property. Everything is taken from us by inexorable and inevitable death, and often even before death they are taken away by unforeseen circumstances and upheavals. We lay down our very body in the cherished Prague for eternity. Our property, our property and treasure is our soul, our soul alone. “What will a man give for his soul?” (Mark 8:37) speaks the word of God. We have nothing to compensate for the loss of a soul when it is killed by eternal death, which seductively appears as life. What does it mean to take up your cross? The cross was an instrument of blasphemous execution for the mob and prisoners deprived of civil rights. A proud world, a world hostile to Christ, deprives the disciples of Christ of the rights that the sons of the world enjoy. “If you had been quicker from the world,” the Lord says to his followers, “the world would have loved its own, as you are not from the world, but I chose you out of the world, for this reason the world hates you” (John 15:19). “You will be cut off from the congregation, ... and everyone who kills you will think of offering service to God” (John 16:2). To take up your cross means to generously endure those ridicule and reproaches with which the world showers a follower of Christ, those sorrows and persecutions with which the sin-loving and blind world persecutes a follower of Christ. “This is acceptable before God,” says the holy Apostle Peter, “if for God’s sake someone endures sorrow, suffering without righteousness. For this you are called quickly” (1 Pet. 2:19, 21) by the Lord, who informed His beloved: “you will be in a world of sorrow: but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). To take up one's cross means to valiantly endure hard invisible labor, invisible languor and martyrdom for the sake of the Gospel while fighting against one's own passions, against the sin that lives within us, against the spirits of malice who will rise up with rage against us and resist us with bitterness when we decide to throw off the yoke of sin and submit to the yoke of Christ. “Our struggle,” said the holy Apostle Paul, “is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, and against the powers, and against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but are mighty through God to destroy the firmament: casting down the thoughts and every exaltation that is brought to the mind of God, and bringing into captivity every mind into the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4-5). Having won victory in this invisible but difficult battle, the apostle exclaimed: “Let me not boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom peace was crucified to me, and to the world” (Gal. 6:14). To take up your cross means to submit with submission and humility to those temporary sorrows and disasters that Divine Providence is pleased to allow us to cleanse our sins. Then the cross serves as a ladder for a person from earth to heaven. The robber mentioned in the Gospel ascended along this ladder, ascended from the midst of the most terrible crimes into the brightest abodes of paradise: from his cross he uttered verbs filled with humility; Through humility he entered into the knowledge of God, and through the knowledge of God he acquired heaven. “You who are worthy of your deeds are accepted,” he said, “remember me, O Lord, when you come into this kingdom” (Luke 23:41–42). And we, beloved brethren, when sorrow surrounds us, will repeat the words of the thief, words whose price is paradise! or, like Job, let us bless the just and at the same time merciful Lord who punishes us. “Good,” said this sufferer, “we have received from the hand of the Lord, shall we not endure the evil?” (Job 2:10) “As the Lord willed, so it was: blessed be the name of the Lord forever” (Job 1:21). May God’s true promise come true over us: “Blessed is the man who endures temptation; having been tempted, he receives the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12). To take up your cross means to voluntarily and diligently submit to hardships and struggles that curb the wordless aspirations of our flesh. The holy Apostle Paul also resorted to such crucifixion of the flesh: “I mortify my body,” he says, “and make it enslaved, lest I preach to others, and be the key myself” (1 Cor. 9:27). “Those who are in the flesh,” that is, those who do not bridle their flesh, but allow it to prevail over the spirit, “cannot please God.” And therefore, while living in the flesh, we must not live for the flesh! “If you live according to the flesh, you are about to die an eternal death; If you put to death the deeds of the flesh with the Spirit, you will live an eternal, blessed life (Rom. 8:8, 13). The flesh is essentially restrained by the spirit; but then only the spirit can have dominion over the flesh and control it when it is prepared for obedience by crucifixion. The flesh is crucified by fasting, vigil, kneeling and other bodily labors imposed on it prudently and moderately. Prudent and moderate bodily feat frees the body from heaviness and fatness, sharpens its strength, and keeps it constantly light and capable of activity. “They who are Christ’s,” says the apostle, “the flesh was crucified with its passions and lusts” (Gal. 5:24). What does it mean to take up a cross, and take up your own cross? This means that every Christian must patiently endure precisely those insults and those persecutions from the world that befall him, and not any others. This means that every Christian must fight with courage and constancy precisely those passions and those sinful thoughts that arise in him. This means that every Christian must with humility, with devotion to the will of God, with confession of the justice and mercy of God, with thanksgiving to God, endure those sorrows and hardships that Divine Providence allows him, and not any others imagined and suggested by proud dreams. This means being content with precisely those bodily feats that correspond to our bodily strengths, which our flesh specifically needs to keep it in order, and not at all striving, carried away by vainglorious zeal, in the words of St. John Climacus 60, to intense fasting, to intense vigil and other immensity in deeds that destroy bodily health and direct the spirit to conceit and self-delusion. All humanity works and suffers on earth; but how varied are these sufferings; how varied are the passions that combat us; how varied are the sorrows and temptations that God sends to us for our healing, for the cleansing of our sins; what a difference there is between people in their very physical strength, in their health! Exactly: every person has his own cross. And it is this cross that every Christian is commanded to accept with selflessness and follow Christ. He who has accepted his cross, denying himself, has come to terms with himself, with his circumstances, with his situation, external and internal, is the only one who can reasonably and correctly follow Christ. What does it mean to follow Christ? This means: to study the Gospel, to have the Gospel as the only guide for the activity of the mind, the activity of the heart, and the activity of the body. This means: borrow your way of thinking from the Gospel, attune your heartfelt feelings to the Gospel and serve as an expression of the Gospel with all your actions, all your movements, secret and overt. We repeat, only those who, having avoided the deception of “the humility of mind destined for him” (Col. 2:18), are capable of such following Christ, wished to find true humility where it rests—in obedience and submission to God. He who entered into obedience to God, into obedience combined with complete selflessness, took up his cross, recognized and confessed this cross as his own. Beloved brothers! Today, according to the statutes of the Holy Church, giving veneration to the honorable Cross of the Lord with our bodies, let us also give veneration to it in spirit! Let us honor the honorable Cross of Christ - the instrument of victory and the banner of the glory of Christ - by confessing each one from his cross: “I will accept what is worthy according to my deeds! Remember me, Lord, in Your kingdom!” By recognizing our sinfulness, giving thanks to God, and submitting to the will of God, let us make our cross—an instrument of execution and a banner of dishonor—an instrument of victory and a banner of glory, like the Cross of the Lord. Let us open heaven for ourselves with the cross. Let us not allow ourselves malicious murmurs, especially let us not allow ourselves the soul-destroying blasphemy that is often heard from the lips of a blinded, embittered sinner, tormented and beating on his cross, trying in vain to get rid of the cross. With murmuring and blasphemy, the cross becomes an unbearable weight, dragging the one crucified on it to hell. "What have I done?" - the unconfessed sinner cries and reproaches the just and merciful God for injustice and unmercifulness, condemns and rejects the Providence of God; seeing the Son of God crucified, mockingly and slyly demands from Him: “If You are the Christ, save Yourself and this” (Luke 23:39), come down from the cross (Matthew 27:41–42). But our Lord Jesus Christ “willed in the flesh to ascend to the cross and endure death 61 in order to reconcile humanity with God through the cross, and through death to save humanity from eternal death. Preparing the holy apostles for a great event - for the redemption of the human race to be accomplished through the suffering and blasphemous death of the God-man made man, the Lord told the apostles in good time that He must be delivered into the hands of sinners, suffer a lot, be killed and rise again. Such a prediction seemed strange and unrealistic to some of the holy apostles. Then the Lord called His disciples before Him and said to them: “Whoever wants to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and come after Me.” Amen. Saint Simeon the New Theologian. According to a book written in verse, the word is 55th Sunday troparion in the 2nd tone and Sunday troparion in the 5th tone You might be interested in: