Fr. Rafail Noica: the Cross as the culmination of Christ's love
The martyrs, perceiving the Divinity of Christ like the sinful woman, were filled with the grace of this love, and were unmoved by torments and death, and they died full of grace...
Fragments from a conference titled “What is Man?” held in Alba Iulia, Romania on November 23, 2006
Translated by Grig Gheorghiu
What is love? I want to say I don’t know, and may God enlighten you and enlighten all of us so that we know what it is. But, if I venture on this dangerous path, let me try to say some words about it. I think we can take as a model Christ on the Cross. We should understand Him correctly as the expression of love’s culmination, because He Himself says “greater love has no one but this, to give one’s life for one’s friends”. Who are Christ’s friends? First of all, He says “you are My friends if you do what I command you”. But Christ told us we should love our enemies too. Christ, however, doesn’t command that we do something, but the divine commandments are a revelation of what God is (either Christ incarnated, or Christ born in our hearts). Were we to paraphrase Christ’s words “love your enemies”, we could say “I, God, love even my enemies”. Why does God love His enemies? Is there a limit to Christ’s love? I would say that God doesn’t have love (because what you have, you can lose), but God is love, and this love never changes. If we are friends or if we are enemies, if our name is John or Peter or Judas, Christ’s love remains unchanged.
If you look attentively, you’ll see how in the four Gospels, especially during the evening of the Last Supper, Christ tried many times and in many ways to tear what was written for Judas, the prophesied deed, just like God tore the prophesied deed for the Ninevites, in the days of the Prophet Jonah, when Jonah preached to the Ninevites: “You will all perish, you and your herds, if you don’t repent”. They repented and they didn’t perish. So God stopped His own prophecy, out of love, when His prophecy was to the disadvantage of human beings, His beloved creatures. He also wanted to stop the prophecy about Judas. Look at the first verses from Holy Thursday, at the reading of the Twelve Gospels. After the first Gospel reading, there are several verses, and each one shows in what way, in what different way Christ tried to wake Judas up, to hear some words from Judas through which Christ could say “Let it be to you according to your faith”, or “Your sins are forgiven”, or anything to erase, to tear the written deed. When I say “tear the written deed”, many of you know that I am quoting the Troparion from Great Lent, from the sixth hour: “O Christ God, on the sixth day and hour, You nailed to the Cross the sin which rebellious Adam committed in paradise. Tear asunder also the bonds of our iniquity, and save us!” Christ breaks down the bonds which are against us.
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Elder Sophrony used to tell us that “humility is that quality of divine love which gives itself to the beloved, without asking for anything back”. In Lucifer’s thought of setting his seat above the Heavens and to be like the Most High there was a rejection of the other, and there was no “beloved”, but “the beloved is I, and no other, and there is room for no one else inside me”. Humility is an openness to everyone, even to enemies. May the Lord reveal this to us, because we need this in this savage and lying History. Because Christ Himself in the beginning didn’t give Himself to anyone, as the Gospel of St. John says, because He knew what is inside a human being, and didn’t need anyone to tell him that. But the moment came when He reckoned it was time to give Himself to humankind, and in less than twenty-four hours He was on the Cross. But Christ remained unchanged. Because God is love. God doesn’t have love, but is love.
The Cross is the culmination of love, a love which doesn’t stop itself from torments, not even from death itself, because it gives itself to the beloved fully, with no reservations. Christ didn’t keep anything for Himself. In the yelling mob which accompanied Him to the Cross, there were a few women who were lamenting for Him, for Christ, and He turned to them and said to them “daughters of Jerusalem, don’t cry for me, but cry for yourselves and for your children”. Why? Because in their madness, the mob had just yelled “Let His blood be on us and on our children”. They called on the Saviour’s blood as a curse on themselves and on their children, and Christ extinguished the curse, He wanted to extinguish it. He said “cry for yourselves and for your children, not for me”. Not even then did Christ have anything set aside in Himself for Himself. He was thinking of others, and when He was raised on the Cross, He cried from the Cross to the Father: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing”. He had compassion on our bestiality, instead of being pained by His torments.
Christ is love, decreased by nothing, moved by nothing, decimated by nothing. Because His love, whether He was alive or dead, was still love, and He showed us this mystery: that this love cannot be contained by death, and that death itself perished, and that Hell poured out all that it had in its bowels, and will do so again at the Final Judgment (which is getting closer). God’s love was lived with gusto, as we would say today (gusto is a cheap word in this context) by all the disciples, mostly in the first three centuries, but also to this day.
Love as life – when this love lives in the members of a human being, then torments cannot decrease it, and death has no teeth to bite into it. I want to bring your attention to another Troparion which we sing on Holy Wednesday – the Troparion of St. Cassiani: “The woman who had fallen into many sins, perceiving Thy divinity, said ‘Woe is me, for my life was a dark and moonless night’”. This is all I remember, but pay attention to this. The martyrs, perceiving like the sinful woman the Divinity of Christ, were filled with the grace of this love, and were unmoved by torments and death, and they died full of grace, and their bodies, instead of becoming carcasses and decaying, became relics for us. In the Old Testament everything that died became filthy. When people buried their parents, then a whole day, twenty-four hours, they were not allowed to go into the temple so that they wouldn’t defile the living with the dead. Today, if we don’t have relics of saints or martyrs in our altars, then the altars are not consecrated, and we are not able to serve the Liturgy. You see, among other things, how death was mocked by Christ. Because even sinful human beings were able to become like Christ.
[…] True martyrs were the ones whose testimony was pure. Among the 20,000 martyrs of Nicomedia, it seems that one name was not written down as a martyr. Why? Because on the way to martyrdom, he tore down from a wall the Decree of Caesar which condemned the Christians. His fault was that from that moment on he could be prosecuted by Caesar, according to Caesar’s judgement, because he set himself against Caesar. His testimony was about the way Caesar ruled over his people, so his testimony for the incorrupt Life was not pure. This is what we need to keep in mind - that we need to be witnesses to that Life which lives in the members of the human being, which cannot be overcome, as Christ says to Peter: “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
I think the days are coming when our life needs to be pure. Pure doesn’t mean we don’t have any sins. But at least our thinking needs to be pure, whole, complete. Because if not, we run the risk of being swallowed by the waves, the tsunamis of the postmodern world. True life culminates with the Cross, paradoxically. But doesn’t the Church say “Blessed life-giving Cross”? How is it life-giving, when the Giver of Life died on it? The body is not all, the body was an object of sacrifice, and He gave it to us as Communion, and also His blood which was spilled. And we also, by eating the Body and Blood under the form of bread and wine, because He knows we are not cannibals, we eat the Body and Blood which knew the Resurrection, and so we eat everlasting Life, as Christ says.
Ever since I was allowed to hear confessions, I’ve heard many times from young people a confession of this type: “I tried the things of the flesh”, or the things of the flesh tried them, and they say either: “But I didn’t go too far”, or “I didn’t go all the way”, or “I went all the way”, or, as some were saying “Oh, Father, when I had this experience for the first time, I thought: is this all?”. I want to say two more things:
1. Is this all? Yes, or course, this is all; you were looking for love, but your poor body was able to only offer you this much. Why? Because, in its essence, it is nothing but a biological function and the body can’t do more. It is a biological function which is veiled by lies into a whole mysticism of the body, and even of the soul. You look for fulfillment or things like that. Those who have had this experience, expecting such things, were disappointed. All are deceived when these things attract them too much.
2. All the way. I want to focus on the expression “too far”, or “all the way”. Love needs to go all the way, and this allows the enemy to hinder us and darken us, and the human being goes “all the way” to the end of the carnal coming together, which in its law, in its limits, is very good, very beautiful, if only we had sufficient freedom from passions to see with pure eyes this work of conceiving the image of God, even after the Fall. All the way; love cannot help but give itself all the way. It’s not that it can’t, but it is in its nature, it is a consuming fire which consumes God Himself. He consumes Himself because He is love, and if we talk about history, a history where things culminate with death, then He allows Himself to be consumed by love unto death, consumed for the sake of His beloved. And when He says on the cross “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing”, He wasn’t lamenting His wounds, but our wounds, our darkness. Because these poor darkened beings don’t know that they are killing their only true Friend. “But I will die for them, and through this death I will find another way to save them, since I did not find an answer of obedience and love in them; through their hate and their criminality, I, God immortal, let Myself be killed, and through this sacrifice I will spoil the work of death and of Hell, and even so I will save them.” And, of course, we need to add “Give us, God, to want this, and to want it more fully”.
The great heresy is the way we understand the Cross and we say “Oh, I am carrying my cross”, which is to say I suffer much. We equate the cross with suffering. Heresy! The cross is love, love brought - to quote - “too far”, love brought “all the way”, true love, which doesn’t need carnal fulfillment, which is very good but can only be experienced within its own law and its own limits. But love needs to go beyond that. The Cross is that which human beings desire, and when they arrive at sin, at that end where there is disappointment, then they think it wasn’t sufficient, and they look for another experience, they seek another person. They try more and more and they run the risk of running aground in their sinful ways, in lies, in darkness, in going all the way.
Would you believe me if I tell you that human beings seek the Cross of Christ and nothing else? May God enlighten us, and then we will be able to sing “Oh Life-Giving Cross!”