Feast of the Holy Cross

The Feast of the Holy Cross

The final festal days that fulfill the Church Year
are these Seven Sundays.
The feast recalls to us the fulfillment of all history,
when the Lord of Glory comes again to begin the New Aeon.

The Glory of the Lord is present in "The Victory of the Cross."

Christ the Lord is reigning now in His Kingdom,
and this reign is made present to us in the Holy Mysteries of the Kingdom: these are the sacramental mysteries of the Church.

Thus we see in faith that "The Victory of the Holy Cross" is the reason, the "logos" as it were, at work in the Sacramental Mysteries, in the Church itself, and in all that we profess in the Apostles Creed: "the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen."

The "Victory of the Cross" is contained within the Apostles and Nicene Creeds~
We confess Christ's Death, Resurrection, and Ascension "to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from thence He shall come again in Glory to judge the living and the dead, and His Kingdom will have no end" ~

Given such a "dynamis" of salvific economy, the Paschal Victory of the Cross celebrates and confirms the Church's living faith under aspects of christology, ecclesiology, soteriology, eschatology.

Each event in salvation history contains a dynamis of the whole Pasch:
The Apostles Creed names events in sequence, yes, but much more:
"An Anamnesis of the Pasch" through all Salvation History.

This anamnesis is the same reason (again "the logos of")

• why the Orthodox icon of "The Descent Unto Hell" is a witness to the Victory of the Cross,

• why christology becomes both ecclesiology and soteriology in the events and shape of salvation history,
• why christology becomes both ecclesiology and soteriology in the metanoia and parousia of liturgy,
• why christology becomes both ecclesiology and soteriology in the perichoresis of pneumatology~

Yet the Feast of the Holy Cross professes as well the ascesis of spiritual theology, by which our individual and communal conversion into Christ is embraced and embodied. The benedictines have a motto that summarizes this ascesis of the Cross, a discipleship via the martyrion of self-gift in dying to self: "conversatio morum"

In this light, indeed a Taboric and eucharistic light, the "The Victory of the Cross" celebrates the divine gifts and graces by which, and within which, the Spirit animates and perfects the cosmos, the communio ecclesiae, the individual soul, indeed the whole man. Therein we hear anew the gospel summed up in the maxim of Irenaeus of Lyons:
For the glory of God is man alive, and the life of man is the vision of God"
(Adv. Haer. IV, 20, 7)

"The Victory of the Holy Cross" can also be seen in the liturgical mysteries of the Church's holy icons, where the gold shimmering round the saints of the Mystical Body reflects "The Parousia" of His Victory and "The Advent" of The New Aeon.



Pantokrator
written by the hand of K. Heather Durka



See also our 2006 Post:

The Seven Sundays of the Holy Cross