A Sermon on the Exaltation of the Cross (2026) - The Inner Exaltation of the Cross

My brothers and sisters, we celebrate today once again the Great Feast of the Exaltation of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross of Christ. Today in every Orthodox church throughout the world, the Cross stands in the center of the nave, adorned with flowers and praised with hymns, and all the faithful fall prostrate before it in humility and gratitude and love. For truly, the Cross is the supreme symbol of all that God has given us: forgiveness, salvation, deification, and live eternal. “Behold, through the Cross joy has come to all the world.”

But at the same time, the Cross is also the supreme symbol of all that we ourselves must give to God. The Lord is quite clear in the Holy Gospels: “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me” (Matt. 16:24). And again: “whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:27). Therefore, on this great and holy feast-day, we must not be content merely to exalt the Cross outwardly in the center of our churches, but we must also resolve firmly to exalt the Cross inwardly by embracing it with our whole hearts.

What does this mean, and how are we to set about accomplishing it? Firstly we must understand how the historical Exaltation of the Cross was accomplished, and then we must discern how to apply such lessons to our own lives.

When St. Constantine desired to find and venerate the True Cross of Christ, he sent his most pious mother, the Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Empress Helen, from the Roman capital to the Holy City of Jerusalem. She made this journey joyfully, despite already being afflicted by the infirmities of old age. And so too must it be with us, my dear brothers and sisters: we must become willing to separate ourselves from the world, and to make our inner journey toward the spiritual Jerusalem within our own hearts. St. John Climacus, in his incomparable The Ladder of Divine Ascent, taught this same thing when he described the first three steps of that ladder as renunciation of the world, detachment, and exile.

Let us not be deceived: in the Christian life, there can be no compromises or half-measures when it comes to such renunciation. We cannot hold on to anything whatsoever in this fallen world or this temporal life. Christ Himself told us this: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon… But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness” (Matt. 6:24, 33).

The ever-memorable Fr. Seraphim (Rose) once gave an extremely stark and sobering explanation of this principle, one which is particularly appropriate to today’s feast:

Let not us, who would be Christians, expect anything else from [the world] than to be crucified. For to be Christian is to be crucified, in this time and in any time since Christ came for the first time. His life is the example — and warning — to us all. We must be crucified personally, mystically; for through crucifixion is the only path to resurrection. If we would rise with Christ, we must first be humbled with Him — even to the ultimate humiliation, being devoured and spit forth by the uncomprehending world. And we must be crucified outwardly, in the eyes of the world; for Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, and the world cannot bear it, even a single representative of it, even for a single moment. The world can only accept Antichrist, now or at any time. No wonder then, that it is hard to be a Christian — it is not hard, it is impossible. No one can knowingly accept a way of life which, the more truly it is lived, leads the more surely to one’s own destruction. And that is why we constantly rebel, try to make life easier, try to be half-Christian, try to make the best of both worlds. We must ultimately choose — our felicity lies in one world or the other, not in both. God give us the strength to pursue the path to crucifixion; there is no other way to be Christian.

But to return to the story of St. Helen: when she had left her home and arrived in Jerusalem, what did she first do? She did not straightway begin her search for the Cross itself, but rather took an extraordinarily important first step: she ordered that the pagan idols and temples in Jerusalem be destroyed. For indeed, it is not possible for us to worthily exalt the Cross of Christ in a place defiled by idolatry and spiritual filth. And just as St. Helen first cleansed the city of Jerusalem before lifting up the Cross within it, so too we must firmly resolve to cleanse our hearts of all defilement before daring to offer our honor and worship to Christ and His Cross.

This lesson is expounded with characteristic clarity by St. Theophan the Recluse in his Letters on the Spiritual Life:

When the Lord was taken down from the Cross, the Cross remained on Golgotha, and then it was thrown into the pit that was in that place, where this instrument of execution was usually thrown, together with other refuse. Soon Jerusalem was razed and all of its edifices were leveled to the ground. The pit containing the Cross of Christ was also filled over. When the pagans rebuilt the city (the Jews were forbidden to come near the place where it was), it happened that on the place where the Cross of Christ was hidden, they placed an idol of Venus, the pagan Goddess of fornication and all manner of lusts. This is what the enemy suggested to them. This is how it is with our inner cross. When the enemy destroys the spiritual order in the soul, this is our mental Jerusalem, and then the spiritual cross is thrown down from the Golgotha of the heart and is covered over with the garbage of the affections and lusts. Lustful self-pleasure then rises like a tower over all our inner peace, and everything in us bows down to it and fulfills its commands until grace shines upon us, inspiring us to cast down the idol and lift up the cross of self-crucifixion.

And here, St. Theophan gives us the third and final step in accomplishing our inner and spiritual exaltation of the Cross: firstly we must renounce the world, secondly we must cleanse our hearts of idolatrous passion, and finally we must “lift up the cross of self-crucifixion.” Perhaps this third and final step might seem to us to be more or less the same as the second: if we “have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts” (Gal. 5:24), then what further need do we have of self-crucifixion? But such an impression betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of both the Cross of Christ and of the salvation which He accomplished upon it for our sakes.

My brothers and sisters, salvation is not merely an escape from sin and death. It is that, to be sure. But it is also so much more than that — which is why some of the Holy Fathers teach that Christ would still have become incarnate even if the Fall of Man had never occurred. It is one thing (and an indisputably needful thing!) to put our passions to death. Yet as St. Isaac the Syrian taught, even some of the pagan philosophers put us Christians to shame by their virtue and asceticism — yet these things by no means acquired for them the indwelling grace of the Holy Spirit, which is freely given to all Christians in Holy Baptism. And as our own beloved Fr. Panteleimon always used to say: “Christianity is not a self-help program!” It is a great trap to believe that our Christian life principally consists in the struggle to defeat sin and acquire virtue. Again, it is absolutely indisputable that this struggle is necessary! But the purpose of that struggle must always be nothing other than union with Christ and the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. And for that, we need more than merely the victory of virtue over vice. For that, we need the Cross.

I can think of no better explanation for this than that given by St. Isaac the Syrian:

But the sum of all is that God the Lord surrendered His own Son to death on the Cross for the fervent love of creation. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son over to death for its sake.“ This was not, however, because He could not have redeemed us in another way, but so that His surpassing love, manifested hereby, might be a teacher unto us. And by the death of His only-begotten Son He made us near to Himself. Yea, if He had had anything more precious, He would have given it to us, so that by it our race might be His own. Because of His great love for us it was not His pleasure to do violence to our freedom (although He is able to do so), but He chose that we should draw near to Him by the love of our understanding.

The Cross is the greatest possible expression of God’s love for us. And it must also become the greatest possible expression of our love for Him. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). And that is precisely why our self-crucifixion must go beyond mere denial of our idolatrous and passionate desires. We must offer everything up to God: not only that which is sinful, but even all that is good in our lives — and ultimately, we must offer up to Him even our very lives themselves. We must hold nothing back, just as He Himself held nothing back: “by the death of His only-begotten Son He made us near to Himself. Yea, if He had had anything more precious, He would have given it to us, so that by it our race might be His own.”

My brothers and sisters, let us never look for reasons why we need not give something up for God; rather, let us eagerly look for every opportunity to give anything to God — even and especially that which is most good and most dear to us in this world. Because only by such supreme and self-emptying love can we possibly draw near to the God Who is love.

Like all of the Gospel commandments, there can be no doubt that “this is an hard saying” (cf. John 6:60). On a human level, it is even impossible — as Fr. Seraphim (Rose) said. “But with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26). And it is sure and certain that the “impossibility” of self-crucifixion will be followed — even already in this life — by the “impossibility” of resurrection, salvation, and deification. Whatever we might give up for Christ, we are never by any means the poorer for it. Quite the contrary:

And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My sake, and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.

Mark 10:29-30

Above all, my dear brothers and sisters, let us give careful heed to the exhortation of St. Paul: “let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:1-2). Truly, it was “for the joy that was set before Him” that Christ endured the Cross, and it is for the sake of that same joy that we must always resolve to endure our own, for it is precisely “through the Cross [that] joy hath come to all the world.”

Therefore, as we bow the knees of our bodies before the Precious Wood of the Cross on this day, let us resolve also to exalt with joy and spiritual exultation the Cross of Christ within our own hearts and with our whole lives. Let us make our every act a free offering of love to our Savior — and through Him, to each one of His children whom He sends into our lives. Let us hold nothing back for ourselves, but rather let us live henceforth by the same divine generosity which has been poured out so richly and so freely upon us. And let us truly count as loss every moment of our lives in which we live in any other way than that which Christ showed us on the Cross standing here before each one of us today. For truly, only such love is worthy of those who would be called the sons and daughters of God. Amen.