Preparation and the Power of the Cross
This post comes from an email in the "Walk Through the Church Year" series which goes out to folks who sign up to receive two emails per month about major feasts and selected commemorations in the liturgical calendar. To receive these emails in your inbox, sign up here.
The original email was sent out in September of 2024.
by Brendan Byrd
The Troparion, or hymn, for the feast beautifully summarizes its message:
Your nativity, O Virgin, has proclaimed joy to the whole universe!
The Sun of Righteousness, Christ our God, has shone from you, O Theotokos.
By annulling the curse, He bestowed a blessing;
By destroying death, He granted us eternal life.
Birth of Mary, New Life for Us
The passages that will be read at liturgies on this day all contain references linking to the Theotokos’ part that she played in Christ’s life and victory. Whether it is Jacob’s ladder from Genesis 28 or the “living temple of God filled with the divine Glory” (Ezekiel 43-44), the Virgin Mary is praised for her role in bringing about Christ’s incarnation, His embodiment. She is literally the God-bearer, the Theotokos. She will carry God within her so that He can bear her and all others who accept his gift of victory and reconciliation. Her response of “let it be” (Luke 1:38) to the Archangel Gabriel’s words enable her to become the Second Eve. The Word will become flesh (John 1:1) through her flesh. Everything in the cosmos will be changed. Nine months later, the synergy of God working with her becomes God-with-us, Immanuel.
First Things First: Preparation
But, we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves–Mary has to be born first! And the story of her own miraculous birth to an older, barren couple is a prefiguring of the impossible becoming possible in God’s will. The holy tradition handed down by the Church of her parents, Saints Joachim and Anna, speaks of their faithfulness and trust in God. It reminds us of many other stories throughout the Scriptures where against all earthly odds, a son is born, a family is saved, a nation is reborn. Of course, all of those stories are pointing to the coming of Christ.
The Theotokos’ own birth story is the last step, the last link, and it makes clear once again that God keeps His promises to His people. He hasn’t forgotten what He said in Genesis 3:15 to Eve and Adam and the millennia that follow. With the Theotokos’ birth, that wait is nearly over. The cosmos is on the verge of receiving its King. Just a few more years of waiting after her birth for our mortal enemies of sin, death, and the evil one to be conquered by the Resurrection of her Son.
It is in this spirit that we have the opportunity to celebrate and remember what happened then. It also can remind us how important our decision to say ‘yes’ to God is now. Each of us has the real opportunity to invite God to dwell in us. Like the Theotokos, each of us has the opportunity to see Him making “all things being made new” (Revelation 21:5) through the new birth of life that He gives us.
Sometimes one has to wait weeks before the next major feast. But in September, six days after commemorating the Theotokos’ birth we get to the Elevation of the Holy Cross.
19th Century Old Believer icon depicting the Exaltation of the Cross
The Power of God, the Power of the Cross
This Feast takes us all the way back to the year 326 during the reign of the first Christian Roman Emperor, St. Constantine. During the centuries of upheaval in Jerusalem following the Crucifixion, Christ’s cross was lost to memory and assumed destroyed. When St. Helen, Constantine’s mother, visited the Holy Land in the 20th year of his reign, she went with the goal of building churches and supporting the Christian presence there. (Remember, it had been a mere 13 years since Constantine declared toleration for the Church.)
While in Jerusalem, through following traditional clues and miraculous intervention, St. Helen led the effort to locate the True Cross. Icons commemorating this event typically show the patriarch of Jerusalem, Macarius, holding aloft the True Cross for Helen and the rest of the gathered court to venerate it and to give praise to God for its discovery.
Here is the troparion (hymn) for this feast:
Save, O Lord, Your people and bless Your inheritance;
grant victory to the faithful over their adversaries.
And protect Your commonwealth, by the power of Your Cross.
This day is set aside to recall this tangible reminder of Christ’s passion. As such, it is a reminder of how God’s power transformed the shame and degradation of an instrument of death into a glorified image of His life-giving power. It also is a vivid depiction of God’s value of physical matter. The True Faith concerns the whole person and all creation, spiritual and material. The lifting up of the True Cross is an annual reminder that as God cared about preserving and revealing the actual wooden cross upon which Christ died, He cares about the whole person of each sinner.
Both the Nativity of the Theotokos and the Elevation of the Holy Cross commemorate historical events. We believe that they actually happened on a specific date in history, to real people. Not merely symbols, they are a prefiguring and a fulfillment of God’s providence within history. Consider also how they also give additional context to those two most renowned feasts, Christ’s Nativity (Christmas) and Pascha (Easter). With these two September feasts, we understand a bit more about the rest of the story that God is telling through His Scripture, tradition, and the life of the Church.
Like the first day of the new church year, these feasts fall on a weekend which means that most of us can more easily attend these liturgies. It can be challenging sometimes to catch a mid-week feast. I hope that you are able to worship with your local parish, or even visit as a guest, and “taste and see” what the Church in Her wisdom has given us to remember through this year, starting with this feast.
Whether you’re like me, not having celebrated (or even heard of) these two feasts before becoming Orthodox, or you’ve been celebrating them with family and friends since before you can remember, it is today that matters. These feasts are two more days set aside for repentance and reconciliation. May each of us choose to do that more faithfully today–and tomorrow.
Peace of Christ,
– Brendan
Brendan Byrd came into the Orthodox Church with his family in 2018. An educator, husband, and father of five, he lives in the west Michigan woods with his family and precocious cat, surrounded by mountains of books and icons.