The Power of the Cross: Fr. Dumitru Stanilaoe

The power of the Cross doesn’t only purify the faithful and their relationship with the world, but also the world itself. The Cross puts to flight those demons which cause evil and launch temptations through water, wine, fruit, and human beings. The faithful believe that, by making the sign of the Cross, in all their actions and on all the paths of their lives, at every contact with nature and people, they have the Holy Spirit as support. There’s a special connection between the Holy Spirit and the Cross, because the latter is the human effort at purification, while the Holy Spirit is the purifying divine power. Both need to be in tandem. The Cross is the cleansing force of the universe. And when we make the sign with faith and determination, for a pure life in the world, the power of the Spirit of Christ comes, of Him Who was pure in the world. And we avoid sin and await death. The Cross gives us this power of Christ because, bearing it in mind, we want to imitate its example and behave in the world without selfish passions, in a spirit of mature restraint, peace and concord with others. “The Cross is a weapon against the devil,” sings the Orthodox Church. It’s a weapon against all those temptations and machinations of the devil, against the passions which cause altercations, against intractability. The Cross is a weapon against the devil insofar as it reinforces within us the spirit of sacrifice, of communion with God and each other. Only the Cross, by taming our selfish passions and loosening our excessive attachment to the world, which is held to be the only reality, can bring lasting peace among people and nations. The Holy Fathers have declared that the sight of God in the world, or the transparency of God in the world, depends on our purification from the passions. This idea was elaborated theoretically, in a particular manner, by Saint Maximus the Confessor. According to him, when we look at things and are free of the passions, we restore their true meaning, that is the transparency of God through them: “Meaning is affected by passion; complex thinking consists of passion and meaning. If we separate passion from meaning, what’s left is sublime thinking.” This doesn’t mean the destruction of the world, but rather the re-discovery of the truths of its meanings—which haven’t been distorted by the passions—and of its divine transparency.