Carrying our Cross through Love

For the past two Sun­days, the Gospel read­ings have related the Para­ble of the Sower. The Sower is God and the Seed is His Word, Jesus Christ, who has been planted in all of our hearts. The Cop­tic month of Hatour focuses on the com­ing of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and this focus is to pre­pare us to cel­e­brate, next month, the com­ing of our Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh. The incar­na­tion of our Lord is the theme for the next Cop­tic month of Kiahk.

These two months high­light for us the pat­tern of the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist. First we must hear the Word of God with our ears through the five read­ings: the Pauline and Catholic Epis­tles, the Acts of the Apos­tles, the Psalm, and the Gospel. The Word of God must sink deep within our hearts and pro­duce fruit in our lives. After we have received the Word through our ears, then we are called to par­take of the Word of God in the form of bread and wine, when He gives us his body to eat and his blood to drink.

Dur­ing this third week of the Church is teach­ing us about the cost of dis­ci­ple­ship, the price one must pay to cul­ti­vate the Word which has sunk deep within our hearts and now must bear fruit. St. Paul praises the con­gre­ga­tion in Thes­sa­lonica and says, “We are bound to thank God always for you, brethren, as it is fit­ting, because your faith grows exceed­ingly, and the love of every one of you all abounds toward each other” (II Thess. 1:3). As the seed has been sown within our hearts, our faith must increase and our abil­ity to love must increase. The mea­sure of our faith and spir­i­tu­al­ity is our abil­ity to love. If we can love more and care more about oth­ers in this world, then our spir­i­tual life is yield­ing fruit. Oth­er­wise, we are becom­ing ster­ile and unfertile.

In the Catholic Epis­tle we also see St. Peter urg­ing his read­ers say­ing, “And above all things have fer­vent love for one another, for ‘love will cover a mul­ti­tude of sins.’… Be hos­pitable to one another with­out grum­bling. As each one has received a gift, min­is­ter it to one another, as good stew­ards of the man­i­fold grace of God…that in all things God may be glo­ri­fied through Jesus Christ, to whom belong the glory and the domin­ion for­ever and ever. Amen” (I Peter 4:8–11).

While to speak about love as being the supreme fruit of the Spirit is a well-known teach­ing of Scrip­ture and our Church, the Gospel read­ing bal­ances the teach­ing of love with the teach­ing of the cross. Our Lord Jesus Christ, as we read in the Gospel read­ing for today, admon­ishes us by say­ing, “If any­one comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and chil­dren, broth­ers and sis­ters, yes, and his own life also, he can­not be My dis­ci­ple. And who­ever does not bear his cross and come after Me can­not be My dis­ci­ple” (Lk 14:26). How can we both hate our fam­ily, and grow in love at the same time?

We are to love God more than any­thing else. Gre­gory the Great, a 6^th cen­turgy father and saint in the East­ern Ortho­dox Church, com­mented that we should be like the cows that were used to return the Ark of the Covenant to Israel after the Philistines cap­tured it (I Sam. 6). Even though the cows were nurs­ing their calves, they were doing the work of the Lord and seek­ing out God’s will, so they left their young and car­ried the Ark to where the Lord desired.

We are fur­ther called to carry our cross, and this is not unre­lated to our duty to love. The Cross itself is the pin­na­cle of suf­fer­ing, and we are called to share in the suf­fer­ings of our Lord Jesus Christ. St. Paul rejoiced in his suf­fer­ings and said he “filled up what was lack­ing in the afflic­tions of Christ” (Col. 1:24). St. Paul desired to know the fel­low­ship of His suf­fer­ings being con­formed to His death (Phil 3:11). But the les­son of the cross is not sim­ply suf­fer­ing for the sake of suf­fer­ing. Suf­fer­ing itself is the cost of love. God man­i­fested His love for us by send­ing His Son into the world to die for the world. Any­one who truly loves some­one is pre­pared to suf­fer ter­ri­ble tor­tures for the sake of the other per­son. The abil­ity to suf­fer reveals the depth of love in a person.

Our Lord calls us to carry our cross, so that our love for our friends, fam­ily, parish, priests, bishop, and neigh­bors will be real and tan­gi­ble. Christ is ask­ing us not to love in word, but to love in deed.

What is tragic is that this les­son, while it is easy to speak about, is dif­fi­cult to do. The Para­ble of the Sower speaks of 4 cat­e­gories of peo­ple, 3 of them per­ish, and only 1 was saved. Next week we’ll hear about a young man who could not carry out Jesus’ com­mand to go and sell all that he had, and our Lord reacted sadly by say­ing few are saved. Let us strug­gle to carry our cross, and may God give us the grace to glory in the Cross of our Sav­ior, to him be the glory with his good Father and the Holy Spirit, now and for­ever. Amen

This arti­cle was writ­ten and gra­ciously con­tributed by Father Daniel Habib of St. John Cop­tic Ortho­dox Church in West Covina.

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