Peter1000
Well-Known Member
A stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, it is. And to Mormons, because your religion teaches you to hate Christianity and think what we do to be "abominable" before GOd, something "disconnected" from your worship of Jesus. That is literally unthinkable to Christians. Even those who do not venerate the cross as we do in the Orthodox Church still would never disconnect it from the worship of Jesus, as the holy scriptures themselves teach us not only that it is the only thing that we are to glory in, but that we are also preached and are to preach Christ crucified, with the apostles as our models in this.
Here is a Roman Catholic meditation on the glorification of the Holy Cross that I believe (even as an Orthodox person who has purposely left the RCC) sums it up quite well:
When we believe such things as proclaimed above (and we do), it is only natural that the liturgical among us would express it liturgically in veneration of the cross, not because we are so in love with two intersecting pieces of wood, but because we too are transformed and saved by the One who bore death upon it for our sake, and so we take it as our own symbol of everlasting life, power, and protection from the sting of death and draw of sin to which we were bound before His holy sacrifice upon it and His glorious resurrection. As explained in the video above, what was in the time of Christ a symbol of shame and death has been transformed by Him into the symbol of eternal life. And so when/if we speak of the "Power of the Cross" or some such, it is power that He has given it by His sacrifice upon it. Obviously it has no power of its own, since it could not overtake Him as it did (for instance) the left-hand thief. But through it He broke the power of death (recall the earlier Latin hymn, "Crucem Sanctam Subiit"), and so it has been completely transformed. Not only does it not signify death anymore, it cannot, because He has so utterly robbed it of that power by destroying death upon it.
I know I've shared this before, but the little bit in English at the beginning sums it up from the Orthodox point of view:
O Christ our God, Who was crucified for the redemption of our race,
May Your Cross be unto us a sign of tranquility,
The banner of victory and the armor of salvation
Protect us all under its wings and keep us by its victorious power
Our Lord and our God, forever and ever
Is this too "worshiping the cross"? Then thank God I should be counted among its "worshipers", because every single word of it is something I and all my fellow Orthodox Christians believe in very deeply, and I am sure we are not the only ones, even if not every kind of Christian has specific days set aside for the veneration of the holy cross. We don't begrudge anyone their organically-developed worship standards (at least not in the Oriental Orthodox Church...), so long as they too have the faith in the power of His sacrifice upon the cross, that by entering into it we are saved, and so as He was risen He will return to raise us up on the last day, that we shall have eternal life with Him by that very same power that is symbolized by the cross (the eternal victory of God over death). By this we can say with no amount of hyperbole that it is in/through/by the cross that we find salvation (as in the Syriac Orthodox hymn posted earlier which you misunderstood, "Sogdinan L'Slibo"/"We bow for the Cross"). Only you take this to be something separate from Jesus' sacrifice upon it because only you guys (Mormons) separate the two in the first place. The Scriptures clearly don't, as St. Paul and others testify. And so the Christian Church never has, because we received that same faith from the apostles themselves, not from a latter-day vision (given in nine different versions or something like that) to a farm boy in upstate NY by 'God' which supposedly overturned ~1,830 years of the apostolic Christian understanding of these matters. Though as you can see it really did nothing of the sort, anywhere, ever. Only those deceived by JS and his latter-day revelation believe otherwise, but that's just another in Mormonism's seemingly endless blasphemies which we can add to the list of things that he will have to answer for upon Christ's return. May Christ our God (the real one, not the one JS made up) have mercy on him and all those whom he has deceived.[/QUOTE]
Your veneration of the cross has been a beautiful event for thousands of years now, and it is beautiful.
I feel that there is a line between veneration and worshiping the cross. Sometimes Christians in their enthusiasm for the Lord go over the line and give the cross powers that it does not have and worship the cross as much as they worship Jesus, who died on the cross for all mankind.
We try to keep that line between veneration and worship clear and distinct. We honor the cross, we worship him who died upon it. That is beautiful too.
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