Another Sermon on the Cross

(Or notes on one -- let's pray that this comes out well tomorrow):

You've heard of The Secret -- this book that's apparently a cross between The Da Vinci Code and The Power of Positive Thinking.

Well, I'll tell you two secrets!

The first has to do with a question they've been wrestling with since the middle ages: "Would Christ had become incarnate if there was no Fall?" (Or in other words, "Would there have been a necessity for the Cross if Adam and Eve had not sinned?")

This is our picture of the conversation in Heaven just after the Creation:

"Hey, aren't they awesome, just look at them -- No, wait, stop -- OH RATS!!"

"What are we going to do now?"

"You want me to do WHAT?"

"And then they're going to WHAT??"

The problem with this is, you have some very important Fathers of the Church saying some very strange things like this:

St. Irenaeus of Lyons: "Since He Who saves already existed, it was necessary that he who would be saved should come into existence, that the One Who saves should not exist in vain."

And St. Maximus the Confessor: Adam fell "together with his coming-into-being", at that very moment!

In fact, there was no time in which man existed and lived before the fall -- and this was God's expectation from the very beginning. The first secret is that conversation in Heaven actually went like this:

"You know what's going to happen?"

"I know."

"You know what you'll have to do?"

"I know."

"You know what this will cost?"

"I know."

"And you still want to go ahead and do this?"

"I do, I do, I do."

Or rather, "Amen, Amen, Amen."

The first secret is that God loves us SO MUCH that with full knowledge of what's going to happen, of what He'll have to do, of what it will cost, He creates us, inscribing the Cross into the very structure of Creation. The Cross is there from the very beginning.

And the second secret has to do with how all of this can manage not to be in vain. The second secret is that “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. [The Savior] did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” (St. Mark 2:17)

If we claim to be well, if we set ourselves with the righteous, He won't save us -- we won't be asking Him to! He is the Savior from all eternity, but we will declare that we have no need of one. The second secret is that we have to mean it when we say "I believe, O Lord, and I confess, that Thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the Living God, Who didst come into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief."

And that's what this season of Lent is all about. To take the time, to do the work, to be able not only to say this, but to know this, to believe it and confess it as the deepest reality about ourselves: "I am the chief of sinners. It's my fault all this has happened. You have come to this Cross because of me."

And when we can say this with true conviction -- with our own "Amen, Amen, Amen" -- then He Who Is, the Savior from all eternity, will joyfully do what He took upon Himself to do from before He made us, from the very moment of our creation. He Who Is is He Who Saves. Us.