Meditation: The Obedience of the Cross

It is a terrible thing to be stripped of every measure of success, every illusion of usefulness, every comfort of being seen or understood. The ego cries out like a wounded animal, clawing to preserve some image of its own worth. Yet this is the obedience of the Cross; not the tidy obedience of rules or the self-assured obedience that expects blessing, but the kind that empties a man of all his imagined importance until only naked love remains.

I am beginning to see how deeply this truth wounds and heals at once. So much of what has formed me in the world, even within the Church, has been bound to doing, to proving, to achieving. Even prayer can become a kind of performance, another subtle attempt to secure a sense of value before God and men. But the obedience of Christ overturns every such measure. It does not build monuments; it allows itself to be nailed to wood. It does not argue or justify; it simply follows love wherever love leads, even into darkness.

Archimandrite Zacharou says that obedience makes us vulnerable and that in this vulnerability there is no danger, for we obey those who love God and who love us. Yet everything in me resists such naked trust. To become vulnerable feels like standing unarmed before the sword. My mind rebels, my pride recoils, my heart trembles at the thought of being so exposed. Still, grace waits on the other side of this fear. Grace does not descend into the fortress of self-protection but into the open wound of surrender.

The secret of obedience, Zacharou writes, is that it severs every attachment to the world so that purity of prayer may be born. I have felt this in glimpses; those hours when everything is taken and only silence remains, when the prayer becomes less a word than a cry. That is when the will of God ceases to be an idea and becomes breath itself. To live is to obey. To obey is to die. And in dying, one finally begins to live.

The humiliation of Christ is our only path. In His abasement is His triumph. In His silence before those who mocked Him is His wisdom. When Isaiah says that His judgment was lifted up in His humiliation, I know it must also be so with us. Every humiliation, every stripping, every loss that feels like defeat is in truth a hidden victory if endured in love. If I accept to die daily, to die to self-will, to my demand to be seen, to my fear of poverty and failure, then that death condemns the deeper death born of sin and pride.

Sometimes I fear that I have already lost too much. That my life has dwindled into obscurity, that all I once hoped to build has vanished. Yet perhaps this is precisely what God desires: that I learn the obedience that asks for nothing and clings to nothing. That I finally allow His will to be the law of my existence.

To stand before the Crucified with nothing left but love; that is perfect obedience. It is the dying of every false light until the true Light, hidden and inexhaustible, rises in the heart. In that poverty, there is no more fear. Only God. Only love. Only life beyond measure.