Cross (Voluntary Crucifixion)
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“The Cross represents the voluntary offering of the incarnate Son of God who shared our fallen human nature. On the Cross, Christ gave up His life to deliver us from the powers of sin and death. In doing so, He was both the offering and the priest who offered it. No one took His life from Him, but He gave it up in the role of our High Priest. He did this that we might be freed from captivity to corruption and have eternal life.” (Fr. Basil)
“Jesus will go to His death as an act of divine love but voluntarily in His own time and at His own choosing. Death and the devil have no power over Christ. Satan may believe he can defeat Christ, but he has deceived himself, for Christ will use His death to conquer both the devil and death….Christ’s taking upon himself the role of a servant, voluntarily going to the Passion, does not diminish our perception of what we might otherwise have considered to be His divinity, but actually manifests His true divinity.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh, Fr. John Behr)
“As confirmed by the experience of certainly hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Christians through the ages, the only way to turn from sin, to repent, to seek to do the Father’s will, is the path Christ showed: voluntary self-sacrificial love, the way of “seeking not His own” but only always doing the Father’s will…When in our own lives we attain our likeness to the Logos and in this process are inevitably crucified, this crucifixion can be extremely hard to take. Moreover, it is not God’s will that we make this self-sacrifice by force, unwillingly. His own crucifixion was voluntary, and forced crucifixion was not the path originally ordained by God. Rather, our forced sufferings are the tragic echo of two facts: a) that Adam and Eve took on their vision of the Cross while they were still too young and unready and b) in order to do so, “forced” their way to the Cross by entering the portion of the Garden that was forbidden to them.” (Dr. Mary S. Ford, Timothy G. Patitsas)
“In the story of the Last Judgment, all of humanity asks, “When did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, a stranger, and a prisoner?” Christ answers, “In the least of these my brethren.” …here really is another time when we do see Christ exactly fitting these six descriptions: at His crucifixion. There on Golgotha, Christ is a prisoner, a stranger, physically suffering, naked, thirsty, and hungry–all the states included in the criteria of the Last Judgment in Matthe 25:31-46….Matthew in fact tells us that His own crucifixion is the moment of judgment for the entire human race! The six questions do not merely point us towards the poor but toward the mystery of the God-man crucified. And thus, through these six questions, we are being told that, Christ in His voluntary crucifixion will be the standard for the judgment of the world! To put this another way, when Christ poses the six questions to be asked of us at the Last Judgment, He is actually, in a humble way, saying that our reaction to Him, whenever we find Him crucified, is what will reveal the state of our souls and determine our eternal destiny. And thus it is before the Holy Cross that we will be judged, that we are already all being judged.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)
“God is not involuntarily good, in the way that a fire is involuntarily hot. No, it is completely voluntary on God’s part to give good things, whether or not He has been asked. No one is saved against his will, for man is not some inanimate object. Rather, we run to salvation voluntarily and of our own free choice. Man received the commandments so that he could choose for himself what things to do and what things to avoid. God does not do good because He has no other choice. Rather, his free choice blesses those who spontaneously turn to Him.” (St. Clement of Alexandria)
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