“Lo, through the Cross has joy come into all the world.” This is what we proclaim throughout the Paschal season, and at every Sunday Orthros and Liturgy. Sometimes people have the idea that Christianity is gloomy. It’s all this talk about taking up our cross and following Christ and denying ourselves, and even being crucified with Christ, like we heard in today’s Epistle and Gospel readings.

Actually, though, it’s not having the Cross of Christ in our lives that would be a gloomy prospect. True Christianity is never gloomy. In fact it’s the world and its ways that are gloomy. And we Christians are only gloomy when we accept the world’s ways and forget the true way of Christ. A “gloomy Christian” is really an oxymoron.

That’s not to say that we have to always be smiling and feeling great. I’m not telling you to “fake it till you make it.” That’s not Orthodoxy. That’s not the joy Christ is calling us to embrace. Real joy can’t be faked. Real joy means that if you’re sad, be sad, but be sad with Christ. And if we’re suffering, we don’t deny it. But we trust in Christ. And we take comfort in His suffering which is joined to our suffering. And we believe that through the Cross joy comes into the world. And so we wait through the night, knowing the morning will come, and with it the sunrise of joy.

There’s a difference between worldly happiness and heavenly joy. It’s a huge difference, like between a cartoonish drawing of a star, and a real star twinkling in the night sky. Real joy comes to us through repentance, as strange as that sounds. That’s because sin squashes joy. Happiness may come and go, but if we’re leading a life of repentance, then joy is possible even during unhappy times.

Fr. Zacharias of St. John Monastery in Essex, England, told us about a monastic saying. If the monks saw a brother who was gloomy and grumpy, they would say, “He didn’t weep enough during the night.” In other words, if we weep before God, and pour out our heart to Him; if we labor and suffer through the process of true repentance, then eventually, the joy will come. Psalm 29 says, “weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning.” It’s that morning joy that we live for as Christians. And if we know and believe in that joy of the Resurrection, then even in our suffering that joy starts to work it’s way into our hearts. It’s not “fake it till you make it.” Rather, it’s that having experienced the joy at some point in the past, we know God will grant it again when and how He wills, and anticipating it, we can find joy even as we walk to Golgotha. Even as we are crucified with Christ; even as we anticipate some terrible trial, we can still feel that Paschal joy by God’s grace.

Great Lent would be dreadful if we didn’t have Pascha to look forward to. And this life would be dreadful if we forgot about the joy of knowing Christ and the ultimate joy of rising to eternal life with Him. But remembering those things, we can look even death in the face and say, “O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?”

The mourning, the sadness, the suffering that is legitimate and necessary is the mourning and sadness of repentance. “Blessed are those who mourn” - that is, who mourn for their sinfulness. If we mourn the loss of material things, or if we sorrow in a morbid way, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. The light only comes when we let go of those things, and mourn in a completely different way - mourn for the fact that we fall short; mourn that we are not as God created us to be. This is the only real tragedy in life. Saints are not those who are unattainably good; Saints are what we were created to be. So if we recognize that, then we mourn that we are not yet as we should be; but we mourn with faith - faith that God is able to change us. We mourn with hope that He will change us. We mourn with love for Him who has already accomplished our transformation by His incarnation, death and resurrection.

We are called to be crucified with Christ; this is not a gloomy calling. It’s the best, the highest, the most joyful calling. If we really understood it, we would be giddy with excitement like children waking up on Christmas morning. Not, “we have to be crucified with Christ,” but, “we get to be crucified with Christ.” Being crucified with Christ means having our sins wiped away, and being raised up to Heaven.

Do you want to know what people look like who have been crucified with Christ?

I remember my great-grandmother, who when her memory was all but gone, at the age of 103, would still remember to say “thank you.” In fact, that was about all she would say. She would thank God, and thank us for coming to see her. It seemed that everything had been taken from her, even her mind. This was a crucifixion with Christ; what remained was her joyful “thank you.”

I think of my friend Victor, a man I was so blessed to have met shortly before his departure from this life. Victor was a man crucified with Christ. Elderly and bedridden, able to do hardly anything except to pray and to talk to people who visited him, there was no gloominess in Victor. In fact, I’ve never seen a more child-like joy and eagerness in an adult. His face would shine when you would come to his room to visit him as he lay in bed. He would say things like, “People feel sorry for me because all I can do is lie here on this bed. But what more do I need? I have everything I need to get to heaven right here. The only important thing is heaven. But we have to want it more than anything.” His thoughts were always about Heaven.

I know an abbess of a monastery who joyfully serves others, who speaks with meekness and gentleness, and who won’t let me kiss her hand no matter how hard I try. I’m humbled by her humility. She’s an example of someone crucified with Christ.

I know a monk - a very holy monk who lived through terrible suffering during communism - and he is full of joy. He says communism was the best thing that ever happened to him because it forced him to pray and to meet Christ in his heart.

I think of Elder Paisius, who always had a joke for those who came to him for spiritual counsel. Even his sense of humor was sanctified by the way of the Cross, and because he had been crucified with Christ, he took burdens away from other people, and in return gave joy and a sober lightheartedness.

I think of St. John Maximovitch, who refused to condemn the people who took him to court on false charges, but would only say that the one to blame was the devil - he would not condemn even those who treated him terribly, because he was crucified with Christ. He would go around wearing a paper hat the children had made him, barefoot because he gave his shoes away, and, although he could be strict, he also had a radiant smile that would melt even a hard heart. This is someone who lived in hope and joyful expectation, because he lived the way of the cross, repenting for his sins and putting his trust in Christ.

I know of people even here, in our midst, who struggle in many ways to maintain joyfulness in the midst of life’s chaos and heaviness. Not faking it, but sincerely struggling to remember the Cross of Christ and the Resurrection that follows, and because of this, the grace of God helps them rise up above the things that threaten to drag them down. The way of joy is not the way of following our own sinful desires. That’s the way of false happiness, which actually leads to despair. The way of real joy is the way of repentance, sacrificial love, serving others, and giving thanks to God always and in everything.

This is the joy of the Cross. It is the joy of always remembering Heaven, like Victor. It’s the joy the Christ has for each of us today and always, if we will only accept it.