THE EXALTATION OF THE HOLY CROSS

[cappie]

This week’s feast is an ancient one, known as The Triumph (or The Exaltation) of the Cross or simply Holy Cross Day. Legend has it that on this date, September 14 in 330, St Helena, a Christian, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, discovered “the true cross” on which Jesus had died in Jerusalem.

The English word, paradox, means something that is true, even though you wouldn’t think it could be true.  Paradox is something that would be contrary to normal belief.  The word has Greek origins: para+doxa.  Doxa means “glory.”  (We get our word “doxology” from the same root.)  Doxa is glory.  Para means “other.”  Other glory; glory in a way other than we would have expected.  When we hear paradox on Jesus’ lips, he’s talking about the glory of God being revealed in a way other than what we might have imagined.  That’s paradox.   

Over the centuries, the cross has become the universal symbol of our Christian faith.  Some people wear it around their necks. Many have a crucifix at home. A cross hangs in every Catholic Church. We venerate the cross during the liturgy on Good Friday. And every day we, like our forebears who have gone before us in the Faith, begin and end our prayers, including the celebration of the Mass, making the Sign of the Cross while we say, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

 

In this one simple gesture and prayer, the Sign of the Cross, we express the two great mysteries that lie at the very heart of our faith as Christians: God is Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the One God – and God revealed his great mercy and steadfast love for us in Jesus’ death on a cross, for “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16).

  The chief Christian symbol, on which everything else hangs, is the cross, the rather off-putting contradiction of the cross.  “If you want to be my disciples,” says Jesus to all of us, “you must “take up your cross and follow me.”  And Jesus goes on to say, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  Someone has said that the Gospel, the good news, is bad news before it is good news.  And I would call this some of the bad news – at least the tough news of the Gospel.

 The second reading is one of the most important of St Paul’s writings. He writes that Christ, though enjoying a divine status, “emptied himself,” freely taking “the form of a slave,” humbling himself, even to death on a cross. “Therefore, God highly exalted him” so that all should confess that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” His crucifixion was not his defeat or failure but rather his victory and triumph.

St Paul exhorts his readers, including us: “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” St John captures succinctly what this “mind of Christ Jesus” involves: “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another” (1 Jn 4:11).

Jesus says, “Come, follow me.”  And the way he goes, his truth, his life goes via the cross. I don’t think we’ve got to go looking for the cross; the cross has a way of finding us, and we either trip over it, or we must pick it up.  And if you understand just now what it is to have been handed a cross, to be carrying a heavy cross, or to be nailed to a cross, and it is undeniable and unavoidable and inescapable, then do it.  Surrender to it.  Take up your cross and take Jesus at his word: wait for Jesus or wait with Jesus to discover the life that he promises comes through the cross, the paradoxical glory of the cross that he does not spare us of, but rather shares with us.  Our theology hangs on this paradox.