Exaltation of the Cross

Title

The Message of the Crucifix

Outline

When I first taught in Germany I made by first cross

The churches I had gone to had no crosses, but I knew the meaning of a physical symbol to take one to the reality and I was reading the spiritual tradition, so I made a cross - no corpus, but a cross.

Now our rooms are studded with crucifixes, a cross, but more than a cross, and it is before the Blessed Sacrament, God’s sacrificial mercy in person, with a crucifix hanging above that I pray my daily prayer for divine mercy.

Why the change? Because the true cross that St Helena found points not to itself, but to the person who hung upon it.

Look at our texts

Moses hung up a bronze image of what was killing them under the direction of God and those gazing at it in trust were healed, for it imaged the power of the snake destroyed.

Paul verbally displays the co-eternal Son going down, not just to become human, but to a shameful death. And that is source of exaltation so that every knee bows, and those who copy it in their lives bow best for then it leads to their exaltation after death with him.

John tells us (in a passage in which Jesus’ voice is fading and John’s voice is coming in) that Jesus came down and was lifted up in type by Moses to give not mortal life, but eternal life. Then he lifts the veil and tells us it was God giving us his Son, not to condemn us, but to save or deliver us, to give us eternal life, but we must commit ourselves to the one on the cross. And that will mean taking up our cross.

In sum

Christians did not use the cross for two plus centuries, for it was a symbol of Roman power, a vulgar word, and the instrument of Rome’s victory over Jews, Jesus, and Christians. The one cross symbol I have seen was in Ephesus, scratched on the pavement, and has an ass’s head in mockery.

But then Roman learned that the power of God was in the cross, so the Empire stopped using it and Christians realized that this power was God’s love so they embraced the cross to exchange their lives for the eternal life in Jesus’ blood. And as Paul says in Philippians, this was the pattern for Christian life.

So we embrace the cross, not that the wood is magic, but because in embracing it in our veneration we embrace him who hung on it and in doing that we embrace life itself.