Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Ave crux, spes unica! Hail to the cross, our only hope! Amen.
Amidst some of the bleakest and most uncertain days of 2020, gold-and-black signs bearing the words, “Tough Times Didn’t Break Us, They Made Us” began appearing in and around the city of Pittsburgh, where I was then living. To an outsider, this message may have seemed like a nice little bit of encouragement for an unprecedented and trying time. But for Pittsburghers, those eight words, fittingly framed by the city’s iconic colors, were an immediate reminder and rallying cry of who they were: A people shaped over years of enduring times such as these, and how, like the steel forged by generations of their forebears, each pass through the blast furnace had only made them stronger. In fact, nearly everything Pittsburghers have come to be known and celebrated for has roots in the countless challenges they’ve met and overcome; as a result, Pittsburghers understand as well as anyone that the road to the best of times invariably runs through the worst of them. And, with the pandemic showing no sign of letting up any time soon, it was important for Pittsburghers to reflect on that truth and to hang on to the sure hope it offered them.
I say sure hope because, unlike vain hope, sure hope has much more going for it than mere wishful thinking. Hope that is sure, or certain, is built on a sound and reliable foundation. Simply put, we can be assured that there’s good reason to believe in it, even if at that precise moment it’s unclear how that hope can possibly pan out.
Hope’s capacity for being born out of the worst of circumstances never ceases to amaze me. One might wonder, for example, how something like the cross – devised as an instrument and symbol of imperial power and intimidation – can possibly be embraced, even celebrated, as a sign of sure hope in God’s loving-kindness. After all, its original purpose was quite the opposite: to inflict one of the most agonizing deaths imaginable on its victims, while simultaneously encouraging anyone else who might be thinking about challenging the state to think again. It was certainly never intended to inspire hope. And yet, we find ourselves here today, in a monastic order named for the cross, in the presence of two very large depictions of the cross, while exalting it in one of the principal celebrations of the church’s calendar. Like the outsider reading those Pittsburgh signs without fully grasping their true significance, we could be forgiven for finding all this cross-honoring a bit odd, especially since its most famous victim just so happens to be the founder of our religion.
Luckily, it’s Jesus himself who provides the key to understanding the deeper meaning of the cross for us today. In our gospel reading, Jesus has already entered Jerusalem for the last time and is fully aware of the plotting that’s going on against him. Knowing of the Pharisees’ plan to turn him over to the Romans as a revolutionary, crucifixion is almost certainly the death that’s in store for Jesus. And so, he makes a point of proclaiming that God has already defeated the plotters’ plan. “Now is the judgement of this world,” Jesus tells them. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth (that is, up onto the cross), will draw all people to myself.” Even as they scheme to silence Jesus by killing him on a cross, they’re unwittingly playing into God’s purposes rather than their own. Despite the crowd not quite understanding Jesus, he urges them to pick up and carry his light into the world once he’s taken from them. “While you have the light, believe in the light,” he says, “so that you may become children of light.” Jesus is no lamb being led gently to the slaughter; he’s defiant in the face of injustice, and wants people to realize that they have not only the power, but the duty, to carry on his prophetic mission after he leaves them.
In saying this, Jesus helps us understand that, regardless of how bleak things may seem in any given moment (and, facing impending crucifixion is definitely pretty bleak), God’s capacity to lead us through our present suffering and into new life is never bound by any human power. For Pilate, the cross seemed the obvious instrument for crushing Jesus and his message. But for Jesus, accepting with sure and certain hope that God would use even his forthcoming crucifixion to lead him – and all of us – more fully into God, the cross became a far more powerful means of subverting Pilate’s plans. In so doing, Jesus transforms the cross from a public spectacle of shame and death into a beacon of hope and new life. In other words, Jesus our High Priest has ripped the cross away from Pilate and offered it directly to God.
Of course, as we know, humans do have a stubborn tendency to appropriate and misuse the good things of God, which means that even the cross we celebrate here today as a sign of hopefulness has at times been used for purposes more aligned with the cruel cowardice of Pilate than with the merciful message of Jesus. Sadly, and because of this, the cross has come to symbolize for far too many not the Reign of God, but rather cruelty, intolerance, judgementalism, exclusion, violence, and even death. I hope all of us, as a people who have hope in Jesus’ promise to draw everyone to God, will accept his invitation to become children of light and courageously live the cross’ true, transformed meaning in the world with compassion, respect, understanding, and, above all, love.
Jesus and the disciples lived in a strange and seemingly apocalyptic time, as do we. Initially, the cross must have felt like utter defeat for those closest to Jesus, but it was an absolutely necessary step along the way to the bigger future God had planned for them. Even as the world itself seemed to be falling apart and there appeared to be no certain hope on the horizon, God’s people were being led toward something far better than the past they were already mourning. And God was doing this by overturning and glorifying one of the worst things imaginable in first-century Jerusalem: the cross.
Even as we try – and, at times, struggle – to look ahead with hope at the future God has already prepared for all of us, it’s important that we not lose sight of God’s presence right now, in the struggles themselves. After all, it’s the small moments of grace building one upon another during these stretches of suffering that ultimately move us into the better times for which we long. Although it can be difficult for us to stop and notice them in the here and now, if we dare to, we will surely recognize the presence of God. And, looking back later, we may even be astonished to see all the ways God was here, acting, the whole time. As Saint Augustine, patron of this very monastic church, reminds us in a sermon on Jesus’ Passion:
“What God promises us for the future is great, but what God has already done for us in Christ is greater still. Who can doubt that he will give us his life, since he has already given us his death? … So my brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge without fear, indeed, let us announce publicly that Christ was crucified for us. Let us proclaim it not trembling, but rejoicing; not shamefacedly, but boasting. As the apostle Paul said, ‘Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.’”
Yes, God is here with each of us even now in both our personal and collective struggles, just as God was fully present to Jesus even as he was raised onto the cross. We must never doubt that Jesus is already using our own crosses to lead us more fully into the knowledge and loving presence of God. With sure hope in God, tough times – even these tough times – can never break us.
May peace and all that is good remain with us, and all those we love, and may we keep the cross of Christ ever before us, showing forth the light and hope of God into our world. Amen.
