Holy Cross Day , Year B: Friday, September 14, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Holy Cross Day-  Friday, September 14, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Randy Greve, OHC 

“And I”, Jesus says in the gospel reading, “when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  Jesus also says, “I lay down my life.”  “You have no power over me.”  “No one takes my life from me.”   In our tradition, from the office for Noonday from the Book of Common Prayer: “Blessed Savior, at this hour you hung upon the cross, stretching out your loving arms: Grant that all the peoples of the earth may look to you and be saved; for your tender mercies’ sake”.  And from Eucharistic Prayer A in the Prayer Book: “He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.”  

This is active voice language in the face of a means of death that was designed to render the condemned victim powerless and humiliated and voiceless.  Jesus does not say “people will be drawn to me in my broken state”.  The prayer does not say “his arms were stretched out by the executioner, yet he is a perfect sacrifice.”  Neither the scripture nor the liturgical language which gets its imagery from the Bible will countenance the crucifixion as an event in which Jesus is a helpless and docile victim.  By all appearance, a crucified person does not draw anyone to himself.  And it is the Romans who do the arm-stretching, not the condemned.  So this language is not spiritual sentimentality, it speaks of a great reversal.  In a total indictment of the domination system’s use of power and violence to subjugate and repress, Jesus declares that his dying hours on the cross will be a raising to glory, the very sight that attracts and woos the world to him.  And this is what his death was and is from those at the cross through time. 

A death intended by the crucifiers to enact a stripping of all dignity, even annihilation, is for Jesus an emptying that is the fullness of life.  The worst that the empire can dish out is no match for his infinite capacity for forgiveness.  Jesus is put to death, of his own free will, but he is not conquered, not broken.  He is numbered among thousands of victims of Roman torture, but he does not surrender nor despair.  His saving work continues even in dying; and dying in a way and with a power that makes this active language of laying down, drawing, and stretching the acts of love, through sweat and blood and the horror of forsakenness, is his complete and eternal giving of himself in love to the world. 
Jesus as the one executed absorbs the violence inflicted on him – takes it into his very flesh, thereby exposing once and for all the illegitimacy of the belief that violence can ever be the best or final or even a good response to evil without the violent one becoming the thing being destroyed.  The cross is the world’s sign of future hope, the event of love and victory that prefigures the world that Christ will one day rule in glory.  It is also our present sign of prophetic resistance.  On this Holy Cross Day, we are witnesses to a way of life and death that regards as foolishness and futility much of how the world thinks and speaks and acts. 

Systems, movements, and impulses to evil act within and around us just as they did in Jesus’ day. Our response is to be like Jesus’.  An active, present tense way of speaking and living that proclaims the new reality of reconciliation on this side of the cross and resurrection.  We are not defined by what happened or is happening to us, by the ways others define or malign us.  To live as victims is to deny the power of Jesus’ active resistance.  We are defined by being within the stretched out arms, the loving embrace of the crucified which puts down the mighty lifts the lowly.

Some preach God’s regard for humans as a clinched fist of wrath or a pointing finger of accusation, but Jesus reminds us that we are seen with eyes of compassion, with arms stretched out in an all-encompassing embrace.  So many do not know Jesus in this way.  Many even in the church are caught between the false choices of running from the crises of the world into a spiritual bubble or turning the church into a humanist society that is merely concerned with fixing what it can.  We are drawn to a savior with whom we enter into compassionate solidarity with the suffering – a savior who is also redeeming and will ultimately undo the suffering that is so much a part of our world.  The lifted Jesus, drawing us, is inviting us into a way that faces the pain of the world, of our neighbors, with empathy and hope.  As we draw near the cross, we draw near one who knows and experiences our joys and sorrows, blessings and losses even as he is conquering and bringing to perfection and peace all that would prevent us from knowing the fullness of that love.  Stretch out your loving arms upon us, gracious Christ.  Forgive, restore, and heal us.  Use us, use our arms, stretched in love to our neighbors, to bring peace and hope and justice to our fractured world. Amen.