Today we are celebrating the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross—which is, of course, the feast of title for this community, the Order of the Holy Cross. And as I’m sure many of you know, what this day actually commemorates is the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the year 335. Tradition says that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is built over the sites of both the crucifixion (Golgotha or Calvary) and the burial-place of Jesus, his tomb in the garden.
It was at the site of Calvary that legend tells us the Emperor Constantine’s mother St. Helena unearthed the remains of three crosses. And to discover which, if any of the three, was the True Cross on which Jesus died, she touched wood from each of them to a diseased woman. And, of course, when this woman was touched with the wood of the True Cross she was healed instantly. Or so the story goes.
Eventually it would become the practice of the Church in Jerusalem to bring out the wood of the True Cross each year on Good Friday, and the people would be invited forward to offer veneration. This is recounted for us by Egeria, that holy pilgrim of the fourth century, and she tells us that the wood was placed on a table before the bishop, who would grip and hold one end of it, with deacons standing on either side to guard it. She writes:
“There is a reason why it is guarded in this manner. It is the practice here for all the people to come forth, one by one… to bow down before the table, kiss the holy wood, and then move on. It is said that someone (I do not know when) took a bite and stole a piece of the holy cross. Therefore, it is now guarded by the deacons standing around, lest there be anyone who would dare come and do that again.”
Nevertheless, splinters did spread over the centuries, becoming relics in churches around the world, including in this church here, thanks be, perhaps, to some now unknown biting bandit. And now, two millennia later, the strangeness of this act of venerating, kissing, a cross, an instrument of state-sanctioned torture and death, has mostly worn off for us. We wear crosses around our necks, hang them in our homes, and place them above our altars; we mark ourselves with the sign of the cross. And little by little the reality of this symbol has been softened, perhaps even cheapened, and worse, commercialized.
And so it’s good now and then to remind ourselves that if Jesus had died in the twentieth century we’d all be wearing little electric chairs or lethal injection devices around our necks, or a couple of centuries earlier, little miniature sterling silver guillotines.
My father was killed by a driver who was on too much medication and should not have been behind the wheel of a car. The driver swerved out of his lane and struck and killed my dad and a fellow Department of Transportation coworker. What would it be like if I kept a broken piece of the bumper of that car that killed my dad, and brought it out every year to kiss on the anniversary of his death?
It is a strange thing that we do with the wood of the cross. The power is in fact in that strangeness. We need to not lose, to not dull, how odd and shocking and counter to our natural emotional instincts it is that we reverence the holy cross. It would be much more intuitively emotionally normal if we rather spat upon the unholy cross.
But to exalt the holy cross—this is not something to pass over lightly. What is happening here? I often pray the rosary, which cycles through three sets of mysteries, or events, from the life of Mary and Jesus: the Joyful Mysteries of annunciation, birth, and childhood; the Sorrowful Mysteries of suffering and death; and the Glorious Mysteries of Resurrection and renewal.
I’ve prayed those mysteries countless times, but a few weeks ago, as I moved through the Sorrowful Mysteries—from the Agony in the Garden, to the Scourging at the Pillar, to the Crowning with Thorns, to the Carrying of the Cross, and finally to the Crucifixion—when I reached that last mystery, I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up. I found myself saying “No, no, no, no…” I didn’t want to pray it. I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t want him to die. Not like this. And then with tears in my eyes I took up the beads.
I can’t make his death on a cross not be a part of the story. I can’t make my father’s horrific death on the roadside not be a part of the story. It’s the claiming, owning, and transforming of such a terrifying and heartbreaking symbol as the cross that makes it so powerful. The Cross is the horror of Empire on full display. The violent normalcy of what we call “civilization” on full display. When early Christians took up the cross and claimed it, it was not so different from any oppressed group today who has taken up the language of their oppressor and re-appropriated it, as we’ve seen done with the n-word or words like queer. By taking up the evil thing and kissing it, rather than spitting on it, it loses its power; we change the nature of its power; it becomes truly powerful.
What had been the Empire’s symbol, used to strike fear into the hearts of revolting peasants, instead becomes a strange symbol of resistance, of nonviolence, a symbol of new life and of love poured out to the fullest. St. Paul says in our Epistle reading, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Rather than be embarrassed by the vulnerability and powerlessness revealed on the cross, he embraces it and so it becomes true power.
Not that this symbol would not be coopted yet again by Empire, and used on banners charging into war. But that brings us to another important part of the story of this feast day. The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross entered the calendar of the Western Church in the seventh century after Emperor Heraclius recovered the Cross from the Persians, who had carried it off in 614, fifteen years earlier. And the story goes that Heraclius intended to carry the cross back to Jerusalem himself, with full imperial pomp and regalia, but when he went to lift it, it wouldn’t budge; he could not move it, until he took off all his imperial garb and carried the wood as a barefoot pilgrim.
The True Cross always resists and subverts the forces of Empire, unmasking them for the violence they in fact always are. One of the greatest theologians of the Cross, in my opinion, is the 14th century English mystic, Julian of Norwich. In her Revelations of Divine Love she struggles to reconcile a good, loving, and omnipotent God with the harsh realities of sin and evil.
Denys Turner, in his book Julian of Norwich: Theologian, suggests that Julian ultimately finds the solution to this paradox in the Cross. He writes: “This solution, the Cross, is itself a riddle. Yet for all its irreducibly paradoxical character, it is the only story that to Julian could be credible. It is paradoxical that the Cross’s demolition of the intellectually mediating space that explanations seek to occupy is exactly where our salvation is to be found. There are only two realities for Julian: sin and God’s love. Nothing mediates between these realities except sin’s defeat of love, that is, the Cross.”
He continues: “...the conflict between sin and love is the final conflict, and the Cross is the final outcome of that conflict. It is perhaps Julian’s central theological insight that sin wages war against love because sin is of its own nature violent, but love wages no wars at all, not even against sin, for love is absolute vulnerability. For that reason, then, neither is any subsequent reversal of the Cross’s violent defeat necessary, for it is precisely in that victory of sin over love that sin is defeated. In its victory over love sin defeats itself. Sin’s failure to engage perfect love in a contest on sin’s terms of violence and power is sin’s defeat, its power being exhausted by its very success. For killing is the best strategy that sin can come up with; it is sin’s last resort. The Resurrection, then, is the meaning of the Cross, the meaning that the vulnerability of love, its refusal of the sword, is stronger than sin’s power to kill. That is all we know. That is all we can know.”
And so we kiss the Cross. Even as it churns our stomachs and breaks our hearts, because the Cross shows us that Love wins by refusing to be anything other than Love. It is by this Love lifted up on the cross, Jesus tells us in our Gospel reading, that he will draw all to himself. Our English translation says “all people”; but in fact, the Greek simply says pantas—all. He will draw all to himself.
Mother Virginia Brown, a mentor of mine who died last year, loved this passage. Another friend, Lisa Inman, writes of her, “‘When I am lifted up,’ Virginia quoted John’s Gospel in sermons more than once, ‘I will draw all to myself,’ and she would go on to explain that the passage arguably meant that Jesus would draw not just all people, or all nations, but all: every crumb, every atom, every speck of the dust of stars, everything, into the embrace of God, so that nothing is left over or lost.”
In Jesus’ drawing all to himself through his death on the cross, I imagine his death much like the death of a star in space. When a star dies sometimes it actually implodes, collapsing in on itself and opening a black hole, a tear in the fabric of space and time that draws things into itself. Perhaps we can see Christ’s death on the Cross in a similar way—the implosion of his love at that moment so great that it opens a hole in the fabric of the universe and of history that draws all things back into God’s love.
Again, Mother Virginia writes: “The Cross is the true center, drawing all to him who hung there, reshaping all space-time by a kind of gravity of love… and we, as we choose to love in return, are immediately taken up into the Paschal Mystery which surrounds it, rather like a ‘white hole,’ a true Mystery which can’t be comprehended fully, a wisdom looking like folly from the outside of its ‘event horizon’…”
On this Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, may we reclaim that seeming folly, reclaim the strangeness and subversiveness of what we celebrate today, kissing the evil thing, and thereby allowing it to defeat itself, the now Holy Cross opening in the world and in our hearts a love so great that all, every last speck of creation, is drawn back into the Heart of God.
Amen.
