Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: Cross

  • Tuesday of the Fifth Week in Lent

    Tuesday of the Fifth Week in Lent

    Today’s readings

    Just as the saraph serpent was lifted up on a pole in the desert for the people to see, and thus live, so the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, was lifted up on the cross for the salvation of the world. This fifth week of Lent is the beginning of what we call “Passiontide.” In these late Lenten days, the Church is looking to the Cross, looking toward Jerusalem, knowing that the hour of the Lord, in which he would pay the dear price of our salvation, is near at hand.

    With hearts filled with gratitude, we come to this Eucharist, with our eyes fixed on our Lord lifted up for us, who pours himself out for us again and still. When we see him lifted up, we remember that he is “I AM,” our crucified and risen Lord, and whenever we look to him, we are saved from all that ails us, from our sins and brokenness, and we ourselves are lifted up to eternal life.

    Our challenge in these late Lenten days is to be that icon of the Cross, like the saraph serpent, to whom people can look and find healing and salvation. We have to be the image of Christ crucified so that the world can become whole. Just as many came to believe because Jesus spoke of himself in this way, so may many come to believe because we live it.

    We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:
    Because by your holy Cross, you have redeemed the world.

  • Thursday after Ash Wednesday

    Thursday after Ash Wednesday

    Today’s readings

    “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
    and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

    You know, in my life, I’ve found that that quote is very easy to accept until a cross actually presents itself. Then, when the cross shows up, there’s an overwhelming sense of despair. But Lent is supposed to teach us how to take up the cross. The fasting, almsgiving, and prayer that we have taken up, or are about to take up, don’t mean anything unless we give them to Jesus and ask him to help us with the cross, whether it’s the cross we are currently bearing, or a cross in the future. It’s like going to the gym and training our muscles so that we can do our work and care for ourselves and our loved ones. Faith is like a muscle: it has to be trained so that we can have it in our times of need.  How will our Lenten penance help us to take up our crosses?

  • Friday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    About twenty or so years ago now, my home parish put on a production of the musical Godspell, and somehow I found myself part of the cast.  If you’ve ever seen the musical, you know that it is based on the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel that we are reading during this current Church year.  I remember the first song of the musical was kind of strange to me at the time.  It’s called “Tower of Babel” and the lyrics are a hodge-podge of lots of philosophies and philosophers throughout time.  I didn’t get, at the time, the significance of the song, but I do now.  “Tower of Babel” represents the various schools of thought about God, over time.  It shows how philosophy at its worst has been an attempt to figure out God by going over God’s head, by leaving God out of the picture completely.

    Now the composer of the musical is an agnostic Jew, and so he didn’t really have great philosophy in mind when he wrote Godspell, but as often happens, God had the last word.  The “Tower of Babel” song ends abruptly and goes right into the second song of the musical, “Prepare Ye,” of which the major lyric is “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”  The message that we can take from that is that the useless, and in some ways sinful, babbling of the pagan philosophers was once and for all settled by Jesus Christ.  If we want to know the meaning of life, if we want to know who God is, we have only to look to Jesus.  That’s true of most things in life.

    And Jesus didn’t build us a tower to get to God.  Instead, he mounted a cross.  The path to God, the path to heaven, was not some grand tower of our own design, but instead a cross on which our God laid down his life.  The way to get where he was going, the way to get where we need to go, is to take up that cross, lose our lives, and gain the kingdom.  Because what good is it to gain the whole world, to build a tower of our own design, and forfeit the life of heaven?

  • The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I think, as a pastor, the issue I wrestle with most is the suffering that is out there.  People come to me in their suffering, and that is a great privilege, a holy space.  The father in me wants to be able to say a quick prayer and take all the suffering away, but of course, that’s now how this works.  And so I have accompanied parishioners, and even my own family members, as they suffer.  Suffering, unfortunately, is part of our life on earth, and we all do it at some time or another in our lives. 

    A lot of us, truth be told, have the same outlook as Saint Peter.  We don’t want to think about suffering as part and parcel of our life here on earth.  Today’s Gospel tells us that, after leading the Apostles in a little discernment about who Jesus was, Jesus then begins to foretell his own suffering and death.  And we know that that suffering and death was absolutely necessary to pay the price for our sins.  But Peter, and probably the others as well, didn’t want to think about that.  They were still under the thinking about what the Messiah was supposed to be according to Jewish scriptures, and that Messiah wasn’t supposed to suffer and die.  So Peter begins to audaciously rebuke our Lord, and our Lord then rebukes Peter.

    I think this year, we’ve seen an awful lot of suffering.  Many of us have lost loved ones to COVID-19, or have had a loved one pass away from something else during that time, but the pandemic prevented us from accompanying them.  Others have lost massive amounts of business during that time or suffered financially from the economic downturn.  Even if none of that touched our lives, the pandemic affected the way we live from day to day.  Grandparents couldn’t hug their grandchildren.  We were not able to travel or visit loved ones near or far.  Many couldn’t come to church, even when things opened up a bit, and had to avoid large gatherings or public places of any kind due to a concern about their immunity.  We had to re-think absolutely everything we did, and frankly we still are.

    This weekend, I think too, about where I was twenty years ago.  We all remember that fateful, horrible, 9-11 day, when it seemed like the world was crashing down around us.  Nobody traveled in those days either.  In those days, we had to re-think the way we did so many things, and we don’t take our safety for granted in the ways we did before that day.  We also continue to remember the loss of so many people in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania – people whose lives ended quickly at the start of a workday, and those who gave their lives to help others.  There was more than enough suffering to go around on that horrible day.

    And all of that is to say nothing about the day-to-day suffering we all experience.  The illness and loss of loved ones; the brokenness of our families; the loss of a job or opportunity; the effects of sin and addiction, whether our own or that of those close to us.  The list goes on and on.  The real truth of life in this world is that there is suffering, and none of us gets a free pass.  Even Mary, full of grace, had to watch her Son suffer and die.  Even Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus and he himself suffered a terrible, painful, humiliating death.  None of us gets out of this life unscathed.  In some crazy sense, we all are united in the fact that we all suffer, some time and for something.

    And so it is in fact audacious and even offensive that Saint Peter rebukes our Lord for talking about suffering.  Peter himself will suffer a similar fate as that of his Lord, being crucified upside-down.  Every one of us, in some way, has to take up the cross and walk with it, because it is only in doing that that we can make our way to the resurrection.

    I remember a time when I was going through a very difficult time in my priesthood.  One of my good friends came to visit me and brought me a wood carving of Jesus carrying the Cross.  She told me that she hoped it would help me pray through that difficult time and would help me to take up my own cross, as Jesus said we must in today’s Gospel.  Her prayers, and those of so many others, buoyed me up during that time, and reflecting on the Cross made me realize that I had to be there right then, and had to trust our Lord to bring me where I needed to go.

    And the truth of this, friends, is that we have it a lot easier than our Lord did.  We just bear our own suffering; he had to take with him the suffering of every person embroiled in sin in all of time.  We have him to help us take up our crosses and to help make those crosses lighter; he had no one except for Simon of Cyrene who helped him begrudgingly.  His death had to blast open the gates of heaven; we will just get to walk through it, if we follow him and live the gospel.

    Jesus never ever promised to make all our suffering go away.  But he did promise never to abandon us, and he did engage in suffering when he chose to come to earth.  That, friends, is our salvation.  So we have to suffer in this world, we have to deny ourselves and take up the crosses that lay before us.  Because that is the way to follow our Lord who beckons us to come to him.

    For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
    but whoever loses his life for my sake
    and that of the gospel will save it.

  • The Triumph of the Holy Cross

    The Triumph of the Holy Cross

    Today’s readings

    Bishop Robert Barron tells about an interreligious dialogue between Catholics and Buddhists. At one point, one of the Buddhists said to him, “Why is that obscene image on every wall in your buildings?” He was, of course, referring to the Crucifix. The Buddhist explained that it would be considered a mockery in his religion to venerate the very thing that killed their leader. The truth is, of course, that it is obscene. It is strange, and Barron wrote a whole book about it called The Strangest Way.

    And we all must have thought about this at one time or another. Why is it that God could only accomplish the salvation of the world through the horrible, brutal, and lonely death of his Son? That question goes right to the root of our faith. We know that we had been alienated from God, separated by a vast chasm of sin and death. But into this obscene world, Jesus becomes incarnate; he is born right into the midst of all that sin and death. He walks among us, and goes through all of the sorrows and pains of life and death right with along with us. If death has been the obscenity that has kept us from God, then God was going to use that very thing to bring us back. Jesus comes into our world and dies our death because God wants us to know that there is no place we can go, no experience we can ever have that is outside of God’s reach.

    Today’s feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, also called the Triumph of the Cross, was celebrated very early in the Church’s history. In the fourth century St. Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, went to Jerusalem in search of the holy places of Christ’s life. She razed the Temple of Aphrodite, which tradition held was built over the Savior’s tomb, and her son built the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher over the tomb. During the excavation, workers found three crosses. Legend has it that the one on which Jesus died was identified when its touch healed a dying woman. The cross immediately became an object of veneration.

    About this great feast, St. Andrew of Crete wrote: “Had there been no cross, Christ could not have been crucified. Had there been no cross, life itself could not have been nailed to the tree. And if life had not been nailed to it, there would be no streams of immortality pouring from Christ’s side, blood and water for the world’s cleansing. The legal bond of our sin would not be cancelled, we should not have attained our freedom, we should not have enjoyed the fruit of the tree of life and the gates of paradise would not stand open. Had there been no cross, death would not have been trodden underfoot, nor hell despoiled.”

    Because of the Cross, all of our sadness has been overcome. Disease, pain, death, and sin – none of these things that assail us in this life have ultimate power over us. Just as Jesus suffered on that Cross, so we too may have to suffer in the trials that this life brings us. But Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven to prepare a place for us, a place where there will be no more sadness, death or pain, a place where we can live in the radiant light of God for all eternity. Because of the Cross, we have hope, a hope that can never be taken away.

    The Cross is indeed a very strange way to save the world, but the triumph that came into the world through the One who suffered on the cross is immeasurable. As our Gospel reminds us today, all of this happened because God so loved the world.

    We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.

  • The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night of Easter

    The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night of Easter

    Today’s readings

    Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

    We English-speakers have just one word for time, but other languages have more; those languages recognize the different kinds of time.  Most notably for us, because it is reflected in the New Testament, the Greek language has two kinds of time: chronos and kairos.  Chronos is the kind of time you can measure.  It’s a day or a week or even the timeline of a project at work.  Kairos on the other hand can be thought of as quality time: a summer afternoon spent with your family, a visit to a sick loved one, or a chance encounter with an old friend.  This kind of time is mostly unmeasurable, and in some sense kairos is always “now.”

    It’s important to keep these kinds of time in mind because the world sometimes sees time in a rather cynical way.   But that’s not how our God sees time.  Did you hear what we prayed at the very beginning of tonight’s vigil?  Listen again: “Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, all time belongs to him, and all the ages, to him be glory and power through every age and for ever.  Amen.”  And these are important, even brave words for us to offer on this most holy night.  Tonight’s vigil proclaims that all time is holy, sanctified by our God who has walked with us through our yesterdays, remains with us today, and forges on with us toward our tomorrows.  There is not a single moment of our life, not a single moment of our history that is not holy because every moment has been, is now, and always will be imbued with the presence of our God who is holiness itself.  That’s what we gather to celebrate on this most holy night.

    But as we have walked through Lent, and especially through this Holy Week, there may even be a temptation, I think, to come to think that the world, and especially human history, was a creative experiment that went horribly wrong, that God sent his Son to clean up the mess only to have him killed for it, and then in a last move of desperation raised him up out of the grave.  But we know that’s not how this works.  Salvation was not some kind of dumb luck or happy accident.  The salvation of the world had been part of God’s creative plan all along.  Humanity, given the grace of free will had, and has, certainly gone astray.  But God did not create us simply to follow our own devices and end up in hell.  He created us for himself, and so sent his Son Jesus to walk our walk, to die our death, and to rise up over it all in the everlasting promise of eternal life.  That’s what we celebrate on this most holy of all nights.

    There is a cynical view of our world that would have us believe that everything is futile and that the only possible way to endure this world is to cultivate a kind of cynical apathy that divorces us from our God, our loved ones, our communities and our world.  If we don’t get involved and invested, if we don’t love with abandon, we aren’t likely to get hurt.  We are conditioned to believe that time, and life itself, is meaningless, that there is nothing worth living for, and certainly nothing worth dying for.  But tonight’s vigil debunks all of that.  Tonight we are assured by our God that our present is no less redeemable than was our past, nor is it any less filled with promise than is our future.

    This wonderful three-day Liturgy that we call the Sacred Paschal Triduum began on Thursday night.  On that night we sang “Lift High the Cross,” which is reminiscent of the proper entrance antiphon that the Church gives us for the Liturgy of these holy days:

    We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
    through whom we are saved and delivered.

    Should there be any doubt about the glory of the Cross, these words, which are borrowed from the letter to the Galatians, remind us that there is nothing on earth that is so ponderous that our God can’t redeem it.  There is no darkness that our Lord’s Paschal Mystery can’t brighten.  There is no pain or sadness that our Lord hasn’t taken on himself and defeated, once and for all, on this most holy of all nights.

    Tonight we have heard stories of our salvation, God’s saving action in the world throughout all time.  Each of our readings has been a stop in the history of God’s love for us.  God’s plan for salvation, and his sanctification of time, began back at the beginning of it all.  Each of the days was hallowed with precious creation, and all of it was created and pronounced good.  Then Abraham’s faithfulness and righteousness earned us a future as bright as a zillion twinkling stars.  Later, as Moses and the Israelites stood trapped by the waters of the Red Sea, God’s providence made a way for them and cut off their pursuers, making the future safe for those God calls his own.  The prophet Isaiah calls us to seek the Lord while he may be found, not spending our lives on things that fail to satisfy, but investing in our relationship with God that gives us everything.  The prophet Ezekiel foretells the re-creation all humanity will experience as they come to know Christ and are filled with the Spirit.  Saint Paul rejoices in the baptism that has washed away the stains of sin as we have died and risen with Christ, and has brought us into a new life that leads ultimately to God’s kingdom.  And finally, our Gospel tonight tells us not to be afraid, to go forth into the Galilee of our future and expect to see the Risen Lord.

    We Christians have been spared the necessity and sadness of a cynical view of the world and its people.  Our gift has been and always is the promise that Jesus Christ is with us forever, even until the end of the world.  And so, just as God sanctified all of time through his interventions of salvation, so too has he sanctified our lives through the interventions of Sacrament.  We are a sacramental people, purified and reborn in baptism, fed and strengthened in the Eucharist, and in Confirmation, set on fire to burn brightly and light up our world with the glory of God’s presence.  Tonight we recall these three Sacraments of Initiation and recommit ourselves to the promises of our baptism.  Also, for the first time since Thursday, we have the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist together, drawing strength from the food our God provides.

    These days of Lent have been a sanctifying journey for all of us, as we have walked the Stations of the Cross together, fasted together, celebrated the sacraments, taken part in our Project Passion Prayer experience, done works of service, and so much more.  Christ has definitely sanctified this Lenten time for all of us, and has now brought us to the fullness of this hour, when he rises over sin and death to bring us all to the promise of life eternal.

    And it is this very night that cleanses our world from all the stains of sin and death and lights up the darkness.  The Exsultet, the Easter Proclamation that Deacon Ryan sang when we entered Church tonight, tells us: “This is the night of which it is written: The night shall be as bright as day, dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness.  The sanctifying power of this night dispels wickedness, washes faults away, restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to mourners, drives out hatred, fosters concord, and brings down the mighty.”  This is a most powerful night!  What a gift this night is, not just to us gathered here in this church, not just to all the Catholics gathered together throughout the world on this holy night, but to all people in every time and place.  Our world needs the light and our time needs the presence of Christ, and our history needs salvation.  Blessed be God who never leaves his people without the great hope of his abiding presence!

    And so, having come through this hour to be sanctified in this vigil, we will shortly be sent forth to help sanctify our own time and place.  Brightened by this beautiful vigil, we now become a flame to light up our darkened world.  That is our ministry in the world.  That is our call as believers.  That is our vocation as disciples.  “May this flame be found still burning by the Morning Star.  The one Morning Star who never sets, Christ your Son, who coming back from death’s domain, has shed his peaceful light on humanity, and lives and reigns forever and ever.  Amen.”

    Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

  • Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Today’s readings
    “When you lift up the Son of Man,
    then you will realize that I AM…”

    Just as the saraph serpent was lifted up on a pole in the desert for the people to see, and thus live, so the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, was lifted up on the cross for the salvation of the world.  In these late Lenten days, the Church is looking to the Cross, looking toward Jerusalem, knowing that the hour of the Lord, in which he would pay the dear price of our salvation, is near at hand.

    With hearts filled with gratitude, we come to this Eucharist, with our eyes fixed on our Lord lifted up for us, who pours himself out for us again and still.  When we see him lifted up, we remember that he is “I AM,” our crucified and risen Lord, and whenever we look to him, we are saved from all that ails us, from our sins and brokenness, and we ourselves are lifted up to eternal life.

    Our challenge in these late Lenten days is to be that icon of the Cross, like the saraph serpent, to whom people can look and find healing and salvation. We have to be the image of Christ crucified so that the world can become whole.

  • The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night: The Triumph of the Cross

    The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night: The Triumph of the Cross

    Tonight’s readings

    “You shall be my people, and I will be your God” (Ezekiel 36:28). I love that last line from the last of the Old Testament readings we heard tonight. There is a covenant, there has always been a covenant, there always will be a covenant. God created us in love, and he loves us first and best. No matter where we may wander; no matter how far from the covenant we may stray, God still keeps it forever. We will always be his people and he will always be our God. If I had to pick a line that sums up what we’re here for tonight, that would be it.

    Over the past couple of days, as we have observed this Sacred Paschal Triduum, which comes to its denouement tonight in this Vigil of vigils, I have reflected on the Cross. I did that because it is the Cross that Holy Mother Church sets before us during the Triduum, from the lines of the Entrance Antiphon way back on Holy Thursday Evening:

    We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    i    n whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
    through whom we are saved and delivered.

    On Thursday, I reflected on the scandal of the Cross, rejecting the idea that going to the Cross made our God any less, and instead acknowledging that the real scandal was the reason he went there, which was for my sins. Yesterday, on Good Friday, I reflected on the Way of the Cross, noting that our Savior willingly took up the Cross so that you and I might have life, and I reflected on the reality of our own little crosses and the way that we disciples have to travel. Tonight, I would like to conclude that reflection on the Holy Cross, which is our glory, by celebrating the Triumph of the Cross. We actually celebrate that on September the 14th each year, but the reason for its Exaltation is what we come to experience tonight.

    It might seem a little odd to reflect on the Cross – triumph or not – on this holy night. I mean, surely we’ve moved on, haven’t we? We came here for resurrection and want to get on with our lives. Just like we tend to rush through our grieving of loved ones – to our own psychological and spiritual peril, by the way – so too we want to rush through our Lent and particularly our Good Friday and Holy Saturday, so that we can eat our Peeps and chocolate bunnies and call it a day.

    But we disciples dare not let it be so. Because certainly we know how we got here to this moment. We know that we don’t get an Easter Sunday without a Good Friday, that we can’t have resurrection if there hasn’t been death, that we can’t have salvation if there hasn’t been a sacrifice.

    And there sure was a sacrifice. Our Lord suffered a brutal, ugly death between two hardened criminals, taking the place of a revolutionary. He was beaten, humiliated, mistreated and nails were pounded into his flesh, that flesh that he borrowed from us. He hung in agony for three hours and finally, when all was finished, he cried out in anguish and handed over his spirit. Placed in the tomb, he descended into hell. Collecting the souls of the blessed ones of old, he waited while earth mourned and disciples scattered and everyone wondered what happened to this Christ.

    And then came the morning. The Sabbath was over, and the sun was rising in the east on the first day of the week, and the women came with spices to prepare our Lord for burial. But they couldn’t: he has been raised! He is not here! Our Lord is risen and death is defeated! The menacing, ugly Cross has become the altar of salvation! The Cross, that instrument of horror, has triumphed over every darkness thrown at it, and we can do – should do – no less than praise our God!

    We have journeyed with our Jesus for three days now. We ate with him, we prayed through the night with him, some of us at seven churches. We saw him walk the way of the Cross and tearfully recalled his crucifixion. We reverenced the Cross, joining our own crosses to his. Now we’ve stayed up all night and shared the stories of our salvation, with eager excitement at the ways God has kept that covenant through the ages. A roaring fire shattered the darkness, and a candle was lit to mingle with the lights of heaven. Then grace had its defining moment as Christ shattered the prison-bars of death and rose triumphant from the underworld.

    Our birth would have meant nothing had we not been redeemed. If we were born only to live and die for this short span of time, how horrible that would have been. But thanks be to God, the sin of Adam was destroyed completely by the death of Christ! The Cross has triumphed and we are made new! Dazzling is this night for us, and full of gladness! Because our Lord is risen, our hope of eternity has dawned, and there is no darkness which can blot it out. We will always be God’s people, and he will always be our God!

    We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
    through whom we are saved and delivered.

    He is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

  • Holy Thursday: The Scandal of the Cross

    Holy Thursday: The Scandal of the Cross

    Today’s readings

    I love what Jesus says to Peter after Peter initially refuses to have his feet washed. “What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will understand later.” I kind of feel like that’s what could be said about the entirety of our faith. What we are taught very rarely makes sense at the first presentation, but later, when we have eyes opened up by the Resurrection, well, then things start to fall into place.

    So I want to start my reflection on these three holy days, this Sacred Paschal Triduum, with the incredibly scandalous idea that is the Holy Cross. The Church would have us do so, too, for She provides just one entrance antiphon for these three days, and that comes at the beginning of today’s Mass, and it says:

    We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
    through whom we are saved and delivered.

    This antiphon is adapted from Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians (6:14) in which he spends most of the letter chastising the community – even to the point of calling them “stupid” (3:1) – for taking their eyes off Jesus and the Gospel and everything that Saint Paul has taught them, and instead looking back to the Jewish law and all its artificial marks of righteousness. But we dare not condemn them so quickly. Because, quite frankly, we have to understand their faltering faith in light of our own.

    For us, now removed a couple of thousand years past the Crucifixion of our Lord, the Cross seems pretty standard – it almost doesn’t even phase us any more. We see it in church, we probably have one or more in our homes, and we might even wear one around our neck pretty often. And so, I think, the Cross may have lost some of its very important impact: an impact Jesus’ disciples certainly experienced as they fled in fear. It’s an impact Saint Paul’s Church in Galatia would have experienced too, and perhaps explained their trying to find justification in other ways.

    Because the cross was terrifying. And not only that, the cross was scandalous. It was saved for the dregs of society, for the worst of the worst. For those who were a problem for society. It was saved for the likes of Barabbas, for heaven’s sake! And the unrepentant thief. And yet, that is where our Lord went at the end of his life on earth. Nobody in Jesus’ day would have been inspired by this awful display. Saint Paul acknowledges as much in his first letter to the Corinthians when he says, “But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1:23).

    But if people in that day missed the importance of Jesus embracing and dying on the cross, then they missed his entire message too. Because it was every bit as scandalous that Jesus ate with sinners and touched lepers. Just as scandalous as the cross was his getting up at supper and taking off his outer garments, tying a towel around his waist, and washing the feet of the disciples. That was the job of a servant, but then he did come to serve not to be served. That was the job of a slave, but then he did come to set us free from our ancient sinfulness.

    As scandalous as the Cross was for the early Church, it is also deeply problematic for the Church today. Because we live in a society that values freedom, convenience, and bright shiny happiness – none of which, I dare say, you’ll find on the Cross. In our society, we might boast that there is a pill for almost every ailment, even if they come with a horrifying list of side-effects. In our society, we have convenience down to a science: we eat fast food, we bank and shop online and delight in free overnight shipping, we lose our minds in the line at the DMV. In our society, we do our best to spin every situation into some kind of false happiness, with painted smiles and happy music and all kinds of glitzy advertising.

    We’re more than happy to have a Resurrection, thank you, but the Cross … well that’s just not something we’re open to embracing. And the problem with that is that living the Gospel requires that we take up our own crosses and follow our Lord (Matthew 16:24). So our aversion to the Cross, both in the ancient Church and now, is a real obstacle to our life of faith, a real obstacle to our eternity.

    The cause of the obstacle, I would assert – at least in my own spiritual life – is that on the Cross, we see our own sins. The real scandalous part of the Cross for us is that our Savior had to go there to free us from our sins. What makes us turn our heads away and avert our gaze is that we can’t bear to see that even our smallest sins have such horrible, scandalous consequences. The real scandal of the Cross is that the Word made flesh had to give up his own life in such a terrible death in order that I might live.

    What on earth are we supposed to do with that? How do we live with the fact that God’s only begotten Son died for us? Well, he tells us in today’s Gospel. “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.” And he’s not just talking about washing feet, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ. Whatever he’s done for us, we’re supposed to do for others. If he’s forgiven us much, then we should never stop forgiving. If he has served us, then we have to serve others. If he has laid down our life for us, then we better do the same for the people in our lives. Anything less is an offense against the Holy Cross.

    As we gather on this Holy Thursday night, we know that the washing of the feet is a mere foreshadowing of the Cross. Jesus came to give himself completely so that we might have life. He washes feet, cleansing the disciples of their sins and making them fit for service. He offers his Body and Blood to be the food that sustains us on our journey. And he offers us our own crosses that we might have a share in his own, leading us onward to eternal life.

    We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
    through whom we are saved and delivered.

  • The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    Today’s readings

    In a lot of ways, this is a strange feast we are celebrating today. Think about it. This is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which in Jesus’ day would have been as big an oxymoron as one could possibly imagine. It’s like us saying that we are going to celebrate the exaltation of a lethal injection chamber. There is nothing exalted about an instrument of execution: it’s tortuous, humiliating, and as dark as one can get.

    So to get from that to where we are now is nothing short of a miracle. A miracle, of course, of the highest order! God used this instrument of punishment to remit the punishment we deserved for our sins. God used the epitome of darkness to bathe the world in unfathomable light.

    And he didn’t have to. The cross is what we deserved for our many sins. Today’s first reading gives us just a glimpse into the problem. The Israelites, fresh from deliverance from slavery in Egypt, are making their way through the desert. Along the way, they pause to complain that God’s food, which he provided in the desert, wasn’t good enough for them. They had chosen slavery over deliverance; food that perishes over food that endures unto eternal life.

    But we’re there too, right? We often choose the wrong kind of food, get off the path, and choose slavery to our vices and sins over new life in Christ. In fact it was because of all that that Jesus came to us in the first place. God noticed our brokenness and would not let us remain dead in sin. So to put an end to that cycle of sin and death, he sent his only Son to us to die on the cross, paying the price for our sins. But that death may no longer have power over us, he raised him up, cheating the cross and the evil one of their power, and exalting the Holy Cross to the instrument not of our death, but of our salvation.

    Because of the Cross, all of our sadness has been overcome. Disease, pain, death, and sin – none of these have ultimate power over us. Just as Jesus suffered on that Cross, so we too may have to suffer in the trials that this life brings us. But Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven to prepare a place for us, a place where there will be no more sadness, death or pain, a place where we can live in the radiant light of God for all eternity. Because of the Cross, we have hope, a hope that can never be taken away.

    The Cross is indeed a very strange way to save the world, but the triumph that came into the world through the One who suffered on the cross is immeasurable. As our Gospel reminds us today, all of this happened because God so loved the world.

    We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.