Just as the saraph serpent was lifted up on a pole in the desert for the people to 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, as we look upon the cross, either here in church or in our homes, our hearts surely must be stirred to remember the painful price our Lord paid for our salvation. 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.
Tag: Cross
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Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent
“Where are you from?” That’s a question we’ve all probably answered countless times. Mostly, of course, it’s an attempt to learn something new about a person, to deepen our friendship. Occasionally, though, the question of where one hails from is used against them. They may have been lived in a bad part of time, or been raised on the wrong side of the tracks.
This is the kind of attack the Pharisees are mounting against Jesus in today’s Gospel. The case against him is coming to a fever pitch at this point, and they are using just about any piece of information to call for his death. This, of course, leads to the cross for him, and that story will continue to unfold rather vividly as we complete these last couple of weeks of Lent.
But for us, the gospel asks us to look at how we treat other people. How do we get to know them? Do we make judgments about them before we really do get to know them? What role does information like where a person lives, how much money they have, what they look like, and so on, have in how we treat them. Or can we possibly see them with the eyes of God, eyes that see the other person’s gifts?
If we don’t try to see other people with those eyes, who knows if we aren’t sending our Lord to the cross, yet again?
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The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Theologian 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 Cross. 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 sin and death have been the obscenities that have kept us from God, then God was going to use those very things 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 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.
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Friday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s Liturgy of the Word asks us to ponder the question, “what do we have to do to remain in covenant with God?” And the question, I think, is an important one. We would want to respond to God’s gracious act of covenanting with us first. We see in today’s readings that he chose us first, and calls us out of love for us. Moses recites the mighty acts of God in which he remembered the promises made to the people’s ancestors and kept them, even though the people certainly didn’t deserve it. Even though they often sought to break the covenant, God kept it anyway, loving the people even when they were unlovable.
But what should our response be? For Moses and the people Israel, the response was to keep the law. The law itself was a wonderful document, given to the people out of love, to help them walk the straight and narrow, and to remain in relationship with God and others. Moses contends that no other nation had gods that were loving and wise enough to provide something like that for their people.
Jesus, of course, takes it several steps further. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Following the law was the first step, but it was pretty basic. Even if the people obeyed it – which they often did not – it was still a matter of will mostly, and not heart. Jesus calls us to make the same sacrifice he did: lay down our lives for one another out of love.
“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” And isn’t that the truth, really? When we get so caught up in ourselves and our own pettiness, how quickly life slips away and we wonder what it all meant. But when we lose our lives following Christ and loving God and neighbor with reckless abandon, well, then we have really found something.
God loved us first and best, and always seeks covenant with us. The law is still a good guide, but the cross is the best measure of the heart. How willing are we this day to lose our lives relentlessly spending the love we have received from our God with others?
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Holy Thursday: Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper
“We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
for he is our salvation, our life and our resurrection;
through him we are saved and made free.”That is the proper entrance antiphon, also known as the introit, for this Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper. It is taken from Paul’s letter to the Galatians in which he says “May I never boast about anything other than the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which I have been crucified to the world and the world to me.” As you know, the Church considers these three days – the Sacred Triduum – as just one day, one liturgy. When we gather for Mass tonight, and reconvene tomorrow for the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion, and finally gather for the great Easter Vigil on Saturday, it’s just one day for the church, one Liturgy in three parts. And the only part that has an entrance antiphon is tonight’s Mass, so the Church has chosen this text to set the tone for our celebrations for these three nights, and to draw all of them together with the cross holding them all together.
I think what the cross teaches us in these days, and what this evening’s part of the Liturgy says in particular is summed up in the Latin word, caritas. Caritas is most often translated into English as either “charity” or “love.” And, as in the case of most translations, both are inadequate. When we think about the word “charity,” we usually think of something we do to the poor: we give to the poor, we have pity on the poor, that kind of thing. And “love” can have a whole host of different meanings, depending on the context, and the emotion involved. And that’s not what caritas means at all. I think caritas is best imagined as a love that shows itself in the action of setting oneself aside for the good of others. It’s a love that remembers that everything is not about me, that God gives us opportunities all the time to pour ourselves out on behalf of others, that we were put on this earth to love one another into heaven.
Two parts of this evening’s Liturgy show us what caritas means. The first is what we call the mandatum: the washing of the feet. Here, Jesus gets up from the meal, puts on a towel and begins to wash the feet of his disciples. Washing the feet of guests was a common practice in Jesus’ time. In those days, people often had to travel quite a distance to accept an invitation to a feast or celebration. And they would travel that distance, not by car or train or even by beast of burden, but most often on foot. The travelers’ feet would then become not only dirty from the dusty roads, but also hot and tired from the long journey. It was a gesture of hospitality to wash the guests’ feet, but it was a gesture that was supplied not by the host of the gathering, but instead by someone much lower in stature, usually a servant or slave. But at the Last Supper, it is Jesus himself who wraps a towel around himself, picks up the bowl and pitcher, and washes the feet of his friends.
We will reenact that Gospel vignette in a few minutes. But I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of this particular ritual. Not because I don’t like washing feet or don’t care to have mine washed. It’s just that I think this particular ritual should be reenacted outside of church. Every day, in every place where Christians are. Let me give you an example.
In seminary, we used to eat cafeteria style most of the time, much like any institution of higher learning. But several times a year, we would have formal dinners. They would happen on special feast days or to celebrate the giving of ministries or ordinations to the deaconate. On those occasions, our round tables would have white tablecloths, there would be wine at the table, and special food. On one of the chairs of every table, there would be a white apron. The person who got that chair was to put on the apron – much like Jesus wrapped the towel around him – and serve the rest of the people at the table. Now, when I first got to seminary, my objective, I am not proud to tell you, was to get over to the refectory early so that I wouldn’t have to be that person. Lots of us did that at first. But sometime during seminary, and I’m not sure exactly when it happened, my objective changed. I would try to get to the refectory early, not to avoid being the one to serve the rest, but to get that seat at the table so that I could serve the others. Certainly that was the work of the Holy Spirit.
And I think this kind of caritas can happen everywhere. Maybe you make an effort to get home from work a little sooner to help your spouse get dinner ready or help your children with their homework. Maybe at work you try to get in early so that you can make the first pot of coffee so that people can smell it when they come in to the office. Or maybe after lunch you take a minute or two to wipe out the microwave so it’s not gross the next day. If you’re a young person, perhaps you can try on occasion to do a chore without being asked or even wash the dishes when it’s not your turn to do it. Or if one of your classmates has a lot of stuff to bring to school one day, you can offer to carry some of his or her books to lighten the load.
This kind of thing costs us. It’s not our job. We’re entitled to be treated well too. It’s inconvenient. I’ve had a hard day at work – or at school. I want to see this show on television. I’m in the middle of reading the paper. But caritas requires something of us – something over and above what we may be prepared to do. But, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, he’s given us an example: as he has done, so we must do. And not just here in church washing each other’s feet, but out there in our world, washing the feet of all those in our lives who need to be loved into heaven.
The second part of our Liturgy that illustrates caritas is one with which we are so familiar, we may most of the time let it pass us by without giving it a thought. And that, of course, is the Eucharist. This evening we commemorate that night when Jesus, for the very first time, shared bread and wine with his closest friends and offered the meal as his very own body and blood, poured out on behalf of the world, given that we might remember, as often as we do it, what caritas means. This is the meal that we share here tonight, not just as a memory of something that happened in the far distant past, but instead experienced with Jesus and his disciples, and all the church of every time and place, on earth and in heaven, gathered around the same Table of the Lord, nourished by the same body, blood, soul and divinity of our Savior who poured himself out for us in the ultimate act of caritas.
We who eat this meal have to be willing to be changed by it. Because we too must pour ourselves out for others. We must feed them with our presence and our love and our understanding even when we would rather not. We must help them to know Christ’s presence in their lives by the way that we serve them, in humility, giving of ourselves and asking nothing in return.
The ultimate act of caritas will unfold tomorrow and Saturday night as we look to the cross and keep vigil for the resurrection. Tonight it will suffice for us to hear the command to go and do likewise, pouring ourselves out for others, laying down our life for them, washing their feet and becoming Eucharist for them. It may seem difficult to glory in the cross – it may even seem strange to say it. But the Church makes it clear tonight: the cross is our salvation, it is caritas poured out for us, it is caritas poured out on others through us, every time we extend ourselves, lay down our lives, abandon our sense of entitlement and give of ourselves.
“We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
for he is our salvation, our life and our resurrection;
through him we are saved and made free.” -
Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion
Today’s celebration reminds us that Lent has been taking us somewhere, and now we see where that somewhere is: Calvary. These days have led us to the cross, which is a place to which, quite frankly, few of us ever want to go. The Psalmist today captures the feeling of our hearts as we arrive here at the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
And haven’t we all asked that question at least once in our lives? As we sing those words, they can quite frankly bring back painful memories, whether they be memories of past hurts, or reflections of current ones. Maybe it’s the time when you were sexually abused and felt abandoned because you were convinced no one would believe you. Maybe it’s the time you received a frightening diagnosis and you felt abandoned because you couldn’t enter into daily life with the same carefree attitude you previously had. Maybe it’s the occasion of the death of a loved one and you felt abandoned because everyone on the planet seemed joyful, except you. Maybe it’s the time you were laid off from your job and you felt abandoned because it seemed that no one valued your skills and talents.
And so we pray with the Psalmist, with Jesus, and with every person who has ever felt lost and alone: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” It’s natural that we would prefer to avoid the cross. It’s painful, it’s embarrassing, and it ultimately alienates us from the world. But, the cross is what joins us to Christ. Christ did not shun the cross on the way to accomplish his mission. He took up that cross, died on it, taking with it all of our pain, all of our shame, all of our loneliness, all of our abandonment, all of our sin, and most of all, our death.
Without the cross, there is no resurrection. Not for Jesus, and so also, not for us. Jesus certainly had his moment in the Garden of Gethsemane when the knowledge of his impending death filled him with dread; so it will be for us, countless times when we are called on to take up the cross. But as we enter this Holy Week, we are reminded gently that the cross, while significant, is not the end of the story. There will be a resurrection for Jesus, and so also a resurrection for all those who believe in him, have faith in him, and follow him. And that is what gives us all the confidence to take up our cross and journey on.
I invite you all to enter into these Holy Days with passion, with prayerfulness and in faith. Gather with us on Holy Thursday evening to celebrate the giving of the Eucharist and the Priesthood, and the call to service that comes from our baptism. On Good Friday afternoon and evening, we will have the opportunity once again to reflect on the Passion, to venerate the cross that won our salvation, and to receive the Eucharist, which is our strength. Finally, on the evening of Holy Saturday, we will gather to keep vigil for the resurrection we have been promised. We will hear stories of our salvation, we will celebrate our baptism as we welcome new members to our family, seeing them fully initiated into the life of the Church, rejoicing with them in the victory of Christ over sin and death. No Catholic should miss the celebrations of these Holy Days, for these days truly sustain our daily living and give us the grace to take up our little crosses day by day.
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CREEDS Retreat Conference III: Salvation through the Cross and Resurrection
Scriptures: Matthew 27:33-56; Matthew 28:1-10
Godspell: “Finale”
Ask a bunch of church type people what their favorite celebration of the Church year is, and inevitably most of them will tell you that it’s the Paschal Triduum. That period from the evening of Holy Thursday to the Evening of Holy Saturday, celebrating the giving of the Eucharist and the establishment of the Church on Holy Thursday, observing the memorial of our Lord’s Passion and the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, and cutting loose – in a Liturgical way of course – with the Vigil of all vigils – the great Easter Vigil Mass with its service of light, proclamation of the Exsultet, extended Liturgy of the Word, Baptism of catechumens and celebration of the Eucharist – that three-day Day of all Days is by far the most incredible of all the days of the Church year.
I remember my very first time going to the Easter Vigil Mass. I was in high school, and a friend of ours was being received into Full Communion with the Church. I was hooked – the joy of that night was palpable, all the more so in welcoming someone who was a friend into the Church which was my home. If you’ve been close to anyone received into the Church like that, you know what I mean.
Typically, the Church lets it all loose on these wonderful days. We pull out all the stops, have all the best music, exquisite decorations, incense, processions, reverence beyond anything we display all year long. And for good reason. As the Exsultet sings,
This is the night,
when first you saved our fathers:
you freed the people of Israel from their slav’ry,
and led them dry-shod through the sea.This is the night,
when the pillar of fire destroyed the darkness of sin.This is night,
when Christians ev’rywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.This is the night,
when Jesus broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.
These are the central mysteries of our faith. Without the Cross and Resurrection, none of the rest of it makes any sense. Without the gift of salvation, the Incarnation is just an act of divine curiosity or snooping. Without salvation, even the creation of the world is meaningless. But salvation was always God’s plan from the very beginning. There was never a time when God was making it up as he went along. Age after age, we were sent prophets and given miracles and we constantly turned away from God. We had created this huge chasm between us and God that kept us apart. But all those prophets and miracles prepared us for the coming of our God, for the incredible act of divine grace that would re-create the world in astounding ways.Many have noted that this was an awfully strange way to save the world. Certainly our God did not have to debase himself to take on our corrupt human nature, but he did. He didn’t have to come and take on all our human frailty, walking our walk and living our life, but he did. He certainly did not have to die our death, the most miserable, humiliating death reserved for the lowest of the low and the commonest of criminals, but he did. And because he did, God raised him up, destroying death and its miserable chains forever. Because of this great act, as the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer for funerals tells us, “For those who believe in Christ, life is changed, not ended. When the body of our earthly life dwells in death, we gain an everlasting dwelling place in heaven.”
I think Godspell appropriately gets the earth-shattering nature of the Cross, but pretty much soft-pedals the Resurrection. As the Gospel readings show us, both events included violent earthquakes. That’s because in those two events, everything changed – everything. But the movie does make a strong point that even though God died – and make no mistake, God did die on that Cross – even though God died, God lives forever through the Resurrection: “Long live God!” Curiously the singing at the end of the movie moves from “Oh God, you’re dead” to “Long live God” to “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” to “Day by Day.” I think that’s interesting, and I think there’s something very right about it.
In the Resurrection, Christ lives forever, paving the way for us to do the same. And because he lives forever, we need to prepare the way for the Lord day after day after day, or “Day by Day,” if you will. The end of the movie mimics the rather cyclical nature of our Church year. And it is very true that the Salvation event, the Paschal Mystery, brings us back to the Advent of Christ in whole new ways. Preparing the way of the Lord is not something we do just in the four weeks of Advent. It is the project of a lifetime, the project of the ages of the Church, a project to be lived out day by day as we see God more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly.
At my mom’s house we have one very simple ornament for the Christmas Tree. Among all the others, you’ll find it hanging on a back branch to remind us of the truth of it all. It’s a nail, a spike really, hung from a green ribbon. It reminds us that at Christmas we celebrate something that doesn’t get wrapped up until the Easter days. The wood of the Christmas tree and the wood of the manger become the wood of the Cross. Birth leads to death leads to Resurrection leads to re-creation. All things are made new. The misery of a dark world is replaced by Christ, the light of the world. The grace of this wonderful mystery makes possible our flame of faith. The Exsultet says of that flame:
May the Morning Star which never sets
find this flame still burning:
Christ, that Morning Star,
who came back from the dead,
and shed his peaceful light on all mankind,
your Son, who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen. -
Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time
Our first reading this past week has been taking us on a kind of tour of the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament. Today’s pearl of wisdom, from the book of Ecclesiastes, talks about the seasons of a person’s life. In some ways, the book of Ecclesiastes can seem to be the most pessimistic of the books of Scripture. Based on the conjecture that the book may have been written by wise king Solomon, some say this was the book he wrote late in life, looking back on where life has taken him with a tired and cynical heart. You can get that feeling as you read through the book of Ecclesiastes, but if you stay with it, you often unearth some treasures like today’s selection.
Today we hear that there is a time for everything. And you can well imagine Solomon saying this at an old age, looking back on his life. We all know that life takes us all sorts of places, some good and some bad, some pleasant and some unpleasant, some joy-filled and some laden with sorrow. We need the one to appreciate the other, I think, and we pray for short times of unhappiness mixed with generous portions of joy. Life ebbs and flows, and ultimately leads us to the God who made us. I love the line toward the end of the reading: “He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts…”
Jesus too realized that his own life would be mixed with joy and sorrow. After asking who they said he was, he instructed them carefully that he would suffer, be rejected, would die and then rise. Here he links the sorrow in his life and in ours with the Cross, and the joy in his life and in ours with the Resurrection. We can’t have one without the other, and through it all God is glorified.
The protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up aptly in his famous serenity prayer. You’ve heard the beginning, but the ending is truly brilliant:
God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.Amen.
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The Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Youth Version)
This was for the afternoon youth ministry Mass.
Today is the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, sometimes called the Triumph of the Cross. On the face of it, this is a rather strange feast. How could something as awful as the cross ever be triumphant, exultant, or glorious? It’s been said that the cross was a very strange way to save the world, and I think that’s a good point. Sometimes I think we get so used to seeing the cross that we forget how terrible it is. We see the cross in Church, in our houses, on neck chains, and many other places. Maybe we’ve gotten kind of jaded because we’ve seen it so often.But the truth is the cross was horrible, humiliating and terrifying. So why on earth did God pick that way to save the world?
First of all, we know we needed salvation. We are all of us sinners, me too. People all through history have been sinful, and time and time again we have turned away from God. The price of all that sinfulness is death and a final ending in hell, or the netherworld as the Bible calls it. But God wasn’t satisfied with that. He made us to be with him forever, and so there is no way that he could let sin and death be the end of us. He refused to live forever without us, so he pursues us relentlessly, even to the point of his own Son’s death on the cross.
Because we had no way to make up for our sins, God did it for us. He sent his only Son Jesus into our world to live our life and die our death. He became one of us and acquainted himself with all our frustrations and worries. He taught us the way to live and we have all that in the Gospels. But he also took up our death, and died in the most horrifying, humiliating and painful way possible at that time. He died a criminal’s death for us who had been criminals against God.
But that death wasn’t the end of the story. God raised Jesus up and made possible our own resurrection from the dead one day. Just as death wasn’t the end for Jesus, it doesn’t have to be the end for us, if only we believe in Jesus and follow his way. The Gospel puts it simply for us today. We all know this verse John 3:16 because we see it on posters at so many sporting events. “For God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish, but have eternal life.”
People sometimes call that one verse the “Gospel in miniature.” And it sums up what we believe about the Cross today. Yes, it was horrifying, painful and humiliating, but because of the Cross we have the possibility of eternal life with Jesus Christ. There would be no Easter without Good Friday. Only God could take something as horrible as the cross and make it a victory. And so today we thank God for the gift of salvation as we celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
“We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.”
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The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Chicago priest and theologian Robert Barron speaks of what he calls a “beige” Catholicism. This is how he describes the Church during the years following the second Vatican Council. It was a time, he says, when “Christianity’s distinctive qualities and bright colors tended to be muted and its rough edges smoothed, while points of contact and continuity with non-Christian and secular realms were consistently brought into the light and celebrated.” Now, to be fair, Vatican II did indeed rightly bring to light the points of contact we have with our protestant brothers and sisters, and even our non-Christian friends. We do, in fact, have some things in common. But the downside of this emphasis was this kind of “beige” or blasé religion which challenged no one. “As a result,” Barron says, “the Christianity into which I was initiated was relatively bland and domesticated, easy to grasp and unthreatening.So what we were left with was a Catholicism in which one could come and go, there were no demands made of anyone so that they didn’t feel bad, and everyone was welcome to gather around and sing “Kumbaya.” And there may be a time and a place for all that, but it’s not what our religion is ultimately about.
And so we have today this relatively strange feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, sometimes called the Triumph of the Cross. This feast enters into our Liturgical year and rips us from our complacency to gaze on the awful, disfigured body of our Lord, writhing in pain, nailed to the cross. There is nothing beige about this moment. We are forced to look at this horrible scene and try to figure out how it can ever be glorious. What is exultant or triumphant about such a horrible, painful, humiliating death?
Now, to be fair, we have looked at the cross so many times in our lives that it may no longer be shocking to us. But in order to recapture the significance of this feast, indeed in order to recapture the significance of our faith, we must look once again at the cross and be repulsed. The book of Lamentations is a wonderful invitation to the cross: “Come, all you who pass by the way, look and see whether there is any suffering like my suffering, which has been dealt me when the LORD afflicted me on the day of his blazing wrath.” (Lamentations 1:12) If the thought of our God nailed to a cross and suffering an agony that can only be relieved by death doesn’t evoke strong feelings in us, then we cannot possibly ever come to a true acceptance of our faith.
What we should see on that cross is that our faith is not so much about our quest for God as much as it is about God’s relentless quest for us. As Fr. Barron says, his quest for us is a quest even to the point of death. And that’s the triumph we see on that horrible cross. The truth is that our God simply loves us too much to let sin and death have any kind of permanent hold on us. So he sent his only Son into our world to walk among us, to live our life and bear our temptations and frustrations, and to die our death in the most horrible and shocking way possible so that we could be relieved of the burden of our sins and come at last to everlasting life.
That’s the message of today’s Gospel. That one verse, John 3:16, which we see on placards and posters at so many sporting events, has been called the “Gospel in miniature.” “For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.” And sadly, we can get pretty bland about that too. We can accept the fact that our believing brings us to eternal life to the point that we never give it a second thought. But the cross makes that kind of beige faith impossible. It shows us that the eternal life of our expectation came at a price; a horrible, painful, humiliating price.
We are an Easter people who dwell, as well we should, on the Resurrection of our Lord. But we must not ever forget that the Resurrection would never have been possible without the Cross. Without the Resurrection, the cross is definitely that awful reminder of a meaningless death. But without the Cross, the Resurrection would never be the joyful relief that it is. We are never a Church that is about just one thing. We are always about Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
Which is good news for us because, as I’m sure you can tell me, every day of our lives isn’t Easter Sunday. We experience all sorts of death: the very real death of a loved one, failures of all sorts, sickness and infirmity, broken relationships, disappointments and frustrations – all of these are deaths that we must suffer at one point or another in our life. No life is untouched by hardship at some point. This feast, though, reminds us that God’s love can embrace all of that death, take it to the cross and rise up over it. Our life’s pain is not the end for any of us; those who believe in Christ can have eternal life, as John the evangelist eagerly reminds us today.
And so, as much painful as it is to look with horror on the cross today, our eyes of faith can also see great beauty, exaltation and triumph. But we have to see both things. If we cannot bear to walk through the pain of the Cross, we’ll never get to the joy of the Resurrection – it’s both or nothing.
So this feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross has us seeing anything but beige. Instead we see the black darkness of sin and death, the red blood of Christ shed for that sin, and the gold glory of the Resurrection. This feast must find us bending the knee at the cross of Christ, and proclaiming with our lips that Jesus Christ is Lord – Lord of our pain and Lord of our triumph – to the glory of God the Father.
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