Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity/Holy Cross Day
admin | 14 September 2014“They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh,
with the affections and lusts” … “Go and do thou likewise”
A double text. Words from today’s Epistle and Gospel, yet words, too, which illumine and are illumined in turn by another feature of this day, namely, Holy Cross.
I have often been struck by the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall and the return to School with The Feast of the Holy Cross on September 14th, and especially, with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks profoundly and yet paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Inventio crucis.
Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the historical and celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem, and from her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.
In the Christian understanding, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual and spiritual life. The cross is the meeting place of lovers which demands our action of loving service, our acting out of the charity of Christ, something which belongs to the deep meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Who is the true neighbour? “He that showed mercy on him.” But what is that mercy except exactly that which is ultimately seen on the Cross of Christ.
The true Cross? The actual Cross on which Christ was crucified? How exactly would one know? Surely it is worthy of the kind of dismissive scorn of an Edward Gibbons to point out that the many relics of the true Cross scattered throughout Europe would make for a veritable forest of crosses. Which is the true one? How would one know?
It is one thing to accept that there was crucifixion and that Christ was crucified. It is, after all, what we preach, says St. Paul. But it is another thing to say this or that piece of wood was the Cross on which he was crucified. We confront the inescapable limits of historical knowing. Yet this feast, rooted and grounded in the subsequent history of the Church, bears witness to the theological significance of the Cross for the understanding of the Christian faith and for the understanding, too, of the cultures and worlds that the Cross has shaped.
The shadows of the Cross reach backwards and forwards. In a wonderful way, we are illumined by its shadows. There we discover the limits of human love as well as the divine love that redeems all our desires.
In a wonderful passage in The Book of Genesis, Abraham encounters the Lord, it is said, as three men or three angels, under the shade of the oaks of Mamre. A scene of exquisite oriental courtesy and ancient hospitality to the stranger or strangers in our midst, Abraham sacrifices a calf from his herd and hastens to prepare a feast for them as they “rest under the tree.” As the text puts it, “he stood by them under the tree while they ate.” He is present but only as a servant standing by. They – the plural is instructive and intriguing – ask him, “where is Sarah your wife?” but then, the promise of a son to Abraham and Sarah is given by the Lord in the singular, “I”. “I will return in the spring, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.” The ambiguities of ‘they’ and ‘I’, of the three and one, are profoundly suggestive.
The son is the promised son, Isaac, the one through whom God’s promise to Abraham that “through your seed all nations shall be blessed” will be realized. But the promised son, too, is the unwitting son of the intended sacrifice by Abraham in the terrifying scene of the test of Abraham’s faith. “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”, Isaac will innocently ask, to which Abraham will heart-wrenchingly reply, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” Indeed, “God will provide himself.” Sarah, listening at the tent door, overhears the Lord’s promise to Abraham about a son and she “laughed to herself”, saying in effect, how shall this be? since I and my husband have grown old.
The laughter of Sarah reverberates down throughout the centuries and expresses the ancient sense of the unbridgeable distance between God and our humanity and the contemporary sense of the collapse of God into our world; in short, nihilism – the meaninglessness of all reality. Here the “God from whom no secrets [can be] hid” (“and to whom all desires [are] known!”) challenges the laughter of Sarah. “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Thus, Sarah quickly denies that she has laughed. “With God”, of course, “all things are possible.”
The laughter of Sarah will ultimately be redeemed by the question and response of Mary to the will of God conveyed by the message of an angel. “How shall this be?” Mary, too, asks, not in skeptical doubt but in questioning wonder – the true eros of our humanity. As the counter to Sarah’s denial, there is Mary’s affirmation, “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That means the crucifying of our expectations and certainties, the crucifying of our desires without which there can be no redemption of our desires. The shadows of the Cross illuminate what happened under the shade of the oaks of Mamre and what happens in the dark wood of our contemporary lives.
This biblical scene becomes the basis for one of the most wonderful icons of Eastern Orthodoxy, the icon of the Trinity and the Eucharist, the icon of the divine fellowship between God and man. We are there as participants, not just as servants standing by or hiding behind the tent door, listening and laughing at what seems utterly preposterous and altogether beyond all and every human desire.
The shadows of the Cross reach forward into the history and life of the Church and into the web and tangle of our own lives. “My eros is crucified”, Ignatius of Antioch said, capturing in a phrase the meaning of the Cross as the meeting place of lovers. Our eros is the passionate yearning of our souls for wholeness and completeness; ultimately, it is the desire of the soul for God. But it is confused and misguided, and even willful and destructive about what it thinks it wants and about how it is to be achieved. Full of good intentions, we make a mess of our lives and hurt those whom we love. The Cross is the ultimate statement about the violent disorder and destructive confusion in our souls. The crucifixion of Christ is our vain and futile attempt to annihilate God, the empty triumph of our nihilism.
But the Cross is something far more and far greater than our folly and nothingness. It is the liber charitatis, as Lancelot Andrewes puts it, the book of love opened for us to read because of the divine love which redeems our human loves. How we read shapes how we act. That is the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan; it illustrates what it means to love your neighbor by the giving of ourselves to one another. Such is mercy. But all and only because of God’s love signaled on the cross.
“They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh,
with the affections and lusts” … “Go and do thou likewise”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 13 and Holy Cross
September 14th, 2014