Sermon for Holy Cross Day
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”
The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing,” as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It is signaled in what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy which is shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire, of love as forgiveness. But what does it mean?
I have often been struck with the coincidence of the early beginning of school term with the Feast of the Holy Cross, and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so 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 celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and 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 part our renewed discovery of our commitment to Christ in his Church.
In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life. The cross is the meeting place of all lovers.
