“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.
The true Cross? The actual Cross on which Christ was crucified, as Christians believe? How would one know? The many relics of the true Cross scattered throughout Europe in churches and cathedrals would make for a veritable “Birnum Wood,” a moving forest of crosses. Which is the true one? And how could one possibly 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 piece of wood 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 to the understanding, too, for that matter, of the cultures and worlds that the Cross has shaped, even a post-Christian world, whatever one might mean by that term.
The Cross convicts and convinces. As a symbol, it signifies the meeting and the encounter between the human and the divine. Not in the sense that the horizontal signifies human love and the vertical, divine love. Our human loves, too, are about aspirations, however incomplete and misguided, confused and in disarray, and even deadly and destructive. Such is the reality of sin. The Cross convicts us of our sins. And yet it convinces us of something which is greater than our sins, the grace of God in the sacrifice of Christ. It convinces us of the divine love which sets love in order in us, if we will let it. For it means the crucifying of our desires. But this is something we have always to learn,and to discover ever anew. “You know not what you ask,” Jesus says to the Mother of James and John.
Yet we are meant to learn how to participate in the passion and death of Christ, bearing in our own bodies as Paul puts it in the Epistle read on Sunday, “the marks of the Lord Jesus.” It is the meaning of Baptism and Communion – the one signals the beginning of our lives as marked by the sign of the Cross in our dying to ourselves and living to God and for one another in the Body of Christ; the other signals our continual incorporation into his life, “a perpetual memorial of that his precious death” and “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” We come to the altar only by way of the Cross, passing under the Rood Screen to kneel in penitential adoration.
“My eros is crucified,” Ignatius of Antioch said, capturing in 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, 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. The Cross is the ultimate statement about the violent disorder and destructive confusion in our souls.
But even more the Cross is the liber charitatis, (Lancelot Andrewes) “the book of love” opened for us to read precisely because of the divine love which redeems our human loves. They have to be crucified in us in order to be reconstituted by the divine love made manifest on the Cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” There can be no more gentle and yet more crucifying word from the Crucified than this most convicting and most convincing word.
It is signaled, too, in the movement and logic of the liturgy. “Lift up your hearts” we hear, and by grace we respond, “we lift them up unto the Lord.” How is this possible? How can there be this upward desiring of my soul and yours? Because of the redemption of our desires in Christ. “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me.” Because of the Cross. It convicts and convinces us of the divine love which forgives and restores.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”
Fr. David Curry,
Holy Cross, September 14th, 2015