by CCW | 14 September 2016 01:01
There is something quite wonderful about saints’ days and holy days, whether major or minor. They often bring out connections and associations which belong to the spiritual coherence of our life together in the body of Christ, the Church. In September, for example, there is the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary that already points us towards the Nativity of Christ at Christmas. Though there is not a shred of biblical or scriptural reference to Mary’s birth, only later legends and many depictions in art, it is a necessary and reasonable deduction that she was born and that her birth (like her conception) is part of the divine economy, part of God’s plan and purpose for our humanity. She is the chosen vehicle and vessel through whom God becomes man and those ideas as tied to the Annunciation illumine the mystery of the Incarnation. Her active acquiescence to the divine will conveyed by angel’s words is the essence of faith. “Be it unto me according to thy word.” The purpose of her whole being is discovered in her willing the divine will for our salvation.
That in turn leads to another feast, The Feast of the Holy Cross. It actually refers to the post-biblical event of the supposed discovery or invention and subsequent exaltation of the true Cross by the Empress Helena in the fourth century. It is a way of calling our attention to the deeper purpose of Christ’s Incarnation. His conception and birth through Mary is now seen in the light of his passion. The passion concentrates on the cross. The Feast of the Holy Cross focuses our attention on the purpose and meaning of the cross.
At once a hideous and uncouth thing, a symbol of the reality of cruelty and torture, of death and shame, it has become the means of our being joined to Christ, to our being gathered to him in love and joy. But only if we look upon the cross. In his being lifted up on the cross and our looking upon him there is the hope of our being lifted up into the love of God.
John has famously captured the point of the crucifixion by way of reference to an Old Testament story of the people of Israel in the wilderness complaining and kvetching against God and Moses. The lessons of the Exodus are hard lessons, to be sure. In their complaints they are punished by being afflicted by biting serpents. They cry out to Moses to intercede to God for mercy. The mercy, a symbolical foreshadowing of the cross in the Christian understanding, is the bronze serpent, an image of the serpent that is made and raised up before the people. Whoever looks upon the brazen serpent raised up is healed, made whole. They are healed and made whole by looking upon their sin made objective before them in the image of the serpent. Just so, John suggests, Christ’s being lifted up saves our broken and wounded humanity. We look upon the crucified. “They” – we – Zechariah suggests – “shall look on him whom they” – we – “pierced.” It is a phrase with which John concludes his account of the Passion.
The Feast of the Holy Cross reminds us of the tangible reality of Christ’s crucifixion and its meaning and purpose, the good that comes out of human evil made objective before us in the crucified. In him we see the full meaning of our sin objectified. A relic, however understood, reminds us of the actual and physical aspects of the spiritual. We cannot know whether this piece of wood or that piece of wood, or this cloth or that cloth, this nail or that nail are the real ones associated with the story of Christ. There are inescapable limits to our historical knowing. What we contemplate through the witness of the Scripture are the reality of those things in principle and for our understanding. They belong to the ways in which we are gathered to Christ.
The Holy Eucharist, too, is about our being gathered into the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the power of the Spirit. The cross is ever before us. It is central to the Christian mystery of the love of God. It belongs to God, and, most explicitly, in the story of Christ’s sacrifice and passion, to bring evil out of all and every form of human evil. That is a most powerful idea and one which speaks profoundly, I think, to the disorders of our times in our post-Christian world. The cross gathers us to Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Eve of Holy Cross, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/09/14/sermon-for-the-feast-of-the-holy-cross/
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