by CCW | 14 September 2017 21:00
Our Prayer Book provides a Collect[1] for Holy Cross Day and appoints the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday for its commemoration. There is something quite wonderful and powerful about that sensibility. We are being recalled through a non-biblical feast based upon a set of post-biblical events to what is central and essential to the Christian faith. We are simply recalled to the centrality of the Cross.
Why? The Cross is at once the meeting place of lovers and the betrayal of all our loves. We crucify Christ. The Cross confronts us with the failings and failures of our humanity, of the disorder and disarray of our hearts and minds that lead to devastation and destruction in every age. But the Cross confronts us with the greatest betrayal – our betrayal of God and his friendship with us. To be recalled to the Cross is to be recalled to the Passion of Christ – to what he wills to endure for us. It shows us the divine love which is greater than all and every human love and which overcomes all our sin and folly. Such is the power of forgiveness.
Forgiveness. The Cross is the sign of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the reconciling love that makes all things new out of the violent nothingness of our sins. Forgiveness is made visible and audible on the cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Christ carries us in our ignorant folly and violence into the hands of his Father, into the reconciling love which is his Passion and Death. Such is the radical meaning of the Cross. It is then in turn required of us to live and act in the same way. What is that way? It is the way signaled in the Collect. God’s grace is given so that we take up the Cross and follow Christ through life and death.
The Cross speaks to us about death and resurrection and about the necessity of sacrifice. Sacrifice is about Christ’s life in us. Another lives in me and I in him and only so can we live for one another. It means a dying to ourselves and living to God and one another in the body of Christ, the Church.
We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children and her sons, James and John, who come to Jesus “desiring a certain thing of him.” The point is that while we think we know what we want we are often mistaken. “Ye know not what ye ask,” Jesus tells her about her ambition for her sons. She had wanted positions of prestige and power for her boys. Doesn’t every parent have ambitions for their children? Here we are being reminded that we often don’t know what we are asking for either for ourselves or for our children.
Ultimately the greatest good that we can seek is found not in privilege and appointment but in sacrifice and service. Holy Cross reminds us of the constant reality of living sacrificially. It is the exact opposite of the entitlement culture which thinks that God and the world owe us everything that we think we want. No. We fail to confront ourselves in “the devices and desires of our hearts” which we have followed too much and to our own detriment and that of others. To confess the Cross is to confront the human condition of sinfulness without being destroyed by what we see of ourselves. And all because of the mercy of God made visible and audible on the Cross of Christ.
In our baptisms we are signed with the sign of the Cross. We come into this Cross-shaped place. We pass under the Rood Screen to the altar. We receive the sacrament of Christ’s sacrifice for us so that his sacrifice can shape and inform our lives.
Sacrifice is not about a martyr complex. It is about living in and with and from Christ in his deep love for us. His sacrifice compelling us to live sacrificially for him and for one another. We live in and from what he has accomplished for us. Only so can it be ours.
Fr. David Curry
Holy Cross Day
September 14th, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/09/14/meditation-for-holy-cross-day/
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