God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ
Sunday’s epistle reading (Trinity 15) from Galatians complements and informs Holy Cross Day. The major feast days are all about important moments in the life of Christ and of the Apostles and other figures that are named and mentioned in the Scriptures. Holy Cross is a minor feast day which reflects on things or people that emerge in the history of the Church and which have theological significance.
The cross is central to Christian thinking, to be sure. We are signed with the sign of the cross in baptism. The cross is often a central feature of the architecture of the Church as cross-shaped and as in the rood screen here at Christ Church. Rood is an old English word for Cross. Then there are other visible things like the processional cross and the altar cross, as well as the cross above the pulpit and at the back of the Church which bear the figure of Christ crucified on them. We are reminded of the Cross as the dominant symbol of Christian identity. In the liturgy, absolution and blessing is pronounced in word and action, the action is the sign of the cross made by the priest and some people make the sign of the cross themselves. Somehow the cross signals our Christian identity.
A symbol of comfort, it also must discomfort us, a “strange and uncouth thing,” as the poet George Herbert puts it. There have been those who find it a disturbing sign because it recalls the ineluctable cruelty of our humanity; in short, a symbol of violence and torture. Yet the symbolic power of the cross has everything to do with Christ’s overcoming of all and every form of evil: past, present, and future. It is that victory of Christ through the cross that is constantly being recalled to us. It has become a “beauteous form”which assures “a piteous mind,” as John Donne puts it, a mind in need of pity.
Apart from the theological significance of the cross in the Christian understanding, The Feast of the Holy Cross is also about its historical importance. One of the earlier titles for this feast is The Invention of the Holy Cross. An intriguing title, it does not mean that the cross is some sort of fictional device or instrument. Invenio or invention here refers to the discovery of what was thought to be the true cross by the Empress Helena in the fourth century. Along with the Invention, there was The Feast of The Exaltation of The Cross. The true cross? Well, that there was a cross seems certain but whether one could possibly know what was or was not the true cross is another matter. How could one possibly know? We can say theologically that there was an historical cross on which the historical Jesus was crucified but it is not at all clear how one could possibly lay claim to the actual and physical pieces of the true cross.
What is claimed for as pieces of the true cross throughout the churches of the world would make a veritable forest but what is more important is the significance of the cross itself as the symbol of human redemption and as the symbol of sacrificial love and service in our lives. That is what Holy Cross day reminds us by way of the Collect and then the suggested readings from Passion Sunday, readings which recall us to Christ’s sacrifice and the ways of our participation in that sacrifice. In other words, Holy Cross day recalls us to the cross as the potent symbol of our Christian identity.
Paul’s words in Galatians show us how an instrument of torture and cruelty becomes the symbol of new life, indeed a new creation. We glory in the cross of Christ precisely because the world is crucified unto us and we unto the world. What that means is that we do not need to be defined by the agendas of the world; instead we glory in the Cross of Christ. Our identity in him governs our actions in the world. It gives us a kind of freedom in the face of the world’s tyrannies and nonsense. We need to learn to have confidence in the cross of Christ remembering what it teaches and what it means.
The cross, Lancelot Andrewes famously says in a Good Friday sermon, is the liber charitatis, the book of love, opened out for us to read. The cross cannot be divorced from the events of Holy Week, from the passion of Christ, which is entirely about his love for us and for his broken and fallen world. In contemplating the cross, we are being lifted up even as Christ was lifted up on the cross to gather all people unto himself.
The outstretched arms of the crucified embrace us in God’s love. That love is to be engraven on our hearts and even on our bodies. We are to bear the marks of his loving sacrifice in the living out of our lives. Cross-shaped lives are lives of sacrificial love. Such love is nothing less than the love of Christ at work in us.
God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ
Fr. David Curry
Eve of Holy Cross
September 13th, 2018