And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me
The shadows of the Cross reach forwards and backwards, it seems. It is the central and defining image of the Christian Faith; everything is concentrated on the Cross. There we behold the realities of sin and love.
I am struck by the wonderful coincidence of the Feast of the Holy Cross on September 14th with the early beginning of the School year and the return to academic studies. The Feast itself as marked in the Prayer Book Calendar as Holy Cross Day refers to either the Invention of the Holy Cross associated with the celebrated visit of Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine to Jerusalem, and to her purported discovery of the Holy Cross in the early 4th century, or the 7th century celebration of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. These are, obviously, post-biblical events that belong to the living tradition of the Church, and yet reveal something about the symbolic significance of the Cross in the Christian understanding.
For some the Cross is an uncomfortable and disquieting symbol of human cruelty and civilisational barbarism. Yet it is something more than just that “strange and uncouth thing,” as George Herbert calls it (‘The Crosse’). Somehow there is in the idea of the Cross and in its representations a “beauteous form,” as John Donne suggests (‘What if this Present Were the World’s Last Night’). It is, in the Christian understanding, the meeting place of lovers. As Lancelot Andrewes beautifully puts it, the cross is liber charitatis, the book of love opened for us to read. It is the great symbol of God’s reconciling love in the redemption of our humanity, the recovery and restoration of our fallen being; of creation restored to God, we might say. The title, ‘invention,’ is suggestive of what belongs to intellectual life, to the discovery of truth and goodness. Invenio crucis. And in the exaltation, the lifting up of the Cross, we are reminded of Christ’s great teaching about the Cross. “And I, I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me” (John 12. 32).
Whether or not, Helena actually discovered the actual cross or pieces thereof upon which Christ was crucified is beside the point and unknowable. Who could possibly know and upon what evidence? There are things which can’t be known empirically or historically; things which are lost in the shadows of time.
We see but in “a glass darkly,” in enigmas and mysteries, in the shadows. The great wonder of Holy Cross Day is that something is glimpsed and known in and through the shadows of our broken world. If creation is revelation then so too is redemption. Something is made known under the shadows of the Cross.
T.S. Eliot ends his poem, The Hollow Men, itself a commentary on the uncertainties of modernity, with a set of two contrasting couplets and one triplet with the recurring refrain “Falls the Shadow.” The images reflect a range of neo-Platonic and Christian ideas about our relation to the One, the Good, to the Divine Intellect; in short, to God. I would like to think that perhaps the shadow that falls is the shadow of the Cross which illumines and redeems.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow …
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow.
In the shadows of the Cross we glimpse something of the reality of the idea, of the unity of the motion and the act, of the concept and the creation, of the emotion and the response, of the desire and the spasm, of the potency and the existence, of the essence and the descent. Such shadows illumine and lift us up to God. The shadows reveal as much as they conceal. And that is our good.
Under the shadows of the Oak of Mamre, God reveals himself to Abraham and Sarah as Three Men or Angels and as the One Lord who promises to them the birth of the promised son. Sarah hiding behind the tent door laughs at the very idea. But “with God all things are possible” and in ways that go far beyond human imagining. The promised son will be the intended sacrifice by Abraham only to be saved for “God himself will provide the sacrifice.” Something of the shadows of the Cross reach back to the shade of the oak of Mamre and to the intended sacrifice of Isaac. The shadows reach forward to Calvary, to the free-willing knowledge of Christ in his sacrifice for us. “And I, if be lifted up will draw all men unto me.” We discover this only to be lifted by it.
Such is light in the shadows, the shadows of the Cross.
And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me
Fr. David Curry
Holy Cross Day, September 14th, 2020