Day: September 15, 2022

Sermons

Meditation on the Feast of the Holy Cross

“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 signals 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. But what does it mean?

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14th) 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. Invenio 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. Invenio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

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 such lovers, too.

The true Cross? The actual Cross on which Christ was crucified, as Christians believe? How would one know? Surely it is worthy of the kind of dismissive scorn of an Edward Gibbons to point out that the many relics of the true Cross scattered throughout Europe would make for a veritable “Birnum Wood” of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, a moving forest of crosses. Which is the true one? And how would one 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, it is not too much to say, has shaped, even a post-Christian world.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 15 September

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

The question of the Psalmist (Ps. 8.4), the biblical hymn writer, looks back to the story of creation in Genesis. The question reflects what we see before us in the work of the sixth day. Creation, we have discovered, is an orderly affair that marks the distinction of one thing from another. It is poetic and philosophical and as such provides the ground for ‘science’ understood in its different forms over more than two millennia. Creation is about a relation to the Creator, to an intellectual principle upon which the being and knowing of things depends.

The radical nature of this way of thinking is often overlooked. To put it simply, it means that the world is, in principle, intelligible. Creation is sacred but not divine nor is the natural world something to be feared and frightening; in short, something evil. As Genesis 1 makes emphatically clear, it is good in its parts, indeed very good as a whole. That sense of good is intellectual but with ethical implications. It serves as an important counter to our culture of antagonism and fear.

Last Thursday was the first of the first Chapel services. It was also the last service in the Chapel under the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. It was only in the early afternoon of September 8th that we learned of her death at age 96. With this Thursday’s service, a week later, all of the services have entered into history as being now under the reign of King Charles III. I mention these things because the concept of sovereignty, whether diffused throughout the body politic in the manner of republicanism or concentrated in the person of the monarch, is so significant. Order is paramount. Political life in its truth is not simply about power for power’s sake; it is about truth and order, about dignity and respect, about duty and service. In the Christian understanding and as echoed in other religions, the souls of Kings and Queens, of those in authority, are in the hands of God. God is the ultimate author and creation in its varied forms is God’s poetry, God’s making. The Greek word for making or creating is poesis, poetry. God in the wonder of the creation story speaks the world into being.

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