“God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”
Today’s Epistle from Galatians complements Holy Cross Day which is tomorrow, September 14th. The Major Feast days in the Church Calendar are known as “Red Letter Days” because in the manuscript tradition they were highlighted in red, rubro in Latin, from which we also get the idea of rubrics or directions in the Prayer Book. Ironically they are printed in the Prayer Book Calendar in bold black letters! The Major Holy Days highlight important moments in the life of Christ and the Apostles and others named in the New Testament Scriptures.
There are also a number of Minor Feast days or “Black Letter Days” that commemorate events or people in the history of the Church. Holy Cross is a Minor feast day, associated with an historic event, the so-called “discovery of the Cross” of Christ’s crucifixion by the Empress Helena in the fourth century, originally commemorated on May 3rd as The Invention of the Holy Cross, meaning discovery, and then as The Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14th in the basilica in Jerusalem. Both feasts were known in Saxon times as Roodmas-day; Rood means cross in Old English. Both feasts were restored in the calendar of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother-prayer book of what has come to be known as the Anglican Communion.
These titles belong to Holy Cross Day, September 14th. It also serves as a marker for an ancient sensibility about the natural seasons of the year in relation to the Sanctorale, the cycle of Saints’ days within the structure of the Church Year. The Autumn Ember Days occur on the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after Holy Cross Day. In the Canadian BCP, a Collect for Holy Cross Day (BCP, p. 321) is appointed along with a permissive rubric about using the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday. A nice provision, it underscores the interrelationship of justification, sanctification, and glorification through the centrality of the Cross. All these considerations speak to the theological significance of the Cross in the life of the Christian Church as today’s Epistle indicates. Along with the awareness of the patterns of the seasons of nature, the Ember Days highlight the ordained ministry of the Church, directing that the Pentecost Ember Day propers about the divers Orders in the Church be always used first in the other Ember seasons.
[Holy Cross Day is significant too for priests who belong to the SSC, The Society of the Holy Cross, such as myself and Fr. Todd. This week I will be off to Ft. Worth, Texas for the annual Synod of the SSC Province to which we are attached. Please pray for me and for the Society which promotes the sanctification and the spirituality of our catholic priesthood to the glory of God and the good of his Church and people.]
The Cross is central to Christian thinking and imagery. We are signed with the sign of the Cross in baptism; something which classical Anglican divines such as Richard Hooker argued was a befitting, reasonable and proper custom and holy practice. Christian Churches architecturally are often cross-shaped or cruciform. Some have rood screens such as here at Christ Church. Note the significance of the movement in the liturgy symbolized architecturally: we go from the baptismal font, near the entrance of the Church marking the sacramental beginning of our lives in faith, passing through the nave, and under the Rood Screen or Cross to the altar at Communion. A powerful and symbolic reminder of our Christian life in pilgrimage and faith.
There are other visible things like the Processional Cross as carried by Gavin 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. The Cross is simply the dominant symbol of Christian identity. In the liturgy, absolution and blessing are pronounced by word and action. The sign of the Cross is made by the priest and some cross themselves in response to absolution and to the blessing. The Cross signals our Christian identity in word and action, we might say. It is more than just a pretty piece of jewelry.
Yet as a symbol of comfort, it must also discomfort us. The poet George Herbert calls it a “strange and uncouth thing.” Some find it a disturbing sign because it recalls the ineluctable cruelty of our humanity; in short, a symbol of violence and torture. But whose violence and torture? Ours in the vain attempt to obliterate or kill God in the crucifixion of Christ. “Crucify him. Crucify him,” we cry on Palm Sunday. 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 remembered. It has become, as John Donne suggests, this “beauteous form” which assures “a piteous mind,” a mind in need of pity; our minds!
“The Cross shines forth in mystic glow … He reigns and triumphs from the Tree … O Tree of grace, the conquering sign,” as in Fortunatus’ wonderful Passion Sunday hymns. “Faithful Cross, thou sign of triumph/ Now for man the noblest Tree … Symbol of the world’s redemption.” Pretty powerful stuff.
The earliest title, The Invention of the Holy Cross, does not mean that the cross is some sort of fictional device or instrument but refers to the discovery of what was thought to be the true cross by Empress Helena. This signals the idea of the making known of spiritual truths through claims about physical things. I have often reflected on the complementary association between The Invention of the Holy Cross with the beginning of the School Year, suggesting that education, too, is a kind of invention, meaning the discovery of the things of the understanding that happens through learning; a marked contrast to an instrumental or utilitarian approach to education.
But the true cross? What exactly does that mean? Well, that there was a cross seems reasonable to presume. Certainly there is historical evidence that crosses were used for the punishment and death of ‘criminals’, but how could one possibly know which was (or was not) the actual cross on which Christ was crucified? We can say theologically that there was an ‘historical cross’ on which the ‘historical Jesus’ was crucified as witnessed in the Scriptures and subsequent accounts, but it is not at all clear how one could possibly lay claim to the actual physical pieces of the true cross. Such are the limitations and the contingencies of history. There are so many things that can’t be known historically in any kind of empirical way. But that is not the only form of truth and knowledge.
To be sure, what are claimed as pieces of the true cross, scattered in reliquaries throughout the churches of the world, would make for a veritable forest, not unlike Shakespeare’s “Birnum Wood com[ing] to Dunsinane” in his play MacBeth. What is most 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 actually plays into the imagery of Shakespeare’s Macbeth since the walking forest of Birnum Wood (branches used as camouflage, the source of Tolkien’s Ents, walking trees in Lord of the Rings?) signals the overthrow of the tyrant Macbeth and the restoration of Scotland. The imagery suggests the ways nature is used by grace to restore order and truth. That is the deeper significance of Holy Cross Day. It recalls Christ’s sacrifice and the ways of our participation in that sacrifice. We are reminded of the Cross as the potent symbol of our Christian identity in today’s readings and in their close association with Holy Cross Day.
Paul in Galatians shows how the Cross becomes the symbol of new life, indeed, “a new creation.” We “glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” precisely because “the world is crucified unto [us] and [we] unto the world”. “I bear in my body,” Paul says, “the marks of the Lord Jesus.” This alludes to the sufferings of Christ as concentrated and made visible on the Cross. He suffers for us and in us. “We suffer, that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom.8.17). Redemptive suffering belongs to our life in Christ.
The Cross is the real counter to our anxieties identified in the Gospel which belong to the conflicts in our souls between God and Mammon, meaning our worldly concerns. It is not that the concerns about food, drink, clothing, etc., don’t matter; at issue is how much they matter to us, whether they completely define or possess us. Jesus’s words “be not anxious,” repeated thrice, belong to his Sermon on the Mount. In a wonderful parade of images, he bids us think about the features of the natural world that point to the Providence of God at work in nature and in our lives. “Behold the fowls of the air”; “ Consider the lilies of the field”; there are lessons to be learned from the created order, but, above all, he says, “seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”
This means that we are not to be defined by the agendas of the world; instead we glory in the Cross of Christ which overcomes the world in its opposition to God occasioned by human sin. Our identity in him governs our actions in the world. This gives us a kind of freedom in the face of the world’s tyrannies and nonsense. We learn to have confidence in the Cross of Christ by remembering what it teaches and what it means.
The Cross always recalls us to the Passion of Christ, which is entirely about his love for us and for our broken and fallen world. In contemplating the Cross, we are lifted up out of ourselves even as Christ, lifted up on the Cross, gathers all people unto himself. The arms of the Crucified embrace us in God’s love. That love is to be written 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. This is nicely captured in a Holy Week prayer from the American Prayer Book.
Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
Such is the peace that “passeth understanding” and “keeps us from all things hurtful and leads us to all things profitable to our salvation”. And so we say with Paul that “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 15
September 13th, 2026