Author: CCW

“They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh,
with the affections and lusts” … “Go and do thou likewise”

A double text. Words from today’s Epistle and Gospel, yet words, too, which illumine and are illumined in turn by another feature of this day, namely, Holy Cross.

I have often been struck by the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall and the return to School with The Feast of the Holy Cross on September 14^th, and especially, with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks profoundly and yet paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the historical and celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem, and from 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. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual and spiritual life. The cross is the meeting place of lovers which demands our action of loving service, our acting out of the charity of Christ, something which belongs to the deep meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Who is the true neighbour? “He that showed mercy on him.” But what is that mercy except exactly that which is ultimately seen on the Cross of Christ.

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“He hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear
and the dumb to speak”

In the days of the closing down of summer, to use Alistair MacLeod’s compelling phrase and image, the title of his most reflective short story, we make a turn to new beginnings, to the renewal of patterns and programmes in our various lives. On the Sunday after Labour Day, in the Maritimes, at any rate, the cottages have begun to be closed down for the winter, schools and colleges have resumed, vacations are over and done, and even summer seems already a distant and nostalgic memory. We are back, it might seem, to our usual lives.

But are we? Is it really about merely returning to the drudgery and the boring sameness of week after week, day after day, even Sunday after Sunday? It needn’t be, it seems to me. Not only are there the beginning hints of changes in the air but there are the deeper challenges of the Scripture readings. This Sunday marks the notional mid-way point of the Trinity Season and it signals important things to us. We are being challenged to be open – “Ephphatha”, Jesus says, in one of those rare but precious moments where Aramaic appears in the Scripture and is immediately translated by the Evangelist, in this case Mark, into Greek. For us, of course, there is the further translation into English, yet the Aramaic word remains in our text, a quiet witness to another aspect of the reality of the Incarnate Christ. His spoken words were in all likelihood Aramaic, a variant of Hebrew, but we only know his words through the Greek and subsequent translations. His saving word for all humanity is revealed through a particular culture and language; the universal in and through the particular.

“He has done all things well”, Mark concludes, having detailed a healing miracle. What is that all about? In a way, we are being opened to the very thing that St. Paul is saying in the Epistle reading from 2^nd Corinthians. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life”.

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