Christ Church

Link to the Audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 15

I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus

Such marks in the body are like large letters. They tell a story. What is written in our lives? In the Gospel, Jesus tells us three times not to be anxious. Yet we live in a most anxious time. Tyndale’s translation, which shaped the King James version which came to be used in the Prayer Book in 1662, has Jesus bid us “be not careful.” This may seem strange until we realize that we are only too often full of cares, overburdened with fears and worries, “distracted with much busyness,” like Martha, literally unable to attend to the “one thing necessary.” In modern times, the older concept of carefulness has been replaced with a more loaded and psychological word, anxiety, the Englishing of the German angst.

That has, I think, a different kind of intensity. It belongs to a more modern preoccupation with ourselves and with a kind of dread, at least as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche see it, a fear about ourselves in having to commit, to think and to act in an alien and meaningless world. The anxiety is in us, in the negativity of our modern subjectivity and self-consciousness; incurvatus in se, as turned in upon ourselves we are in dread of ourselves, uncertain about how to act or how to be. The title of W.H. Auden’s 1947 prose poem, ‘The Age of Anxiety,’ has come to define our culture as the culture of anxiety, at once wanting to connect and be with one another in a kind of sympathy and yet altogether uncertain about how that can be accomplished. We are, perhaps, no longer “assured of certain certainties,” in Eliot’s phrase but sense the need to be taught as he puts it, “to care and not to care,” to learn to care in the right way. The current culture of outrage only adds to our anxieties and divides us from one another in endless antagonisms. Anxious about being anxious only adds to our anxieties.

In our obsessions and busyness, our fears and worries, we lose something of ourselves. The paradox of being too caught up in ourselves is a loss of ourselves, a forgetting of who we are in the sight of God and his providence.

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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.

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