Celebrating and Sharing in Jesus’ Triumph, Exaltation of the Cross, September 14, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross
September 14, 2020
Num 21:4-9, Ps 78, Phil 2:6-11, Jn 3:13-17

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we celebrate what Saint John Paul II used to call the symbol of Christianity. We marked ourselves with it upon entering the Church. We began Mass with it. We’ll end Mass with it. We start almost every time of prayer with it. Probably every one of our bedrooms and dining rooms has one in it. All types of people wear it around their necks, from the Pope and bishops, to teenage pop stars, to newly baptized babies. The priest holds his arms in the shape of it during the Eucharistic prayer. And it is the center and focal point of every Catholic Church. We are talking about the Cross. The Cross is the greatest summary of our faith. St. Francis of Assisi used to call it his “book,” where he learned all of his wisdom. The Cross is also the key that opens the doors of heaven. St. Rose of Lima, the first saint of the Americas, said, “Apart from the Cross, there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.” If we wish to get to eternal life with God, we must climb up with Jesus by means of the Cross.
• To non-believers, to celebrate the feast of the Cross makes no sense at all. It is sheer lunacy. To those who don’t believe, the Cross is exclusively a symbol of pain and horrible death. Crucifixion was the worst and most cruel end imaginable in the ancient world. The modern day equivalent would be the electric chair. To celebrate or “exalt” the Cross would be akin to our “lifting up the electric chair” in jubilation. To center every Church with an image of Christ’s suffering on the Cross would be similar to constructing a place of worship in which one would put a gruesome image of someone convulsing and dying in an electric chair or placing a sculpture of someone being burned at the stake. We’ve become so used to seeing the Cross that we’ve become somewhat anaesthetized to the normal shock that should be any person’s first reaction to it and we need to recover a little of the initial human horror we should have before the Cross. This is one reason why St. Paul wrote that Christ on the Cross is “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.” The pagans used to mock the early Christians for worshipping someone who was killed on the Cross, who suffered such a horrible, ignoble end. Because that derision was still happening even centuries after his death, many of the first Christians were somewhat embarrassed by the Cross and didn’t use it as a popular Christian symbol until the 300s. Today, there are still some Christians who are embarrassed by the Cross. We see it in those Catholic schools and universities who have removed the Cross from classrooms lest anyone be “offended.” We’ve seen it in Catholic hospitals who have removed them from patients’ rooms even though in the hospital people need to derive meaning from their sufferings from uniting them to Christ’s. We’ve seen them in various “modern” Catholic parishes that, instead of putting up a Crucifix in the sanctuary as is required in every Church, they erect an image of the Risen Jesus, as if that “book” of St. Francis no longer had anything to teach.
• The Cross, for believers, is not so much a symbol of pain, but rather of the Love that made even that much suffering worth it. Jesus said during the Last Supper, “No one has any greater love than to lay down his life for his friends” and that’s precisely what Jesus as our Good Shepherd did when he gave his own life on the Cross so that we, might live. The Cross is a picture not principally of agonizing suffering but of this mind-blowing love of God for us. St. Paul — after he stated that the Cross is a scandal to the Jews and a folly to everyone else — declared that “to those who are called, the Crucified Christ is the ‘power of God and the wisdom of God.’” Christ on the cross manifests the power of Christ’s love and the wisdom of God’s plan of salvation.
• In today’s Gospel, St. John tells us, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” As one great mystic said, each of Jesus’s five wounds are like a pair of lips saying, “I love you this much!” God’s love was so great that he was willing to bear such torture and death for each of us. St. Paul tells us in the second reading that even though Jesus was God, “he didn’t deem equality with God something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave… And being born in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient even unto death, death on a Cross.” The Cross is the great sign of God’s kenotic humility. Real love is willing to do anything for the beloved, and God was willing not just to come down from heaven and take on our human nature, but to allow those he created, those he was about to redeem, to torture, abuse and kill him in order to save them and us. Jesus was willing out of love to undergo everything we might undergo as human beings, even worse. Whatever pain we might suffer, Christ suffered more. Whatever injustice we might bear, Christ bore it before us. Whatever loneliness we experience, Jesus felt it, too. This is what led the writer of the Letter of the Hebrews to exclaim one of the most consoling truths in all of Sacred Scripture: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tested in every way that we are, yet never sinned.”
• The reason why the Church gives us this Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross is not just so that we may look at the Cross physically and ponder its meaning spiritually. It’s not so that we remain stunned at beholding the One we have pierced. When we truly confront the reality of the Cross, we cannot remain a detached bystander. On Good Friday, as you know, we all process up the nave humbly without shoes, genuflect and venerate the Cross with a kiss. In order truly to venerate the Cross, however, we need to do more than just kiss it. We need to embrace it as a way of life. That’s what Jesus clearly wants us to do and calls us to do. He never said to us, “I’m taking up the Cross so that you don’t have to.” Rather he said, “If you wish to be my disciple, you must deny yourself, pick up your Cross every day, and follow me” and “whoever does not pick up the Cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” We’re here because we want to be true disciples of the Lord. We want to follow him all the way to heaven. But to do this, we need to follow him to Calvary; we need to walk the Way of the Cross. As St. Rose of Lima told us earlier, there is no other ladder to heaven but the ladder of the Cross. To be a disciple means to embrace the Cross.
• To embrace the way of the Cross means first to forsake the way of sin because we see what our sins have done. In today’s first reading, after the Jews were unfaithful in the desert, God sent among them poisonous saraph serpents, which led the Israelites to remember that just like Adam and Eve had gone the way of sin by means of the machinations of the devil in the disguise of a serpent, so, too, they had forsaken the Lord. The people turned to Moses to intercede for them with God to save their lives. Moses prayed and God had him make a bronze serpent and mount it on a pole, saying that whoever looked at this serpent on a pole would live. They were going to have to face-up to what was killing them, that they had chosen to follow the way of sin, and after having acknowledged that and having turn prayerfully to God for forgiveness they would be saved. That was a prophetic act foretelling what would happen with Jesus on the Cross. Jesus said in today’s Gospel, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” Just as with the snake bitten Israelites in the desert, so we have been bitten by the poison of sin, we have negotiated with the ancient serpent and chosen against God. We need to come face-to-face with our own sins, seeing what they did to Jesus, and then with real contrition turn to the Lord for salvation. We do this not just as an antidote to the poison in the moment of suffering, but to lead us through the desert of life all the way to the eternal repose. To embrace the way of the Cross means to reject the life of sin and commit ourselves to following the life of grace.
• The second thing that embracing the Cross means is that it commits us to the path of self-sacrificial love. Many Catholics when they hear Jesus’ command to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow Jesus think that it means “offering up” their hardships, their difficulties, their pain, and bearing with peaceful resignation the contradictions of the day. That is part of it, but, actually, a small part of it. To embrace the Cross means to kiss Christ’s love and to imitate it. Jesus said, in the greatest of all commandments, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Picking up our Cross and following the Lord means following him down the path of selfless self-giving love. Jesus, in fact, gives us the Cross so that we, like him, might die on it, die to ourselves for others, so that he might live fully in us and love others through us. That point is a crucial one, so I’ll repeat it: the Lord gave us the Cross so that we might die to ourselves on it and allow him to live in us so that his self-sacrificial love might reign in us. This is exactly what St. Paul pointed to when he wrote to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” We want Christ to live in us and Christ himself wants to live in us, but the only way that happens is to be crucified with him through the gift of the Cross. The most beautiful reality is that when we do this, we not only abide in Christ and he in us — and share in the fullness of salvation — but we become co-redeemers with Christ. St. Paul was alluding to this reality when he said to the first Christians in Colossae, “In my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross — which saved the world — always intended to be united to our sacrifices united with him on the Cross. That’s what occurs when we really live as his disciples, picking up our Crosses every day, dying to ourselves on them, and allowing the Risen Christ to live in us and to unite ourselves to his redemptive work.
• To some this might seem like a new mystery or something too theologically deep, but it is a reality that we have been living for as long as we have been Catholic. It is a reality that began on the day we were baptized, when we were marked by the priest, our parents and our godparents with the Sign of the Cross and then sacramentally died in Christ and he rose from the dead within us. The Christian life is a school of the Cross from our first day as a Christian; the Cross of Jesus that we carry within is at the heart of the mystery of God’s love and of our faith. The actual feast of the Exaltation of the Cross comes from the year 629 when the Emperor Heraclius recovered the relics of the True Cross that had been stolen by the Persians and brought them back to the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Even though there had previously been a celebration of the Cross of the Lord in Jerusalem (on May 3), the celebration on September 14 was a particular thanksgiving to God for the finding of the Cross, which they had come to appreciate even more during the 15 years it was in Persian custody. I like to think that it is an annual feast for us to “rediscover” the central importance of the Cross, to thank God for what Jesus accomplished on it, and to seek to be lifted up by him on it.
• The early Christians used to say and sing, “Ave, O Crux, Spes Unica!,” “Hail, O Cross, our Only Hope.” The cross is our only hope in two ways. First, because without Christ’s sacrificial triumph on the Cross, we would have no hope of eternal salvation; and second, because unless we pick up our Cross every day to unite ourselves to God, we have no hope of salvation either. The Cross is the world’s greatest love story but we need to grasp that we are a central character in that romance. The message of the love of the Cross that we receive and share, we’re called to proclaim from the rooftops. It’s the most important message we can preach because it is the summary and essence of the Gospel. St. Paul, the greatest evangelist who ever lived, after many eloquent homilies, had a conversion. As he wrote to the Corinthians, “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to preach nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” To preach Christ crucified, this incredible reality of God’s love, is our common mission. In one of the great Catholic hymns sing: “Lift High the Cross, the Love of Christ proclaim, until all the world adore his holy name!” And we lift it highest, we proclaim it most eloquently, when we live it most! And insofar as the vast majority of the human race is not yet adoring Christ’s holy name, we need to lift it higher and proclaim it more loudly in loving deeds than we ever have until now.
• The greatest way for us to be strengthened in living the mystery of the Cross is here at the Mass, in which we share live in the sacrifice of Christ that began at the Last Supper and was consummated on the Cross, when he gave his body and his blood for us and our salvation. To celebrate the Mass is to exalt the Cross, to echo Jesus’ words “This is my body,” “This is my blood,” “given for you.” I always linked the Eucharist and Calvary on this Feast because I’ve had the privilege, probably about 20 times now, of celebrating Mass on Calvary within the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. There’s no “Mass” of Good Friday and so priests always celebrate there today’s Mass. How moving it is to receive at Mass the fruit that comes from the new Tree of Life, which is the Cross! There’s a beautiful phrase in the Preface for this Mass on which I’ve meditated often there where it happened: “For you placed the salvation of the human race on the wood of the Cross so that, where death arose, life might again spring forth and the evil one, who conquered on a tree, might likewise on a tree be conquered!” That is what we mark with joy, as we ponder the happiest Person who ever lived at the supreme moment of his triumph, the joy of one who made eternal life possible for us whom he loved.  The connection between the Cross and the Mass ia indelibly impressed upon a priest on the day of his priestly ordination. Right after he has become a priest by the bishop’s laying on of hands and the invocation of the Holy Spirit, the new priest kneels in front of his bishop, who puts in his hands the chalice and paten with bread and says: “Receive the oblation of the holy people to be offered to God. Understand what you do, imitate what you celebrate and conform your life to the mystery of the Lord’s cross.” The latter part of that prayer is an instruction applicable to each of us. Understand what you do — we’re about to enter into the greatest reality a human being can share, as we prepare to receive the fruit of the Tree of the Cross, Jesus himself. Imitate what you celebrate — which is the call to live the Eucharist, to become whom we eat, to emulate the self-giving love enfleshed in the Eucharist. And finally: Conform your life to the mystery of the Lord’s Cross. Today God wants to give us the help he knows we need to base our entire existence on the love we celebrate on the Cross, so that we may not only experience in this world a foretaste of Christ’s victory upon this new Tree of Life, but come by his grace to be exalted together with him upon it eternally. Today as we prepare for that dual exaltation, we make our own today’s Alleluia verse that we’re accustomed to say as we pray the Way of the Cross:  “We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, for by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world!” This is what we celebrate today. Ave, O Crux, Spes Unica! Amen.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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