+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Tradition holds that on this day 1,699 years ago Saint Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine the Great, found the spot on which our Lord was crucified in Jerusalem and identified the relics of the True Cross, the very instrument of his saving death. I’ll leave it to the historians to debate the veracity of this account. There is good historical and archaeological evidence to back up the claim that the place she found, on which now stands the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is the true location of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. But as for the True Cross itself, the jury is out and I have no idea.
Within a generation the cross was divided and fragments distributed to churches throughout the known world. Medieval forgeries make matters even more difficult. While Calvin claimed that enough purported fragments of the original were to be found that they could build a ship out of them, this is calumny. Forgery was never that bad, but provenance does remain something of an issue.
I’m not Puritan, so I’m not going to claim that these issues are neither here nor there. An object relating to Christ, his Blessed Mother, or the saints can be a powerful aid to devotion, so long as we avoid worshiping the object itself like an idol or engaging in some other superstition. Nor do I believe in some sort of post-modern way that an object of devotion gets its power from whatever we project onto it, like our good “juju” somehow makes something holy. The facts of the matter matter.
All that said, these concerns are secondary. Primary for Christians is not the object or the location, but the reality of Christ’s saving work, which today he accomplishes in a secret place–the soul of the believer. I am not going to defend the Crusades this morning, which seem an exception which proves the rule, except to say that they began as an attempt to secure safe passage for pilgrims to holy sites before sadly evolving into bloody conquest to the end of controlling sites and states. We should, as Christians, at least theoretically be less concerned than say Jews and Muslims fighting over whether a particular mountain should have a rebuilt Jewish temple or the Al-Aqsa mosque on top. I’m grateful that many years ago I was able to go to Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Galilee and visit the sites associated with Our Lord. But more important than Christ being born on a particular spot rather than another, is that he was born in my heart. More important than the fact that GPS can guide me to where loaves and fishes were distributed to the multitude is that Jesus still feeds me with his Word and with his very Body and Blood. I am grateful that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is still in Christian hands instead of it being a Temple of Venus, as it was before Constantine and Helena—don’t get me wrong—but the more important thing, indeed the infinitely important thing, is that he died for each and every one of us and he rose again that we might be justified and live forever with him and each other in the Resurrection.
Holy Cross Day is the good and proper counterpoint to Good Friday. On that day we appropriately mourn. We grieve what our sin made necessary in the perfect Will’s response of love over wrath. Today we glory in the majesty of that horrific implement of torture and death which has been transformed into a beautiful , life-giving token for the salvation of the world. For we, like St. Paul, bear the marks of our Lord, invisibly but indelibly inscribed at our baptisms. Christ has accomplished what he foretold, that when he was lifted up he would draw all sorts and conditions of people to himself. We still flee to that cross to find the life which radiates from its luminous arms.
I recently reread the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola for the first time since seminary. Some hardcore spiritual athletes might say that just reading the book isn’t as useful as practicing the exercises Ignatius described just as he described them isn’t terribly useful, but not currently having five hours available for daily meditation over thirty straight days, I had to pick up what I could reasonably apply considering present obligations.
Anyway, he suggests several dialectical practices where we imagine ourselves in the biblical scene and have a conversation with its subject, and he begins with the crucifixion. Such a conversation is appropriately uncomfortable, considering the pain and sorrow our Lord endured and our part in necessitating it, but perhaps we shouldn’t shrink so quickly from such a task. One may counter that Christ is no longer dying nor dead, that he is risen and the cross now stands empty; they have a point, but that argument strikes me a little bit as “being so right it’s wrong.” Yes, the crucifixion is an historical moment which has been accomplished, but along with the Resurrection, it’s a transhistorical or metahistorical event, which is just a perhaps pretentious way of saying that it stands above and beyond time and transforms it from beginning to end. It is, as I’ve heard it called, the hinge-point of history and so we have access to it in the here and now in a powerful, mystical way.
So my suggestion today, like that of St. Ignatius, is to consider taking a sort of spiritual pilgrimage to Golgotha. No airfare or passport is required. Do it in whatever physical space you find conducive to prayer and meditation. Approach the tree of life and see hanging from it the fruit which even the boughs of Eden could not bear. Speak to our Lord and listen for his response to your deepest questions, your most profound pains, the hopes you dare not even hope. And then see that cross transformed in your seeing to brightness beyond compare and comprehension. Behold your Lord reigning from that tree, sovereign of all creation and of your heart, and commit all that grieves your heart to him, knowing that he is accomplishing for us his perfect will and will finally welcome us into the kingdom which has no end.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.