The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, also known as
the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross, commemorates three historical events:
the discovery of the True Cross in 326, its initial exaltation for public
veneration in 335, and the recovery of the Cross from the Persians in 628.
Nowadays, this feast also celebrates the boundless impact of Christ’s Cross
upon all of creation.
We celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on
September 14th, because this is the day in 335 when the relics of the true
Cross, which had been miraculously rediscovered nine years earlier, were
brought outside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem for public
veneration. This church (also called the Church of the Resurrection) had just
been dedicated the day before.
Early in the fourth century, Saint Helena, mother of the
Roman Emperor Constantine, went to Jerusalem in search of the holy places of
Christ’s life. She razed the second-century Temple of Aphrodite, which
tradition held was built over the Savior’s tomb. During the excavation, workers
found three crosses. Legend has it that the one on which Jesus died was
identified when its touch healed a dying woman.
Her son Constantine then built the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher on
that spot.
To this day, the Eastern Churches, Catholic and Orthodox
alike, celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on the September anniversary
of the basilica’s dedication. The feast entered the Western calendar in the
seventh century after Emperor Heraclius recovered the cross from the Persians,
who had carried it off 14 years earlier in 614. According to the story, the
emperor intended to carry the cross back into Jerusalem himself but was unable
to move forward until he took off his imperial garb and became a barefoot
pilgrim.
The cross is today the universal image of Christian belief.
Countless generations of artists have turned it into a thing of beauty to be
carried in procession or worn as jewelry. However, to the eyes of the first
Christians, it had no beauty. It stood outside too many city walls, decorated
only with decaying corpses, as a threat to anyone who defied Rome’s
authority—including Christians who refused sacrifice to Roman gods. Although
believers spoke of the cross as the instrument of salvation, it seldom appeared
in early Christian art unless disguised as an anchor or the Chi-Rho until after
Constantine’s edict of toleration in 314.
Although we commemorate these three historical events today,
the core of our celebration is not the physical wood of the Cross or the holy
sites where Jesus died and was buried. Our primary focus is the infinite love
shown through the selfless and perfect Sacrifice of the Son of God and the
boundless mercy that has poured forth upon the world as a result. The Cross
itself is a cruel instrument of torture and death. The fact that it is now the
symbol of God’s perfect love only further magnifies that love and showcases
God’s infinite power to use the worst for the best: to use death to bring life
and to transform the greatest act of cruelty ever known into the greatest act
of mercy ever bestowed upon the world. Today, the cruelty of the Cross is not
what is exalted, but the Love that God manifested to humanity by accepting
death on the Cross: “Who, though in the form of God, emptied himself, taking
the form of a slave. This is the glory of the Cross of Jesus!” (Pope Francis)
“Jesus said to Nicodemus: ‘No one has gone up to heaven
except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. And 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.’ For God so loved the
world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not
perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world
to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” (John
3:13-17).
Stop turning in on ourselves
“Being Christian,” Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “is not the
result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event.”
The Gospel the liturgy offers us on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy
Cross suggests that God wants to enter into a relationship of love with
everyone. This is offered in His Son, Jesus, lifted up on the Cross.
Lifting up our gaze to God expresses a very important truth:
we are invited to enter back into relationship with Divinity. We need to stop
turning in on ourselves, uselessly nurturing a sense of guilt and forgetting
that “in whatever our hearts condemn, God is greater than our hearts” (1 John
3:20). Let us lift up our eyes toward the stars (remember Abraham and the
promise of many descendants), knowing how to cast every worry onto God.
Wonder and gratitude
Lifting up our gaze should not enkindle fear, but gratitude,
because that elevation is the measure of the love with which God loves His
children, in God’s Son. It is the Mercy of God, therefore, which, as is the
case with Nicodemus, illuminates the darkness of our lives and allows us to
continue on our journey.
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