Holy Cross Day
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Almost 20 years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Holy Land to attend my nephew’s baptism. My sister-in-law is from Palestine and comes from a very devout Greek Orthodox family which took us around to all the holy sites. It was wonderful to hear those explained and interpreted by local believers whose piety is very different from that of us Lutherans. So different, in fact, that a number of times I had to bite my tongue.
How do you know that this was the mountain where Jesus spoke the beatitudes, the site where he healed a leper, or the place where he commissioned Peter? Why is there a large venerated marble slab in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on which supposedly Jesus’ body had been embalmed, when the gospels say Jesus’ body hadn’t been embalmed, which is why the women came to the tomb early Easter morning to correct that situation? I learned to keep mum.
And so I remained mum when my sister-in-law explained to us the significance of one strange place in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Off to one side, lower than the rest of the church, is a space with a low ceiling and a big rock coming out of a ground that otherwise looks like an unfinished basement floor. A fence keeps that space off limits. At that fence, people were kneeling and praying.
I asked my sister-in-law what that place was, and she explained. It goes back to Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine the Great and an avid Holy Land traveler who “discovered” and labeled many of the holy sites there. Around the year 325, St. Helena came to this place and found three wooden crosses. She immediately knew that these “must” be the three crosses from Golgotha and that one of them “must” be the cross of Jesus. But which one?
This is how they found out: They took the body of a recently deceased man and laid it on one cross. Nothing happened. They laid the body on another cross. Nothing happened. They laid it on the third cross, and lo and behold, the man came back to life. That’s how they knew which cross was Jesus’ and they could venerate it and the site where it was found.
Personally, I have a hard time relating to this magical way of thinking about the cross and other religious symbols. Yet for many people a certain kind of magical mysteriousness is a very attractive part of religion.
It sounds like the people Moses is steering through the wilderness and their descendants were attracted by the magical. It started when the people were once again grumbling against God and Moses, complaining again about the hardships of the journey to the Promised Land.
God is getting mighty tired of these complaints. He gets angry and punishes the people by sending poisonous snakes into their midst. They bite the people and many of them die. There is nothing like an onslaught of poisonous snakes to bring people to their senses. Immediately they know where these snakes come from, and why, and they repent of their ungrateful behavior and ask Moses to intercede before God on their behalf.
Good old Moses does pray for the people. God relents and gives Moses the antidote to the snake poison: Make a serpent out of bronze and set it on a pole; everyone who is bitten can look at it and live. Moses makes the snake, and it works and people are saved from death.
The Israelites learn something that day. They learn that ungratefulness can be deadly and can separate them from God. They learn that God doesn’t suffer fools lightly. They learn that God listens to prayers of repentance. They learn that God is willing to forgive repentant sinners and rescue them from the deadly consequences of their sins. They learn that God has power to save.
Having come through this harrowing experience and having learned these important truths, it is no wonder that the Israelites should hang on to the bronze serpent. It was their reminder of what God had done among them and for them.
It seems, however, that the status of the bronze serpent changed over the years, from a reminder of God’s grace to a magical instrument to be venerated. A couple of centuries later King Hezekiah renovates the temple in Jerusalem. He finds it necessary to remove the bronze serpent because it had become the object of idol worship. People adored its magic power and forgot the truth of the story behind it.
Which made me wonder: Has a similar thing happened to the cross? In the gospel, John compares the lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness to the lifting up of Christ on the cross. Did the two symbols over time suffer the same ‘magification’?
Vampire movies certainly ascribe magic powers to the cross. Hold one up, and the vampire can’t get you. That puts the cross on one level with garlic, I suppose.
What about other uses of the cross? When an athlete crosses him- or herself before an important play, does that reflect the true meaning of the cross or some magical thinking? When countless people wear cross pendants who never darken the church doors, what does the cross mean to them?
Even in today’s world with its science and enlightenment, we in the church are still wrestling with a tendency of folk to bring magic into religion.
My mother remembers a news story in the late sixties in Germany. For generations, the local Roman Catholic Church had offered an annual service of the blessings of cars. The priests and altarboys would process around the parking lot and sprinkle the hoods with holy water and say prayers. At the time, all this was done in Latin, the worship language of the Catholic Church.
Then came the Second Vatican Council, at which it was decided to switch to local languages for worship. Mass and all other rites would now be in the language of the people. They could actually understand what was being said.
That year, the priest and the altarboys made their way around the parking lot as always, sprinkling holy water and saying their prayers, only this time they said them in German. And the people were worried. “Is it still going to work?”, they asked. The ritual had lost its magic flair of a foreign language, and the people were disappointed.
Today is Holy Cross Day. It is a good day for us to think about the cross; a good time to reclaim the cross and the truth it stands for.
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send his Son to condemn the world, but in order that the world might live through him.” What do we learn about the truth of the cross from these famous verses?
We learn that God loves the world. And in John’s gospel, “the world” has a negative connotation. It doesn’t mean all of creation, as we use the word today. Rather, “the world” is at odds with Jesus. Time and again in his gospel account, John states that the world hates Jesus and his followers, and that the world seeks darkness rather than light.
And still, God loves that world. In Jesus, God reaches out to that world. In the cross, God overcomes the power of that world and offers it salvation. The cross is about God loving the ungodly, about Jesus dying for the sinner, about God’s love being stronger than the forces of darkness. When we claim the cross and wear it as pendants and make the sign of the cross in remembrance of our baptism, we proclaim that truth. And we promise to live that truth, believing in God’s love and power, and participating in Christ’s mission to “the world”.
“Everyone who believes in Christ shall not perish but have eternal life.” In John’s theology, eternal life is not something that begins after death. For John, eternal life begins when you come to believe in Jesus Christ. For all the baptized, eternal life is now. We are called to live all of life under the sign of the cross. That means not just tragic events like death and suffering, but also wonderful events, empowering events, joyful events. Life under the sign of the cross is a life that looks to Jesus lifted up, trusting in his love and mercy and forgiveness, and sharing that love and mercy and forgiveness with the world. Living under the sign of the cross means lifting Jesus up in all that we do and say.
The cross is a symbol that reminds us of the truth of the gospel: That we are sinners, but that God loves us and redeems us and invites us to be God’s people and to live in God’s kingdom, both now and in the resurrection.
I had a classmate in seminary whose parents had gotten married just a couple of days before the husband left to serve in World War II. Her mother always said that her wedding band meant so much to her during those months of waiting for him to come home. It was just a golden thing, but to her it was a symbol of love and faithfulness and hope for years of happy married life in the future.
It’s similar with the cross. It’s just a thing made of wood or metal or some other material. There is nothing magical about it. It has meaning for us because it is a symbol that stands for love and hope, for forgiveness and mercy, for healing and salvation, for eternal life both now and forever. Let us cherish the cross as a visual sign of divine grace that reminds us of the gospel, and that shapes our lives and inspires us to be the people of God today. Amen.