Afterfeast of the Exaltation of the Cross

On Wednesday of this past week we celebrated the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. As we read from the Epistle on that day, the message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

What kind of madness is Christianity, that we would venerate the Cross – a symbol of torture and the cruelest of deaths? And yet, the Cross is indeed precious and life-giving to us – for through the sufferings, death, and resurrection of Christ, the Cross has become our symbol of hope and its message is one of unutterable love.

For our Lord has said: ‘Greater love has no one that this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.’ Our Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t just speak about this as an ideal… He demonstrates this for us in laying down His life for us upon the Cross. The God Who created us; Who established us in Paradise; Who gifted us with the tremendous and terrible grace of freedom… the freedom to respond to His love with our love or to choose to turn away; Who taught us by the Law; Who spoke to us by the Prophets. This God finally takes flesh upon Himself and submits to all the miseries that we have created, and suffers through it all, and submits to death upon a Cross for each of us Whom He calls His friends. There is no greater expression of love than this and this is why we exalt and venerate the Cross.

And it is through His death upon the Cross that life and Paradise are once again re-opened to us. The path to the glorious light of Christ’s resurrection must pass through the Cross and death and His descent into Hades… there is no place marked by the suffering of sin that Christ has not touched, and touching it He makes the way for healing and resurrection.

One of the most profound and important statements from the holy fathers of the Church is found in the words of St Gregory the Theologian, who said the following: ‘That which is not assumed is not healed.’ What do these words mean? And why are they such a significant insight into the reason for and the meaning of Christ’s death upon the Cross?

‘That which is not assumed is not healed.’ In other words, that which is not taken up, or put upon oneself… is not healed. This is the significance of Christ’s incarnation. He assumed upon Himself our humanity. In so doing, He took upon Himself and experienced the joys and sorrows of what it is to be a human being. He united Himself to our humanity in all things except one… He did not submit to sin. But temptation, loneliness, hunger, betrayal, sorrow, pain… all of these things He endured and in so doing, in assuming these things upon Himself, He triumphed over them and healed them. And this assumption of our humanity He takes to the ultimate level in submitting to be nailed upon a Cross, to suffer, and to die. His humanity submits to death and His divinity triumphs over it.

This is why we exalt the Cross of Christ… because it is the ultimate sign of God’s love and because it is the ultimate sign of Christ’s victory over sin and death.

The process of our salvation is uniting our self to Christ. In uniting our self to Christ, we unite our self to His victory, to His triumph over all that oppresses us… sin and sorrow and death.

Christ calls us to a love which is best symbolized by the Cross. Christ calls us to a love which is not self-serving and self-pleasing, but is self-sacrificing. Anyone who has truly loved another, knows that with love comes pain of heart. We no longer live for ourselves and for the pursuit of our own pleasures. We live for another… we long for their presence, we co-suffer with them in whatever tribulations they may encounter, we make ourselves vulnerable to them, and we would willingly sacrifice all that we have for their good. In a word, we would lay down our life for them.

This is the way of the Cross. And the outstretched arms of our Lord upon the Cross embrace all the world with this self-sacrificial love. The Cross, which is foolishness to the world, is for us the symbol and the reality of the love of God. It is the signpost pointing us to the way upon which we should walk. It is a path of denying ourselves, taking up our Cross, and following after Christ.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, let us follow Christ along the path of love… emulating His kindness and mercy, His courageous resistance to temptation and evil, and even daring to embrace His way of suffering and death which lead to resurrection.