9/14/2014 Exaltation of the Cross – John 3:13-17, Phil. 2:6-11

      Today, we commemorate the feast of the exaltation of the holy cross.  We honor the cross by which Christ redeemed the world.   We focus on the mystery of the cross today, and ultimately, the mystery of God’s love for us.  We just had our wonderful mission given by Father Burke Masters this past week on The Joy of the Gospel.   Pope Francis mentions the cross 18 different times in that document.   He reminds us that in our faith it can be easy to try to approach Jesus in a purely spiritual sense, to ignore the cross and to ignore the way we are challenged to see Jesus and our faith in our daily lives. 

      Where do we see our the cross in the reality of our lives?  When I was a missionary, we established a high school deep in the rain forest jungle.   This was the first opportunity most of the youth and adults in that region of the rain forest had of earning a high school diploma.  Most of the adults and youth work on their family’s cocoa, rice, banana, or coffee crops during the week, so we met all day on Saturdays.  I remember one teenager in particular. Jose had to paddle in a canoe 5 hours each way in order to get to our school.  I remember one Saturday morning he came in late, hobbling in actually with great difficulty. I noticed that his leg was all bandaged up.  He had an accident with a machete and had cut himself really badly while cutting some brush in the forest.  The wound looked awful, but this young man was grateful to be at school and to have the opportunity to get an education.

      We all have our crosses, don’t we? That is what reminded me of this young man who had to make such a great sacrifice just to come to school.   Our crosses can make us angry and bitter, or we can bear them with grace and dignity, uniting them with the cross of Jesus, finding meaning in our crosses and growing from the lessons we learn from them.  We hear an ancient hymn that is part of Paul letter to the Philippians.  Paul states that God exalted Jesus because of how he humbled himself in obedience, even unto his death on a cross.  The cross is such a ubiquitous symbol of our Christian faith, but what does it really say about our faith, and what are the implications of the cross in our daily life? 

      Why would we celebrate a feast day in our Church’s liturgical year every September 14 exalting the cross?   After Christ’s death, non-believers in Israel had hidden and buried the cross on which he was crucified so that the faithful could not come and venerate it.   The Roman Emperor Constantine so deeply revered the victory-bearing sign of the cross of Christ that he wanted to find the actual cross itself.  He sent his mother, the Empress Helena, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to find the cross, which she discovered on September 14, 326.   Nine years later, on September 14, 335, the remains of cross were publicly venerated at the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on the site of Christ’s crucifixion and burial. 

      When we think about the cross of Jesus, a symbol that means so much to us in our Catholic faith, we can think about other symbolic crosses we encounter on our journey.  When we talked the pilgrimage of St James in Spain during Lent of last year, we talked about the “cruz de ferro,” the cross of iron, located on a high mountaintop along the pilgrimage route.  When the pilgrim places a rock on that huge pile of rocks located at the foot of that cross, he feels the many prayers left with those millions of rocks in the pile: prayers for sick family members, for deceased loved ones, for the depression or addictions that we struggle with, for a failed relationship or for a new job, or for things that we’ve done that we know were wrong and that we are not proud of. Approaching the iron cross on the road to Santiago is one of the most humbling moments of my life, because for me, that really represented the cross of Jesus, the cross of my faith.

      It is a paradox that the cross of Jesus, a sign of shame and rejection, becomes for us Christians a sign of God’s victory in Christ, and a sign of Christ’s victory over sin and death for all humanity.   Paul’s hymn summarizes this story of salvation: the self-emptying of Jesus in his incarnation, his obedience to death on the cross, and the exaltation in his resurrection from death and his ascension into heaven.   While our modern world admires power and strength, Jesus willingly took on human form and limitations, he embraced humanity in mind, body, and spirit.  C. Our modern world esteems freedom and self-determination, but then we see Jesus humbly obeys God in accepting his cross.   Jesus did not seek individual gain and achievement, but rather emptied himself as an offering for others.  In the exaltation of the cross, the one who came as a servant is now proclaimed LORD of all.  And now we are the Body of Christ.  Paul says: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”  We are called to be humble and obedient as a part of our faith and trust in God’s merciful love.   Let us echo in our hearts and in our daily actions the antiphon for today’s afternoon prayer in the liturgy of the hours: Dying you destroyed our death, rising you restored our life.  Save us by your cross, Christ our Redeemer.