Feast of Exaltation of the Cross
The Cross of Christ, the centre and pinnacle of God’s saving work, is
also the centerpiece of our faith. The cross reveals the most profound depths
of God’s love: “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16).
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI tells
us that “the cross … is the definitive sign par excellence given to us so that
we might understand the truth about man and the truth about God; we have all
been created and redeemed by a God who sacrificed his only Son out of love.
This is why the Crucifixion … is the culmination of that turning of God against
himself in which he give himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is
love in its most radical form.” (Deus
Caritas Est, 12)
Nevertheless, the cross remains a sign of contradiction – it is both
an unthinkable disgrace and yet a potent source of grace. It has inspired confidence
in armies to march into battle and others to sue for peace; it has been used as
a palpable symbol of power as well as powerlessness. And so it is both despised
as well as coveted by one human power or another – Constantine used it as a
talisman of power in the civil war with his brother and the Persians claimed it
as their greatest battle trophy over the Byzantines.
So, how is the cross a symbol of power and powerlessness? The
symbolism of power hidden in the cross is often lost on us, and is only
revealed as a mystery of revelation. The Cross represents the Sovereign
authority of God and his providence. This is certainly difficult to comprehend.
Yet, what seems to us to be failure is, in God’s eyes, the victory of
sacrificial love. It is on the cross, that Christ receives the highest
exaltation from God, ironically, at the moment he suffered the greatest
humiliation at the hands of men. As Christ was lifted up on the Cross, now by means of the
Cross, he lifts up humanity, and indeed all creation. As today’s gospel reminds us, “for God sent
his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the
world might be saved”. The Cross possesses the power to forgive sins which are
hidden, the power to heal consciences and human hearts. It is there that we have been set free of the debt of sin and
liberated from the clutches of death.
But paradoxically, the cross is also a symbol and an instrument of
powerlessness. There are few things that can match the depravity of this
instrument of torture and death. For a brief moment, where hours seem like
eternity, the Son of God gave up His access to the powers of the universe so
that He could die at our hands. On the wood of the cross, the most powerful
being in the universe chose to be powerless. The Lutheran theologian and
martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, describes the profound significance of this
moment, “God allows himself to be
edged out of the world and onto the cross. God is weak and powerless in the
world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us
and help us.” So what God has done is that He took an instrument of evil, an
instrument that brings death and transformed it so that it gives life, brings
goodness and healing, and that’s what we hear Jesus saying about himself, “When
I am lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, then I will give
life.” The instrument of death becomes an instrument of healing, life and
salvation.
The power and the powerlessness of the cross
provide us with the necessary lens to view our own suffering, our daily
crosses. St John Paul II, who prophetically wrote his first encyclical on
Suffering, and would later suffer that fate in the last years of his
pontificate, uses the cross to formulate his answer to man’s perennial dilemma
– Why do we have to suffer. The saintly Pope stated, with piercing simplicity,
that the answer has "been given by God to man in the cross of Jesus
Christ." Each of us is called to "share in that suffering through
which the Redemption was accomplished." Through his only-begotten
Son, God "has confirmed His desire to act especially through suffering,
which is man's weakness and emptying of self, and He wishes to make His power
known precisely in this weakness and emptying of self."
And this is the way we experience God’s power here on earth,
sometimes to our great frustration, and this is the way that Jesus was deemed
powerful during his lifetime. The Gospels make this clear. Jesus was born
powerless, and he died helpless on a cross. Yet both his birth and his death
show the kind of power on which we can ultimately build our lives. The cross of Christ, therefore, teaches us that
we can find power in weakness, in that which makes us vulnerable and even
seemingly powerless.
Perhaps, what makes it so difficult to accept
the good news of the cross, is that we are stubbornly hold on to power; we want
to have a “sense of control.” Henri Nouwen writes, “What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible?
Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of
love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control
people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.” Most
of us fear our powerlessness in the face of illness and death. We would
like to retain an element of control, even though we realise that dying often
involves the very opposite: a total loss of control, over our muscles, our
emotions, our minds, our bowels and our very lives, as our human framework
succumbs to powerful disintegrative forces.
Even when those disintegrative forces become
extreme and our suffering may seem overwhelming, however, an important
spiritual journey always remains open for us. This path is a "road
less traveled," a path that, unexpectedly, enables us to achieve genuine
control in the face of suffering and even death. The hallmark of this path is
the personal decision to accept our sufferings, actively laying down our life
on behalf of others by embracing the particular kind of death God has ordained
for us, patterning our choice on the choice consciously made by Jesus Christ.
As no one had ever done before, Jesus charted the path of love-driven
sacrifice, choosing to lay down his life for his friends. He was no mere victim
in the sense of being a passive and unwilling participant in his own suffering
and death. He was in control. No one could possibly take his life from
him, unless he chose to lay it down.
Jesus foresaw that his greatest work lay ahead
as he ascended Calvary to embrace his own powerlessness and
self-emptying. Paradoxically, it was when he most seemed powerless, that
he was most powerful. The cross would prove victorious when meeting our ancient
enemies on the battlefield – sin, death and evil would be defeated by the very
sacrifice of Christ himself. Jesus' radical embracing of his Passion — and our
radical embracing of our own — marks the supreme moment of a person, whose life
seems otherwise spinning out of control or into chaos, as God assumed control
of one’s life and destiny through our willing immersion into His hope-filled
and redemptive designs.
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