Welcome to the new school year!

                                                                                                      Holy Cross Day evensong

                                                                                                      Trinity Cathedral

                                                                                                      13 Sept 09

Today is Holy Cross Day.  What on earth is that?  And why do we even notice it?  We take notice of saints’ days, and important events in the life of the church, and sometimes we take even notice of days that celebrate theological concepts—like Trinity Sunday, for example, which is a little strange.  But today is the only day we seemingly celebrate a thing.

Of course, it’s a very famous thing. It is often referred to as the “one, true cross,” perhaps to help out the booming medieval market in sacred relics, in which splinters of the cross played an important part.  Many commentators have remarked that if all the relic splinters were put together, they would have made a great many very large crosses.  John Calvin, that great protestant reformer, noted that there was enough wood in all the relics to build, or at least fill, a ship, adding that “There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen.”  The argument over the one trueness of all these little bits of wood continued at least into the late 19^th century, when one researcher catalogued all the known relics and claimed that they would only have made a very small cross.  This sort of thing is not atypical of the church.

The continuing interest in these relics reflects in part wonderful stories associated with the cross.  Here is one: The story goes that when Adam lay dying, he asked his son Seth to go to the Archangel Michael and beg for a seed from the Tree of Life. As Adam died, the seed was placed in his mouth and was buried with him. The seed grew into a tree that was cut down many centuries later and used to build a bridge. The Queen of Sheba passed over it on her way to meet King Solomon and fell on her knees and worshipped it. She told Solomon that a piece of wood from the bridge would bring about a new covenant with God’s people, so Solomon, naturally, had the bridge destroyed and buried. Fourteen generations later, the wood taken from the bridge became the Cross used at the Crucifixion. 

Eastern Orthodoxy has a story that the cross is made of three different kinds of wood: cedar, pine and cypress. The trees grew together in one spot, and were watered by Abraham’s nephew Lot, of salted-wife fame. According to this tradition, these trees were used to construct the Temple in Jerusalem but, during Herod's reconstruction of the Temple, the wood was removed and discarded, eventually being used to construct the cross of Jesus.  Oddly, this story has the same idea of the wood being rejected and discarded—perhaps much like its later occupant, the crucified Jesus.

So much for finding the wood to build the cross.  Finding it after the crucifixion was also a complex process.  And again there is a story for that. By the time of the emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, the site of Jesus’ tomb near Calvary had been covered over with a temple to the goddess Venus. Constantine appointed his mother, now known as St. Helena, to roam the empire and recover Christian relics, and she had the temple torn down.  Underneath were found three crosses, the power of which was tested on an old, sick woman.  She touched the first cross and was still old and sick. Then the second—no change.  But of course she miraculously recovered after touching the third, which Helena declared to be the True Cross.

By the time of the Crusades, the cross, which had been venerated at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for many generations, had vanished as a solid thing, but had reappeared as the chunks and splinters that still can be found everywhere, even on eBay.  Trust me, I checked.

So now the cross is not even really a thing anymore.  It’s more an idea, a symbol.  Not “just” a symbol, mind you—symbols can be and are extremely powerful ways of drawing us into what they symbolize, of creating relationships that cross boundaries, of putting us in touch with transcendent reality.  Symbols are how we are able to talk of God and participate in the Kingdom.  Symbols are the beating heart of every religion.  And so it is with the cross.   The wood of the cross may be splintered, but the many meanings of the cross live on.

The cross lives on as a focus of meditation and absorption on the meaning of love, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom.  It is there in the front of all our churches, drawing our attention to the central reality of what we profess as Christians—the salvific life and death of Jesus the Christ. 

The cross lives on as we make its sign across our bodies or receive it in blessings from our leaders, a physical and spiritual reminder of the vows of our baptism, our membership in the body of that same Christ, the community of believers.

The cross lives on in graveyards, on headstones, bringing us into relationship with all those who have gone before us in faith, that great cloud of witnesses who struggled to express the great mystery they experienced, as we do still today.

The cross lives on at the head of our liturgical processions, still leading Christian soldiers, not to war, not to conquer other peoples, but to conquer selfishness and greed and pettiness and intolerance.

The cross lives on in its representation of suffering, a stark call to us to question our own complicity in human suffering and injustice and pain and an unavoidable call to alleviate their horrible consequences.

The cross lives on in the hearts of those of whom the beatitudes spoke—the humble and meek and poor and oppressed—who find in it not a message of death and suffering, but a message of hope and transcendence, of possibilities for the future, of the inbreaking of the Kingdom.

For the cross of Christ is rooted not in the mouth of Adam.  The cross of Christ is rooted in the heart of man.  It is from our hearts that we raise it still today, to crucify, to execute, to humiliate.  It is also from our hearts that we raise it still today, to shine a beacon of redemption and joy and to remake the face of the earth.