Today (actually September 14) is the Feast of the Holy Cross (again, actually Sept 14) so today we talk about crosses, and Constantine, and Saladin, and Muslims, and other stuff. W00T?
John 3:13-17; 1 Corinithians 1:18-25; Psalm 98; Numbers 21:4b-9
Today is Holy Cross day, the day when we celebrate the founding of our church. Wait no, not that. It is our namesake holiday during the church year, though, so it’s kind of a big-ish deal for us. Well, ok not really that either. It’s an excuse to break out the white paraments in the midst of this season of unending green.
Anyways, it’s always puzzled me why Holy Cross Day is in the middle of September. There’s so many other options when it could be. I’d expect something around Easter or Holy Week, where the cross kind of plays a major role, not a time almost six months removed from that event. So I did a little bit of hunting to sate my curiosity.
Holy Cross Day is better expressed as the Feast of the Cross or, if you really want to get official, Exaltatio Sanctae Crucis, meaning “The raising aloft of the Holy Cross” in Latin. It turns out that this day has a fairly random significance. It all comes from a legend that involves the finding of the True Cross. In and around 135 AD, the site of Jesus’ burial had been buried itself and a temple to Venus was built on the site. In 325, Emporer Constantine ordered the temple razed in order to build church on the site. When they worked to uncover Jesus’ tomb, Helena, Constantine’s mother, discovered three crosses, a set of nails, and the board with the inscription Jesus had over his cross. They set the three crosses before a seriously ill woman, who touched each in turn. Upon touching the third cross she was healed of her illness, and so they decided that the third cross was the True Cross on which Christ was crucified.
Helena sent the nails back to Constantinople, to be included in the emperor’s crown, along with a small piece of the cross, but the rest she had enclosed in a silver reliquary. Construction on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher started afterwards and nine years later, on September 13, 335 the Church was dedicated. The next day, the True Cross was brought outside for pilgrims and clergy to venerate, and Holy Cross Day was born.
Now to add to the drama, in 614 Khosrau II invaded Jerusalem and stole the Cross out of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. In 630 Emperor Heraclius captured the cross back, and its return began to be included in celebrations of Holy Cross Day. For the curious, through the crusades the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was a hotly contested area, and even today has some interesting arrangements of its care. It’s maintained jointly by the Easter Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, and Roman Catholic churches, with the Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, and Syriac Orthodox maintaining lesser responsibilities. Following a decree of Saladin in 1192, two Muslim families, the Joudeh and the Nusseibeh, are responsible for the key to the church and the keeping of the door, respectively.
So, the whole thing of Holy Cross Day comes from the veneration of the Cross at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on September 14, 335. Now, while I was still in seminary, and even before, I had a very good friend who was (and still is) very Catholic. There were always a few liturgical and doctrinal issues that he and I could never quite see eye-to-eye on, and for the longest time the veneration of the cross was one of those issues. I never really saw the point of celebrating a piece of wood, even if it happened to be a piece of wood on which Jesus was crucified. We threw Bible verses at each other left and right until he found one that, for me, ruined all of my arguments.
See, in Galatians 6, Paul writes, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Now that’s something very subtle, because the cross becomes not just a piece of wood but something quite a bit more important. And that got me to thinking. We make the sign of the cross; we talk constantly about Christ crucified; on Good Friday we even announce, “Behold, the life-giving cross on which was hung the salvation of the whole world.” The cross itself is a lot more important than I gave it credit for.
But there was still something odd to me about exalting the cross, or boasting in the cross, or venerating the cross. Then something clicked for me. It’s a cross. In my mind, celebrating the cross was akin to celebrating a hangman’s noose, or a lethal injection needle — it’s easy to forget that the cross was a symbol of execution, which is exactly why Paul writes that the cross is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.
To the Jews, it was unthinkable that the Messiah ought to die in the first place, and even more unthinkable that he should die on a “tree”, because in Deuteronomy 21:23 it says, “anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse”. To the Gentiles, well, they just see it as incredibly foolish to worship someone who was on a cross, let alone make an instrument of execution something important.
Yet to us, the cross is the instrument, not of an execution, but of our salvation. On the cross, we see the true nature of God — not a distant clockmaker simply setting creation on its course, but a God who loves us enough to humble himself and die. A God who isn’t about condemning us in our sin, even though we fully deserve it, but one who wants us to be saved from our sin. What happened on the cross is the defining moment in Christianity, so why not celebrate it?