CHRISTIANS can rejoice the resurrection at any time, but Easter Day is the main target of festivity. The incarnation is everlasting truth, yet Christmas Day is the prism refracting divine light into colors. Holy Cross Day, on 14 September, is so called because that was when Helena (mother of the primary Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine) discovered a cross in Jerusalem. But this, too, is each day.
Some say that Helena’s pilgrimage was a literal “guilt trip”, driven by her involvement in Constantine’s murder of his son and wife. No one knows the reality of that double killing, but, if it did encourage her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, it shows how repentance can lead someone to strive for good.
The world is stuffed with crosses, not only in churches but on partitions of homes, at wayside shrines, hung around necks, carried in purses, clutched in prayer. They are all “holy”, because all of them communicate the meaning of the cross. Although the primary Christians knew the cross as an instrument of execution, they still combed the scriptures for clues to its sacred significance. For them, divine-human history contained fragments of the cross — within the tree of Eden, the oak at Mamre, the outstretched arms of Moses. In east and west alike, they identified it in Elisha’s axe-head (2 Kings 6.1-7). And, in fact, they recognised it in Moses’s serpent-staff (Numbers 21.9).
The cross is in all places, and at all times: and it’s meaning-full. In 1 Corinthians 1.18, Paul says, “The meaning [or ‘message’ or ‘preaching’ or ‘reason’] of the cross is folly to those that are perishing, but for us who’re being saved it’s the facility of God.” We perceive it figuratively in acts of judicial cruelty and undeserved suffering, partly because human cruelty and suffering, too, are in all places and at all times. We also observe it materially, for our vision is attuned to detecting that sacred shape, outside churches in addition to inside.
But the cross of Christ can also be greater than a fortuitous formation detected by our pattern-hungry eyes. We can understand higher how the cross works by reading Philippians 2 and asking what it means for us to have “the identical mind” as Christ Jesus. If that sounds too difficult, Paul’s words will be expressed one other way: if we “think like Jesus” we will share in his death on the cross, and, by meaning, come to share in his resurrection.
Crosses are in all places, but there is simply one Holy Cross. Would it matter if what Helena found was a cross, not the cross? Would that make its many pieces, fractured and distributed among the many faithful like consecrated bread, worthless? No. The meaning of each sacred object that we use devotionally, nonetheless venerable, is similar: to point us beyond material reality to ultimate reality, for “we glance not at what will be seen but at what can’t be seen; for what will be seen is temporary, but what can’t be seen is everlasting” (2 Corinthians 4.18).
When Paul proclaims that Christ Jesus became “obedient to the purpose of death —even death on a cross”, his focus is firmly on the body of Christ. He isn’t investing blood-soaked wood with miraculous power. Even the one true cross is simply ever a way to an end, an instrument of God’s purpose. Kissing the cross on Good Friday is worshipping not the wood however the Son of God who died to avoid wasting us. That is why we must always seek and rejoice crosses in all places, inside and outdoors church, for each glimpse of intersection is a fresh restatement of the promise.
That promise is easy. As the Son got here into the world hallowing human flesh, so he died hallowing the world that human beings inhabit. He made what’s supremely unusual — wood, material stuff — right into a cradle of holiness.
Flesh and blood won’t inherit the Kingdom (1 Corinthians 15.50). Even touching the wood of the one true cross doesn’t routinely, miraculously, make us something which in reality we aren’t. The last chronological word on the cross in scripture is 1 Peter 2.24: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross.” But the Last Word — within the sense of ultimate message — is about people, not wood: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everybody who believes in him may not perish but could have everlasting life” (John 3.16).
