A Sermon preached on Saturday 14 September (Holy Cross) at The English Church in Heidelberg (CAECG Meeting)
Numbers 21:4-9, Philippians 2:6-11, John 3:13-17
May these spoken words be faithful to the written word and lead us to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Today we celebrate Holy Cross Day, an ancient, ecumenical feast day shared by both Eastern and Western Christians, though not generally by our Reformed and Free Church brothers and sisters.
As many of you know, we commemorate both the finding of the True Cross by Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, should we want to accept that discovery, and at the very least the dedication of the churches built by Emperor Constantine on the site of the Holy Sepulchre and Mount Calvary on 14 September 335. In the 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood”[1] the Rood, that is the Cross, remembers being found and brought back into light:
“In a deep pit
they buried us.
But friends and servants of the Lord learnt where I was,
and decorated me with gold and silver.”
Good Friday, another Day of the Cross, focuses on the suffering and the death of the one who died for us on the Cross and is a sombre and reflective service. Holy Cross Day has a more festal atmosphere when we recognise the Cross as a symbol of triumph, as a sign of Christ's victory over death, and a reminder of His promise, "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." (John 12:32)
What is the Cross for us? At one level, if we wear one or when we make the sign of Cross, or have one on the walls of our churches or the top of our roofs, it’s an outward sign of our identity, that we belong to the Triune God, and especially to the one who came and shared our life with us and suffered and died for us. Sneak preview: we are not just called to wear but to carry a cross – in tomorrow’s Gospel (Mark 8:27.38) we will be told that as Jesus’ followers, we are to deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow him.” But I won’t preach tomorrow’s sermon today.
In the poem I quoted from earlier, the “Dream of the Rood,” the Cross goes on to say:
On me the Son of God once suffered; therefore
now
I tower mighty underneath the heavens,
And I may heal all those in awe of me.
Once I became the cruellest of tortures,
Most hateful to all nations, till the time
I opened the right way of life for all.
So then the prince of glory honoured me,
And heaven's King exalted me above all other trees,
These themes, healing, the way of life, exaltation and being lifted up for all to see are echoed in today’s readings. In Numbers the serpent of bronze lifted up to cure the snake bites foreshadows the cross as a symbol of an even greater healing. In the Christ Hymn from Philippians, the cross at the centre of the passage is both the culmination of Jesus’ path of humility and obedience and the moment of his triumph and exaltation. In the passage from John’s Gospel, the Cross is the means by which Jesus is lifted up, made known so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
In my church in Wiesbaden, until it almost completely burned down in a fire in 1966, a large wooden crucifix – the Rood - sat on a wooden beam, between the nave and the chancel. The beam was inscribed with the first words of John 3:16 in Latin: Sic Deus dilexit mundum, for God so loved the world. Both objects survived the fire, but badly damaged, and now that charcoaled beam and charcoaled crucifix, carefully preserved, are in the entrance of our building as physical, visible symbols of the resurrection of that church and community after the fire.
It is – as the Rood itself told us in the poem – one of God’s great mysteries and paradoxes that a symbol of torture and death can become a sign of life and love. But that is our hope: that all the destructive and hateful things we see in the world, wars, the abuse of creation, all the division and othering, and the fear that is behind so many of these evil things, that this can all be transformed by the Cross and by the one who was lifted up on it. For in Jesus, we see the full display of God’s saving and transforming love.
We have a role to play in that transformation, in our lives and witness in our chaplaincies and parishes, in the cities, as Anglicans together, and with all our other Christian partners in this country. We play a role with our creation care initiatives, with our refugee projects, with our work with the homeless, whenever we welcome the stranger, and also by taking a clear stand for democracy and against its enemies. In doing so we witness to the Cross and to its power by making it and Jesus visible and fully known to the world that God loves and into which God sent God’s only Son.
For in the words of the well known hymn, our main task, and not just on Holy Cross Day, is simply to:
“Lift high the cross; the love of Christ proclaim till all the world adore his sacred name.”
Amen.
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