TRINITY · 14 SEPTEMBER
The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Holy Cross Day · The Instrument of Salvation Exalted · The Tree of Life Restored
Exaltation — eg-zol-TAY-shun · Helena — HEL-en-ah · Calvary — KAL-vah-ree · Pange Lingua — PAN-jay LING-gwah · Crux fidelis — KRUKS fih-DAY-lis · Heraclius — her-AK-lee-us
O God, who didst will that thy Son should suffer the cross for our redemption, and hast exalted that same cross to be the sign of thy triumph and the tree of our life; Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may bear it as the instrument of our salvation and the measure of thy love; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
The cross stands at the centre of the Christian faith and at the centre of the Christian Calendar. The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (eg-zol-TAY-shun) has two historical origins: the dedication of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 335, built by Constantine over Calvary (KAL-vah-ree) and the tomb, at which the Cross that Helena (HEL-en-ah) had discovered was publicly displayed; and the restoration of that same Cross to Jerusalem by the Emperor Heraclius (her-AK-lee-us) in 628 after it had been captured by the Persians. Both events are celebrations of the exaltation of the Cross — the lifting up of the instrument of shame and torture as the sign of victory, the transformation of the gallows into the throne, the death-tree into the tree of life.
The paradox of the Cross is the paradox at the heart of the Gospel: that the thing done to Christ in shame and cruelty and apparent defeat is the very act by which salvation is accomplished. God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ — Paul’s declaration in Galatians is the theological ground of the feast. The Cross is not merely the prelude to the Resurrection; it is itself the act of redemption, the moment in which the love of God reaches its fullest expression. Venantius Fortunatus’s sixth-century hymn Pange Lingua (PAN-jay LING-gwah) — sung at Passiontide and on Holy Cross Day — is the most theologically rich hymn in the Western tradition: Crux fidelis (KRUKS fih-DAY-lis), faithful Cross, above all other, one and only noble tree — sweet the wood and sweet the iron, and thy load, most sweet is he. The Cross is exalted not because wood and iron are holy in themselves but because of what was hung on them.
The archive has traced martyrdom from Ignatius to Stephen to Lucy to the Oxford Martyrs — and every martyr’s death is in some sense a participation in the Cross, a sharing of the suffering that the Lord said his followers would share. But Holy Cross Day is not about the martyrs’ crosses; it is about the one Cross, the original Cross, from which every subsequent bearing of suffering draws its meaning and its power. The martyrs could face their deaths because they knew that death had been entered and overcome on Calvary; the cross they carried was a carrying of the one Cross, an entering into the same pattern of self-gift that the Lord himself had lived. This is what Paul means by filling up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ — not that Christ’s work was insufficient but that the pattern of his love, expressed in the Cross, continues to be expressed in the lives of those who are united with him. Holy Cross Day names that pattern at its source.
The feast falls on 14 September in Trinity-tide — two days before the feast of Hildegard of Bingen (17 September) in the same week, a pairing that is not accidental: the woman who described herself as a feather on the breath of God was also the woman who knew that the breath that carried her was the breath of the crucified and risen Lord. The Cross and the living light are not opposed; the death and the viriditas are the same act of the same God seen from inside and outside the mystery. Trinity-tide is the long season of living from the Cross — not the dramatic crisis of Holy Week but the daily bearing of the ordinary cross that discipleship requires. Holy Cross Day gives that daily bearing its annual focal point: the feast that says, this is what it means, this is what love looks like, this is the measure.
O Almighty God, who in the Cross of thy Son hast shown us the uttermost extent of thy love and the cost at which our redemption was purchased; Grant that we may glory in no other boast than this, and may find in the daily bearing of the cross we are given the same pattern of self-gift that thy Son enacted once and enacts eternally; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.