September 14, 2025 – The Feast of the Holy Cross

Today we keep one of the more unusual and yet deeply powerful feasts of the Church year: the Feast of the Holy Cross. On the surface it might seem strange, even morbid, that Christians should set aside a day not to remember a saint, not to celebrate an event in Christ’s life, but to exalt the instrument of His execution. The cross, after all, was Rome’s cruelest weapon—a means of humiliation, suffering, and death. And yet here we are, lifting it high, singing of its glory, calling it our “life and salvation.”

This paradox—death becoming life, weakness becoming strength, shame becoming glory—is at the very heart of the Christian faith. It is what Paul calls “the foolishness of the cross” in our epistle reading today.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre cropped to approximately the area of the original church

By Gerd Eichmann - File:Jerusalem-Grabeskirche-14-vom_Erloeserkirchturm-2010-gje.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110873750

The Feast of the Holy Cross has its roots in the early fourth century, when Christianity emerged from persecution into public life under the Emperor Constantine. Around the year 326, Constantine’s mother, St. Helena, journeyed to Jerusalem. According to tradition, she discovered the very cross upon which Jesus was crucified, along with the sites of His crucifixion and resurrection. Constantine ordered a great church to be built on that spot—the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as it is known in the West, or as Eastern Christians call it, the Church of the Resurrection. It may seem like a subtle difference, but one focuses on death and the other focuses on life.

The church was dedicated on September 13, 335, and the following day, September 14, the relic of the True Cross was brought forth and “exalted” for the faithful to venerate. From that point on, the feast spread across the Christian world, not so much as a commemoration of a discovery, but as a theological proclamation: that through the Cross of Christ, death itself is put to death, and life eternal is given to the world.

So today is not about relics, or buildings, or even St. Helena’s pilgrimage. It is about the mystery the cross reveals—the love of God poured out for us, the means by which the world is saved.

Our first reading takes us into the wilderness with the people of Israel, who have grown weary and impatient on their journey from slavery to freedom. They complain against God and against Moses, and in their rebellion they encounter death in the form of venomous serpents. Yet in the midst of judgment, God provides a strange and paradoxical salvation: Moses is to lift up a bronze serpent on a pole, and anyone who looks upon it will live.

Notice the pattern: the very image of their suffering becomes the means of their healing. The instrument of death is transformed into the channel of life.

This is not just an ancient story—it is a foreshadowing of the Cross. Jesus Himself makes the connection in today’s Gospel: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

Paul understood this paradox well. To the world, the cross was absurd. “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,” he writes, “but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

To Jews, the cross was a scandal: how could God’s Messiah be cursed and humiliated? To Greeks, it was foolishness: why revere a man executed in shame? And yet, Paul insists, it is precisely through this foolishness that God reveals His wisdom and power.

The cross dismantles our expectations of how God should act. We want God to show strength, victory, and triumph. But God chooses weakness, vulnerability, and even death. In doing so, God meets us in the very depths of human suffering and redeems it from the inside out.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells Nicodemus that the Son of Man must be “lifted up” just as Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness. The word “lifted up” carries a double meaning. It means both being physically raised up on the cross and being glorified, exalted.

This is the scandal and the glory of our faith: the place of deepest human suffering becomes the place of God’s greatest revelation. “For God so loved the world,” Jesus declares, “that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

The cross is not about appeasing an angry God. It is about the self-giving love of God, willing to go to the uttermost lengths—even death on a cross—for the sake of the world.

The Stone of Anointing, where Jesus's body is said to have been anointed before burial

By Berthold Werner - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13895553

Several years ago, I had the privilege of making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to the very place where these mysteries are remembered and embodied in stone, in worship, and in prayer. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands as a great, if complicated, witness to both the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus.

I will never forget stepping into that holy space. The church is dark, noisy, crowded, filled with pilgrims and processions from every corner of the Christian world. And yet, in the midst of the chaos, there are moments of profound encounter.

I knelt at the Stone of Anointing, where tradition says Jesus’ body was prepared for burial. I touched the rock of Golgotha, where the cross once stood. I entered the small, dark tomb, empty for nearly two thousand years, where death was swallowed up by life.

Standing in that place, I felt the paradox of the cross in a way that words can scarcely describe. Here was the site of humanity’s worst violence, and yet it has become a fountain of life and hope for the whole world. Here was a place of death, and yet pilgrims from every nation were singing alleluias. Here was a place of division, even among Christians, and yet it radiated with the promise of resurrection.

The celebration of this feast day is more than an exercise in history or a memory of my pilgrimage. It is an invitation to see how God is at work in our own lives in precisely the places that feel most broken, most painful, most shameful.

We all carry crosses of some kind—illness, grief, strained relationships, worries about the future. We live in a world marked by violence, injustice, and suffering. And yet the message of today’s feast is that none of these things have the last word. God is able to take what looks like failure and transform it into victory, to take what looks like weakness and fill it with power, to take what looks like death and bring forth life.

To exalt the cross is not to glorify suffering for its own sake, but to proclaim that no suffering, no death, no loss is beyond the reach of God’s redeeming love.

So how do we live as people of the cross? Paul gives us a clue: we do not rely on our own strength or wisdom, but on the power of God revealed in weakness. We learn to forgive when it would be easier to hate. We choose compassion when the world preaches indifference. We trust in resurrection even when all we can see is death.

The cross also calls us to a kind of discipleship that is costly. To follow Jesus is to take up our own cross—not as a burden of despair, but as a way of life shaped by love, service, and sacrifice.

My dear siblings in Christ, on this Feast of the Holy Cross, we are invited to see anew the mystery at the heart of our faith. The cross, once a symbol of shame and death, has become for us the tree of life, the sign of hope, the instrument of salvation.

As we lift high the cross in our worship today, let us also lift it high in our lives: in the way we love, in the way we forgive, in the way we trust God’s power to bring life out of death.

And let us remember the words of Jesus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Amen.