OUR LADY & ST BENEDICT'S

Exaltation of the Holy Cross – the Prior of Holy Cross Priory preaches on the terrifying power of the Cross.

In the Letter to the Galatians, St Paul speaks of Christ as having been ‘publicly portrayed’ or ‘postered up’ as crucified (Gal 3:1). We might even translate this Greek word (proegraphē) as ‘advertised’: in his crucifixion Christ became, in a certain sense, a poster boy for the Roman Empire.

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And indeed, crucifixion was, in its own way, a brilliant piece of advertising. Not that Pontius Pilate intended to advertise Christ, of course; he was advertising Roman power, the power of this world to control people, to intimidate them, to rule and limit them. It might not be a very subtle piece of advertising, and it certainly did not attempt to instil a love of Rome among the subject peoples, but only fear. One is reminded of the (allegedly) favourite saying of Caligula, oderint dum metuant: ‘let them hate, as long as they fear’.

Among the genteel Roman citizens, the very word ‘cross’ was considered indecent, yet their lives depended upon the subjection of slaves and subject peoples. When Spartacus and his fellow slaves rebelled, about a hundred years before Christ’s crucifixion, six thousand of them were crucified along the main road into Rome. It was a simple advertisement that said, ‘obey or die, slowly, shamefully and horribly’.

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So when in our Priory of the Holy Cross I bring out our precious relic this coming Sunday for veneration, the people will be adoring a tiny piece of a torture device – a device not just for the humiliation and murder of one man, but for the suppression and destruction of whole civilisations, for the killing of hope. When Jesus died on the Cross, when he was ‘lifted up’ like a grotesque billboard, the Jewish people were being told ‘behold your king, behold your hopes and dreams and aspirations: this is what they amount to’.

This sermon is not intended to be a rant about the Romans. They did not invent crucifixion – it was brought to Europe from Persia by Alexander the Great – and they were not the only ones to use it. Indeed, the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus is reported to have crucified eight hundred pharisees before the Romans conquered Judea. There is nothing special about Italy that makes people cruel, inhuman or monstrous; rather, there is something about being human that makes us so, something about being a member of fallen humanity. The Romans were just, as in so many things, very good at being inhuman on a large scale.

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This is what we need to recognise in order to understand Christ’s death: God did not only choose to live as one of us, but to subject himself to us, to undergo every misery and despair that we could inflict upon him. ‘He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross’ (Philippians 2:8). And in the face of all this, his love endured and he pleaded ‘Father, forgive them’ (Luke 23:34).

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This is the first part of God’s answer to sin – to our sins. He does not pretend not to see them, he does not magic them away with a click of his divine fingers. He endures them, bears them and forgives them.

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The second part of this answer follows in our second reading: ‘Therefore God has highly exalted him’ (Phil 2:9). In raising up Christ, he raises up all of us with whom he shared in our human nature and our human weakness. However low we sink, whatever depravities we devise, God will raise us up, will forgive us, and will transform us. In the resurrection of Christ, God took the Cross that was the brutally unsubtle advertisement of human sin and of the power of evil, and make it into the most subtle and yet powerful advertisement ever known. When we venerate the Cross, we remind ourselves not only of how cruel human beings can be, but also of how there is no cruelty so deep, no wickedness so inhuman, that it can separate us from the love of God.

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But as with any advertisement, there is a price. The price is to share in that love, to be willing to pay the price that Jesus paid. Dare we risk to love as God loves, enduring the contempt and hatred of a world in thrall to darkness, and so bring the light of the Cross into the lives of our friends, our neighbours, and even our enemies?

Readings: Numbers 21:4-9 | Philippians 2:6-11 | John 3:13-17