Homily

How is it that we come to celebrate this feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross? One reason is to remember the work of the Empress St. Helena, mother of Constantine. She travelled to the Holy Land in the years 326 to 328 founding churches at many of the places where important events in the life of Christ took place and also setting up relief agencies to help the poor. Always playing detective she kept interviewing people to try and discover the place where Jesus was killed and buried. She learned that the Emperor Hadrian had built a temple to the goddess Venus over the site where Christians used to go to see the tomb of the Lord in Jerusalem. So, Helena had the temple torn down and began digging. She found the hiding place where large fragments of three crosses had been hidden. But which one, or were any of them, the Cross of Christ? One day they were praying with a woman who was very ill and touched the pieces of wood to her, and at the touch of one she was cured, so they believed this was the Cross of Christ. Helena built the Church of the Resurrection on that site, which is now, in the west, called the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The largest piece of the Cross remained in Jerusalem, but other pieces were sent out to different cities.

We have the stories of a woman named Egeria who spent two years in the Holy Land about 50 years after the Cross was discovered. She tells how the bishop of Jerusalem would bring the large piece of the cross out and lay it on a table surrounded by deacons. Thousands of people would come up over the next hours touching their eyes to the Cross and kissing it. None of the people dared to touch it with their hands because it was so holy. The bishop kept a firm grip on the relic and the deacons stood as guards because, she was told, one time a man, while bending over it kiss the relic, bit off a piece of the wood intending to take it home with him.

Even more important for the development of this feast was an event which happened some 300 years later. The pagan Persian Empire moved against Byzantium and in the year 614 the Persians conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Church of the Resurrection and carried off the Patriarch and the relic of the True Cross back to Persia. Fourteen years later the Byzantine emperor Heraclius regained Jerusalem and defeated the Persians, bringing the Patriarch and the Cross back to Jerusalem. The people of the city were so glad to have the Cross back that they demanded to see it so that they could once again pray to Christ in front of that piece of the Cross on which He died for our salvation. So, the Cross was brought out and for hour after hour the faithful filed passed it, touching their eyes to it and kissing it. This became part of the regular cycle of the Church year on September 14th. Ten years later when the Muslim Arabs conquered Jerusalem, this large piece of the Cross was taken to Constantinople, and there the yearly exposition and veneration of the Cross was held in great ceremony every September and this celebration spread through the entire Church, as it still is with us today, both East and West.

The term "Exaltation of the Cross" refers to part of the annual ceremony in Constantinople when the Patriarch would hold up high the piece of the Cross and bless the four corners of the earth with it. So the Ambon prayer near the end of Liturgy today takes that idea of raising up and putting down and uses it over and over again. The prayer proclaims that the Cross is a symbol of TRIUMPH, stating that "we show forth and we venerate it as the sign of the Lord's victory." The prayer describes Christ as the one Who, having suffered under the power of death, has now conquered Death, put it into chains and leads it around as His prisoner.

After Christ was lifted up upon the cross, it seemed to all the world that His power and influence were finished, and as He was lowered into the tomb, His memory would soon also fade away like His mortal remains would fade away. But He rose up from the dead, and by His rising He casts down the power of death that had captured the entire human race, even as He lifts up to life eternal all those who are willing to carry their crosses and follow after Him as His disciples, as we heard in the Gospel today.

We all have our own crosses here today as we continue to try and do our best to serve the Lord and follow Him. Objectively speaking some of us have very heavy crosses while others’ may not seem as heavy. It can be very, very easy to get caught up in the drama of our own suffering, and how difficult things are for us, how painful our troubles, and we can dwell on them, magnify them, marinate in them, allow them to dominate us and imprison us in their own corruptive embrace. We can recount our miseries to others and replay them in our own minds and lead ourselves deeper into the trap of fearing that we are in danger of being defeated.

It may be the case that we are actually dragging our crosses behind us like some kind of ball and chain we can’t get rid of. But Jesus says that if we want to follow Him we need to pick up our cross. Pick it up. Pick it up and carry it. Because if we are dragging it we will keep looking behind us to see it there. We’ll keep looking to see what we are dragging. But if we pick it up then we can look ahead to Christ and keep our eyes focused on Him, walking ahead of us and leading us in life and into life. Let’s not drag our crosses, making them the focus of our attention, but let’s pick them up and find that the Lord is with us, and not only with us but showing us the way to walk as His disciples.

I think how heavy our own cross may seem to us depends very much on how willing we are to surrender ourselves to our Master Whom we follow, for certainly this is what He meant when He said that for those who were tired and heavily burdened, they should come to Him, for His yoke is easy and His burden is light. Our cross may be a huge burden, but it will not seem so heavy if we are close to Christ in love and in hope – if we see Him leading us along the way.

Every single time we make the sign of the Cross, we should mark ourselves as people who reject what the fallen world considers to be victory. Every single time we make the sign of the Cross, we should mark ourselves as people who desire to follow only the Lord, Jesus Christ. It is easy for the sign of the cross to become routine, but let it represent our own desire to routinely follow the Lord with our own cross, until the day He lifts it from our hands.