Homily

The Church is wise. After a few weeks of some Lenten work, she hopes that we are softened up a little from the hardness of regular life, from the casualness or indifference we may have allowed ourselves to fall into during the rest of the year. By spending a few weeks in prayer, fasting, almsgiving and refocusing our lives at least a bit, and talking to our Lord at least a bit more, we may now be more receptive to the message we have heard so many times. And this is the message here lying before us. It is the love of Jesus for us that we see. The Savior willing to be crowned with thorns, beaten, battered, spit upon, mocked and humiliated, and then hung on a cross to die in agonizing pain. Almost everyone has deserted Him and abandoned Him to save their own necks. The most innocent man who ever lived is crushed under the pain of crucifixion. It is a pain and suffering He takes upon Himself not because He is forced into it, not because there is no other choice for Him. He willingly ascends the cross out of His overwhelming love for mankind. Jesus dies so that every person who ever sinned might have the possibility of forgiveness, and not just forgiveness, but the possibility of sharing in God’s own divine life, and a future of everlasting life in eternal happiness with Him, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. This symbol of the love of the Son of God for us is placed in front of us today, so that in kissing it, we may kiss the Lord Himself and allow even some more of our resistance to fade away.

May we kiss the Holy Cross as we ask pardon for our sins; including the sins we try to avoid thinking about, the sins we excuse for one reason or another, the sins we commit so routinely and easily that we hardly even notice. Let us kiss the Cross not as a sign of our righteousness but as a sign of our contrition.

May we kiss the Holy Cross and ask for the gift of grace. It may be that we are spending so much time fixing, arranging, preparing, and mending our own lives that we have forgotten to depend on the Lord’s grace, that we have neglected prayer in favor of our own plans and activities, and carry on running our lives without seeking His help—unless we are desperate. We will always call on Him when we are desperate and cannot find our own way out of trouble. And yet He ascended the cross so that we might have access to Him every day and all the time—because He wishes to save us every day and all the time. He wants to save us from sin which disfigures and corrupts our life; He wants to save us for love, the love He bears for us; He wants to save us from ourselves so that we might find ourselves in Him.

Let us kiss the cross in hope. Let us hope and believe we can continue to convert our lives into lives that live for Christ. See how His arms are stretched out for us, as so many of the Fathers tells us. He stretches His arms wide for us to come and be embraced by Him. Let us hope in His promises above all else. Let us hope in Him above all else. We place so many hopes in so many places, in so many areas of our lives, and we work to make these hopes come true as best we can. But Jesus is the only sure hope that will never fail for us. Let us grow in the hope we have in Him.

One of the great dangers we face is to insulate ourselves from Christ. We don’t want to be totally cut off, of course, but we put some distance between ourselves and Him. Sometimes that happens by our deliberate choices, sometimes it happens indirectly as we let other people and other priorities become more important in our lives and the love of the Lord is neglected for lesser, material goods, and other people. We’ve been distracted and we have distracted ourselves. The internet, sports, games, videos. “But I am watching a movie about Jesus.” That may be a very good thing, of course, unless it’s simply another distraction that is replacing your talking to Jesus. We let those things that are in front of our face distract us from the face of Christ. Here is His face. What will we say to Him?

Coptic Christians in Egypt, living for 1,400 years in a country dominated by Muslims, have faced heavy taxation, kidnappings of their children, violence, and death even today because of their faith in Jesus Christ. When they are young children, they are marked by a tattoo of the cross on their right wrist or hand. This identification will often bring them scorn, insults, gross discrimination and sometimes even death. But they carry their cross literally on their arms for all to see.

We do not face this same type of threat here. The threat for us is a society that is quickly slipping into gross immorality and a pagan denial of the sanctity of life as given by God. We must pick up the cross in our lives against these threats, model our faith for our children, and give example for our neighbors, that we are the people of the Cross.

We use the cross so much, in so many ways, and rightly so, but there is always the danger that it becomes so common that we no longer even notice the crucified Lord Who hangs on that cross for our sake. But not today. Let us come and kiss the cross and ask Him for pardon, for grace and for hope. And let’s get back on with our Lenten work, pick up our own cross once again, and follow the Savior wherever He leads us.