Lifting Up

[A reflection on the Gospel reading for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Sunday, September 14, 2025. This and the other readings may be found at https://www.episcopalchurch.org/lectionary/holy-cross-day/]

Since St. Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine bankrolled and enabled the discovery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, Christians have been commemorating the event. While it has the status of a Greater Double/Red Letter Day/Major Feast in the West, in the East it is considered one of the Twelve Great Feasts with its own special rules and observances and "customized" liturgy. For non-Christians and even some Christians who take nothing at face value this is puzzling. "Why would Jesus allow His followers to commemorate the painful, humiliating, and horrible means of His Death?"

Fair question, but the answer lies within the contrast of the Nature of God versus the fallen nature of humanity. In one of today's Epistle selections (Phil. 2.5-11) St. Paul highlights Our Lord's innate humility, stressing His obedience even to the point of a horrid death. In the other (Gal. 6.14-18), St. Paul mentioned that the Church proclaimed Christ crucified, a stumbling-block and foolishness to most, but to those who experienced it the wisdom and power of God. In the Gospel reading, Our Lord stated that He must be lifted up (a euphemism for being destroyed) so that He might draw all people to Himself.

How is this humility wise? How is this demonstration of powerlessness the power of God?

Were Jesus human only, this would have been nothing more than yet another prophet slain because his message was inconvenient. However, in Him was the fulness of God incarnate, the perfect union of Human and Divine, where His human humility and His human will were perfectly unified with His divine humility and His divine will, conforming the human nature to its original intent, to be the image of the One, Immortal, Limitless God. As such, this humiliating death was not so much the inconvenience of having preached a message that angered those with a vested interest in the status quo, but instead it was the key to breaking the hold of Death and Corruption on the nature of all humanity. The Cross was the means by which Jesus met Death on its own ground to destroy it and its hold on humanity. Death claimed Jesus' human nature only to find it unified with the nature of God Most High over which it had no claim and could enforce no claim, and so the old hold was broken. In the Cross Jesus redeemed and renewed our nature, rebuilding it free from the lasting hold of Death. The Cross no longer became a final humiliation but the symbol of Death having done its worst and bringing its own destruction upon itself. It was not only Jesus who died upon the Cross. Death itself was tacked up there, and it will not be taken down.