Numbers 21: 4-9; Philippians 2: 6-11; Jn. 3: 13-17
Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 2025
Fr Marc
“So must the Son of Man be lifted up.” May I speak in the name of the Son, to the glory of the Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
St John’s account of the gospel of Jesus Christ is quite different from the Lukan narrative we have been hearing over most of the last 10 months. St Luke’s account is an orderly, crafted and highly selective presentation of our Lord’s life and ministry. It is predominantly an episodic account, whose style-shifting between different forms of Greek indicates the author’s intended outreach to a diverse audience: early Jewish-Christians, the educated speakers of Greek and the wider gentile world.
St John, by contrast, in spite of his shared intention to introduce his readers to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, uses a different methodology. Forasmuch as the author is clear about his objective to communicate the passion of Christ, what is going on often seems ambiguous to us as we and hear and read the account, which is a much more schematic attempt to uncover the divine identity of the incarnate Jesus.
We are given an insight into John’s high Christology here. He wants to communicate to us, if you like, the incommunicable by a thoroughgoing discernment of who Jesus is, especially in the first 12 chapters of the book, whereby we learn the identity of the Lord in signs that little by little unfurl the abiding mystery of the Father’s self-revelation.
Jesus Christ can and does do way-out things. Creating prodigious quantities of wine from water, it seems, is but the start of it.
Today’s Eucharistic feast honours – exalts - the cross; perhaps the most way-out episode of salvation history, and the clearest ever communication of the incommunicable that we can receive.
The cross is, as the Lord himself suggests to Nicodemus, the ultimate sign of the power and wisdom of God’s activity in the world, since it will become the mechanism by which the salvation and in-breaking of Almighty God is realised in the physical, sacramental breaking of the Son of Man’s blessed body and the outpouring of his precious blood.
The cross, perversely, is the great vehicle of God’s recreation. Where life was lost, as the prayer reminds us, there life has been restored. Only Jesus’ exaltation from the earth will enable God’s people to draw near to the Father; indeed no-one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, remember, without being born from above; without the paradoxical vantage point of the cross on which love is enthroned in order that grace may abound and love reign to reorder the life of the world.
“When the woes of life o’ertake me/hopes deceive and fears annoy/never shall the cross forsake me/lo, it glows with peace and joy,” writes John Bowring. And it glows with the true light who is dawning upon a dark world, the world that God loves so much that he sends his only Son to save it. This is the point of the cross: as it bears the crucified God, so it bears us all in him – bears us upward – to be not defeated failures dead in sin, but living signs: a kingdom and priests serving our God. Walking sacraments imparting tangible and lasting hope amidst the temporary brokenness, for the sake of the one who was broken there first. We can and we surely do carry our crosses because love has led the way; Jesus first loved us to the point of death, St Paul reminds us, even the death of the cross. And that death is the portal to life abundant; to everything that it means to be truly ourselves; truly real.
We cannot come to the resurrection of eternal life except through the same cross, the cross that will make Johannine signs of all of us, as we allow its power, its peace and joy to dissolve day by day, week by week, little by little, the darkness around and within us, and awaken the dawn of Easter that is the hope of all people. Such is the translucence – the transformation - of the holy cross. Here death is put to death and the mystery of all that it is to be born from above is revealed perpetually for the universe’s sake.
Grant Lord, that as we commemorate the exaltation of your holy cross today, we who see and taste your glory in living signs, may be exalted with you as living sacrifices of your presence in the world and joyfully welcome many into the kingdom prepared for them before its foundation. The Kingdom surveyed and the kingdom forever consummated at the wondrous cross. Amen.