the Cross

The Exaltation of the Cross: Suffering and Gratitude

Leave a Comment

Exaltation-Cross

NM 21:4b-9; PS 78:1bc-2, 34-35, 36-37, 38; PHIL 2:6-11; JN 3:13-17

This Sunday, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross takes precedence over what would be the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. The readings show us how the Cross teaches gratitude.

The first reading, one of the stories about the Exodus in the Book of Numbers, begins with one of the Bible’s most amusing stories, about ingratitude. God has brought his people out of slavery in Egypt – and they complain, “against God and Moses,” “We are disgusted with this wretched food!”

The Exodus is the central story of the Old Testament. This humorous little story of ingratitude takes us to the heart of Scripture.

***

God’s response foreshadows the Cross. He punishes them, with biting serpents. But why does God punish?

The punishment leads them to ask God for deliverance: “Pray the LORD to take the serpents from us.” The punishment takes them from complaining to trust, from ingratitude to a rediscovery of gratitude.

God’s way of salvation is even stranger, at first glance, than is his choice to punish. “Make a saraph [a serpent] and mount it on a pole, and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live.” The poisonous snake on a pole becomes the symbol of healing. (We still see that symbol on ambulances, and are reminded of it – and of the strange old union between barbers and medicine – in barber poles.)

The whole dynamic is of gratitude. To look at the bronze serpent is to be reminded that everything comes from God: the punishment, the good things we were punished for not appreciating, and the healing from that punishment.

Our sufferings cease to sting when we discover that they too are a gift.

***

Our reading from Philippians, the great Christ Hymn, gives us another angle on the same story.

“Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.” The Philippians hymn teaches us about two kinds of grasping.

The first is our grasping. We think everything is ours for the taking. We demand food – and delicious food! – in the wilderness, we demand an end to our suffering. We demand even equality with God. But Jesus teaches us that equality with God is not something to be grasped. Like everything else, we can only receive it as a gift. We need a savior.

And that savior himself does not grasp, and so shows us what it looks like to accept God as Father. “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. . . . He humbled himself, becoming obedient to death.” Jesus models the humility that alone can lead us to God: the humility that grasps at nothing, and is obedient even to death on a cross.

***

John’s Gospel simply states the thesis. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”

People often insert a word that isn’t there. “God loved the world so much”? But that’s a different word (ever clearer in the Greek). It doesn’t say this is how much God loved the world. It says this is the way he loved the world.

The particular way God chose to love us was by giving his Son to die on a cross – “just as,” the same passage tells us, “Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert.”

He could have loved us a different way: could have given us more delightful food, could have shortened our wanderings in the desert. Instead he gives us the Cross – both the fangs that sting us, and the sting of death lifted up in our sight.

***

“He gave his only Son,” John tells us, “so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life . . . that the world might be saved through him.”

We can look at our crosses and think God wants “to condemn the world.” Rather, he wants to remind us that “no one has gone up to heaven” without being taken there by Jesus; “equality with God is not something to be grasped.”

Like the serpents in the desert, our crosses, paradoxically, can teach us not to complain, but to cry out to God for help. When we cry out, God does not give us the deliverance we expect. He shows us the Cross of Jesus, to teach us that our crosses are gifts from him, just as everything is, and that the true relief is his presence, his union with us. He alone is our peace.

What parts of our life do we fail to receive with gratitude?

At the Foot of the Cross, She Stands

Leave a Comment

stabat materOn Monday, a week after Mary’s birthday, and one day after the Triumph of the Cross, we celebrate Our Lady of Sorrows.

The tie-ins are nice. First we celebrate, with a bigger feast, Christ’s triumph. In fact, this feast used to be called, “The Finding of the Cross.” “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the Savior of the world.” This is a very objective feast. By focusing on the Cross itself, it reminds us that Christ did the work. Christ saves us. It is the Cross that sets us free.

Placed in September, it lets the Easter mysteries of Spring penetrate to the other side of the year. And it recalls the High Holy Days of the Jews, and the Day of Atonement, in which the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies to offer sacrifice for the sins of the people – perfected on the Cross.

But the next day, we celebrate, as it were, the subjective side. It is Christ who saves us. But it is Mary who is first to be saved, Mary who receives the gift of Christ on the Cross. Our Lady of Sorrows doesn’t do anything, except enter into what Christ does. Yet it is that entering in that is the whole point. Christ died to save us – and Mary stands there for us.

Indeed – this is the other tie-in – it is for this that Mary was born. In a quick week, we go from celebrating all the promise of Mary’s birth to seeing the fulfillment of that promise, in the Cross. For this she was born: to share in the sufferings of Christ, to be bathed in his blood.

***

But what does Mary gain at the Cross? What happens to her there?

The tradition – especially the Dominican tradition – focuses on a single word in John’s Gospel: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother” (John 19:25). Stabat Mater, sings the great sequence, the special hymn for this day: she stood.

She did not faint. Though others were there, the heart of the mother, which, Simeon prophesies in Luke’s Gospel will be “pierced by a sword” (Lk 2:35), is a singular place to meditate on this standing.

Notice, when you look at traditional art of the crucifixion, that Mary Magdalene is typically sprawled on the ground. And who would not? The Cross is too awful, the very pinnacle of awfulness. If the Cross does not make us despair, if the Cross does not make us faint, then nothing will.

But the Cross does not make the Mother of Jesus faint or despair. She stands. (So, says the Greek of the New Testament, does the disciple Jesus loves: in traditional images, John too is standing with Mary, as we are called to stand.)

***

We are not meant to see in this an image of Mary’s strength, or stoicism. To name a feast Our Lady of Sorrows is to see the connection between Mary Magdalene and Mary the Mother of Jesus. She has every reason to fall. Nobody’s heart could be more broken than Mary’s.

How then does she stand? Her standing is an image of grace. We can imagine a ray of light (as in the image of Divine Mercy) shining into Mary’s heart, holding her up beyond all human strength. A ray of hope beyond hope: for “hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man sees, why does he still hope for? But if we hope for what we do not see, then with patience we wait for it” (Rom 8:24-25).

The Holy Spirit dwelling in Mary’s heart keeps hope alive in complete darkness. She cannot see beyond the darkness. But hope keeps her alive. Hope keeps her standing.

And the root of that hope is love: the love that binds her to Jesus on the Cross, and the love that is as strong as death (Song 8:6).

 ***

This is the Gospel. This is the meaning of the Cross.

Jesus does not save us from suffering. We are “joint-heirs with Christ; if we suffer with him, then we may be also glorified together” (Rom 8:17). Glory sounds nice – but the promise is that we may pass to heaven through the Cross.

Yet the promise of Our Lady of Sorrows is that we can stand through that suffering. Jesus has been there. Mary has been there. John has been there. We do not take the place of Jesus, but like Mary, his Spirit poured into our hearts can transform our suffering into the place of union, of hope and love. If, like John, we stand at the foot of the Cross with Mary.

What Cross is Jesus offering to help us stand through? What does it look like when we faint?

Twenty-Second Sunday: Trusting God, Even to the Cross

Leave a Comment
St. Dominic, Fra Angelico

St. Dominic, Fra Angelico

JER 20:7-9; PS 63:2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9; ROM 12:1-2; MT 16:21-27

This Sunday’s readings teach us that God is sweeter than life and stronger than death.

The Gospel is the second half of last week’s story. Last week Peter professed that Jesus was the Son of God. “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you,” Jesus responded, “but my heavenly Father.” Then, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.”

But this week, “Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly.” “God forbid, Lord!” said Peter (maybe better translated, “goodness gracious!”). “No such thing shall ever happen to you.”

Jesus responds, “You are an obstacle to me.” Skandalon means something like a stick you trip on; it’s a nice parallel to “upon this rock I will build.” And parallel to “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you,” “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

***

Then Jesus applies it to us. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Interesting: in all the Gospels, until Jesus goes to Jerusalem to die, the only times he ever mentions the cross are in saying the disciples must carry it. He doesn’t tell them that he will carry a cross, too.

***

The reading from Jeremiah is a classic. “You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.”

How did God dupe him? By convincing him to be a prophet – and then making him prophecy the Cross. “I must cry out, violence and outrage is my message. . . . I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart.”

The Cross appears on two levels. First, it is what Jeremiah must preach: in effect, he must preach that the people have to carry their crosses.

But this preaching is itself Jeremiah’s cross. “The word of the LORD” – this word of “violence and outrage,” of repentance and the cross – “has brought me derision and reproach all the day.” Just as Peter rebuked Jesus, the people rebuke Jeremiah for preaching the cross. To preach the cross is a cross.

And yet the strength of God, and the sweetness of God, compels him. How could he turn away from God’s call to him?

***

Our reading from Romans takes us deeper. “I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.”

Now this is interesting. They are supposed to use precisely their bodies for spiritual worship. (The Greek word for spiritual, logike, from logos, is even more intellectual and unbodily than the English word “spiritual.”)

“Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” The message is all about ideas and thinking. But the expression is bodily.

And this is the heart of the matter: to choose God as our God, to recognize him as God, has concrete consequences. If we are going to worship Jesus, we have to accept the cross. If we care about the will of God, we will have to express it in bodily sacrifices.

***

We return, then, to the Gospel.

To think as God does means choosing a different standard. To think as men is to fear death, fear suffering, fear the cross.

But to think as God does means accepting the cross: Jesus’s cross and our own.

Why? First, because God is powerful. “For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory,” says Jesus. The cross is terror if it is the last word. But it is not the last word.

Indeed, Jesus had just told them “that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly . . . and be killed and on the third day be raised.” If there is no resurrection, the cross is terror. But God is with us, and there is resurrection.

Second, we accept the cross because God is sweet. “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Losing our lives is not the point of the cross. The point is that we give our all for him, because he is worth it. To lose everything and gain God is to lose nothing at all.

What cross do we fear to carry? Why?

Thinking about the Cross

Leave a Comment
King David Doing Penance, Albrecht Durer

King David Doing Penance, Albrecht Durer

St. Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) was a French monk and then Archbishop of Canterbury, and a very important theologian. His arguments are famously slippery from a purely rational perspective. But he is really writing spiritual exercises, more like meditations than like philosophical arguments.

One of his most famous books, Cur Deus Homo, or “why God became man,” discusses the Cross. It can help us think about Holy Week.

On a rational level, Cur Deus Homo is famously slippery. The argument is, basically, that sin is an infinite offense, which requires an infinite repayment. Man needs to make the repayment, but only God can do it. Therefore God must become man and die.

Most people, even theologians, are turned off by many elements of this argument. God is not a miser, demanding repayment. Nor does he will death as a fitting repayment of sin. Nonetheless, we can learn much from this text by reading it spiritually.

***

Anselm’s first insight is the horror of sin. To understand this insight, though, we have to turn it around, from “offense against God” to overwhelming sadness for our stupidity.

He guides us through a meditation on the sin of Adam and Eve. They had everything. More than everything, they had God, who is so overwhelmingly, superabundantly good that he is worth losing everything for. If God is the Creator of all good things, then not only can he give us all those things, but, far deeper, he is better than all those things, infinitely better.

Anselm asks us to consider, then, just how dramatically irrational sin is. The point is not the rule we are breaking, nor the “anger” we arouse in God. The point is that sin, by definition, means choosing a radically inferior thing even when it means losing everything. We can’t hurt God. Sin does not hurt God. But it hurts us, because it is the choice not to have God. Dramatic stupidity, radical tragedy.

***

This is important, for example, if we follow St. Alphonsus Ligouri’s famous meditations on the Stations of the Cross (which many parishes use on Fridays during Lent). “My Jesus, I am sorry for having offended you,” he has us pray. Well now, that’s a little imprecise – blame it on the translation, or maybe the change in cultural context. Sin doesn’t “offend” Jesus. Jesus isn’t touchy or over-sensitive! To the contrary, Jesus was so willing to put up with our sin that he even died on the Cross.

But St. Alphonsus’s point is that sin is a rejection of Jesus. As if he, the God of all goodness, and the man of all sweetness, stands before us, offers us everything, and we say, “nah.” The problem with sin is not that Jesus takes offense. The problem is that, like Esau in the Book of Genesis, we are “trading our birthright for a pot of lentils.” Jesus is so very good, and we choose things that are so much less good.

This goes for our relationships, too. The deeper problem is not the rules we break. It’s that, for example, when we are snippy with someone, we are willing to lose the massive good of that relationship so that we can hold onto . . . what? Our high opinion of ourselves? Our “right” to get annoyed? This is a stupid trade. Sin is always about giving up what is really wonderful in exchange for something that just isn’t worth it.

***

This is the situation of fallen man: our scale of values is upside down. We have set our hearts on really worthless things when we could have God himself.

The death of Christ is, first, a witness to the re-scaling of values. It is not that God wants us to die – he raises Jesus from the dead! It is not that he wants us to suffer: he offers us heaven. But he does want us to reconsider.

The Cross is key because it shows what it means to re-scale our values. Now that we are so caught up in sin – however original sin technically works, it’s just a fact that we very frequently choose snippiness over charity, our own way over seeking God – we need to rethink.

Christ on the Cross has everything, because he has the Father, and because he loves his own “to the end.” Why are we unwilling to follow?

But even more powerfully, Christ who is God pours out from the Cross his grace, his sacraments, his Holy Spirit, so that we can be transformed into his likeness. He offers us help, so that we can choose the way of God and the way of love, and scoff at the cost.

***

What crosses are you called to carry? Why don’t you carry them?