"The LORD has made known his victory; * his
righteousness has he openly shown in the sight of the nations." Psalm 98:3
As you might
have noticed, just now I made the sign of the Cross over myself. I do it quite often. I sat down and counted this week, and
discovered that in the usual course of celebrating the Eucharist on Sunday, I
make the sign of the Cross not once or five or ten times, but 27 times, as well
as making it over each of you individually with the wafer when you come forward
to receive Holy Communion. Making the
sign of the Cross is a ritual that accompanies many different words and
movements in the course of the liturgy, including nearly all the most important
ones. I use the Cross when I ask God to
be with me in reading and hearing the Gospel, when I speak His word absolving
your sins, when I bless the bread and wine, when I speak His blessing over all
of you at the end of the service, and at quite a few other times besides
these.
And of
course, the Cross isn’t just here among us in the ritual action, we also
worship facing a Cross. The service
begins when the choir and the sacred ministers come in, proceeded by a
Cross—and we brought the beautiful jeweled one out of the vault to mark this
special day. There are crosses on the
windows and the paintings, the arches and the plates. The silver cruets we use at the Altar have
crosses on their tops. My vestments
today are adorned with a half-dozen of them.
There’s one on the steeple, and the whole building, for that matter, is
shaped like a Cross.
Now, if
you’re new here, all these crosses are likely to strike you as rather odd,
maybe as a kind of symbolic overkill.
Surely, we could mix it up a bit, couldn’t we? What is it about the Cross that urges us
Christians to plant it everywhere, to mark everything with it? What does it
mean for us?
We might
begin to answer that question by saying what it doesn’t mean for us
anymore. Because at first, the Cross
wasn’t a holy symbol of any kind. The ancient
Romans, who were masters of psychological manipulation, had invented
crucifixion. It was a tool for
frightening subject nations, a form of death so bloody and brutal that the mere
threat of it could be enough to put down a possible rebellion. They reserved it for the most dangerous
criminals, and freedom from the danger of it was one of the most cherished
privileges of their own citizens. For
the Jews of ancient times, it carried an added religious meaning, one of
unconditional condemnation. The Old
Testament law decreed that whatever hung on a tree was cursed, and for them the
Cross meant abandonment by God, the very opposite of holiness, life and
peace.
But all that
changed one springtime Friday afternoon when Jesus hung on a Cross. This was a death He had foreseen and freely
chosen, an act of obedience to the will of God the Father, who had ruled that
the world could be saved from sin and death only in this way. Jesus was speaking of that day to come when
He told His disciples, in the words recounted in our Gospel lesson, “I when I
am lifted from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” It was in this way, He assured them, that the
ruler of this world, Satan, would be cast out.
It was in this way that light would shine into the darkness, and that
they, having a share in it, would become children of light.
This was no
easy thing to understand. In the eyes of
so many people, even most of those who were closest to Him, the Cross marked
Jesus as a failure, one rejected by God.
But in truth it was His greatest victory. The man on the Cross appeared
the weakest of all: the pawn of the powerful, beaten down by the force of
violence, overshadowed by a sky turned black.
But this was precisely the moment when He was reversing the ancient
curse, toppling the prince of this world from His throne, and laying the
foundation of the kingdom of light that will never be defeated.
“The Lord,” today’s Psalm says, “has made
known his victory. His righteousness has
he shown in the sight of the nations.”
And how does he reveal His victory?
He does it through the Cross, which as today’s feast proclaims, is holy,
the holiest of all earthly things, because through it God has done His greatest
work. The Cross is the unconquered weapon
God used to bring righteousness to the world and to fill it with His
peace.
His glorious Cross has
become the true sign of God’s power, and the ground for our hope in a troubling
and dangerous world. Saint John
Chrysostom explained it this way: “Never leave your house without making the sign of the cross.
It will be to you a staff, a weapon, an impregnable fortress. Neither man nor
demon will dare to attack you, seeing you covered with such powerful armor… Are
you ignorant of what the cross has done? It has vanquished death, destroyed
sin, emptied hell, dethroned Satan, and restored the universe. Would you then
doubt its power?”[1]
We make the sign of the Cross to remind us
of its power, to claim the fruit of its victory. On the Cross, Jesus died to take away sin’s power
and the power of absolution flows from it—so it means forgiveness. On the Cross, Christ made a way through death
back to the Father—so it means eternal peace and everlasting life. On the Cross, God showed us how far His love
extends, how He would endure all to bring us what we need: so it means
blessing, and the assurance of His presence, protection, and help.
We need the Cross. We need to gaze on it, to hold it tightly and
to trace it on our bodies. You may not
all feel that you need it in all those ways—ritual seems more natural for some
of us than others. But some of us
desperately need that sign of the Cross.
Because it doesn’t always appear that God is winning, that evil has been
defeated, that light is shining into the darkness. Some of you struggle with tremendous burdens:
crippling diseases and disorders, intractable conflicts in your families, jobs
that provide no satisfaction and continual anxiety for you. For some of you, there seems to be much more
evidence for the world’s destiny being in the hands of wealth, power and
violence than the man on the Cross.
We need the Cross to save us from cynicism,
to keep hope alive, to distinguish the ways of dealing with this world that
will endure from those that have been defeated and are passing away. We need to be reminded that we have been set
free, that since our Baptism, we bear on our brows the sign of victory. We need to be reminded that God is not silent
or weak or absent, but that in Christ He has done a great thing, and He will
soon return to complete His work. The sign of the Cross says all those things,
and I believe that if you use it in faith, it will not fail to help you see
this in new and different ways.
I came across a beautiful new hymn about a
year ago and we will sing it as our first communion hymn today. It’s called “Goodness is stronger than evil,”
and it is based on a prayer written a
few decades ago by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who will probably be remembered as
the most important Anglican Christian of the twentieth century.
Archbishop Tutu led the Church in the Province of Southern Africa, our sister denomination, during the final days of that nation’s
apartheid regime. Over the course of a
long and courageous ministry, he suffered in many ways at the hands of those
who denied his full humanity and wanted desperately to silence his call for
justice. But Archbishop Tutu did not
give up. He did not grow bitter. He did not lose the desire to see real reconciliation. He did not forget to be merciful. When his side in the struggle prevailed, and
new laws brought justice and equality for all races, He found the grace to lead
a process of truth and reconciliation that has done so much to heal the
divisions of many generations.
It was the Holy Cross that gave Archbishop
Tutu the confidence to act so courageously, and so generously. Only a follower of Jesus Christ, only one who
knows that sin and death has been defeated at the Cross, and that the way of
light endures forever, only someone like that, I believe, could really proclaim
these words:
Goodness is stronger than evil, love is
stronger than hate.
Light is stronger than darkness, life is
stronger than death.
Victory is ours, victory is ours through
Him who loves us.
Victory is ours, victory is ours through
Him who loves us.
[1] qtd. in Guthrie, Suzanne. “Soulwork toward Sunday: Proper 18A.” Edge of Enclosure. http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/proper17a.html
13 Sep. 2014
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